I recently posted an article on DU that I titled “The GAME”, which drew so many excellent responses that one could write a book on the subject just by following up on all that material.
I began
that post by noting the many
unmentionable things in U.S. politics, and I concluded that the purpose of the censoring of so many important issues is the creation of an alternate reality among a critical mass of the American people. The belief in that alternate reality is necessary in order to convince the American people to continue to play the GAME that has been laid out for them by the GAME’s masters. For the actual reality of the GAME’s methods and purposes, I believe, is so terrible that if people consciously recognized it they would refuse to play, and the GAME would have to be radically altered or come to an end – peaceful or otherwise.
I then ran through a list of numerous questions that I have about the GAME – the truth being that I can barely perceive its shadowy outlines. I listed 6 authors and 9 books that I believe offer exceptional insight into the methods and purposes of the GAME, as well as 10 articles that I have posted on DU about 5 of those authors’ books. I discussed our stumbling into war in Iraq as a prime example of how the GAME is played. I discussed three U.S. Presidents since World War I who I believe refused to play the GAME in some major respect (FDR, Kennedy, and Carter), and the price they paid for that refusal. And then I engaged in speculation about some things, like how President-Elect Obama might fit into this picture.
But I left out a very important aspect, probably because I felt that the post was plenty long enough as it was: The consequences of the GAME. That’s what this post is about.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE GAMEOverthrow of sovereign governments, imperialism, and genocideWe are so often told how good and pure our nation and its people are that only a minority of Americans are aware of the extent of our many illegal and immoral activities, which include overthrowing or assisting in the overthrow of governments of sovereign nations, imperial conquests, and genocides. Many or most who aren’t aware of these activities would be shocked to learn about them and quite resistant to accepting that information as the truth.
The record is long and ugly. In myriad instances when we have overthrown or assisted in the overthrow of sovereign nations, we have either made them an American protectorate or else substituted our own choice of leaders for the previously existing legal government. In the good majority of these instances we substituted a repressive right wing government for one that was much more responsive to the needs and desires of the nation’s citizenry. Sometimes genocide was used to accomplish our goals.
The purpose of these activities has most often been to create a government that is friendlier to the desires of American businesses or corporations. We always have some sort of rationalization for our actions. During the Cold War, the rationalization was often that the sovereign government we overthrew was either Communist or susceptible to Communist takeover. In some cases, that might have actually been an important motivation for some or most of the plotters. I won’t argue that point here.
But even if and when that was true, the fact that a government of a sovereign nation is Communist is no excuse, legally or morally, to overthrow it or to make war upon it. The
United Nations Charter has established only two legal conditions which justify the use of force against a sovereign nation: 1) Self-defense; and 2) UN Security Council use of force to restore international peace. Furthermore, the US Constitution specifies that we must abide by those rules, since we have signed a treaty to that effect. Thus,
according to the Center for Constitutional Rights:
The United Nations Charter is a treaty of the United States, and as such forms part of the "supreme law of the land" under the Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2. The UN Charter is the highest treaty in the world, superseding states’ conflicting obligations under any other international agreement. (Art. 103, UN Charter)
Under the UN Charter, there are only two circumstances in which the use of force is permissible: in collective or individual self-defense against an actual or imminent armed attack; and when the Security Council has directed or authorized use of force to maintain or restore international peace and security.
I have previously discussed in some detail our history of overthrowing sovereign governments, imperialism, and genocide in
this post. Here I will just summarize some of our most egregious activities:
Overthrow of sovereign governmentsIn his book, “
Overthrow – America’s history of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq”, Stephen Kinzer explores all 14 instances of regime change, overt or covert, by the United States since 1893, including only those episodes where the intended regime change was successful and where the United States played the decisive role, rather than where it acted in concert with other nations or as part of a larger war (as in WW II or the Korean War). The 14 episodes describe regime changes in Hawaii (1893), Cuba (1898), Puerto Rico (1898), the Philippines (1899-1902), Nicaragua (1910), Honduras (1911-1912),
Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954),
South Vietnam (1963),
Chile (1973),
Grenada (1983),
Panama (1989),
Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003). I describe the first six of these regime changes in detail in a DU post titled “
The Roots and Consequences of U.S. Overseas Imperialism”, along with the consequences of our actions.
GenocidesAccording to the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, Genocide is defined as:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Fellow DUer Karenina once asked me if I considered our invasion and occupation of Iraq to constitute genocide. I told her that I didn’t think it met the technical definition of genocide because the intent was not to kill them, but to rob them, and the intent to rob them had nothing to do with their race or ethnicity, but only with the fact that they had something that the Bush administration wanted. I also told her that I didn’t think it mattered much whether it met the technical definition of genocide because killing hundreds of thousands of people for their resources is just as bad as killing them for their ethnicity, race or religion in my view.
Since then, I’ve rethought my answer to Karenina’s question and would answer it differently. One big problem with interpreting the definition of genocide too narrowly is that there can be a very fine and blurry line between killing for profit and killing for racial hatred, and sometimes the two are intermixed together so closely that it is next to impossible to differentiate them. And by the same token, there can be a very fine and blurry line between intentional killing and “collateral damage”. In other words, precisely assessing motives is often difficult or impossible to do with accuracy.
With that in mind, a book by David Model, “
State of Darkness”, describes in detail U.S. involvement in several genocides. Cold War related genocides included in that book, are those against
Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954-73),
Indonesia (1965),
Cambodia (1970-75),
Laos (1969-74), and
East Timor (1975). Model also describes our
atomic bombing of Japan (1945) and our two wars against Iraq as examples of genocide, as well as the sanctions that we imposed on Iraq in between the two wars.
Other major illegal and immoral disruptions of sovereign governmentsAs described by William Blum in
his article, “A Concise History of US Global Interventions, 1945 to the Present”, the United States intervened in eleven different South and Central American countries during the Cold War, including Guatemala, Costa Rica, British Guyana, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The main purpose of these interventions was to facilitate changes to regimes that were friendlier to the United States (and in almost all cases less friendly to the indigenous populations of those countries.) For this purpose, we developed the School of the Americas, which was used to train native personnel in the techniques and ideology of insurgency and counter-insurgency.
An article on
reasons to shut down the School of the Americas (SOA) provides a good description of what was involved, and can be summarized as follows:
It describes numerous atrocities committed by graduates of SOA, which are consistent with the SOA curriculum. While SOA torture manuals have been withdrawn, their content has not been repudiated by SOA, and some of the worst abusers continued to be honored as guest instructors for SOA courses.
School of the Americas training is oriented to support the military and political status quo in each country, which places the U.S. in opposition to any who seek free speech to discuss problems, alternative means to solve problems, or democratic means to change governments. More specifically, the enemy is identified as the poor, those who assist the poor, such as church workers, educators, and unions, and certain ideologies such as “socialism” or “liberation theology”. All of this just to make sure that Communists or “leftists” didn’t get a foothold in any of these countries.
Egregious Cold War related U.S. interventions in the Caribbean include (but are not limited to): our
invasion of Cuba in 1961; U.S.
Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 to put down a rebellion against their repressive right wing government; and
U.S. military support of Haitian tyrant and mass murderer, Francois Duvalier.
And Michael Parenti, in “
Rulers of the Planet”, has this to say about our interventions in Africa:
US intervention in Africa is a story in itself. Through the World Bank and the IMF, US leaders have demolished African economies, including their public health and education sectors. Most African nations have sunk into a debt structure that leaves them in peonage to Western investors. US leaders also have fueled eleven wars on the continent, resulting in the death of some seven million people, with millions more facing malnutrition, starvation, and a deepening poverty. Washington has given arms and military training to 50 African countries (out of a total of 53), helping Africa to become the most war-torn region in the world…
Wealth redistribution from the poor and middle class to the wealthy and powerfulExtreme income inequality is a good indication that large segments of society lack the opportunity to make a decent living. In the late 1920s income inequality rose precipitously, to peak just prior to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which precipitated the Great Depression.
This chart plots income inequality in the United States over time, as calculated by the ratio between the average income of the top 0.01% of U.S. families and the bottom 90%:
In my last post (The GAME), I noted that FDR leveled the economic playing field with his New Deal, which began to be dismantled about a half a century later. Now I’ll adopt the persona of Al Franken for my next paragraph, since I love the way he writes:
Can you find the point on the graph where FDR’s New Deal began to be dismantled with the onset of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies? How about the point on the graph where the dismantling of the New Deal accelerated with the onset of George W. Bush’s policies?
Yet, prior to our recent recession, the Bush administration actually bragged about how good our economy was. Jared Bernstein, in his book “
Crunch – Why Do I Feel So Squeezed”, discusses the apparent paradox of how the financial situation of so many Americans could be so precarious in the presence of such healthy “economic indicators”:
Over the course of this highly touted economic expansion, poverty is up, working families’ real incomes are down…. By 2007, 44% said they lacked the money they needed “to make ends meet”…
If you feel squeezed, chances are it’s because you are squeezed. Most of the indicators that matter most to us in our everyday lives… are coming in at stress inducing levels, but GDP… keeps on truckin’. Something’s wrong, something fundamental…
The name of the problem is economic inequality… It’s a sign that something important is broken: the set of economic mechanisms and forces that used to broadly and fairly distribute the benefits of growth… unions, minimum wages… full employment… quality jobs, safety nets, and social insurance…
In other words, the masters of the GAME have done a very good job of changing the rules in their favor, to increase their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. But if we try to talk about that, they accuse us of “class warfare”. And politicians who try to make it a major focus of their campaign are aggressively attacked or ignored by our national news media.
REMEDYI believe that the first step, and maybe the
only requirement that is needed to end the GAME, is for a critical mass of Americans to become aware of and understand the GAME and its purposes. I don’t know precisely what that critical mass is. But once it is reached, politicians and our corporate news media will be forced to talk about issues of crucial importance to the American people that are currently unmentionable. And then the GAME will unravel for good.
But reaching that critical mass will be quite difficult. In November 1994, the National Council for History Standards (NCHS), having used an unprecedented process of open debate, multiple reviews, and the active participation of the largest organizations of history educators in the nation, released its proposed
National Standards for United States History. I discuss this issue in much more detail in
this post, in a section titled “Politicians against historians – The attack on the National Standards for United States History”. So I’ll just offer a quick summary here:
The proposed standards advocated above all a more accurate account of our history, substituting truth for clichés like “The United States is the greatest force for good in the world”. Consequently, they were vehemently
criticized as advocating a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”. In 1995 the U.S. Senate formally
voted 99-1 to condemn the Standards. Our whole Senate played the GAME that day. That is not the kind of action by our elected representatives that will help to end this deadly GAME.
The person for whom I was proud to vote for President* two months ago has a much better idea for what to do about the GAME. In the introduction to the book “
Censored 2009 – The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-08”, she writes:
Much of what is now happening in the world can be laid at the public policy doorstep of Washington, DC. Citizens can act to defend themselves and the integrity of our country only when they know what it is that our country is doing… I welcome a real discussion of all the issues that face our country today and the real public policy options that exist to resolve them. For many Americans, this important discussion has been too vague or completely non-existent… The media in this country obviously do not want the people to be informed about the truths presented by Project Censured…
This is the same women who blatantly broke the rules of the GAME in her
2002 speech against handing George Bush a green light to invade Iraq:
President Bush was warned that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and crash them into buildings in the US…. (She then lists many more suspicious circumstances)….
All of this has become public knowledge since I asked the simple question: What did the Bush Administration know and when did it know it. Now against this backdrop of so many unanswered questions, President Bush wants us to pledge our blind support to him. First, for his war on terrorism and now for his war in Iraq. How can we, in good conscience, send our young men and women back to Iraq to fight yet another war…
* I have not previously acknowledged on DU that I did not vote for Obama for President. I contributed to his campaign, I campaigned for him, and I was thrilled when he was elected. But because I live in a state that is safely Democratic, I cast my vote for President for my first choice – a woman who never has shown much respect for the rules of the GAME. SOME LAST WORDS As long as too many Americans continue to seek comfort in the absurd and false idea that their country is on the right side of every international conflict, and that patriotism means supporting one’s country no matter what it does, rather than seeking to make it better, we will continue on our current disastrous course of attempting to extend the American Empire.
The mutual problems that the nations of the world face today are too great to tolerate a rogue nation that is intent on extending its powers over the whole world at any cost. The world will not long avoid world-wide catastrophe as long as the most militarily powerful nation in the world does not feel the need to work
with the other nations of the world, in compliance with international law, rather than solely for what it sees as its own selfish interests, or the selfish interests of its wealthy elites. President Obama may possibly succeed in presiding over eight years of relative world-wide peace. But even if he manages to do that, that peace is not likely to be sustained without a major change in how Americans view their nation’s relationship to the rest of the world.
Now I’ll end this post with a description from Rick Perlstein's book “
Nixonland – the Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” of the courageous and inspiring actions of the first presidential candidate for whom I was proud to cast my vote for President – another person who refused to play the GAME throughout his whole political career:
On September 1 (1970) Senator McGovern gave the concluding speech in the debate over his amendment to end the Vietnam War. Opposing senators had spoken of the necessity of resolve in the face of adversity, of national honor, of staying the course, of glory, of courage. McGovern responded:
“Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending fifty thousand young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood.”
Senators averted their eyes or stared at there desks or drew their faces taut with fury; this was not senatorial decorum.
“Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage… young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or face, or hopes… Do not talk about national honor, or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible… So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: ‘A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood’”.
The McGovern-Hatfield amendment was defeated 55-39. On Election Day 1972, Senator McGovern lost his Presidential bid in a landslide. Eight years later he lost his U.S. Senate seat. He has ever since been regarded by many or most Americans as a “loser”. But George McGovern, in his run for President, and in his subsequent continued opposition to the Vietnam War, by pressuring Nixon to end the war earlier than he wanted to, did far more good for our country and the world than Nixon ever did as President. It is only through the actions of people like him that this GAME will ever end.
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