The New Evil Empire

By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net

Remember the Red Menace, also known as the Communist threat? Or how about the Third Reich, the creator of which became the chief metaphor for evil in the 20th century?

Most Americans, certainly those younger than 30, don’t remember either. Hell, they don’t even remember Vietnam or Nixon or The Beatles. The terms and their
connotations are totally unfamiliar, unless encountered in history texts. Millions of Americans simply do not remember what America used to stand for
– freedom, justice, equality - and as a result, don’t fully comprehend the appalling reality of what America has become.

Once upon a time, back in the days of Elvis and the hula hoop, when I was a little shaver, I was taught in school that when Germany took over France, Poland and other European countries, that was wrong, and the United States sacrificed almost a half million of its own young people to reverse those situations in the name of freedom. And that happened twice, 1916-18 and
1941-45.

In the same vein, I grew up being taught that the
Soviet Union’s annexation of Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, and all of Eastern Europe was an evil deed,
and that for many years in a period called the Cold
War, the American military objective was aimed at
overturning this unjust oppression. Back in the 1950s
when I was in elementary school, we used to have
routine Civil Defense drills where we used to have to
hide under our desks pretending we were about to be
nuked by the Russians. Really!

It’s a new world now. For one thing, the population of
the planet has doubled in those mere 50 years. And for
another, it is the United States that is now sweeping
the world, scooping up all these other countries in
the name of capitalist democracy, and telling lies
about why it has to go to war. And instead of railing
against the powerful giant stealing freedom from all
these hapless victims, as it did in years past, the
American press is now cheering it, justifying it in
the increasingly ambivalent names of capitalism and
democracy. Worse, the American people are cheering it,
too, something that’s never really happened in U.S.
history, when the people support a war that they know
is based on lies.

Of course, the American press is cheering it because
it is the American military doing it. Even the German
and Russian press aren’t really criticizing it in a
serious way. Because there is no country that can
oppose America, which spends more on its military than
all the other countries in the world combined, yet
still complains that it needs to spend more, even as
its bridges and schools are falling apart and its
manufacturing base has completely disappeared,
precipitating its imminent economic collapse. Still
the military spending increases, and war plans ooze
out like an evil ink stain spreading across the globe.

The evil empire, number one threat to peace in the
world, is now the United States. No more Red Menace.
No more Third Reich. Now it’s a War on Terror executed
by the biggest terrorist of all - America, the nation
that killed its own people by the thousands in order
to trigger World War III and capture all the world’s
oil fields.

Now the shoe is obviously on the other foot. The
United States has now assumed the role of Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia at their worst and all rolled into
one. It has troops poised and threatening in 127 other
countries. By the diabolical mechanisms of the World
Trade Organization and the International Monetary
Fund, it has already plundered most other countries
financially, stealing their utilities and
impoverishing their inhabitants. And those nations who
resist this financial con game, like Yugoslavia, are
simply invaded and coerced into servitude. Those
nations who play the game, like Russia and Argentina,
are reduced to abject poverty with a few pro-Western
billionaires owning everything.

And woe to those nations who won’t play the game, like
Iraq. They are obliterated and turned into permanent
war zones. Their people are murdered in their sleep by
hopped-up American soldiers who are told by their
cynical leaders that they are spreading democracy,
when really what they are spreading are endless
opportunities for plunder by politically connected
corporations.

And America’s leader lie about absolutely everything.
Never at any time in my personal history has there
been a time when an American president has not at
least accidentally told the truth about something, but
that time is now.

Once upon a time, Americans used to preach the cause
of freedom and justice for all. It’s actually written
in their Pledge of Allegiance. But they don’t adhere
to that anymore. After all, Americans have canceled
their Bill of Rights, which once made them famous -
made them loved! - all over the world. Now they are
feared all over the world. Reviled. When Americans
launched their worldwide war on terror - based on a
treasonous event in which they killed large numbers of
their own people - they betrayed the whole world. They
betrayed every dream of freedom anybody ever had
anywhere.

The people who did it did it for a few billion
dollars. Can you blame them? It’s easy money blowing
up countries and blaming it on somebody else. Even you
might do it if you had the chance. Americans support
such an idea. It’s capitalism at its best, controlling
the market, make money on the destruction by selling
the weapons, make money on the reconstruction by
involving your friends in the contracts, no public
bids, of course. So you lose a few dark-skinned lives.
The world is overpopulated anyway. Look at it as
population control (although that it another, much
larger topic).

Things have become so ugly in the United States that
the liberal opposition candidate for president tells
peace activists to "Get over it!" That there will be
no peace no matter who is president. That America is
united to overrun and ravish the whole world, simply
because there is no one to stop it. This is the
America that was venerated and admired all over the
world. This is what America became when there was no
other power to keep it honest. It became dishonest -
and a killer nation.

People overseas make a mistake when the say they have
nothing against the American people, that it is simply
the American government they loathe and fear. It is
the American people who have permitted this to happen,
and they who bear the blame and will reap the
whirlwind for their inaction.

Once, America set an example for the world to
establish representative government and take care of
its less fortunate. Today, America is still setting an
example for the world, an example that democracy is a
hoax, and that all we can expect for our children’s
futures is a dark abyss of endless war based on phony
pretenses.

The thing that made the episodes with Nazi Germany and
Soviet Union have happy endings was that there was
somebody to fight for freedom ready to rescue those
oppressed by military tyranny from a foreign power.

But now, who is ready to defend the freedom of those
in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, or in Macedonia, Serbia,
the Philippines, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Iran,
Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Chile, Bolivia,
Ecuador, Guatemala ... or Palestine?

Who is ready to defend freedom now that the Americans
have declared freedom incompatible with security?

But these things tend to even out over time. Rome
wasn’t built in a day and it took centuries to fall
apart, but eventually it was picked apart by jackals
and sycophantic traitors from within.

The world will yet have the last laugh on America,
after its own leaders have finished picking the bones
of its financially depleted carcass.

Because Americans have given up defending true freedom
around the world, the day will soon arrive (sooner
than they think) when they will have to defend their
own freedom against the very monster they have created
by their own selfish indifference. The corporate beast
that consumes freedom around the world will one day
soon turn its gaping jaws on America itself, and the
Americans, who have decided to forget how to defend
true freedom around the world, will necessarily have
forgotten how to defend their own.

Once upon a time, when I was a little shaver and the
president was some guy named Ike, I was told that
America was the greatest nation in the world because
it was a champion of freedom and justice, and rescued
the oppressed whenever people were in trouble.

So ... were they lying then and telling the truth now,
or telling the truth then and lying now?

And when the rest of the world comes calling to
rectify this murderous tyranny and worldwide
oppression that America now practices, what will you
say to them when they aim their guns at you? That you
didn’t know?

John Kaminski is the author of "America’s Autopsy
Report," a collection of his Internet essays published
by Dandelion Books and featured on hundreds of
websites around the world. For more information on how
to get this book or to financially support his work
(seriously needed now), go to
http://www.johnkaminski.com/. Or, to read some more of
his recent essays for free, go to
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html