State of the Division

by Paul Donahue

 

I can’t stand to listen to Obama talk, but thanks to Democracy Now I did catch clips of his recent State of the Division speech. One of his statements especially caught my attention…..

“When politicians insult Muslims, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. And it betrays who we are as a country.”

Given Obama’s own track record against Muslims - bombing seven Muslim countries since taking office, contributing substantially to the two million or so Muslims the U.S. has murdered since 2001, weekly meetings with his staff to decide which Muslims to add to the kill list, and continuing to preside over Guantanamo - that statement qualifies as first degree hypocrisy.

So who are we as a country? The current president is a war criminal and mass murderer, as was his predecessor, and his predecessor, and his predecessor, etc. The leading Democratic candidate for president is also a war criminal, and a war-monger. The leading Republican candidates for president are raging racists, war-mongers, and wannabe war criminals and mass murderers.

The United States was founded on the greatest genocide in world history, and continues to this day to subjugate its Native American population. Racism is widespread in the country, and institutional racism and violence against minorities, even murder of them, is widely tolerated. Much of the country’s wealth was built with slave labor. In both absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, the U.S. imprisons more people by far than any other country in the world. Through the prison-industrial complex, this prison population has become today’s modern day slave labor force.

Americans fear Iran the most, but when surveys are taken, the rest of the world views the U.S., by far, as the greatest threat to world peace. Every day the U.S. strives to further that reputation by bombing and killing innocents and supporting countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia that do the same. The U.S. spends far more on weapons and war than any nation in the history of the world - more than a trillion dollars a year when everything is accounted for. Part of this goes to maintain more than 700 U.S. military bases OUTSIDE of the U.S. The U.S. is also the biggest exporter of armaments, fueling conflicts around the globe. Analyses have shown repeatedly that U.S. military aid flows disproportionately to those countries with the worst human rights records, such as Colombia. Those unfortunates who end up in U.S. military prisons and “black sites” around the globe are subjected to torture. And despite all the rhetoric aimed at Iran and North Korea and the threat they pose, the U.S. remains the only country in the world to have ever actually used a nuclear weapon - TWICE.

So what country is Obama talking about?  It is only Americans who believe the myth about the U.S. being a bastion of freedom and justice. The rest of the world, especially those parts that have experienced U.S violence, has seen the country’s true colors. If Muslims had to choose between a mosque being spray-painted or hit by one of Obama’s drone strikes, which do you think they would choose?

Other than more illegal drone strikes, and trade pacts like the Trans Pacific Partnership that cancel our laws and turn the world over to huge corporations, what exactly are Obama’s (our) goals?

Pacifica, California
14 January 2016