(originally posted to
Myspace, 23 November 2007)
In addition to feeding my revived interest in the blues,
I've been downloading some of the anti-war songs from the ‘80’s, during the
latter stages of the Cold War, when Andropov and Gorbachev were Presidents of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka Soviet Union) and Ronald Reagan
(or, as I call that son-of-a-bitch, Ronnie Raygun) was President of the United
States. I was pretty involved with the anti-nuke movement here locally,
among some of my other causes at the time, and I can remember the atmosphere of
fear caused by that California cocksucker, Raygun.
Raygun, by the way, was a chickenhawk himself, just like George
Bush II and John Wayne. It really shows how gullible and willfully
ignorant the American public is when its two foremost icons of muscular,
swaggering, militaristic ‘patriotism’ are not only actors but became bellicose hawks after weaseling their way out of
the draft, which they did not for reasons of conscience but to save their own
arses, which would still be not only forgivable but acceptable except for the
fact they both then turned about and advocated sending other young men off to
die.
Because of little Ronnie Raygun's careless half-arsed
shield-thumping, saber-rattling, amateur rhetoric, the world very nearly came
to an end in the autumn of the year 1982, when the U.S. Navy's Sixth Fleet was
in the Eastern Mediterranean, when tensions between the USSR and USA were such
that American forces spent two weeks - that's TWO FULL WEEKS - at DefCon
2. If you haven't seen the movie “War Games”, I should explain that
DefCon 5 is situation normal, DefCon 1 means, push the big red button, let the
missiles fly, destroy the planet...so you can see how close for how long the
chickenhawks had the world at the brink.
The reason all that has returned to mind recently is the
state of affairs between the governments of our two countries, and between the USA and Iran.
Yesterday, I said to my mother “Thank God for Vladimir
Putin.” Funny thing for an agnostic atheist to say, but I did so because he at least is standing up to the second-rate bullying thuggery coming from
the White House directed at Iran, and its collateral threats of nuclear
warfare. The only comfort I can take is that in this case the chickenhawk
neocon threats will probably amount to nothing more than a chimera, since not
only are our imperial forces stretched farther and more spread out than ever
before, but because Putin is moving to block the very real threat to his own
country's security.
Vladimir Putin, mind you, is a second-rate former mid-level
thug of nowhere near the finesse or ruthlessness of the two predecessors I just
mentioned, but, frankly, he's just what the Russian Federation needs right
now. Ruthless and authoritarian he may be, but as far as being
corrupt in terms of avarice, no; he's just what his country needs to un-mire
itself from the quicksand of corruption and chaos into which it was allowed to
sink by its alcoholic and administratively incompetent, though physically
brave, immediate predecessor—Yeltsin—who, in fact, chose him to succeed.
That the descent was not only aided and abetted but
encouraged, sponsored, and in many cases initiated by commercial and financial
interests in the U.S.A. Perhaps if the American President in this most
crucial immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet bloc, break-up of the
USSR, and its transition from a totalitarian society to what was initially
hoped to be a real democracy, had been someone other than George Bush I, the
rapacity of whose corrupt practices in office may have surpassed his son's had
he not been thrown out after one term, citizens of the former Soviet Union
would be much better off.
The reasons which the current situation bring the ‘80’s and
all that to mind aren’t just simple nostalgic. It has more to do with my
term paper for my class in English Composition, which I had my junior year at
the university.
Being an anti-nuke advocate, I began the paper by condemning
nuclear weapons and proceeded through my logical, but humorous, argument.
Hell, it was one of the best things I've ever written, poetry or prose.
But by the time I got to the end of the paper, my own logic had led me, and
anyone reading my essay, to the conclusion that the existence of thermonuclear
weapons and the threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction) had kept the peace
for forty years, but NOT because they served as a deterrent to Soviet expansion
and bellicosity.
No, what MAD served to check was American imperialist
domination and expansion. As the Caledonii leader Calgacus once said
of the Romans, so could the world say now of those in power in
Washington: “A rich enemy excites their avarice, a poor one their
ambition. To robbery, slaughter, and plunder, they give the lying name of
government; they create a wasteland and call it peace.”
This current state of affairs cannot stand. I am no
longer merely an American, a citizen of the United States of America. I
am a Terran, a citizen of Earth; the whole world is my home and all its people
my brother, sisters, and cousins, and I say NO MORE! If it appears the
chickenhawk neocon regime in Washington may be close to getting the desire of
its latest wet-dreams (attacking Iran
militarily), We the People should rise together and resist side-by-side
with nonviolent noncooperation until our own government becomes as afraid of us
as those in Europe are of their own People, which is how democracy should be.
(Postcript: Were I to
write this today, the last thing I would do is endorse Putin as leader of
Russia. I left that piece intact and in
place to show I’m not afraid to admit mistakes of perception and to emphasize
this one WAS a mistake.)
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