By: Jane Stillwater
When the Berlin Wall came down back in 1989, we all breathed a big sigh of relief. At last the evil Soviet Union had finally been defeated and destroyed. But perhaps now, deep down inside, a lot of us are starting to wish that we could get it all back again — back to the good old days when our enemies would stand still in just one place so that we could take potshots at the old USSR with impunity and not constantly be afraid of shooting our own selves in the foot!
Back in the day, Americans worked for YEARS and spent BILLIONS of dollars trying to bring down the old Soviet Union. And then it finally happened — and the Soviet Union went bust. “But who can we have as an enemy now?” asked the Pentagon’s top brass and Wall Street corporatistas and weapons manufacturers everywhere. “We still gotta have an enemy or else Americans will never be scared enough to pay for our bombs.”
So the big cheeses on Wall Street and K Street and in the Pentagon all looked around and decided that Islam should be our next major foe.
But it coulda been anyone.
“Pentagon & Friends” could have declared war on just about anyone after the Soviet Union fell. Liberals, for instance. Or Mexicans. Or gays. Or unions. Or medical cannabis users. Or women. Or cancer patients. Or families. Oops, they’ve already done that. But “Pentagon Incorporated” picked Muslims as their first choice — because a lot of them had access to oil.
But then Muslims actually had the audacity to start fighting back. And “Pentagon United,” mistakenly thinking that War is the ultimate consumer and that one can never have enough enemies, started growing its enemies’ list even longer as well — just to be on the safe side. Now its list also contains the Occupy movement, “American Terrorists” (whatever they are) and the infamous 99% — as well as the usual suspects: Women and gays and Mexicans and cancer patients and liberals and families and medical cannabis users and unions. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/donna-smith/43448/fighting-the-real-enemy-cancer-in-america
And now K Street and Wall Street and the Pentagon have inadvertently created yet another big problem. Their ill-conceived plan to stage “Wars” on medical cannabis users and working people and cancer patients and women and (add a very long, long list here) has clearly backfired because now the “Pentagon Mafia” has added at least three to five billion more potential enemies to its list — both elsewhere in the world and right here at home; enemies who are now starting to get their ducks in a row in order to ready, willing and able to fight back.
“Pentagon & Friends” is now in big trouble because instead of having just a small self-contained “enemy” virus like the USSR to contend with, it now has to deal with a huge free-floating viral epidemic of “enemies,” an unstoppable deadly contagion that “Pentagon Unplugged” itself has created; one that has spread and spread and spread all over the world and here at home too.
I bet that the Pentagon and its allies are now probably starting to truly, sincerely wish that they could magically return to the good old days when all they had to fight was the old Soviet Union!
Further, instead of only having to fight a few Islamic fundamentalists in far-away places that nobody has even heard of, “Pentagon United” has now managed to piss off over one billion middle-of-the-road and even modern Muslims. That was a trick that was really hard to pull off — but “PentagonCon” somehow managed to do even that.
And then, of course, there are the additional three billion women, millions of liberals, a whole wide world of gays, all of Latin America and probably two billion Chinese and approximately 853,566,225 Africans that they managed to piss off as well. And also some Greeks.
That really took some doing but “Pentagon Incorporated” has managed to do it.
And now, instead of just doing some old-skool hatin’ on the Soviets who were all safely isolated in one spot east of the Danube and hemmed in by an Iron Curtain and a seemingly endless supply of vodka, the Pentagon, K Street, Wall Street, etc. now have to go around suspecting almost four-fifths of the world’s population and peeking into EVERYBODY’S shorts.
Wasn’t life a lot easier when no wars were being declared on most of the world’s tighty-whities — only on Khrushchev’s? Weren’t things far less confusing back in the day, when only the Kremlin was bad?
Dontcha really miss the old Soviet Union?
PS: Of course, nowadays Russia still does have all kinds to evil oligarchs for us to be hatin’ on — but now America also has all kinds of evil oligarchs to be hatin’ on too.
Bring back the old USSR? Please!
PPS: I just finished reading the spring issue of “Critical Muslim,” a nicely-bound periodical put out by some of the top modern Islamic thinkers in the world today. Wanna know what Muslims are really thinking? Check out the latest issue of CM at http://www.musliminstitute.org/critical-muslim. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Unlike so many American hack journalists these days, a lot of Muslim writers really are actually thinking.
PPPS: “The Pentagon Group” also appears to be missing the old Soviet Union so much that it is actually trying to recreate it right here in America. And just exactly where does the money for all this group’s new militarized police forces, KGB-like surveillance operations, Stalinesque torture techniques, propaganda-mill news reports, Siberia-style prison gulags and Monsanto-run collective farms come from? From you and me? “Absolyutno, da!”
And is this a good thing? “Nyet, nyet, nyet, nyet!”
For more from Jane Stillwater, visit her blog @ http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com
In reality, I don’t miss the old Soviet Union. I slept for a week in a fallout shelter just off my parents’ basement in 1962, complete with a composting toilet and bunk beds because some asshole in Moscow decided to arm Cuba with missiles.
(Also, blaming European Christianity – particularly Catholicism – for the colonial movements of the 15th-19th centuries isn’t as big a stretch as you might think. I did my masters on European colonialism, focusing on the Belgian Congo and Nigeria/Biafra as ‘results’ of that process – Christianity figured rather highly in those atrocities.)
-W
The fact of the matter is that the U.S./NATO empire never really intended to go toe-to-toe with the U.S.S.R and its colonies (yes, they were every bit as imperialistic as the U.S./NATO empire is today…) – throughout the Cold War the U.S./NATO empire used “Communism” and “Soviet aggression” as its excuse to oppress anyone who decided not to go along with the Western powers ruling classes (even when the opposition wasn’t “Communist” at all and had no real connections to the U.S.S.R.).
In short, the Cold War was a cover to justify imperial expansion – when the Iron Curtain fell the Pentagon panicked because it no longer had a convenient fig leaf to cover itself with (hence the reason they sought out to “redefine NATO’s mission” and settled on “radical Muslims” [who were considered “allies” to that point – go figure…] as the new “bad guy”)…
Much of what America knows about Russia is what America is told about Russia. During the ten years i lived in Mexico, i subscribed to a magazine called “The Soviet Woman”. It was actually the best woman’s magazine i ever read. It didn’t deal with a lot of frivolous stuff like hairdo’s, make-up and how to get (or keep) your man. Each issue was divided into sections; (a) women in science, (b) women in history (c) women in literature; with a sample short story, (d) women in arts and crafts with glossy photos illustrating their creativity, and (e) a page with fold out patterns and instructions for sewing your own clothing.
Russia had, and still has, a lot of good ideas, as do other countries. The tendency of America is to always point out the worst that a country has to leave us with feel good applause about ourselves, but i think it would be more practical and beneficial altogether if we would learn to discover the best a country has and incorporate it into our own social models.
W.D, we’re trying to do the same thing to Russia with our “missile shields” that the Soviet Union did when they installed the missile base in Cuba. Who’s trying to provoke war now?