Consequences Schmonsequences
A Belgian lawyer actually has gotten it together to initiate a legal case against American general Tommy Franks for war crimes committed during the invasion of Iraq, pointing out that Franks did nothing to stop the looting of the hospitals in Baghdad. The US is already threatening “diplomatic consequences.” The alleged “weapons of mass destruction” that were the reason for invading Iraq in the first place have not been found, 5 weeks into the US invasion, and likely won’t be. The Christian Science Monitor published a useful inventory of America’s fraudulent pretexts for invasions and covert operations over the past few decades, including the nonexistent MIG fighters that Reagan used as the basis for funding the covert war against Nicaragua’s Sandanista government and the constructed fiction of Iraqi soldiers snatching babies from Kuwaiti incubators. The big lie continues apace. I am seeing chilling parallels between the Bush administration’s manufacturing of consent on the Iraq invasion, and the stories that my parents (who grew up in Nazi Germany) have told me about how the Nazis maintained their regime’s grip on the hearts and minds of the German people while invading Poland and perpetrating the holocaust. A pliable, frightened population that is xenophobic and feeling economically vulnerable is a prerequisite for the successful demagogue.
There been concern in many quarters that nanotech organisms will soon eat the planet. Wordspy lists a new word for this – ‘global ecophagy.’ Perhaps these nanotech organisms have infected the brains of the Republican right.
