Excerpt from the Preface to the book "Prisoners of the Cave" to be available shortly at 
http://www.humanbeingsfirst.org
http://www.humanbeingsfirst.org
America’s Profound Shame - The collective hypocrisy and responsibility of the American Nation
I wish to finally conclude with a few words on the collective and national hypocrisy of the American public that cannot be so charitably dismissed as indoctrinated and deceived individuals being “Innocent of Knowledge” and captive “Prisoners of the cave”.
The Americans as a nation, seem to have bizarrely frozen in time all crimes against humanity committed by a state, to Nazi Germany. Even as the slaughter of innocent civilians goes on in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq with impunity, it is only the crime of Holocaust against the Jews that remains persistent in the American public psyche with vows of never to let it happen again to anyone. Elaborate war crime tribunals are created in Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Jerusalem, and various human rights conventions, treaties, and international laws are drawn to safe guard humanity from the future barbarism of mentally deranged war mongering lunatics. “Following orders”, “collective civilian punishment”, and “indifference” are made repugnant, immoral, and even criminal as excuses for war crimes. And the distinguished survivor of the Holocaust, director of the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel issues this curse in his memoirs “All Rivers Run to the Sea”: “and I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent.”
As the American nation continues to reflect on the Holocaust victims with memorials and Hollywood films over decades, it silently watches the public spectacles of the Bush government compelling the world to exempt them from America's own yardstick for civilized existence by seeking immunity from prosecution in the world court for war crimes. And the nation dutifully salutes the flag “United We Stand” at the systematic launching of “Shock and Awe” of civilian populations and their civilian infrastructures with millions of tons of Depleted Uranium bombs and frightening munitions. And this after a decade of strangulating economic sanctions which have already resulted in the death and starvation of a million civilians. These new victims however remain ignored and unmourned in the American conscience as the Holocaust is commemorated with even more fervor, and pledges for “never again” staunchly renewed.
What is going on here? Why are the Jewish Holocaust victims at the hands of the Nazi war machine of the past century deemed more worthy of consideration, even if only in constant remembrance of a lesson learned as it should, but the contemporary innocent civilian Muslim victims at the hands of the American war machine not even sympathized with or mourned, when something can actually be done to halt their barbaric terrorization, displacement, internment, and wanton slaughter as an application of that very lesson learned?
The fact of the existence of these innocent civilian victims cannot be denied, and nor is it denied. General Colin Powell even openly proclaimed his “Shock and Awe” terror campaign on densely populated cities. Instead, these victims are daily subjected to the same kind of vile and dehumanizing propaganda that was leveled at the Jews culminating in the Holocaust. Their victimization is justified either as inevitable collateral damage for a higher cause, or as altogether deserved for the higher objective of “saving American lives”! Any act no matter how barbaric, is permissible to save American lives.
Does the import of Elie Wiesel's curse only apply to some victimizers and not others? Obviously, he meant to write those words only for his Nazi persecutors – yet their stark significance is left for some hypothetical future victims and not applied to the bombing and destruction of civilian Muslims occurring today. Why? Is it because they share the religion of Islam with the supposed “Muslim” perpetrators of 9-11?
Taking everything at face value about 9-11: accepting on faith the White House's unsubstantiated and unproven assertions of it being the work of “Muslim” terrorists; even accepting President Bush's unsubstantiated and actually disproved assertions of Sadaam Hussein possessing WMDs being an imminent threat to America; and even that he was directly responsible for 9-11; accepting all these assertions as gospel truth handed by god himself to the American people, how can the American public condone, let alone actively support the “Shock and Awe” retaliation on innocent civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq with all of America's superpower might? Have the American people become a nation of cowards that they pick on the defenseless and the weak with long range bombers and depleted Uranium munitions which keep on killing for decades and even centuries after the hostilities are over? For four decades the Americans could not pick a direct fight with their arch nemesis the Soviet Union – because the latter also had teeth and could bite back. But now, is it time to brow beat all the other much weaker nations into submission? The new barbarians in three piece suits? If there is any other conclusion that any rational person can come to, what is it?
There were no large armies amassed to attack America unlike Pearl Harbor in 1941. There were no vast military and industrial infrastructures to be destroyed as in Dresden and Tokyo. Only at best, some tens or hundreds of individual bare footed criminals 20 thousand miles away hiding in caves and surrounded by hungry, barefooted, and war-ravaged civilian tribal communities, or in equally distant and quite defenseless, years of sanction starved deserts amidst some of the most dense civilian population centers in the region. And even under the assumption that these were the criminal masterminds behind 911, a collective inhuman punishment was and is being visited upon millions of civilians. All of this is a fact that is openly known to the public.
Even worse, how can the American public not absolutely go berserk and immediately march on the White House at the White House's open proclamation of unilateral preemptive nuclear strikes at non-nuclear nations? Here again there is no aspect of deception, only open belligerence and Nuclear War mongering posture upon the majority of innocent people who happen to live in the same area as the few “evil doers”.
While in as much as this book has concentrated on demonstrating how Zbigniew Brzezinski's diabolical thesis in the “Grand Chessboard” is actually being put into practice post 9-11, and how the American population is being bamboozled into an imperial mobilization through lies and deceit, it has not dwelled upon this moral lapse and plain guilt of the American population and the American Congress, from which neither may claim the often abused “I didn't know” exemption. Both knowingly and deliberately agreed to decimating civilian populations with awesomely frightening weapons of mass destruction of their own nation's making.
The sole exception being the lone dissenting and courageous voice of Congress Woman Barbara Lee from Oakland California, and the few hundred thousand people of conscience futilely protesting the call to war in the main streets of America.
The claim to “innocence of knowledge” due to being “prisoners of the cave” may only be made with respect to the deception game of their government and their media in keeping the American public in the dark. Not with respect to what the American public already quite plainly knows. And even that claim to innocence henceforth, has been eviscerated in this book.
The American nation collectively cannot be absolved of accountability, nor escape restitution and compensation to the innocent victims of this “war on terrorism”. The unheard cries of the innocent victims demand it.
I do not advocate collective punishment of any people for the crimes of their leaders – whether elected, selected, inherited, or imposed (that pretty much covers the entire planet). But collective punishment is precisely what is likely to transpire at the hands of the innocent victims of America's global wars who will see no other recourse than to bring the same war home to those watching it on HD television in the comfort of their American living rooms. As this poignant verse notes:
“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do Evil in return.” (W.H. AUDEN, “September 1, 1939”)
There may not remain much difference between Iraqi, Afghani, and Palestinian civilian victims, and American civilian victims – the graveyard is the ultimate equalizer. To protect you – or so they will claim, your leaders will convert this country into a lucrative corporate controlled police state; already many of the prison systems in this nation are run by them. The day isn't very far away when no one will be able to move from their home without showing ID cards at military-police checkpoints on every off ramp and gas station in America.
The oil that all industrialized nations so covet, is really still under other people's soil. All the “evil-doers” have to do is to detonate some nuclear bombs in their own oil fields and there is no process known to man that can remove radioactivity from gasoline. A “Samson” defense isn't the prerogative of Israel alone. Especially when this self-defense can also completely destroy their arch enemies. With the oil fields “peaking”, as some fear mongers boldly allege even while Mobil and Chevron et. al. reap in record breaking profits each year, the long lines and 1929 can be brought back just as easily as the coming military draft – be it of economic servitude, skills of the professional, or the precious lives of the youth. Allies today can easily become arch nemesis tomorrow over a shrinking pie. We shall all be collectively punished when the dominoes fall, bystanders and silent spectators and all. The law of unintended consequences is still among the least understood laws of nature!
Self-interest alone dictates immediate atonement and restitution – before it is too late.
This book is in two parts. Part-1 discloses my dialog with the United States Security agencies in the essay “They dared to knock on my door”. Part-2 employs some key insightful themes from Zbigniew Brzezinski's book “The Grand Chessboard”, to explain, deconstruct, dismantle, and entirely dethrone the fiction of “war on terrorism” which is entirely blueprinted in this 1996-97 “American Mein Kampf” written by the quintessential “ubermensch” mastermind who is directly responsible for “some stirred up Moslems” when “giving to the USSR its Vietnam war” with Muslim blood. This blood is just as red!
Please read the full essay at www.humanbeingsfirst.org at URL:
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/americas-shame.html
Please use this as you deem appropriate as per the diktats of your own conscience. There is aggression looming ahead on another defenseless nation - only the American public can stop it!!! How can we reach them? In this and other forums like this, we mainly preach to the choir and go home after a hard days' workout on the treadmill!
Thank you.
Zahir.
I wish to finally conclude with a few words on the collective and national hypocrisy of the American public that cannot be so charitably dismissed as indoctrinated and deceived individuals being “Innocent of Knowledge” and captive “Prisoners of the cave”.
The Americans as a nation, seem to have bizarrely frozen in time all crimes against humanity committed by a state, to Nazi Germany. Even as the slaughter of innocent civilians goes on in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq with impunity, it is only the crime of Holocaust against the Jews that remains persistent in the American public psyche with vows of never to let it happen again to anyone. Elaborate war crime tribunals are created in Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Jerusalem, and various human rights conventions, treaties, and international laws are drawn to safe guard humanity from the future barbarism of mentally deranged war mongering lunatics. “Following orders”, “collective civilian punishment”, and “indifference” are made repugnant, immoral, and even criminal as excuses for war crimes. And the distinguished survivor of the Holocaust, director of the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel issues this curse in his memoirs “All Rivers Run to the Sea”: “and I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent.”
As the American nation continues to reflect on the Holocaust victims with memorials and Hollywood films over decades, it silently watches the public spectacles of the Bush government compelling the world to exempt them from America's own yardstick for civilized existence by seeking immunity from prosecution in the world court for war crimes. And the nation dutifully salutes the flag “United We Stand” at the systematic launching of “Shock and Awe” of civilian populations and their civilian infrastructures with millions of tons of Depleted Uranium bombs and frightening munitions. And this after a decade of strangulating economic sanctions which have already resulted in the death and starvation of a million civilians. These new victims however remain ignored and unmourned in the American conscience as the Holocaust is commemorated with even more fervor, and pledges for “never again” staunchly renewed.
What is going on here? Why are the Jewish Holocaust victims at the hands of the Nazi war machine of the past century deemed more worthy of consideration, even if only in constant remembrance of a lesson learned as it should, but the contemporary innocent civilian Muslim victims at the hands of the American war machine not even sympathized with or mourned, when something can actually be done to halt their barbaric terrorization, displacement, internment, and wanton slaughter as an application of that very lesson learned?
The fact of the existence of these innocent civilian victims cannot be denied, and nor is it denied. General Colin Powell even openly proclaimed his “Shock and Awe” terror campaign on densely populated cities. Instead, these victims are daily subjected to the same kind of vile and dehumanizing propaganda that was leveled at the Jews culminating in the Holocaust. Their victimization is justified either as inevitable collateral damage for a higher cause, or as altogether deserved for the higher objective of “saving American lives”! Any act no matter how barbaric, is permissible to save American lives.
Does the import of Elie Wiesel's curse only apply to some victimizers and not others? Obviously, he meant to write those words only for his Nazi persecutors – yet their stark significance is left for some hypothetical future victims and not applied to the bombing and destruction of civilian Muslims occurring today. Why? Is it because they share the religion of Islam with the supposed “Muslim” perpetrators of 9-11?
Taking everything at face value about 9-11: accepting on faith the White House's unsubstantiated and unproven assertions of it being the work of “Muslim” terrorists; even accepting President Bush's unsubstantiated and actually disproved assertions of Sadaam Hussein possessing WMDs being an imminent threat to America; and even that he was directly responsible for 9-11; accepting all these assertions as gospel truth handed by god himself to the American people, how can the American public condone, let alone actively support the “Shock and Awe” retaliation on innocent civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq with all of America's superpower might? Have the American people become a nation of cowards that they pick on the defenseless and the weak with long range bombers and depleted Uranium munitions which keep on killing for decades and even centuries after the hostilities are over? For four decades the Americans could not pick a direct fight with their arch nemesis the Soviet Union – because the latter also had teeth and could bite back. But now, is it time to brow beat all the other much weaker nations into submission? The new barbarians in three piece suits? If there is any other conclusion that any rational person can come to, what is it?
There were no large armies amassed to attack America unlike Pearl Harbor in 1941. There were no vast military and industrial infrastructures to be destroyed as in Dresden and Tokyo. Only at best, some tens or hundreds of individual bare footed criminals 20 thousand miles away hiding in caves and surrounded by hungry, barefooted, and war-ravaged civilian tribal communities, or in equally distant and quite defenseless, years of sanction starved deserts amidst some of the most dense civilian population centers in the region. And even under the assumption that these were the criminal masterminds behind 911, a collective inhuman punishment was and is being visited upon millions of civilians. All of this is a fact that is openly known to the public.
Even worse, how can the American public not absolutely go berserk and immediately march on the White House at the White House's open proclamation of unilateral preemptive nuclear strikes at non-nuclear nations? Here again there is no aspect of deception, only open belligerence and Nuclear War mongering posture upon the majority of innocent people who happen to live in the same area as the few “evil doers”.
While in as much as this book has concentrated on demonstrating how Zbigniew Brzezinski's diabolical thesis in the “Grand Chessboard” is actually being put into practice post 9-11, and how the American population is being bamboozled into an imperial mobilization through lies and deceit, it has not dwelled upon this moral lapse and plain guilt of the American population and the American Congress, from which neither may claim the often abused “I didn't know” exemption. Both knowingly and deliberately agreed to decimating civilian populations with awesomely frightening weapons of mass destruction of their own nation's making.
The sole exception being the lone dissenting and courageous voice of Congress Woman Barbara Lee from Oakland California, and the few hundred thousand people of conscience futilely protesting the call to war in the main streets of America.
The claim to “innocence of knowledge” due to being “prisoners of the cave” may only be made with respect to the deception game of their government and their media in keeping the American public in the dark. Not with respect to what the American public already quite plainly knows. And even that claim to innocence henceforth, has been eviscerated in this book.
The American nation collectively cannot be absolved of accountability, nor escape restitution and compensation to the innocent victims of this “war on terrorism”. The unheard cries of the innocent victims demand it.
I do not advocate collective punishment of any people for the crimes of their leaders – whether elected, selected, inherited, or imposed (that pretty much covers the entire planet). But collective punishment is precisely what is likely to transpire at the hands of the innocent victims of America's global wars who will see no other recourse than to bring the same war home to those watching it on HD television in the comfort of their American living rooms. As this poignant verse notes:
“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do Evil in return.” (W.H. AUDEN, “September 1, 1939”)
There may not remain much difference between Iraqi, Afghani, and Palestinian civilian victims, and American civilian victims – the graveyard is the ultimate equalizer. To protect you – or so they will claim, your leaders will convert this country into a lucrative corporate controlled police state; already many of the prison systems in this nation are run by them. The day isn't very far away when no one will be able to move from their home without showing ID cards at military-police checkpoints on every off ramp and gas station in America.
The oil that all industrialized nations so covet, is really still under other people's soil. All the “evil-doers” have to do is to detonate some nuclear bombs in their own oil fields and there is no process known to man that can remove radioactivity from gasoline. A “Samson” defense isn't the prerogative of Israel alone. Especially when this self-defense can also completely destroy their arch enemies. With the oil fields “peaking”, as some fear mongers boldly allege even while Mobil and Chevron et. al. reap in record breaking profits each year, the long lines and 1929 can be brought back just as easily as the coming military draft – be it of economic servitude, skills of the professional, or the precious lives of the youth. Allies today can easily become arch nemesis tomorrow over a shrinking pie. We shall all be collectively punished when the dominoes fall, bystanders and silent spectators and all. The law of unintended consequences is still among the least understood laws of nature!
Self-interest alone dictates immediate atonement and restitution – before it is too late.
This book is in two parts. Part-1 discloses my dialog with the United States Security agencies in the essay “They dared to knock on my door”. Part-2 employs some key insightful themes from Zbigniew Brzezinski's book “The Grand Chessboard”, to explain, deconstruct, dismantle, and entirely dethrone the fiction of “war on terrorism” which is entirely blueprinted in this 1996-97 “American Mein Kampf” written by the quintessential “ubermensch” mastermind who is directly responsible for “some stirred up Moslems” when “giving to the USSR its Vietnam war” with Muslim blood. This blood is just as red!
Please read the full essay at www.humanbeingsfirst.org at URL:
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/americas-shame.html Please use this as you deem appropriate as per the diktats of your own conscience. There is aggression looming ahead on another defenseless nation - only the American public can stop it!!! How can we reach them? In this and other forums like this, we mainly preach to the choir and go home after a hard days' workout on the treadmill!
Thank you.
Zahir.
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