Remember Captain Renault ( Claude Rains) in Casablanca when he had them close Rick’s Cafe Americain. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) runs to him and says ” Why are ya shutting me down?” Renault shouts back ” There’s gambling going on here.” At that moment the croupier runs over to him with a pile of chips saying ” Here’s your winnings sir.” Yes children, art does imitate life.
So, my country, the United States, which I do love in many ways, is performing like Captain Renault in regards to foreign policy. You stroll down the news and news talk television stations, or listen to NPR ( National Propaganda Radio) and you can see the limits of insidiousness. All you can hope to digest, before you reek, is the solemn faces of the pitchman and pitchwomen lamenting about poor Ukraine. Factor that with ‘ The Russians are coming… The Russians are coming!’ since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. Now, do NOT get me wrong here. I was against this action by Russia, or rather the way it is being executed. Yes, Russia had and has a right to protect the 38% of the Donbass Ukraine region who are ethnic Russians, many being victimized by the Neo Nazis. The Crimean peninsula, once a part of the former Soviet Union, has 2.4 million people, with most of them being ethnic Russians, also victimized by the same Neo Nazi Ukrainians. Now that is only a piece of this puzzle. The main piece is that Russia has twice been invaded from that geographic side by Germany, which is now a NATO member. The Ukraine region , during Operation Barbarossa in 1941, had many of its inhabitants welcoming the German Army with flowers and cookies. Remember please that many of the concentration camps actually used Ukrainian guards.
What angers this writer is how the ‘ Usual Suspects of Empire’ here at home used false rationale and false facts to justify invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Were we, the American public, watching a rerun of the Marx Brothers Duck Soup when the Bush/Cheney Cabal sold us the Big Lie of threats of terrorism to justify pre-emptive war? Look at how perhaps hundreds of millions of inhabitants of this planet came out in February of 2003 to protest those plans. Why did it have to be our nation that seems to always get its fingers caught in the dike? Read the late William Blum’s 2000 book Rogue State to understand what I am referring to here. From LBJ’s BS about attacks against us at the Gulf of Tonkin to Bush Sr.’s false flag BS for Iraq War 1, to Clinton’s BS about Serbia to justify carpet bombing thousands of civilians and their infrastructure, to the aforementioned Bush/Cheney illegal and immoral actions, to Obama’s drone missile attacks to the degree of 10X, to Trump’s dropping the ‘ Mother of All Bombs’ and assassination of Iranian General Soleimani while visiting Baghdad in 2020, and now this saber rattling by the Biden administration… with all those events sanctioned by our embedded mainstream media.
Go and view the 1976 Sidney Lumet film Network. Check out the scene when the CEO of the media empire calls the Peter Finch character into his offices. He explains that ” There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only AT&T, IT&T … a collage of corporations.” Sadly, that is what influences most governments worldwide nowadays. In another fine film, Norman Jewison’s Rollerball ( 1975) they mention what they termed ‘ The Corporate Wars ‘, which gave structure to the world of the future. Both of those films, way ahead of their time, almost psychically explaining what was on the horizon for us. It has arrived! Perhaps we need to turn off the boob tube and educate ourselves before we all become spectators at our own execution.
Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on It’s the Empire… stupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change, Countercurrents., Smirking Chimp and Independent Australia sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid ‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].
