Americans need to begin acting like Americans again and say NO to empire and YES to saving our towns, cities and states from the predators who now run things. To use a "play on words" from Pink Floyd: There is no dark side of the empire... it's ALL dark! [...]
One of rock’s greatest albums is Pink Floyd’s 1973 Dark Side of the Moon.
This somber, surrealistic album paints a picture of what society has become, both 44 years ago and now. Such is this present American Empire, replete with our phony wars, excessive militaristic mindset and of course the drive for super wealth by greedy corporations and equally greedy individuals.
Those of us who “knew better” foresaw the economic bubble burst of 2008 years before it occurred. So many of our friends and neighbors cared not a damn about the phony wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and later on against Libya and now proxy wise in Syria.
No, all most of them cared about, and still care about, is making dough on the market or becoming either home flippers or land lords (notice how I separate the two words for better effect — as land lord comes straight out of feudalism). The rest of these apathetic fellow citizens, if not in the financial position to attain the ranking of entrepreneur, simply focus on more and cheaper shopping opportunities as the adopted “Children of Wal-Mart.”
It’s OK for a police officer to kill an unarmed civilian, especially if the victim happens to be of dark skin. It’s OK to march with Nazi-era torches and chant anti Jewish slogans and have your president “pass” on real condemnation. Ditto for the so called Israeli leadership, usually so sensitive to any truthful dissent against their horrific polices, always ready to play the Holocaust card. Trump and Netanyahu’s silence is not golden!
What is really troubling is the multitude of white and non-Jewish (even some Jews too) citizens we mingle with each and every day, who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about it all! Just as so many out there, white and even black, the so called sports journalists, who continue to downplay or criticize Colin Kaepernick and his protest. They usually deal the **** card of how this is sports and should not be the arena for political or social protest.
Oh really, you black and white yuppie so-called pundits! If you were back in this writer’s day during the Vietnam disgrace, you would have just sat back and kept silent as tens of thousands of your peers were DOA in some rice paddy, along with tens of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians. All murdered by this empire to keep its Military Industrial engine full of gas… and profit (Read General Smedley Butler’s 1935 essay War is a Racket).
Americans need to begin acting like Americans again, and say NO to empire and YES to saving our towns, cities and states from the predators who now run things. To use a “play on words” from Pink Floyd: There is no dark side of the empire… it’s ALL dark!
Originally published in August 2017 and modified on 2017-11-12
About the author: Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, New York, longshoremen. He has been a freelance columnist since 2001, with more than 300 of his essays posted on sites like Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, “It’s the Empire… Stupid” with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...
ForwardForty-three years ago on September 11, 1973, the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet, crushed the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende.The objective was to replace a progressive, democratically elected government by a brutal military dictatorship.The military coup was supported by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger played a direct role in the military plot. (Nixon and Kissinger, image right)For details see: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KOR309A.html and references below.In the weeks leading up the coup, US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and members of the CIA held meetings with Chile’s top military brass together with the leaders of the National Party and the ...
In an email sent to his business partner and Democratic fundraiser Jeffrey Leeds, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote of Hillary Clinton, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State during Barack Obama’s first term was an unmitigated disaster for many nations around the world. Neither the Donald Trump campaign nor the corporate media have adequately described how a number of countries around the world suffered horribly from Mrs. Clinton’s foreign policy decisions.Millions of people were adversely harmed by Clinton’s misguided policies and her “play-to-pay” operations involving favors in return for donations ...
The Chinese have a genius for pithy expressions and few are more packed with meaning, while immediately understandable, than "paper tiger". NATO is one, but paper tigers that overestimate their powers can be dangerous.Some Russians are concerned that there are today more hostile troops at the Russian border than at any time since 1941. While this is true, it is not, at the moment, very significant. The Germans invaded the USSR with nearly 150 divisions in 1941. Which, as it turned out, were not enough.Today NATO has – or claims to have – a battle group in each of the three ...
The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis”Part IIntroductionAs the 9th anniversary of 9/11 nears and the war on terror continues to be waged and grows in ferocity and geography, it seems all the more imperative to return to the events of that fateful September morning and re-examine the reasons for war and the nature of the stated culprit, Al-Qaeda.The events of 9/11 pervade the American and indeed the world imagination as a historical myth. The events of that day and those leading up to it remain largely unknown and little understood by the ...
This article was first published in November 2014.Recent developments confirm what is known and documented: Washington is behind the Islamic State (ISIS) and at the same time it is behind the moderate Al Qaeda terrorists, which the Obama administration is supporting as part of America’s campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS). And they expect us to believe that they are committed to waging a campaign against terrorists.The Islamic State (ISIS) was until 2014 called al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).Al Nusra is an al Qaeda affiliate which has committed countless atrocities in Syria. It is now considered by the Obama administration as ...
“If the Nuremberg Laws were applied, then every post-war American President would have been hanged” Noam ChomskyEurasiaHenry Kissinger, one of the fundamental figures in creating and maintaining the US policy of global hegemony during the Cold War,[1] was quite clear and precise in his overviewing the issue of the American geopolitical position, national goals, and foreign policy. His remarks can be summarized in the following points:The US is an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia.The resources and population of Eurasia far exceed the resources and population of the US.Any domination by any single state from Eurasia (either ...
Autism as the political driving forceAs a matter of very historical fact, Kosovo-Metochia’s ethnic Albanians never accepted the state of Yugoslavia as their own state, nor did they ever recognize the country of Serbia as their homeland. Nevertheless, two important points have to be noticed in regard to this phenomenon. As it is quite known, it is a common feature of the highlanders in general. The Yugoslav and Albanian Dinaric highlanders, in fact, never historically accepted fully any kind of state as their own, for which they would feel any sincere responsibility. It concerns, for instance, the Montenegrins regarding the ...
The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking at a conference entitled the “The Spirit of Turkey’s New Security,” referring to the Treaty of Lausanne, said:“The Turkish Republic is the last state that we founded with whatever was left over from all the self-sacrifices we were able to make... We are heirs of a nation that saw its territory expand to 22 million kilometers. Shortly before the Republic was founded, we had 3 million kilometers which kept diminishing until all we had left was 780,000 kilometers. Some may be offended at my mention of Lausanne. But why does it bother ...
Fifty years ago today, in 1967, nearly 100,000 Americans marched on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War. In those days there was a mandatory draft in place, and the risk was very real that a young man just out of high school could quickly wind up 13,000 miles away, fighting an unseen enemy in jungles that didn’t need tanks or B-52 bombers to inflict fear. Worse yet was the possibility of going MIA or coming home in a body bag — just another expendable statistic in the great fight against communism. But even many of those who made it ...
Well-intentioned and artfully executed, The Vietnam War—Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 10-part, 18-hour-long documentary series on PBS—is not history, but rather story-telling and remembrance. Balanced, exhaustive, and relentlessly solemn, it glides along the surface of things, even when that surface is crowded with arrogance, miscalculation, deceit, and bloodletting on an epic scale.According to one promotional trailer prepared for the series, “In war there is no single truth.” Embedded within every war (as in other forms of human endeavor) are multiple truths—some of them trivial, others very important indeed. The purpose of history is to unearth and engage with those truths ...
If a German had shown up in London in 1944 and opened fire, would police have ruled out any connection to Nazism? Fatmir H. comes from a hotbed of jihad activity. The Islamic State and al-Qaeda have issued repeated calls for Muslims in West to murder civilians. We have seen the perpetrators of numerous jihad terror attacks declared mentally ill, often absurdly. In light of all that, the possibility that this was a jihad terror attack cannot be ruled out.“‘He jumped out of the train and started to strike at people with an AXE’: Horror in Dusseldorf as Kosovan attacker ...
Their anxiety about the future of NATO, recently on full display again when the American president was in Europe, could not be bettered as a measure of the incapacity of Europe’s top politicians to guide their continent and represent its populations. Through its provocations of Moscow, NATO systematically helps increase the risk of a military confrontation. By thus sabotaging its declared purpose of preserving collective security for the countries on either side of the Atlantic, it erases its fundamental reason for being and right to exist.Grasping these facts ought be enough to fuel moves aimed at quickly doing away with ...
It is unreasonable to ask taxpayers to pay billions more dollars for NATO’s budget because they get less and less peace, security and stability, says Jan Oberg, director of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research.NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the bloc’s security spending would see its biggest increase since 2014, by 4.3 per cent in 2017. This is a response to US President Donald Trump‘s criticism of NATO countries failing to increase military budgets.Stoltenberg also said the alliance has combat-ready forces along Russia’s border.“NATO’s four multinational battle groups in the Baltic countries and Poland are now fully operational, ...
War is evil; permanent war is permanent evil. It is evil to humans but also to other species and the planet; the weapons used destroy us but also contaminate and destroy nature.Despite a general knowledge of the evils of war and acceptance of peace and the rule of law, war has become a permanent feature of the 21st century -destructive, cruel, dehumanizing and vindictive. Its message: those who can kill and destroy the most have the upper hand. Major General Smedley Butler said it in a speech in 1933: “war is a racket.” Butler, who had joined the Marine Corps ...
On November 3, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) informed the court's Pre-Trial Chamber, "[T]here is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in connection with the armed conflict in Afghanistan."In what Amnesty International's Solomon Sacco called a "seminal moment for the ICC," Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked the court for authorization to commence an investigation that would focus on US military and CIA leaders, as well as Taliban and Afghan officials.Bensouda wrote in a November 14, 2016, report that her preliminary examination revealed "a reasonable basis to believe" ...
Kosovo’s Prime Minister Accused of Running Human Organ, Drug Trafficking CartelIn another grim milestone for the United States and NATO, the Council of Europe (COE) released an explosive report last week, “Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo.”The report charged that former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) boss and current Prime Minister, Hashim Thaçi, “is the head of a ‘mafia-like’ Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe,” The Guardian disclosed.According to a draft resolution unanimously approved December 16 in Paris, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights found compelling ...
For overwhelming Western political analysts, journalists, scientists, etc., the disappearance of the USSR in 1990/91 was symbolized overdramatically by the physical destruction of the Berlin Wall followed by the removal/destruction of status/monuments devoted to the communist leaders and communist ideology. This geopolitical change called for a new world order in international relations (IR) and, in fact, heralded global peace, international democracy, and worldwide security and stability in foreign affairs after the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989). The period of the Cold War was a historic period lasting from the time of the establishment of the NATO pact in 1949 to the ...
The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.America’s hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms ...
he Roman Catholic Church and the Peoples Republic of China are set to sign an agreement, which would formally end the hostilities between these two entities. The Chinese government will formally acknowledge the Pope as the leader of the Catholic Church in China. In exchange, the Pope will reinstate ex-communicated Bishops selected by the Communist Party to lead Catholics on the Chinese mainland. In this context, it is worth reviewing the shifts and evolutions of Catholicism in global politics.Opposing Capitalism and MarxismSurprising as it may be to many Republicans in the United States, the Roman Catholic Church officially opposes capitalism. ...
Those of us who “knew better” foresaw the economic bubble burst of 2008 years before it occurred. So many of our friends and neighbors cared not a damn about the phony wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and later on against Libya and now proxy wise in Syria.
