Don’t Insult the Dead

The most grievous insult to the dead is to ignore them, and that is what America and its media have done… not just the WTC victims or those at the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania, but also in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and for decades of American history, elsewhere in the world. 9/11 was meant to be a rude awakening to war on our own soil which we had escaped throughout a century of fighting wars, declared or undeclared, on other peoples’ soil.

Human beings have an unfortunate history of exterminating those individuals and societies our leaders deem disposable. For some strange reason we, as individuals, have taken to divorcing ourselves from what has been done “in our name” and have not taken ownership of what our governments and the various covert operations of our countries do to keep us comfortable in all our diverse lifestyles. We need to begin questioning the motives of the current world-wide corporatist agenda, which includes the Corporate Media Cartel, starting with the basic issues of who gets heard, who gets ignored, and why.

William Greider in Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy, (1993) :

“…privatization, globalization, a corporate system that rewards the average CEO at a rate 173 times the wage of the average employee, the explosion in temporary work, part-time work; the ascendance of workfare, low wage work, of prison labor, the assaults on immigrants and poor people, on unions, currently losing 150,000 souls each year.”

The institutionalized intervention of these corporate advocates into administrative as well as legislative affairs costs ordinary citizens dearly… more dearly than most are aware. One would think, especially after everything that’s happened over the last decade, that all of us would be painfully aware of what’s really going on, but apparently, such is not the case. Instead, our initial response after 9/11 was to call for intensifying the policies that led to the fury and resentment that provide the background for the terrorist attacks, and to pursue more intensively the agenda of the most hard line elements of the leadership in this country: increased militarization, domestic regimentation, attack on social programs, and the destruction and/or disposal of anyone who gets in the way or disagrees. Except, apparently, the main figure behind al Qaeda, whose name is not Saddam Hussein. Contrary to the propaganda most Americans are being fed, we are not hated for our freedom or for our democracy or for our religion or even our way of life, Bin Laden despises the U.S. for its support of extremist fundamentalist regimes in both Saudi Arabia and Israel. It is just that simple.

So, who is to blame, if we must point the inevitable finger of blame at someone? In my estimation:

• - both major political parties (both of which cater to affluent elites, don’t kid yourself that it’s limited to one party or the other, it’s not),
• - the press (which no longer mediates between the public and its representatives, nor reports anything which might be disagreeable to the current agenda-shapers),
• - big business (as exemplified by the influence wielded by General Electric Co. and others), and even…
• - the populace (whose activism, at least in the U.S., has been fairly limited to grass-roots concerns and those “values” things the media spin machine tells us we should be concerned about - and this isn’t limited to election year bullshit).

The “Villains” include an expanding Executive branch, the collusion of both major Parties with Wall Street interests, the increasing use of technical jargon in the halls of power, and let’s not leave out a press that seems more focused on selling celebrities and providing entertainment than on examining policies and the public statements of our officials which actually contradict those policies.

Almost three and a half years have passed since 9/11, and most Americans still don’t know what’s going on in their names, or (and I hate to be this cynical) they simply don’t care. I should hope that we could be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is really being done (and has been done) in their names, and how they were blatantly lied to by those they supposedly trusted to do what’s best for the citizens of our nation, including some members of the press, they would be utterly appalled.

The facts are that the U.S. invaded Iraq on false pretenses, killed and maimed possibly over a hundred thousand Iraqis and uncounted numbers of Afghanis, shot down women and children in the streets, blew up Iraqis’ homes, hospitals and mosques, cut Iraqis off from vital services such as water and electricity, destroyed their institutions of civil society as well as the archaeological treasures of the cradle of civilization (and what wasn’t destroyed was left unguarded for looters to steal), left half the population without any means of livelihood, filled up prisons with people picked up off the streets (90% of whom haven’t done anything wrong) and then tortured and humiliated them before quietly setting some of them free without having even had the benefit of a fair judicial hearing, or even any opportunity to bring counter-charges before a court of law. And that’s just what I know about, I shudder to think about what’s going on that I don’t know about. There are also numerous reports of ‘ghost prisoners’ and secret extraordinary renditions, as well as secret prisons in countries around the world.

Meanwhile, the right-wingers and their buddies in the media are waving flags and bibles like pom-poms cheering all of this on, and attacking anyone who has the courage to stand up and voice their opposition to incidents and actions that are clearly, morally wrong. Why on earth anyone should believe that this Administration can “keep America safe” when it has already proven to the entire watching world that it cannot keep it’s own borders secure, nor the whole country of Iraq (which is only about the size of California), much less occupy and secure just the city of Baghdad? Why do people seem to conveniently forget that 9/11 happened while George W. Bush was president, on his watch? Why do they trust him to keep them ’safe’ when he didn’t keep them safe in 2001? And now we have Condoleeza Rice, among others in the administration, beginning the drumbeats to invade Iran and/or Syria. People should be scared to death that they have given power to these people. The world deserves a better future than the one on offer from the ruthless money men (PNAC, Big Oil, Defense Contractors, etc.) who are making this terrible attempt to dominate the world via endless war, all the while cheerleading gleefully about patriotism and family values.

“The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.

“They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.” - Eugene V. Debs, Socialist Party Convention, Canton, Ohio, 16 June 1918.

There are still vast numbers of people throughout the world, and yes, even here in America, who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age to death. You honor the dead by stopping the killing, and by shining a glaring light on the problems that led to killing in the first place. You don’t honor the memory of the dead by killing more people.