2004-10-31

Editorial- Hellfire and Brimstone

Bernard J. Fine

On November 2nd we vote. Our country is in serious trouble morally, ethically, militarily, politically. There appears to be no middle ground.

In the aftermath of World War II, during the Nuremberg trials, the question was frequently asked "How could the German people not know what was going on in the concentration camps? How could they not know about the mass extermination of Jews?

How could this happen?

We can see how it happened by examining what is happening in our own country right now.

In Germany, the state propaganda machine controlled the information that people received. The masses were fed only the misinformation and disinformation that advanced the causes of the government. They were aroused by blatant appeals to patriotism, fuhrer worship and cries of "Deutchland Uber Alles." Most Germans couldn't possibly have known what was going on in the remote sites of concentration camps, just as most of us had no idea about what goes on in places like Abu Ghraib and other American detention centers. Just as most Israelis have no idea of what goes on in the towns and villages of Palestine. In this country and in Israel information is controlled by a state apparatus. The apparatus is different than it was in Nazi Germany, but the net effect is the same. There, information was controlled by not allowing any media other than government approved to disseminate information. Here, huge media corporations have on their own initiative presented one-sided news in support of the government. Couple that with an abysmally unsophisticated populace and the net effect here was not unlike the government censorship in Germany.

Just as happened in Germany, our citizens are being fed misinformation and disinformation by media controlled by members of the party in power. Even today, best estimates are that in this country at least 50% of the people still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9-11 and that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. That is completely false information, but at this writing, two days before the election, our leaders are still telling the same lies to the same receptive audiences. Even the president, who has publicly stated that there were no WMD's found in Iraq and that Hussein did not attack the World Trade Center, still persists in telling the same lies that he has confessed to making.

Many of us are not at all tuned into reality. We have no idea what reality is. We watch reality shows on TV without realizing that those shows are unreal. Our brains are empty of thought, idling while waiting for others to feed us the food for thought. And others stand by ready to feed us. So hungry for mental stimulation and unable to provide our own, we swallow everything fed to us, licking up the lies, distortions, fabrications and asking for more. Complex information frightens us. We have no idea about how to go about solving problems or planning for contingencies. We function only in the immediate and can't deal with eventualities. We are intellectually lazy. We trust in those we admire, even though we admire them for reasons having no relationship to their being able to lead us. Many of us have extreme religious views and, at the same time, run around shouting patriotism and waving flags while being thoroughly confused about the separation of church and state upon which our country is based. In Germany it was "The Fatherland," here it's "The Homeland." Whatever happened to "Our Country?"

We worship a President who speaks with God and tells us that God told him to go to war. We never question what kind of a God it is that uses Shock and Awe to blast a country and its people to bits in our name. Instead, we preach about the sanctity of life, the sanctity of the unborn, while we have no problem with sending the already born to war to die. The fetus is sacred and has a right to live, but the same fetus 18 years later is deemed expendable as cannon fodder. We realize that pollution is bad and that a polluted environment can be harmful to the mother and to the unborn, yet we support a President who has ruthlessly destroyed most of the rules and regulations that protect us from harmful environments and that help save the lives of the unborn. How does the same person value life, either born or unborn, and still vote for a destroyer of life of both the born or unborn?

We praise God and some of us have even been reborn as devout Christians while at the same time trivializing God. God is now spoken of everywhere, not only in our government but in our schools and even in our sports. When we hit a home run or make a touchdown some of us point to heaven to acknowledge God's help. Why is God only responsible for the good things? Aren't there devout Christian baseball pitchers who get clobbered? Don't reborn fundamentalist fullbacks ever get thrown for losses? Where's the finger-pointing to heaven then? To raise one's finger to the heaven's to acknowledge God overseeing our home run while at the same time supporting an illegal war that has killed over 1100 U.S. soldiers and, according to the latest scientific estimate, as many as 100,000 Iraqis, half of them women and children, is obscene.

One of the excuses for the horrors that occur in the world today is that God works in mysterious ways. Perhaps, but I seriously doubt if one of God's mysterious ways is to create stupid, unperceptive people who are too lazy to face up to the possibility that God put them on earth and left them to solve their own problems. It's far easier to sing praises to the lord and wait for salvation than it is to face up to working for the good of humanity and doing something about the realities of brutality, cruelty, starvation and bigotry.

When I was in service, I had a good friend, Fil. We lived in Korea and Fil whored himself silly 6 days a week. But he unfailingly went to church and confessed his sins and felt absolved and free to start the new week afresh. And so with a lot of us. God is not our savior, our guide, our leader. No, God is our crutch. God is our excuse and is used in vain by our leaders who would exploit our beliefs. Our leaders have succumbed to the temptation of foreign oil. In the name of God, George Bush has created an evil in Iraq and delivered us unto it. He has "Let us Prey" on the beaten, the subdued, the down-trodden, the have-nots, the innocent bystanders, the women, the children, the elderly. Body parts lay strewn in the streets of Baghdad while he uses the name of God in vain and we, like sheep, safely graze in the rapidly deteriorating political, social and natural environment of our beautiful country, self-absorbed and fearful of bad things happening to us, yet blissfully unaware that we are our own worst enemy.

Whatever the outcome of the election, the struggle will not be over. The real war is not with guns and tanks. The real war is against ignorance, greed and bearing witness to false gods. That war will continue among a united people of good will who know and understand how precious and fragile are the ideas of democracy and equality and who are dedicated to pursuing that fight into the future. The noble experiment that is democracy will not fall to those who worship false idols. They talk the talk. We will continue to walk the walk and the struggle will go on.