March 13, 2008 - Issue 268

Pax Americana: Enemies ARE the People
Represent Our Resistance
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

I heard something the other night on a radio show. The host read an email he received from a caller. I’ll paraphrase this gist of the email at the end of this article.

The corporate media, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, General Electric, Sony, AOL Time Warner, represented by their mouth pieces, have tried to drum up a reality-show war between the presidential candidates. While they haven’t yet been successful at getting the candidates to pull out those missing weapons of mass destruction against each other, the mouth pieces of the corporate media have managed to distract the American public about war - that is, who voted for the commencement and funding of the Iraq war and who didn’t vote for it.

On the one hand, the candidates have politely obliged the corporate media mouths and offered the audience, the American public, the obvious: their voting record on Iraq. No matter. The shows, called “debates” went on, the mouth pieces received their payment, and the bank accounts of corporate media moguls continued to swell.

The American public, on the other hand, still doesn’t see Iraq people dying or forced to leave their homes for refugee camps elsewhere. They don’t see the flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers. And, they haven’t and possibly won’t hear about this business from the candidates. For, didn’t-vote-for-the-war-Barack Obama, according to Jeremy Scahill, has not “‘ruled out’ using private security companies like Blackwater Worldwide Inc in Iraq.” And, “Obama does not plan to sign on to legislation that seeks to ban the use of these forces in US war zones by January 2009,” Scahill writes (“Obama’s Mercenary Position”). Hillary Clinton has her Lockheed Martin lobbyist. Both Democratic candidates follow the Baker-Hamilton Group game plan for Pax Americana (see Scahill). Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran-Republican, John McCain plans to stay in Iraq for 100 years. War is good for business - the business of maintaining Pax Americana!

Who are the REAL enemies of Pax Americana?

Well, as these politicians know, the U.S. “owns” Iraq. It owns the Green Zone and the 736 million dollar luxury U.S. embassy will be the biggest in the world. In-your-face U.S. imperialism at a cost to American tax payers and “ungrateful” Iraqi citizens. King George: Don’t dare touch those oil wells! The imperialist enterprise is growing, with over 800 U.S. bases around the world. This is all very, very good for business, and there are no plans to dismantle these bases and put up Disneyland Parks in their place. Of course that would be a form of imperialism - cultural, yes? Despite billions poured into Afghanistan, security is a disaster. The lives of Afghani women have worsened since the U.S. invasion. But opium is flourishing on the market as the cash crop of Afghanistan. Another profitable adventure for U.S. imperialism!

The U.S. imperialist mission is moving forward because there are “enemies” everywhere and, at the same time, there are countries to “liberate” resources for profit!

U.S. presidents eventually find their role as imperialist presidents. An air of arrogance and a historical sense of superiority stand behind them. The U.S. is a “superpower.” It owns lots of nuclear weapons of mass destruction and won’t let anyone else own them except “good” friends. Its corporate army of profiteers excels at capitalizing from soft or hard orders to “liberate” this or that country. Its multi-millionaire politicians, with elections funded by the corporations, who look good, sound good because they are groomed to dodge domestic and foreign policy issue-questions. And on the orders of the corporate media and these well-groomed politicians, its citizenry turns its collective head, and with Condi Rice, sings The Star Spangled Banner - oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light… a shopping mall to engage in consumerism.

You have to admit, the U.S. government is one that knows itself. It knows that for more than a half century, it has been steadily building its might by aggression everywhere, particularly in every little snot-nose government that dares to “challenge” or not challenge the U.S. It is not a matter of challenging the U.S. It is a matter of obtaining, with the ease of military deployment, resources the U.S. government must procure for its corporate friends. This governments’ love affair with its own aggression is not limited to any particular administration, like that of the King George/Darth Vader administration.

It is a government that has always relied on brute force and aggression in order to snub its domestic and foreign “enemies.” Ask the Native Americans! It is a government that loves itself so much that it writes its own “romantic” narrative about itself as it goes along. It writes itself as hero, its actions against others as necessary for the hero of a “good” nation. What’s good for the U.S. is good for the world! And that “world,” “according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse,” Noam Chomsky observes, is limited to “the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters)” (“The Most-Wanted List”). It is really clear about its agenda and its story! Politicians approve of an Attorney General who doesn’t think water boarding is torture because he is a “good” man for the job! In plain sight, the Pax Americana regime supports other regimes in agreement with its agenda and it therefore supplies the necessary weaponry of mass destruction to destroy the lives of the Palestinians and Somalians. Bombing and occupation is profitable for the politicians, lobbyists, and corporate cronies of U.S. imperialism.

Friends of the King George and Darth Vader, the “torture” clan (or Klan) of Alberto Gonzales, William J. Haynes II and John Yoo, came up with a whopping narrative that allowed for the rounding up of thousands of “terrorists” for the detention camps built especially for them by buddies at Halliburton and at KBR. They may be “innocent” but only the likes of Scooter Libby and Rumsfeld are “innocent.” These are people who might receive a pardon for the destruction of Iraq, for the killing of its people and for the exile of millions of them from their homes - because, as the rhetoric goes, the Iraqis have been “liberated” from the “dictator.”

Who will free us in the U.S. from these lying, conniving warmongers?

Oh say can you see…

…the U.S. imperialists support for dictators like Suharto of Indonesia, Botha of South Africa, Bastita of Cuba, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Smith of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Mobuti of Zaire (Congo), Duvalier (Papa and Jr.) of Haiti and on and on. Funding “extraordinary rendition” with the “enemies” all over the world, forcing these Black, Brown, and Yellow people to engage in proxy conflicts that culminate in the massacre of thousands of their own people - are exemplary of the behavior of the bullies of the world.

If you are Black long enough in the U.S., you know that “Enemy” is anyone or any group the government can’t absorb or neutralize. The building of economic walls and the placement of Black and Latino youth behind prison walls is a strategy of imperialism. In city after city, working class and poor Black families struggle to stay ahead of the walls that are constructed to keep them out of affordable housing. These walls shut them out and put them outdoors.

Two summers ago, a Nigerian couple (living here in Madison, Wisconsin) invited me to attend the Ibo Yam ceremony in Milwaukee. I had to push aside a book as I got in the back of their car. I recognized the title of the book and the author, a “successful” Black professional scholar whose popular book in that year featured an “explanation” of why Black Americans (read: the poor, the “uneducated,” lower-economic class), were not “successful.” It was one of those Black-people’s-fault-books. I pretended I did not notice the book next to me. But I was well aware that that author and his book “educated” the two Nigerians in front of me about me and Black Americans. That author’s work, his narrative perspective, echoed the imperialist regime’s narrative justification for the indifference toward Black descendents of American slavery, exploitation, cultural genocide, incarceration, and murder.

The survivors of the Black Left, for example, not killed by an “assassin” or COINTELPRO operations or imprisoned and tortured have been “buried” beneath the deadweight of Black clones practicing “individual liberalism,” as bell hooks notes, while infesting “the previous politics of communalism, which emphasized racial uplift and sharing resources” (Where We Stand: Class Matters).  From here - we see the others too - JFK, RFK, Malcolm, Martin L. King, Che Guevara, Fred Hampton, Mark Clarke, Newton, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse, with the millions and millions of Black and Native Americans ancestors. We can see Cuba, Chavez, and Morales struggling to maintain the sovereignty. As many Black Americans, Latino/as, Chicano/as, Native Americans, and Hmong know, it is hard to maintain the sovereignty of our children’s minds when forces in the U.S. want to turn them into profitable commodities for the prison or military industrial complexes.

U.S. imperialist agenda doesn’t respect human rights. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, (note: stats compiled by the King George regime. Consider them far lower than actual numbers) for the month of January 7, 6 million Americans were unemployed, 1.7 million were “marginally attached to the labor force,” and 467,000 were “discouraged workers.” Many workers are “employed,” for companies that barely pay a living wage.

There’s a war on the health of Americans. Pharmaceutical companies are aligned with war profiteers. Like the war profiteers, these pharmaceutical companies make profit from the suffering of others. Are the politicians talking about single-payer health care? No. Where’s the profit?! The war on citizen outrage, begins with the election process. Faulty election machines, operated by dubious private corporations, manage the “selection” of certain politicians, partners in alignment with the agenda of Pax Americana. There are worse disasters simmering in the stew, such as the biological weapons the U.S. employs brain power to cook up (“Engineering Warfare: A Close Look at Biological and Chemical Warfare”).

Everywhere, we hear the corporate media hailing the “young people” who are coming out to participate in the “democratic” process. 4,789 per 100,000 Black men along with 358 per 100,000 Black women, 1,862 per 100,000 Latinos, and 152 per 100,000 Latinas are incarcerated. I am sure that most of them are young. Are they being heard? Are they able to participate? The mostly white college students cheerleading for the Baby Boomer candidates haven’t been subjected to an inadequate high school campus. They have not had to live in police-state neighborhoods. In Madison, Wisconsin, some Baby Boomer parents purchase condominiums for their college-aged children in which to live while they attend the University of Wisconsin, Madison. They need not worry about ending up in Iraq or Afghanistan or in any of the over 800 U.S. military bases around the world. They aren’t among the 2.3 million people locked away in a nation that leads the world in imprisoning its people (Pew Center on the States Report). They are the fortunate ones, fortunate by virtue of their race and class. 44 billion dollars isn’t spent to construct prison complexes to house them. They are the wrong demographic.

Rather, these young people could benefit with future employment at Halliburton and at KBR. Their studies in the “prison mentality,” “drug use among ‘minorities,’” or studies in “underdeveloped urban youth” will fare them well in war against drugs or war against terrorists. Like the politicians, these young people won’t question the engineering of poverty in the U.S. They will not question the government’s complicity with corporate interests. They will not ask, is the enemy the poor, the working class, the Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red people of the world ? - the majority of the world!

The enemy of Pax Americana is the world itself! Humanity! Life!

And finally there’s that email the radio host read on air. It’s a narrative and I’ll paraphrase:

This story has been told to new presidents since JFK. It’s the first day as new president of the U.S. The ceremonies are over and the new president is handed a note. It asks that he/she come to a certain room at a certain time. The new president thinks it’s odd. But he/she arrives at the room. He/she knocks and the door opens to a room filled with people dressed very well in business suits. Someone asks the new president to take a seat. Lights are turned off and a film begins. It is the Kennedy assassination - but it is from an angle never seen before. It’s not the familiar Abraham Zapruder film. This footage of the assassination is taken from the grassy knoll.

The lights come up, and the new president is asked if he/she has any questions. And the new president says - “what’s my agenda!” *

*Bill Hicks, Outlaw comedian. See Bill Hicks.com

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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