1/19/09
Israel claims that they will pull out of Gaza in time to watch Obama on TV.

Americans are joining the army because they can’t find a job. Neo-cons rejoice! “With a larger standing army, we’ll have to invade somewhere soon.”

1/27/09

It was astutely brought to my attention today, by the lovely and always pleasant Melanie Murphy, by way of a graphic novel which attempts to teach young people the US Constitution, that the United States has not officially declared war on a nation since WWII. Now this to me, is social manipulation brought on by politicians disguising their campaigns of violence as something softer than what it is: war! Armed conflicts, military operations, whatever you’d like, but what has taken place in Iraq since 2003 is as much of a war as any. Go ask the people who live there if that feels like war to them.

Yet when we do declare war, we do so against the convenient, ambiguous threat of terrorism. In the same breath, US officials list off of groups of dark-skinned radicals and leave out the same violent fanatics that are red-blooded, Caucasian Americans and live in compounds throughout this country’s wooded areas! I don’t mean to say that rural America is made of crazy militia men and women and militia babies, but that some extremists and fundamentalists are born and raised right here as white people and black people and Hispanic people and that every Muslim is not trying to kill us.

Timothy McVeigh. Ah yes, Tim McVeigh. The white American guy who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City to retaliate against his own government for their Tyrannical rule on the federal level. A guy who grew up attending daily mass with his father in Pendleton, NY, enlisted in the Army and trained to become a Green Beret, but somehow failed the psychology test and never made it. The guy who wore White Power shirts around the Army base, and later distributed ATF hats with bullet holes in them. When the word terrorism is thrown about, the average American person doesn't immediately recall McVeigh, or The UniBomber or the numerous assassinations of public figures by the hands of white men.

Ultimately, the government has used the word terror to mask imperialist motives of establishing itself more thoroughly within the Middle East. The word has nearly become a code word to mean radical Muslim, yet terror knows no racial divide. As long as one group or individual feels oppressed by a threat it feel cannot be defeated in an all-out war, than that group or individual will strike in smaller, more precise attacks. That's what has been branded terrorism.

So to declare war on something with no tangible face provides the government an open-ended span of possibility to follow their dangerous whims whichever way they please.

Not declaring war on actual nations is a slick psychological tool of the spoken word in order for men in charge to form a villain against what they call our freedom, but is more against their imperial agenda.