Keeping Them In Prison Helps Us Stay In Power
by
Sudhama Ranganathan | 06.14.2011
We are a nation that likes to point to other nations in order to make ourselves feel better. We don't do it as much as we used to, but from time to time we still point to this or that nation in the news etc. and say, “see these guys, we are better than them.” In the eighties, when I was growing up, we did this on a daily basis and in an almost mocking fashion. The idea was the rest of the world was just plain wrong and in order to be right they needed to be more like us.
In many of those countries we pointed to their systems of oppression to prove how much better life was here. It allayed our fears here helping us to believe we were secure in our spending on defense and wrapped in a pillowy impenetrable layer of protection through a shared ethos. Our freedom was indeed much better than that of those countries we pointed to.
No matter how much people extolled the benefits and utopian ideals of Soviet style communism there was no longer a way for those people to hide the obvious failure. In the Soviet Union there were the pictures on TV of the bread lines that people had to wait in and the shoe lines and the lines for other goods and services. There were the defectors and their stories.
We were constantly being told of the inferior products, standard of living in general and of course the freedom. Were people to speak out against the government, they were locked up period. If they were to say they believed the system under which they lived was wrong, they were found guilty of subversion and sent to Siberia in many cases never to be heard from again.
This did not extend simply to outright speech contradictory to the ideals extolled by the Soviet government. If someone were to write say poetry that got people to think differently whether these people were for or against the government they could be locked up. If they performed music that had notions or rhythms deemed to be contravening the ideals of communism or the administration at the time they could be locked up. In many cases they could even have psychological and other forms of experiments done on them by the government as essentially they were considered trash and human throwaways worthy of nothing more – not very Christian. Even the entertainment media was state run to implement thought and idea controls.
These kinds of things we held up in stark contrast to our society. We would watch news programs about how we are free to say what we please so long as it does not incite violence against the government and be free from repercussions. That if we criticize our government no matter who we are we can be assured no harm will come to us or our family members. We were also reminded of our easy access to credit, goods and services and the abundance thereof. We never needed to worry.
This was sold to us in TV news programs, newspapers and magazines, movies and other forms of entertainment. And often it was true. We were more free. We certainly did not have those lines, inferior products or shortages and that was due to free competition. We were reminded of this through images of the Russians, the Cubans, the Chinese, the defeated Nazis, the Vietnamese and more.
What we weren't told of was that unbeknownst to us our government doing deals and its own business with the very kinds of dictators and oppressive governments it claimed to be against. In South Korea for example, a country that has been a democracy only since the 1990's, for years after WWII we supported dictators of one kind or another. These were often brutal people that kept power and money for themselves at the expense of their people yet we supported them with monetary aid and military support just to hold off any threats from the communist north. These regimes did exactly the same kinds of things as the brutal communist dictators, the only difference was they were funded and backed militarily by us – from the communists but also from those seeking democracy from within.
In Latin America we often backed people like Chile's Augusto Pinochet through money and military aid that was one of the most ruthless dictators in modern Latin American history. He also brutally oppressed free speech often by simply killing people for speaking out against him. Like in the Soviet Union workers spied on their fellow employees, neighbors spied on neighbors and not only did you have to worry if you had a different opinion from the government in power, but say your neighbor decided they did not like you for whatever reason they might report you as someone speaking out against the government and you could be killed or imprisoned for life only God knew where.
In the Middle East and in North Africa many of the countries that have seen their oppressed fight for freedom and the right to democracy over the past year, proving the idea that the majority of Muslim peoples wanted religious based governments and hated democracy wrong, were ruled by dictators as we know. What was less publicized, and kept tightly under wraps until the revolutions for democracy took place, was that we supported most of those governments through aid or military backup and often sold them the arms they were using to hold down their people and siphon off government money to be redirected into their own bank accounts.
Under the Bush administration perhaps one of the most unsettling things to the entire nation was the way they used their power. They blatantly broke laws, they blatantly abused executive power they had no compunctions about just outright lying to get their way. When confronted on how the public felt about some of their decisions they even went so far as to show their disdain by answering with “So?”. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SypeZjeOrY4&feature=related) We felt we were losing freedom.
When campaigning, our current president said he did not agree with those abuses of power and said he would do something about it. He told us he would among other things not repeat the same things and go a different route by not bypassing congressional approval and not overstepping the use of executive privilege specifically with regards to secrecy. He said we needed to get back to a point where the public could trust the executive office again and that he would restore that in part by not engaging in the same sorts of activities that were so unsettling to Democrats, Independents and even many Republicans who helped him win office in 2008.
He said he was not using us by saying that and that he meant it. He said it was not because of popularity that he promised these things but because he believed in the Constitution and that he believed these things were fundamentally right. Yet he still continues many of those very things he railed against to this day.
When the protests broke out in Egypt his administration came to the Egyptian dictator's defense. They said Mubarak was not a dictator and that the country was stable. They also failed to speak up against other governments until protests were well under way, and some of the weapons being used against protesters in Libya were made in America the sales of which were approved by our government.
When we give support and aid to such governments we are by proxy committing the same acts. When many people that merely expressed different opinions from their governments were oppressed for doing so, were we partly responsible for their torture, imprisonment and even death? How many instances of psychological experiments and torture for merely writing something the administration of a particular government felt could jeopardize their chances of staying in power did we contribute something to?
How often were innocent people and their families subjected to blacklisting and home imprisonment to be spied upon by their neighbors and even family members? Why did we support it and why when we made a choice for hope and for a change did we get that as the modus operandi? Why did the president of hope lie and how will he explain the contradictions? Will he say he lied then but will be honest now, or will he continue to tell the same lies? How will he make good on the promise of hope? We don't know who the Republican pick is yet but he better hope they do not manage to inspire more hope than him and be believable. If so he may be in trouble.
The jobs outlook should improve, but as Republican columnist Charles Krauthammer points out that is to be expected due to the bill passed with the cooperation of Republicans at the end of 2010. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/AR201012...) That's the same bill that extended the tax cuts the president said were contradictory to progress just before he decided to renew them... He's got a lot of explaining to do or better yet – a lot of action to get going on.
To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.
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