This was written by Ellen Brown back on April 14. We shall see a few years from now whether Libyans will still be cheering and throwing flowers like Iraqis and Afghanis and Bahraini's are now...
Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:
I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.
Alex Newman wrote in the New American:
In a statement released last week, the rebels reported on the results of a meeting held on March 19. Among other things, the supposed rag-tag revolutionaries announced the "[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi."
Newman quoted CNBC senior editor John Carney, who asked, "Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era."
[snip]
Whatever might be said of Gaddafi's personal crimes, the Libyan people seem to be thriving. A delegation of medical professionals from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus wrote in an appeal to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that after becoming acquainted with Libyan life, it was their view that in few nations did people live in such comfort:
[Libyans] are entitled to free treatment, and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 US dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans, and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe, and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture. The Libyan people are quiet and peaceful, are not inclined to drink, and are very religious.
They maintained that the international community had been misinformed about the struggle against the regime. "Tell us," they said, "who would not like such a regime?"
[snip]
And that appears to be how the Libyan system works. According to Wikipedia, the functions of the Central Bank of Libya include "issuing and regulating banknotes and coins in Libya" and "managing and issuing all state loans". Libya's wholly state-owned bank can and does issue the national currency and lend it for state purposes.
That would explain where Libya gets the money to provide free education and medical care, and to issue each young couple $50,000 in interest-free state loans. It would also explain where the country found the $33 billion to build the Great Man-Made River project. Libyans are worried that North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led air strikes are coming perilously close to this pipeline, threatening another humanitarian disaster.
So is this new war all about oil or all about banking? Maybe both - and water as well. With energy, water, and ample credit to develop the infrastructure to access them, a nation can be free of the grip of foreign creditors. And that may be the real threat of Libya: it could show the world what is possible.
Most countries don't have oil, but new technologies are being developed that could make non-oil-producing nations energy-independent, particularly if infrastructure costs are halved by borrowing from the nation's own publicly owned bank. Energy independence would free governments from the web of the international bankers, and of the need to shift production from domestic to foreign markets to service the loans.
If the Gaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank joins the BIS [Bank of International Settlements], whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors, and whether education and healthcare continue to be free.
British special forces are on the ground in Libya helping to spearhead the hunt for Col Muammar Gaddafi, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
As a £1 million bounty was placed on Gaddafi's head, soldiers from 22 SAS Regiment began guiding rebel soldiers after being ordered in by David Cameron.
For the first time, defence sources have confirmed that the SAS has been in Libya for several weeks, and played a key role in coordinating the fall of Tripoli.
With the majority of the capital now in rebel hands, the SAS soldiers, who have been dressed in Arab civilian clothing and carrying the same weapons as the rebels, have been ordered to switch their focus to the search for Gaddafi, who has been on the run since his fortified headquarters was captured on Tuesday.
"When rebels ransacked Moammar Gadhafi's compound and paraded gleefully with his military hats and golf cart in Tripoli this week, the scenes sparked memories of the looting of Baghdad in 2003. It was a reminder that Libya could plunge into the same post-war anarchy that terrorized Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, when thousands of civilians were killed" is the opening paragraph of Geoffrey York's Globe and Mail article Wednesday afternoon.
But Ghahafi, or Gaddafi, or Quaddafi, or whatever his name is, is gone and Freedom and Democracy has been delivered to Libyans by western humanitarian bombers, without "boots on the ground" - except CIA spook boots that aren't really there, right? Hasn't it?
Well, almost, but things are never quite as clearcut and simple as they're made out to be.
York goes on to explain that, in order to assure that only true Humanitarian BrandTM Freedom and Democracy is delivered to Libyans, the coalition of opportunists, sorry I mean coalition of the willing, have decided that it ain't over until the Libyan population is pacified happy and secure with their newfound 'self-determination', and the only way to accomplish self-determination for them since they aren't really capable of self-determination themselves of course (but it sounded good when it was needed), is to is to send in the police to protect them from each other.
This is all part of the no-fly resolution of course - it's just the baggage that wouldn't fit in the luggage compartments of the bombers dropping freedom bombs - the fine print, as it were.
Call it "Mission Yet To Be Accomplished", for short.
Brendan O'Neill, in Why so many hacks fell for the 'gay girl in Syria', aside from writing a very funny, enjoyable piece, and despite not answering the question correctly, asks the right one: why did the West's 'human rights lobby' and its major news publications stupidly, without hesitation, accept the existence of Tom MacMaster's "Amina Assaf"? He writes:
MacMaster started his hoax in February, yet by the time he had invented Amina's arrest by Assad's forces on 6 June - an invention that would lead to his hoax being exposed - everyone from the pouting princess of the human rights lobby, Bianca Jagger, to mainstream newspapers such as the Guardian was reporting Amina's words and thoughts as fact. On 7 June, Esther Addley, the Guardian's senior news reporter no less, reported - without the benefit of the word 'allegedly' or any quote marks - that '[Amina was] teargassed, arrested and detained with other protesters' and had now been 'snatched from a Damascus street by three armed men and bundled into a vehicle'. Thus did an American man's ramblings, written in Scotland, make it into a serious newspaper's coverage of repression in Syria.
... Meanwhile, the online human rights lobby rallied to Amina's cause. It set up Facebook pages called 'Free Amina Arraf', and designed posters calling for her release. Made to look like cool, 1970s, radical Arab propaganda, the posters quoted from one of the 'poems' that 'Amina' 'wrote' on 'her' website: 'Borders mean nothing / When you have wings.' Thus did an American man's crap poetry, written in Scotland, become the rallying cry of an international campaign to free a lesbian in Syria.
The media and HR lobby will lie otherwise to excuse their foolishness, but MacMaster wasn't exactly a sleuth extraordinaire. A "stubbly bloak" from Edinburgh, he was just another bored blogger:
The media's current focus on the clever nature of the gay-girl hoax ('it is an elaborate hoax', says a track-covering Guardian), overlooks what is easily the most important dynamic in this story: not MacMaster's alleged powers of persuasion, but the media's susceptibility to delusion. However well-written or seemingly authentic MacMaster's blog was - and as it happens, some Syrians have said it was unconvincing - the fact is that it was just a blog; just a self-started website with various bits of personal writing and nothing to suggest that any of it was accurate or authoritative.
The trick with imperial interventions is understanding them as that at their beginnings. That is hard when the 'only' question presented in the media or in church is how to respond to a humanitarian crisis. A humanitarian crisis that now turns out to be largely a myth other than the fact that a violent civil war is a humanitarian crisis all by itself. Ending the civil war (rather than exacerbating it) is and was the way to end the humanitarian crisis.
Some of the rebels were aware of what the real deal was, but they've been pushed aside or fallen in love with Western military power, forgetting what that power fights for (which we learn by reading many Wikileaks cables and 'grokking' the real U.S. worldview (it's corporate-interests oriented and definitely not humanitarian)).
At first, at least, let's recognize that "something weird" is going on when every U.S. "humanitarian intervention" of recent years has been anti-humanitarian by any after-the-fact common sense assessment, but has been good for U.S. corporate or stategic interests.
Imperial/neocolonial wars never go well for the targeted country, except for the thin layer of traitors at the top. That's why it's plain the rebel 'leaders' are not all on the same team; each future puppet is actually an "I gotta get mine, Jack" soloist, hoping to be chosen as the invaders' enforcer.
Imperial interventions never go well for the targeted country; the U.S. has done enough of them in recent years for us to know that. Everyone of good conscience should see through the usual mainstream media war-mongering (and learn that that is what you should expect from the mainstream media) and oppose the Libya war and all wars motivated by imperial greed.
NATO is viewing the ceasefire declared by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as plausible, but will continue air strikes as necessary, vowed secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
The official position of the Alliance is that it will continue executing air strikes, as long as Gaddafi's forces continue to pose dangers for civilians.
At the same time Rasmussen declared that he views the ceasfire as "plausible and trustworthy" and that NATO welcomes all such measures.
Hey, that was nice, except for the cruise missiles. Oh, but if the following could be wrestled into headline form, it might give the above a run for its money:
The most ridiculous notion floated came from the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, which asserted that our fighter planes are protecting the "civilians who comprise the bulk of the rebel forces."
In case you missed it in the propaganda storm, Qaddafi accepted the ceasefire proposed by the African Union, while the rebels rejected it. And NATO, well, see above headline! Details of the ceasefire plan, as reported in the Washington Post:
These "humanitarian interventions" follow a familiar script: demonization, hand in hand with romantic effusions about the demon's opponents, whether the Mujahiddeen in Afghanistan reinvented as Robin Hoods of the Hindukush or the Albanian mafiosi tarted up as freedom-loving Kossovars.
U.S. analysts who instinctively oppose U.S. imperialism often are entrapped by the demonization stage and then at best argue that U.S. intervention is 'wrong' not because it wouldn't be great to oust the target government, but simply because our leaders are being hypocritical or inconsistent. The "why aren't we also invading Bahrain and Yemen?" pseudo-oppositional argument. (A recent example: Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis in yesterday's Counterpunch; another example: John Chuckman a few days earlier in the same publication.) But when an argument can be answered with "What, are you nuts?" is it truly opposition to the latest U.S. imperialist brutality? No, not at all.
What's refreshing is to read analysis that takes for granted that the demonization and 'humanitarian intervention' fog cover up the usual economic imperialism, and then argue directly against that. More often than Americans, British authors like Alex Cockburn (quoted above) take this stance against U.S.-led intervention. (Is it to avoid sounding completely naive, stupid and American that some are 'allowed' in mainstream Britain to use the common sense soft Marxist 'follow the money' approach?) But progressive third world authors, for example Vijay Prashad and Soumaya Ghannoushi, whose native countries continue today to experience the abuse of neo-colonialism, tend to write the straightest takes on what's really going down in nations most Americans really don't give a rat's ass about.
Ghannoushi wrote brilliantly in the Guardian yesterday on the counter-revolution operated by the West, as applied to Libya. Read the entire thing, of course, but here is how it begins:
Arab dictators were not the only ones to have been taken aback by the scale and speed of events in the region. Their allies were also caught off guard. The changes were simply "too much, too fast", as a stunned US official put it. From being the sole actors and directors on the stage, Europe and the US, along with the various despots, found themselves suddenly reduced to mere spectators, and fearful of the future.
The Libyan quagmire was an opportunity for their Euro-American allies, too. It enabled them to breathe life into the corpse of "humanitarian interventionism", using it as a way of riding the wave of change and redirecting its course to their benefit. As the possibility of salvaging a Gaddafi confined to Tripoli and western Libya receded - and with it the chance of protecting their huge business contracts - the international powers shifted positions, joining the rebels' camp instead. ...
Backstage ... the French, British, Italians, and Americans are working to promote their own men among the rebels in preparation for the post-Gaddafi era. The real contest is over who calls the shots in the new Libya and who dominates its economy.
Later in the essay she changes gears, focusing on the IMF-imposed economic model that has been kicking hell out of the third world in recent decades, writing that this phenomenon is perhaps the central reason for the rebellions across the Arab world:
I love Angry Arab so much these days I can't resist excessive bolding him. The guy knows what's going on. And he hammers all the despots in the Middle East, so if you want some Syria's Assad bashing, you'll find it, Saudi royal bashing, plenty there, bashing of Qatar's newest front Aljazeera, got that too. Here he is on the very poor propaganda service (can't be so obvious, guys!) that is 'our leading newspaper':
[Opening lines of New York Times 'our side' news, where pro-intervention urges overwhelm the news content] "Standing at the grave of an 18-month-old baby on Wednesday, officials of the Qaddafi government presented the first specific and credible case of a civilian death caused by Western airstrikes. But relatives speaking a few yards away said they blamed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and welcomed the bombs. "No, no, no, this is not from NATO," one relative said, speaking quietly and on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation."
OK, Mr. Kirkpatrick. What is your point? That U.S. bombs don't have a history of killing many, many civilians, or that those civilian casualties of U.S. bombing should always be dismissed because the US missions are always noble?
Yes, the Qadhdhafi regime lies but it is not difficult to expect, or imagine, the high toll of US bombings on civilians, because we have seen those effects in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places, like Yemen and Somalia.
And then you want to reassure your readers that even if they were killed by U.S. bombs, it does not matter because families of victims "welcome" the bombs, and that Arab mothers would be honored if they children are killed by US bombs.
Are you aware how ridiculous your piece and that opening paragraph in particular sound?
The search for an exit route out of Libya for Muammar Gaddafi is severely constricted by the international criminal court's (ICC) investigation into his alleged crimes against humanity, legal experts warn. ...
It may have been hoped that they could flee to one of several dozen countries that, like Libya, have not ratified the Rome statute, the treaty that established the ICC. Those include .... three permanent members of the UN security council: the US, China and Russia.
But the powers of the ICC investigation extend to all of those countries because the security council, in resolution 1970, urges all member states to co-operate fully, whether they recognise the Hague-based court or not. ...
"I have heard people say that resolution 1970 was a mistake because it gives Gaddafi no way out," says [Malcolm Shaw QC, a senior fellow at Cambridge University's Lauterpacht centre for international law]. "It basically said to Gaddafi, 'You have to fight to the end.' He may have a few short-term options, but the long-term prognosis for him and his family is very difficult. Apart from the fact an amnesty is unlikely to stick for ever, whoever takes over in Libya is sure to want to go after Gaddafi's money."
To review the recent history that led up to the U.S./British/French/Italian air war on Libya:
When a nation in conflict with an imperial power declares a complete and unilateral ceasefire and states that it wants UN inspectors in country, now, to make sure the ceasefire is real and that civilians are protected, what is an military imperialist coalition to do? If the U.S. and its subordinates had been sincere about protecting civilians and so on, they would've at least expressed positive interest in the 'offer' (especially its UN monitors provision!), replied with a confidence-building measure, and asked "its" rebels to stand down briefly. But that is not what happened early on March 19. What did happen is instructive.
Libya's foreign minister has announced an immediate halt to all military operations in the country, following an earlier move by the United Nations which authorised military strikes to protect Libyan civilians."Libya has decided an immediate ceasefire and an immediate halt to all military operations," foreign minister Mussa Kussa told a press conference from the capital, Tripoli, on Friday (local time)."(Libya) takes great interest in protecting civilians," he said, adding that the country would also protect all foreigners and foreign assets in Libya.Mr Kussa said because Libya is a member of the United Nations, it is "obliged to accept the UN Security Council's resolutions."
But then, say those who trust reports from one side in a civil war, didn't the rebels and Western news reports tell us that Libya had ignored its own ceasefire and kept on fighting?
Yes, they did, but that doesn't mean those reports, by one side in an armed conflict, were true. We don't in fact know whether Libya ceased firing. Libya said that it did, while those attacking Libya said that it did not.
We do know that neither the rebels nor the U.S. and its allies, in response to Libya's declaration, either proposed or declared their own unilateral ceasefires.
How could we have been sure, how can we ever be sure that Libya had/has ceased fire? How could we have been sure, how can we ever be sure that Libyan civilians in combat zones (on both sides of the civil war) were and are safe and secure?
With UN experts on the ground monitoring the alleged ceasefire. And that is exactly what Libya has repeatedly asked for beginning late on March 18. Libya has received no response at all to that suggestion, other than cruise missiles.
The U.S. air war on Libya is a case of imperialism. Imperialism is why it is happening, and that is fundamentally why I oppose the war. Imperialism is when a weaker nation is forced to act in the interests of a stronger nation or multinational coalition. The intention of 'our' air war is to force Libya to give over sovereign control of its economy, including of its oil industry, to the forces of corporate globalization, in particular and especially to the corporate interests of those doing the bombing. Find a simpatico perspective in Diana Johnstone's Why are They Making War on Libya? but also definitely don't forget these two Pepe Escobar paragraphs from back on March 19:
History may register that the real tipping point was this past Tuesday when, in an interview to German TV, the African king of kings made sure that Western corporations - unless they are German (because the country was against a no-fly zone) - can kiss goodbye to Libya's energy bonanza. Gaddafi explicitly said, "We do not trust their firms, they have conspired against us ... Our oil contracts are going to Russian, Chinese and Indian firms." In other words: BRICS member countries. ...
When Gaddafi threatened Western oil majors, he meant the show would soon be over for France's Total, Italy's ENI, British Petroleum (BP), Spanish Repsol, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, Hess and Conoco Phillips - though not for the China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC). China ranks Libya as essential for its energy security. China gets 11% of Libya's oil exports. CNPC has quietly repatriated no less than 30,000 Chinese workers (compared to 40 working for BP).
But the actual proof of Western intentions is in the history. Ten or so days ago the UN Security Council passed its 'no fly zone' resolution. Libya then offered an unconditional ceasefire and begged UN inspectors to come to Libya and make sure the ceasefire was real and that civilians were well-treated. Now, at that point, the intimidation of the 'no fly zone' obviously had worked. If the West had simply said 'yes' and put its efforts into making sure the ceasefire worked, then its intervention, the passage of the Security Council resolution and subsequent military preparations, could plausibly have been called 'humanitarian intervention' rather than imperialism.
However, as we know the Western powers rejected Libya's peace offer. Why? Well, because of their imperialist intentions. That is the only explanation. I've written two diaries here and haven't heard another. (Note that many who defend the war, such as John Judis, predictably pretend the preceding offer did not occur; if it didn't happen then they can pretend those opposed to the war don't care about Libya's civilians; since Libya's ceasefire offer did take place it is war proponents who seem to disregard civilian lives.)
Abdelrahman Amr Zaki, 15, rejected what he said were claims the protests are just about economic conditions.
"They are not. My father drives a BMW and I have a very good home. There is no democracy, no freedom. We just want Mubarak to go."
The U.S. media and some progressives and a substantial number of demonstrators will apparently be satisfied with an Egyptian revolution that devolves into just 'Mubarak out'. As we see in the quote at the top and the blockquotes below:
Amr Salah, a coalition representative, told AFP that those who had launched the call to protest last week "will not accept any dialogue with the regime until our principal demand is met, and that is for President Hosni Mubarak to step down."
"Our principal demand"? The subtitle and then a couple paragraphs from Code Pink Medea Benjamin's article on alternet:
This is not about Mubarak. The U.S., us, we're the real boss in Egypt. The people in the Egyptian streets want democracy. The U.S. certainly does NOT want to give them that, because it rejects who the Egyptians would vote for. If you're uncertain of the preceding truths, simply read more Wikileaks (see below for links).
And then there's why the U.S. requires an oppressive, anti-democratic Egypt, briefly and from an unlikely source, JTA:
Egypt's $1.3 billion in annual aid [from the U.S.] -- most of it in defense assistance -- is rooted in its 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
More on that topic here, in this interview with U.S. state dept spokesman P.J. Crowley on Al-Jazeera (hat tips to Mondoweiss and shergald):
Rattansi: But you have more leverage than that. Surely the secretary of state or the President can speak to President Mubarak and say, "Call off your repressive security forces, now begin a transition to democracy, and stop torturing people."
Crowley: But again, you're casting that in zero sum terms and I reject that. We respect what Egypt contributes to the region, it is a stabilizing force, it has made its own peace with Israel, and is pursuing normal relations with Israel, we think that's important, we think that's a model that the region should adopt broadly speaking. at the same time, we recognize that Egypt, Tunisia other countries do need to reform, they do need to respond to the needs of their people, and we encourage that reform and are contributing across the region to that reform. ...
In any case, if you read and watch the news using my title as your filter, it becomes easy to understand U.S. reaction, and easy to figure out what President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are likely saying to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak behind the scenes. The second is way more important, by the way. You wouldn't expect anything different than the following from Ms. Clinton, on ABC:
For a brief and shining moment, well more or less just July 1 & 2, a major mainstream political leader told the truth everyone knows about Afghanistan: it's unwinnable. And he even held his ground for, like, a day. As a consequence, Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele was attacked without mercy by both parties and all of official Washington. That's even though we all know Steele is right, and we all know our first priority, saving Afghan lives, and second priority, saving foreign soldier lives, mean we need to get international military forces quickly removed from Afghanistan. Here's Steele, taboo busting:
This was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. . . .
It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.
Wow, refreshing, a normal person might at first react. Admittedly, you could question the beginning of the statement, since we all know Bush started the Afghan war; but it is also true that after deposing the Taliban Bush kept the war on low or simmer for the rest of his time in office. And Obama has turned the heat way up, doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan (and unleashing McChrystal's assassination squads there, btw). In that reasonable benefit-of-the-doubt context, Steele's first two sentences above are accurate. But oh, what a second paragraph: right on Mr. Steele, and take that, warmongers!
As you'd expect, military-industrial complex and warmonger Republicans are on the anti-Steele warpath. And the other war party, the Democrats, are also attacking Steele, nearly accusing him of treason (yup, that soundsBush-erafamiliar). As if we haven't known it for awhile, the party and President swooped into office by peacenik votes is also the other'support the war or it'll make the troops feel bad' party:
"It is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever."
--Eugene Jarecki
Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki's shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.
He may have been the ultimate icon of 1950s conformity and postwar complacency, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was an iconoclast, visionary, and the Cassandra of the New World Order. Upon departing his presidency, Eisenhower issued a stern, cogent warning about the burgeoning "military industrial complex," foretelling with ominous clarity the state of the world in 2004 with its incestuous entanglement of political, corporate, and Defense Department interests.
"Why We Fight" 99 minutes (and more than worth your time)
Why We Fight (2005), directed by Eugene Jarecki, is a documentary film about the military-industrial complex. The title refers to the World War II-era eponymous newsreels commissioned by the U.S. Government to justify their decision to enter the war against the Axis Powers.
Why We Fight was first screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival on 17 January 2005, exactly forty-four years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address. It won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, however, it received a limited public cinema release on 20 January 2005, and then was released, rated PG-13, on DVD on 27 June 2005, by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Why We Fight describes the rise and maintenance of the United States military-industrial complex and its fifty-year involvement with the wars led by the United States to date, especially its 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The documentary asserts that in every decade since World War II, the American public was told a lie, so that the Government (incumbent Administration) could take them to war and fuel the military-industrial economy maintaining American political dominance in the world. Interviewed about this matter, are politician John McCain, political scientist and former-CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, politician Richard Perle, neoconservative commentator William Kristol, writer Gore Vidal, and public policy expert Joseph Cirincione.
It has come to my attention repeatedly lately that the biggest threat to America is all the people trying to join our Military Forces and die for the New Crusades while having gender or orientation. They come as dirty sexual beings and ask to serve? How dare they!
This is beyond verboten, it is Mortal Sin!
One cannot serve the Lord and Holy Wars while being gay, let alone transgendered, or for that matter even female with a chance of reproduction. And pregnancy? Do these sluts not know what they did to become that way? A truly moral married woman will gladly give her Children to a State Institution for rearing to serve, anything less is Court Martial! Sex outside of a Man and Woman blessed by the Ordained is sinful, anyway, yet the Law prohibits family members from serving together. Our Military has been co-opted by the Satan of Lust. We must save our brave young children so they may fight with the Lord!
What is a Good Christian Nation to do against all these Unholy Masses of Antichrists swarming through the World, refusing to accept the Lord Jesus as their personal Saviour, and refusing to allow the Righteous Moral Leaders of our Land to use their Oil and Assets to further the spread of the Word of God? I mean, we would totally accept them as Servants of Christ, despite their very obvious non-whiteness, if they would only see that the only way to Salvation is to serve us, thus serving the Lord thy God. We are His Chosen.
It definitely seems morally right to side with the colonized against the colonizer and preemptive invader, the U.S. and the Western invaders now so nakedly aggressively imperialist toward the third world. NGOs' feeble cover stories notwithstanding, poor people and poor countries are there for the rich and powerful to exploit, otherwise they are ignored.
But much much better never to join the military as it is now, and I think 'Avatar' can be an impactful as hell anti-recruitment propaganda video for U.S. high school kids. You really don't want to join the corporate mercenary imperial shock troops burning down and blowing up native villages and all inside. Those are the bad guys, the assholes, the macho airheads, not the heroes.
But, the above interpretation of U.S. military conduct in the world, though the obvious one, requires wide social support, by you and me, especially all over the progressive blogs and whineytopia. We must counter the huge corporate media lie, the 'our troops are heroes' bullshit. Make it so my army of progressive and left bloggers!! Talk up Avatar's anti-colonial, pro-resistance, anti-U.S.-military-recruitment meaning everywhere your blogging selves reach.
24 Percent, in Avatar And Anti-Colonial Resistance, explains Michelle/Trudy joining the resistance, turning her guns on her former mercenary mates:
The Na'vi . . . win for real, sending the colonizers - represented by the corporate-military alliance of Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) and the K.I.A. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) back to Earth at the barrels of guns or in pieces. But it isn't just theNa'vi sending the invaders away, the scientific team (Skully, Dr. Augustine, avatar guide and science dork Norm Spellman (Joel Moore), their military pilot Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez) and Dr. Max Patel (Dileep Rao)) joins the Na'vi very quickly. There is no discussion of non-violent resistance or any real attempt to negotiate, the intellectuals - including all the women and people of color among the humans - show no hesitation in siding with the the colonized against the colonizer and shooting humans. By the end of the film we have a clear division between the white male capitalist imperialists fighting ruthlessly for profit and everyone else siding with the indigenous Na'vi fighting to save their homeland. The best line in the movie is when Quaritch says to Skully in the heat of battle, "How does it feel to be a traitor to your race?" The film's answer is: Great! In this way, Trudy is perhaps the most interesting character. She's a member of the military, but through her contact with the scientists gains empathy for the Na'vi. She refuses to fire missiles at the natives' home, this is according to the traditional script. But what isn't is when she rapidly turns her guns on her fellow soldiers. There's no discussion of how she knows the men on the other side and has served with them, nothing about their wives and kids. She dies in combat, and there was never a question of an ethical third-way.
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