If anybody had told me back in Vietnam days that Senator Robert Byrd, who supported that illegal and immoral war, would become one of the bravest and most eloquent opponents of the current and even more illegal and immoral -- if that is possible -- Terror Wars, I would have questioned his sanity. There are many, many examples of former servants of the empire having become, especially since 9/11 and the start of the fraudulent Terror Wars, what they would probably themselves have called a few years earlier "radical dissidents." Many former "conservatives" have left Noam Chomsky in the dust in the distance they have traveled from center stage to join the "wild men in the wings," as McGeorge Bundy referred to Chomsky et al. in 1967.
It would seem that a revolution has taken place, but it is a strange kind of revolution, because nothing much has changed. Here we are again in the middle of a "quagmire" that has cost more than a million lives (4,600 of them Americans), and almost $700 billion, threatening to cost another $179 billion in 2010 and with a "liberal" president about to send in tens of thousands of additional troops. Some of us "radical dissidents," in the permanent state of frustration and dismay that unfortunate predilection for old-fashioned "family values" such as truth and justice condemns us to, are fond of saying that we must change people's minds before we can change the world. But that revolution of the mind, if the polls I've seen are not mistaken, has in fact taken place. What happens now?
There are two possibilities, as I see it: 1) nothing, i.e., things continue as they are because it really doesn't matter what people think and Big Brother already has us completely in hand, or 2) this is the calm before the storm. The latter possibility, as seen from the Fox News perspective, may be brought on not only by "terrorism" but also by "socialism," as rabble-rousers like Glenn Beck are screaming at us. However illogical and vapid such propaganda is, it serves a purpose: when the day comes, when martial law is declared, we should not be too surprised, or wonder about the reasons. It may not even be necessary by 2014 (in Glenn Beck's scenario) to connect the next 9/11, economic collapse, disease epidemic, or other catastrophe to fictive "terrorists" like the 19 Arabs or crazed "socialists" like President Obama. Who will be wondering and analyzing why it happened, once it does? We will be glad to have toilet paper and a handful of mush, like millions of other serfs on the planet.
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