(Article changed on November 5, 2012 at 21:54)
I'm interviewed by Kourosh Ziabari for Iran Review:
Kourosh Ziabari: You have called elections in the United States
"a rigged referendum for this thoroughly corrupt and murderous
system." Would you please explain more about your idea? It has always been
a question in my mind that why all the U.S. Presidents come from either the
Democrat or Republican Party. Why are the alternative political parties in the
United States always marginalized with trivial and insignificant impact on the
political developments?
Linh Dinh : The two parties that dominate US
politics, Democratic and Republican, both serve the military banking complex.
Both of them sanction one war after another, protect the criminal banks and
corporations, and side with Israel on every issue. When it comes to money and
war, they differ not at all, but the Democrats are presented as being more
sympathetic towards women, minorities and gay people, while the Republicans are
painted as defenders of traditional values. In every election, however, these
two parties will get roughly 98% of the votes, and Congress will be divided
roughly 50/50 among them. This is convenient, since each party can blame the
other for whatever ills the country, though they both have had a hand in
ruining it. These two parties work together to advance the agenda of their
sponsors, the banks and corporations, many of them military contractors, that
really run this country. A gargantuan source of corruption, the Pentagon
funnels huge amount of money to these companies, but American politicians have
been bought off by these same companies, so of course they will make sure the
US war budget remains obscenely large. For politicians who don't toe the line, their private indiscretions, perversions
or crimes can be aired out by the corporate media, as happened to Eliot
Spitzer, for example, so American politicians are kept in check through both
bribery and blackmail. With so much going to war, there's little left for
anything else, and that's one reason the US is falling apart. Many Americans go
along with this because US industries have been mostly gutted, except for
weapon manufacturing. The US now accounts for 53% of arms sales worldwide.
While posing as a peace maker, it is most nakedly a merchant of death.
Promoting endless war and enabling banking frauds, these political parties work
together to wreak havoc on the world, and on the American populace itself, yet
Americans keep voting for them. In many countries, there are easily half a
dozen, or more, parties represented in parliament, but the American congress
only has two, with one or two token "independents." After 21 years, for
example, the Green Party has managed to elect no senator, congressman or even a
state governor. Its presidential candidate usually gets only 1% of the votes.
Third party candidates, then, stand no chance because the corporate media will
not pay them any attention. The US mainstream media are owned by only half a
dozen corporations or so, and these are the same companies that benefit from
Pentagon contracts, so of course the talking heads on TV will push a war
agenda, all the while pretending to be objective. Fox News caters to
Republicans, while CNN appeals more to Democrats, but they are both propaganda
mouthpieces for the military banking complex. Neither one will raise questions
about 9/11; the obviously staged death of Bin Laden, with its conveniently
missing corpse; the Federal Reserve banking cartel; Israel's serial crimes; or
why Uncle Sam is using al-Qaeda terrorists to wage war against Syria, all the
while pretending to fight al-Qaeda. No urgent issues are seriously examined on
these TV channels, but they will each spend two weeks discussing Michael
Jackson's death.
Soldiers are inserted into televised sporting events and even music videos. When
the media don't push war, they tranquilize the populace with trivial nonsense.
Your average American is overwhelmed by so much pointless noise broadcast
nearly all day into his skull, he can hardly think straight, and of course his
attention span is shot.
Many Americans still don't know that their media is one big joke, and so is
their democracy with its sham elections. Americans are kept satisfied by the
relatively high standard of living that still exists here, but this wealth is
illusory. This is the most indebted country on earth, and merchandises still
flow here thanks to the reserved currency status of the US Dollar, as enforced
by American guns pointing in all directions, but this unsustainable and
indefensible situation is unraveling even as we speak. One day soon Americans
will wake up to their true poverty.
I have always wondered why the United States wages so many wars and military
expeditions around the world. It seems the U.S. foreign policy doesn't work
without intervention in the internal affairs of other countries and
warmongering, and one who dares to criticize these hawkish policies will be
easily banned from the mainstream media. Why is it so?
If you're a gun dealer, all shootings are good for business. If you make bombs,
then, no bombs are dropped in vain, whether on Serbian, Iraqi, Afghan or Libyan
heads. If you make drones, the world shall be swarmed with drones, God willing.
Simply put, the American ruling class loves war because that's how it makes
lots of money. Of course, what benefits the American ruling class impoverishes
America, so as these war profiteers get richer and richer, the country and its
ordinary people become poorer and poorer. Beyond this, the US uses its war
machinery to get access to oil, natural gas and even opium, and to protect the
US Dollar. Without its heavy military presence in the Persian Gulf, for
example, many oil producing countries will accept other currencies for their
oil, thus gutting the universal demand for the American Dollar. The American
military, then, is used as worldwide threat to make sure this doesn't happen,
although it is starting to happen already, with many countries now trading in
their own currencies, and bypassing the US Dollar.
There are several alternative progressive and anti-war publications in the
U.S., and many prolific and high-ranking activists and authors write for them.
However, the voice of anti-war, anti-imperialism community is usually unheard
amongst the loud hullabaloo of the neoconservative elite. Do you agree?
The best and sanest American political analysts have no access to the
mainstream media. Morons and liars appear regularly on television, but Paul
Craig Roberts, F. William Engdahl, Chris Floyd, Michel Chossudovsky and John
Michael Greer, for example, are never seen, and I mean never. America's best
political writers publish for free on the web, and have a tiny fraction of the
audience of sycophants featured in the mainstream media.
I publish nearly all of my articles for free. In fact, I can barely give my articles
away, and it's not because of my flaws as a writer or thinker, I don't think,
but because of what I choose to write about. I've published a few times in the New
York Times
and the Guardian [1, 2, 3, 4],
supposedly open minded newspapers, but these places sidestep many of the most
critical issues. They don't welcome independent thinking, in fact, but delimit
what's acceptable to discuss. These and other supposedly liberal venues do as
much harm as good because they block from the conversation issues that would
really illuminate our predicaments. I used to publish regularly on Common Dreams, for example,
and my articles always received many positive comments, but now Common Dreams
won't touch anything I write, because it's election season, you see, and they
must rally their readers behind Obama. Or take The Nation. You would think it
has been chastened by its orgasmic jubilation towards Obama's election in 2008,
considering what has happened since, but, no, the Nation is again cheerleading
for Obama. It's shameful, really, the American acceptance of war crimes and
tyranny. Of course, there are invaluable webzines where Americans can go to learn
what's really going on, places such as CounterPunch, Global Research,
Information Clearing House and Dissident Voice, for example, but their
audiences are tiny, I'm sorry to say, while well known and better funded "left"
venues such as The Nation and Huffington Post are little more than petting zoos
where liberals can go to lick and sniff each other, and feel all warm and
fuzzy, inside and outside.
Half-assed critics of the US government serve a cathartic function for their
half-assed audiences. They are no different from television clowns like Jon
Stewart and Stephen Colbert, since they allow the increasingly frustrated
masses to vent and even to laugh, without solving anything. The American
liberal is also prone to making feeble gestures, such as going on a
one-afternoon march to show that he is anti-war, but comes election time he'll
vote for yet another war criminal, and Clinton was a war criminal too, let us
not forget. To divert attention from his blow job scandal, he suddenly bombed
Iraq, for example.
In one of your articles, "Lawless
Police State," you talked about the rising unemployment in the United
States and the consequent layoff of the cops and police's inattention to such
crimes as extortion, embezzlement and burglary in some U.S. states. Is the
situation really so horrendous and chaotic?
Yes, it is getting truly horrible in many cities, but other places are still
relatively tranquil. Many neighborhoods of Philadelphia, where I live, are strictly off limit after dark, and avoided by most residents even
during the day. There are no statistics about this, but there seems to be more
unprovoked beatings by bored or angry youths. In September, six teenaged girls
beat a mentally handicapped woman in Chester, a suburb of Philadelphia, for no
apparent reason, while in August, three boys, with the oldest only
ten-years-old, beat up a 51-year-old Philadelphia woman, and stole $20 from
her. The same month, a 15-year-old high school student shot at two other
students inside a crowded subway car, and a cop was robbed and killed after he
has just gotten off work. For a while, there were all these flash mobs in
Philly, where a huge number of young people would rush down a street, with some
of them hitting and/or robbing strangers. Almost all of these flash mobbers
were black, it must be said, but our black mayor has apparently solved this
problem by imposing a curfew on certain busy streets, and increasing police
patrol, but the underlying causes of so much anger and lawlessness remain, I'm
sure, to explode into the open in some other ways, or at some other times. In
Philadelphia and elsewhere, there is also the new phenomenon of flash mob
burglary, where a group of people, usually teens, will swarm into a store and
take whatever they want, most casually. As the economy falls apart--and trust
me, there's no recovery--Americans become more desperate or crazier, yet cops
are being laid off everywhere, so yes, it is getting truly horrible in many
places, but this is just the beginning. It will get much worse, I'm afraid.
Who are running the U.S. mainstream media? Some progressive thinkers hold
this view that the majority of the U.S. media are in the hands of a small group
of influential and rich Zionists who dictate their political will to these
media. Do you agree? Is this why the criticism of Israel cannot take place in
the American media smoothly and unrestrictedly?
The US mainstream media are owned and run by the military banking complex, by
war profiteers and banksters, and that's why the American mainstream media
always obfuscate the many crimes committed by the ruling class. As for Zionist
influences on American politics and media, it is clear that no American politician
can rise to national prominence without declaring absolute fealty to Israel.
When Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech to the American Congress in 2011, he
received 29 standing ovations, such is the abject subservience of the American
politician towards Israel. In the American mainstream media, then, every
Israeli crime is ignored or explained away, then quickly forgotten. Americans
don't like to talk about divided loyalty, but it is an important factor in many
people's behavior. Just as many American blacks will vote for Obama primarily
because he's black, many American Jews cannot think straight when it comes to
Israel. One must remember, however, that many of the harshest critics of Israel
are also Jewish. On balance, Israel benefits greatly from the
tremendous influence of American Zionists. Many of the most belligerent
neoconservatives are Zionists, for example.
I want to cite a small, rather personal anecdote that can shed some light on
this situation. For several years, I was a part-time professor of creative
writing at Bard College. Joel Kovel was a professor of social studies, and the
college president, then as now, was Leon Botstein. After Kovel published a book
that was critical of Israel, he was terminated from Bard. Seeing a causal effect,
Kovel charged that he was being fired for his political views. I knew neither
man personally, but I wanted to engage others in a discussion over this, so I
sent an email to a Bard listserv, but to my astonishment, no one responded. As
a Bard professor, there is nothing to gain, and much to lose, by questioning
the school president, it is clear. Botstein is best known as a conductor, of
the Jerusalem Orchestra among others, but Kovel is also Jewish, so what you
have here is a conflict between two Jewish men, and the stronger one won.
How do you see the situation of religious and racial minorities in the
United States? As to what we have been hearing from the media, it's clear and
evident that Muslims are subject to discriminatory policies, and African Americans
are also denied many social and civil liberties. What's your take on that?
In my political writing, I've always stressed the common bonds that should
unite Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds. I've always said that
Americans of any color should recognize that they have a common enemy in the
military banking complex. American society is riven by serious divisions,
however, so that there's quite a bit of mistrust, if not outright hostility,
between liberals and conservatives, urban and rural, black and white, or
educated and uneducated, etc., and everyone has been led to view Muslims with
suspicion, at best, if not outright hatred. These divisions benefit the ruling
class, so they are often exacerbated in the mainstream media. The Obama presidency,
then, was a brilliant move by this ruling class, actually. Propping up Obama,
it has managed to pacify many blacks, intellectuals and liberals, all the while
keeping their war and banking-fraud agenda intact. Having a black president
also gives white racists a false target for their anger. They think all their
problems would be solved if only America had a white president again. The fact
that Obama happens to be half-black is only symbolically significant, however,
and completely irrelevant in every other way. It's interesting that's he's
often depicted in the racist or conservative press as non-native, Socialist and
a secret Muslim, even though he bombs half a dozen Muslim countries, protects
banks and weakens unions. This caricature frightens white racists into voting
for Romney, and since Romney is already a caricature of himself, he's used to
frighten liberals into voting, again, for Obama, but as I've already said so
many times, they are on the same tag team, here to enrich the military banking
complex while wrecking both the world and the USA. Romney is the right sock
hand puppet, while Obama is the left.
The United States has been accusing Iran of developing nuclear weapons, while
it's said that it possesses 12,000 nuclear warheads. Isn't this hypocritical?
What do you think about the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. against
Iran? These sanctions have restricted Iranians' access to medicine, foodstuff
and other humanitarian goods. Aren't these sanctions contradicting the
principles of human rights?
In an ideal world, we wouldn't have nuclear weapons, but Iran should have
nuclear bombs to protect it against the US and Israel. Iran has been threatened
by the US for several decades, and it is now surrounded by American troops
stationing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Bahrain, among other countries. As
American troops besiege Iran, the US is also imposing a criminal sanction on
the Iranian people, but the US doesn't care about human rights, especially of a
people it has demonized for a long time now.
Since 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government started a War on Terror, which more
or less can be seen as a War on Islam. Where does this inexplicable animosity
with the Muslims and Islamic nations stem from? Does the U.S. government really
think that they are the Muslims who are the source of violence and terrorism in
the world?
A war on Islam serves two primary purposes. The US demonizes Muslims to steal
their oil and to protect Israel. In the US, Muslims are often portrayed as
fanatical and insane, but Americans forget, not that they're paying much
attention to anything serious anyway, that the US has often funded and
supported fanatical Muslims, as in precursors to the Taliban during their war
against the Soviet, or al-Qaeda in its current war against Syria. The US
supported and funded Bin Laden, for example, then turned him into this monster
who somehow managed to pull off the 9/11 attacks, but there is literally no
evidence of this, none that can stand scrutiny in an actual trial. They didn't
kill Bin Laden in Pakistan during that ridiculously staged raid, of which every
published detail is a lie, but even if they had caught him, then or whenever,
they wouldn't have dared bring him to court, because they simply had no case
against him. The accusation against Bin Laden as the mastermind of 9/11 has
been conjured up entirely through the US corporate media, but Americans are so
brainwashed, many still believe in this preposterous official narrative.
The image of a fanatical Islam hellbent on destroying the West is used to
justify the open-ended American war against Muslim countries, but when this
narrative doesn't quite fit, as with Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Bashar al-Assad's
Syria, then America will resort to the dictator narrative, as in we must save these
people from their own rulers. The US hasn't targeted Hussein or Asad because
they were dictators, however, since the US has always supported dictators,
including Hussein himself when he waged war against Iran. In fact, the CIA
helped Saddam Hussein to gain power in the first place by staging a coup
against Abd al-Karim Qasim. Qasim had to be killed because he had challenged
the Anglo-American control of Iraqi oil. Of course, the CIA toppled Iran's
democratically-elected Mohammad Mosaddegh for a similar reason.
In any case, Uncle Sam loves a corrupt and brutal dictator, since he can
usually be bribed into selling out his country to American interests, and his
long reign allows American corporations to loot said country unmolested for
decades at a time. A true democracy not only protects the people, but is
unpredictable, but a dictator will guarantee "stability" for his foreign
sponsors for as long as he's in power, until he's killed or deposed, as
happened to the Shah.
So America will use the dictator narrative as an excuse to attack a country,
but it should be pointed out that after the US invasion of Iraq, for example,
hundred of thousands of Iraqis fled to Iran and Syria, among other places, and
only a fraction have returned. In Syria, these Iraqis live as refugees and not
as citizens, meaning they don't have full rights, but they still prefer to stay
in Syria, under Assad, than live in their homeland as "liberated" by America.
Now the US is attacking Syria, and I'm afraid this war will only escalate after
the US Election, refugees are streaming out of that country also. Declaring
himself a harbinger of peace and angel of mercy, the death merchant kills and
generates millions of refugees.
What do you think about the upcoming presidential elections in the U.S.? You
had argued that it's now time to boycott
the elections,
because going to ballots is tantamount to giving legitimacy to a corrupt
government. However, by the end of the day, a certain number of people will
take part and a president will be elected. How do you see the future of U.S. in
the wake of the upcoming elections? Will Obama be reelected?
I'm advocating for an election boycott as a way to delegitimize this fraudulent
and criminal government, then a general strike to shut it down until clearly
stated demands are met. These actions are only the first steps, but without
them no progress can be made. For all the noise caused by the Occupy Movement,
it never got beyond the sign waving stage. Its original aim, however, was to
stop Wall Street from functioning, but by announcing their intention beforehand
on the Internet, they gave authorities plenty of time to respond to this
threat. The government sent hundreds of cops to protect the New York Stock
Exchange, so what was meant as Occupy Wall Street became an occupation of
Zuccotti Park, several blocks away, and this occupation of a small public space
became the model nationwide, but you can occupy as many parks as you want, and
the system will not change. At the very least, you must disrupt the system, as
was the Occupiers' original premise.
Many Occupiers talked about revolution, but a revolution is not camping in a
city park and waving signs at passersby. One must become much more aggressive,
and the first step in that direction is to reject these farcical elections. If
you can't even do that, then you won't be able to do anything else. I mean, you
can't vote for a proven war criminal, then complain that he is a war criminal.
There are only a few who are openly advocating for an election boycott, but one
should remember that only about half of eligible voters usually go to the polls
anyway. Granted, some are merely apathetic, but others are so disgusted with
this system, they would rather not vote.
As this country collapses
economically
and socially,
the number of disillusioned and enraged Americans will swell, but the
government is prepared to counter any unrest with a militarized police force,
and laws that allow it to arrest and even kill anyone deemed an enemy of the
state.
This election will be the last with American naivete about the true state of
their government still relatively intact. After November 6th, promises will be
broken, bombs will be dropped, heads will be cracked, and scales will fall from
the eyes of even the most thick skulled among them.
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