As historian Chalmers Johnson explains, "blowback is another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows."
Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, "we the people" are the ones who keep reaping what the government sows.
We're the ones who suffer every time, directly and indirectly, from the blowback.
We're made to pay trillions of dollars in blood money to a military industrial complex that kills without conscience. We've been saddled with a crumbling infrastructure, impoverished cities and a faltering economy while our tax dollars are squandered on lavish military installations and used to prop up foreign economies. We've been stripped of our freedoms. We're treated like suspects and enemy combatants. We're spied on by government agents: our communications read, our movements tracked, our faces mapped, our biometrics entered into a government database. We're terrorized by militarized police who roam our communities and SWAT teams that break into our homes. We're subjected to invasive patdowns in airports, roadside strip searches and cavity probes, forced blood draws.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
America will never be safe or secure as long as our government continues to pillage and plunder and bomb and bulldoze and kill and create instability and fund insurgencies and stockpile weapons of mass destruction and police the globe.
So what can we do to stop the blowback, liberate the country from the iron-clad grip of the military industrial complex, and get back to a point where freedom actually means something?
- For starters, get your priorities in order.
- Stop playing politics with your principles.
- Value all human life as worthy of protection.
- Recognize that in the eyes of the government, we're all expendable.
- Demand that the government stop creating, stockpiling and deploying weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber, etc.
- Finally, stop supporting the war machine.
Until these missteps are corrected, we should probably do as Chalmers Johnson suggests and stop talking about "democracy" and "human rights."
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