What’s the difference between an alcoholic or a junkie… and the American Deep State War Machine?
Nothing. There isn’t any.
Both are deep in the grip of addictions. Neither can exist without its drug of choice. Alcohol or Heroin for the addict; money for the War Machine. Each will do anything for the fix it has to have, even risking system failure and death.
Addicts are autonomous, and those who know best will tell you nothing and no one can save them but themselves. The War Machine, too, is self-directed, free, untethered, answerable to no authority, no governance, but its own.
Just as the addict’s out-of-control behavior breaks down and humiliates love, trust and hope in those who care, and tramples their loyalty and support in the mud, so the rabid, fathomless, ungovernable greed of the War Machine has broken, deceived and betrayed the American people, who stand in the same violated, scorned relation to it as a soul-scarred Alanon wife to a mad, lost drunk or a heartbroken, brutalized child to a smack-ravaged parent.
They will tell you, the wise ones, that the only sane way to treat an addict is with “tough love”: accepting that his horror is his own and deciding to cease being part of it.
The great difference in the cases is, of course, that while the addict can destroy both himself and those who love him most, the War Machine, if we continue to feed its appalling disease, can and will destroy us all.
Tragically, we American enablers have lacked the courage to confront the addiction of the War Machine.
We excuse it as if its abuse of, and contempt for, us and our wellbeing was natural and inevitable.
We’ve made a co-dependent deal with this voracious succubus, allowing it to bleed us dry financially to sustain its habit, because it claims it loves us, must protect us, and has to have our money.
Lying, deception, denial are the techniques of addiction.
All have been employed to convince us that its disease makes us safe, when in truth everything it does robs and cheats our society, bringing us decay, ruin and misery at home, and anger, hatred, and enmity all around the world.
Love never had anything to do with citizens’ support of the War Machine, of course, at least not for the sane.
It was always fear that was used to enslave us.
This should be liberating. Perhaps, if Americans could once see through the toxic cloud of cloddish, vapid, idiotic propaganda, and realize that no nation on earth threatens us as a people, they might turn their justifiable wrath on the mainlining monster that jeopardizes our society and all our lives.
It’s the only way to detox the monstrous War Machine.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
First published by ICH
The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The 21st Century
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America Is A Bully. OK. There, I Said It!: U.S. citizens are scared. Awakened from a dream of rampant consumerism and ignorance of world affairs, we find ourselves confused and uncertain.