Hail Mr. President; muritori salutat!
Sep 23 '02
The Bottom Line Democracy. That sounds awfully nice; let's get us some!
Warnings:
This opinion contains undesirable language.
This opinion is politically incorrect.
This opinion expects you, the reader, to use rusty parts of your brain.
This opinion might have undesirable effects like causing conscience crisis. (In that case simply wash the soul with enormous amounts of beer and you'll be right as rain again.)
I thought Democracy could best be resumed with "Vox populi - vox dei": "The voices of the people are the voices of the gods". But maybe that's only the short and not essential version.
As I look up Plato's work I see no paragraph saying "The (more or less) elected leader of a democratic state has the right to impose his opinion of correct political system on another state by means of sharp metallic objects while he is comfortably watching TV." So I cannot help but wander at which point in history was this part added to the meaning of democracy?
Maybe it was when the great orator (=politician) Cicero paid thugs to set fire to the buildings of Rome so the citizens will finally understand just how vulnerable the Republic was and how the system must be changed and full executive powers must be given to Cicero if Rome was to survive. But that cannot be it since Cicero was kindly asked to empty the contents of his veins into a hot bath. Failing to comply, he was helped.
Maybe when Thoukididis put the "I'm a loony" paper hat and gave the speech on how the greek colonies in Sicily could be protected by means of an invasion. But wait; that cannot be it since Thoukididis personally led the two athenian phalanx divisions sent thus proving that he really believed the things he said. (And leading a phalanx for the athenians meant being one step in front of the phalanx when the enemy grinned!)
Maybe it was when Crassus maneuvered Spatracus into threatening Rome, blackmailing the Senate into giving him the "Praetorian" status? Hmm, could be. But then how come that Rome revoked that status the next year and left him merely a Consul?
No, I get it! It was when Julius Caesar scared the excrements out of Rome with inflated myths of barbaric invasions, used his army (the praetorians) as personal guards and as silencers for those who opposed him and so becoming Emperor? Hmm, but then if that would have been the "Vox populi vox dei" we wouldn't have heard of Brutus..
Maybe it was when the slave dealers started rumors of a "Crusade" to liberate Jerusalem in order to put young kids into ships and sell them. But there were some dudes that said "Some kids to liberate Jerusalem?! Bugger that! I, king of [whatever] will be the one to liberate Jerusalem!" And those merchants got themselves fully armed armies of murderers instead of the 12-13 years old they were expecting. And Jerusalem was liberated a few times until Jerusalem really wished it was occupied rather than liberated. No, that's not it; we can throw all that on the back of feudalism.
Oh, silly me! It was when the nice boys in brown shirts staged a terrorist attack and set the Reichstag on fire (among other buildings) and this one dude with a funny mustache was the only one promising he will take care of the situation, and since he was already chancellor hell, let's grand him extraordinary executive powers, name him Fuhrer! And guess what, Hitler did take care of the situation by changing the name of the "brown shirts" into "really nice gestadt politzie gentleman" and then saying "The terrorist wore FAKE brown shirts and look, they are in Poland right now! Let's go bomb Poland!" Oh, my mistake, that's called FASCIST Dictatorship. Sorry, it's such a small difference lately!
Bingo! It was when Hearst dispatched a photographer to Cuba to photograph the coming war with Spain. When the photographer asked just what war that might be, Hearst is reported to have replied, "You take the photographs, and I will provide the war". Hearst was true to his word, as he published stories of great atrocities being committed against the Cuban people (most of which turned out to be complete fabrications). Luckily(?) for some, on the night of 15/02/1898, the USS Maine, lying in Havana harbor exploded violently. Captain Sigsbee, the commander of the Maine, urged that no assumptions of enemy attack be made until there was a full investigation of the cause of the explosion. (For this, Captain Sigsbee was excoriated in the press for "refusing to see the obvious". The Atlantic Monthly declared flat out that to suppose the explosion to be anything other than a deliberate act by Spain was "completely at defiance of the laws of probability".) Under the slogan "Remember the Maine", Americans went to war with Spain, eventually winning the Phillipines and annexing Hawaii while at it. (In 1975, an investigation led by Admiral Hyman Rickover examined the data recovered from a 1911 examination of the wreck and concluded that there had been no evidence of an external explosion. The most likely cause of the sinking was a coal dust explosion in a coal bunker imprudently located next to the ship's magazines.) So that's when in Democracy the Journalism took over "vox populi" and became "vox dei"!
Bingo again! President Franklin Delano Roosevelt desperately needed a war to drag the still limping nation out of the Great Depression. He wanted a war with Germany so he could look righteous, but "vox populi" did not care for one. So he goes on violating all the points of the neutrality pact he signed, sunk some german ships but no luck - the monotesticled b@stard had other plans for America. So he looked and looked for an enemy and finally laid eyes on an oil depending Japan. So let's embargo the b@stards! And so he did, leaving Japan with dire need do annex Indochina. But since they meditated too much on the subject, hell let's set a preemptive strike force in Hawaii (good man that Hearst). But still the average jobless American needed a reason to take a bullet without a paycheck and was waiting to be enraged. A simple attack in far-far away waters would not do, so the first attack by Japan must be as bloody as possible. From that moment up until the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Roosevelt and his associates made sure that the commanders in Hawaii, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, were kept in the dark as much as possible about the location of the Japanese fleet and it's intentions, then later scapegoated for the attack. (Congress recently exonerated both Short and Kimmel, posthumously restoring them to their former ranks). But as the Army board had concluded at the time, and subsequent de-classified documents confirmed, Washington DC knew the attack was coming, knew exactly where the Japanese fleet was, and knew where it was headed. On November 29th, Secretary of State Hull showed United Press reporter Joe Leib a message with the time and place of the attack, and the New York Times in it's special 12/8/41 Pearl Harbor edition, on page 13, reported that the time and place of the attack had been known in advance! The much repeated claim that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence on it's way to Hawaii was an innocent tiny lie. Among other intercepts still held in the Archives of the NSA is the UNCODED message sent by the Japanese tanker Shirya stating, "proceeding to a position 30.00 N, 154.20 E. Expect to arrive at that point on 3 December." So that's when Democracy got a "only on TV" optional leader. I wander if he was leading the phalanx in Hawaii, what would have been the death count of Pearl Harbor?
Bingo again! President Lyndon Johnson wanted to boost the defense armament companies owned by his golf buddies so why not have a war?! It's not like he'll be leading the phalanx in the stinking swamps! But still that's sooooo far away for anybody to care! So let's order patrols in the Tonkin Golf. That's Vietnamese waters but we can patrol any waters we please - we're praetorians! When a jumpy sonar man picks up the sound of his own screws and reports enemy torpedoes then we need no more! USS Maddox. Captain John J. Herrick, the task force commander in the Gulf, cables to Washington half laughing and correcting the false report?! So what, fyck him! We give the first story to the ink boys ("North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Maddox while it was on routine patrol."), we go on national TV to announce the commencement of air strikes against North Vietnam as retaliation (for an attack that had never occurred) and promote that sonar man! That's Staff General material! And since Democracy has the bad habit of going around and demonstrate against decisions taken without the "vox populi" let's get that Minister of Propaganda working folks! MoP came up with a great idea: "It is OK to impose your vision of Democracy by means of Dictatorship regardless of the people's vision of correct political system as long as they are foreign. It's OK, really. Because we say so, that's why you red b@stard!". I wander if he was leading the phalanx to "go take that hill", what would have been the total casualties of Viet-Nam? So then is when the "vox populi" became "vox whom?!".
I'll be damned, another bingo! George Bush was leaking oil. Literally. He had so much of it the prices kept on going down, and when oil is cheap then gas is cheap. And when gas is cheap then EVERYTHING is cheap. And we can't let that happen to our profits, can we?! So what do we do? We look where all that import oil comes from. Look, it's Iraq! What?! We give him artillery; we give him rockets; we give him chemical weapons; we give him anthrax; all free for his war against Iran and this is his gratitude?! Billions of gallons of practically free oil?! The scoundrel! You tell Saddam to wait on the Kuwaiti border for our go ahead and our help. You get the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador in United States, put her on TV pretending to be a nurse and make her recite a horror story in which Iraqi troops looted the incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital leaving the premature babies on the cold floor to die. After that you give Saddam the Go Ahead on Kuwait and we'll toast the b@stard; kill one third of the oil imports until the next war and lock the second importer (Kuwait) for two years at least! No, don't be daft, nobody will wonder how comes a two-nurses, on-the-border, village hospital with ten beds and no doctor has full operating premature infant delivery incubators! Come to your senses, nobody will ask what would a mobile anti-tank unit do with incubators! (We'll shoot some pictures of anti-tank units at work right here; we're building them after all!) Don't be a sissy, who will doubt the praetorian story?! I wonder if Caesar would have been the first to see the Desert Storms up close and personal how many research institutes would report the existence of a Desert Storm syndrome? So this is the point where to democracy was added the meaning "do what you please as long as you make a profit".
It must be a lucky streak because.. bingo again! A photo of Fikret Alic staring through a barbed wire fence was used to prove the existance of modern day Concentration Camps in a mineral rich region of Bosnia. (Especially rich in Radium, a lately rare and curious radioactive element, look chemistry books for possible applications.) As the headline of "Belsen 92" indicates, all possible associations with the Nazi horrors were made to sell the necessity of sending yet more American fascia to invade another (insignificant) nation. But when German Journalists went to Trnopolje, the site of the supposed Concentration Camp to film a documentary, they discovered that the photo was a fake! The camp at Trnopolje was not a concentration camp but a refugee center. Nor was it surrounded by barbed wire. Careful examination of the original photo revealed that the photographer had shot the photo through a broken section of fence surrounding a tool shed. It was the photographer who was on the inside, shooting out at the refugees (mostly immigrants) sheltered in a humanitarian gesture! So for once I was proud I helped; only not the "democratic" aquila onna stick. (Donations for smuggling of gas from Romania, against the Praetorian embargo.) So this must be the point where to Democracy was added the meaning "In order to be a Democracy you must demonstrate your military powers on any nation does not have the power to complain".
Damn I'm hot! Bingo and double Bingo! We reach Caligula! Coincident with the expected public statement of Monica Lewinsky following her testimony (false since the Caesar says so), Caligula ordered a cruise missile attack on Sudan and Afghanistan, claiming to have irrefutable proof that bogeyman extraordinaire (and former CIA prodigious student, loved ally and trusted business partner) Osama Bin Ladin was creating terrorist chemical weapons there. Examination of the photos of the debris revealed none of the expected structures one would find in a laboratory that handled lethal weapons-grade materials. Assurances from the CIA that they had a positive soil test for biological weapons fell on their face when it was revealed that there had been no open soil anywhere near the pre-bombed facility. Sudan requested that international observers come test the remains of the factory for any signs of the nerve gas Caligula insisted was there. None was found. The Sudanese plant was a harmless aspirin factory (the owner has sued for damages and won); the site hit in Afghanistan was revealed it to be a mosque. (Serves them right for not importing imperial aspirin in one case and for not putting a cross on top in the second case!) But wait, it gets better! Just when needed to distract "vox populi" from both the Sudanese and the spermicidal embarrassments (we don't give a toss about the towelheads), stories about genocide and atrocities in Kosovo start flooding the media. The Ministry of Propaganda sees the crude reality that "vox populi" is so stupid it will believe anything; so let's say that Milosevic is using supersonic Migs to gun down civilians! (In translation - is using a 12t truck to kill one cockroach without harming the other cockroaches.) Know what? Let's say those civilians managed to shoot down one! (Using really bad taunting I guess.) Let's even say we went and filmed the wreckage! (How did you ever passed the other Migs?!) Let's show it on all networks in the entire world! Say what?! People see that all markings are in english?! The Migs are Russian? So what, those Migs were made for Yugoslavia! What do you mean "The population reads, writes and speaks Russian"?! Isn't it different? It's as different as UK English compared to USA English? Well, that's good enough; I don't understand a word of what the limeys speak! Good enough to mark their planes in English. Anyway; nobody we care knows that! Hell, nobody even knows where Yugoslavia IS! We'll go there to save the terrorized (not towelheads this time Mr. President) minority we just bombed the excrements out of! (When the Minister of Education and Religion publicly asked for volunteers to help building shelters for the refugees; more people turned up than we ever expected! Even tourists from other countries like USA! The fact that one out of five refugees was an albanian muslim - whom the Empire was so humanitarily trying to save - was no surprise whatsoever; most of the Europe recognizes a fascist invasion when sees one.) So that's when Democracy started to mean: "Bomb everybody, look who has the fewer casualties and say you saved them."
And goes on: bingo-bingo-bingo, line bingo, crossed bingo, super bingo, up side down bingo and jack pot! New meanings to the word Democracy are added as we speak; but call me a stupid optimist - I still hope the citizens of the Empire remember the name of Cicero and retroactively VETO all changes (and kindly ask him to empty the contents of his veins). I also hope that if there is ever going to be another war, the first phalanx will not be led by your son, but rather by the ones preaching it. However I will not go into details because you can figure them out for yourself and Magic Lantern from the "nice gestadt politzie gentleman" is on the loose again.
I do not criticize - throw stones from a safe distance - pretending my Caesar is nicer. I no longer fool meself believing I live in a Democracy: I know my vote can only change the type of moustache the Caesar is wearing. But I enormously like the idea of Democracy so if I wanted some where should I emigrate, off the planet? The only real and living Democracy I ever heard of is the pigmy's: if the majority of the tribe agrees then it's a law. Those disagreeing can take their sarbacan and their cow and start a new tribe. As simple as that. So.. let's bomb them! For not imposing their opinion on the remaining 49 percent by means of sharp objects! Teach the bastards a lesson on what modern Democracy really means!
My point is: the effective range of an AKM47 is 320m. If Caesar is the first to enter that range and keeps on going I will folow him into the lungs of hell and beyond. But if, once he enters that range, he turns around and changes his mind about oil; I will try to shoot him in the same mouth that brought us there. If he sends me in that range and watches TV from home; I will try to settle the war with a nice game of football. That's a democratic war for me.
Material used:
Plato - "Dialogs, Republic": 1 piece
Plato - "Dialogs, Veto": 1 piece
Tacitus - "History of the Empire": 1 piece
Marcus Aurelius - "Notes to my son": 1 piece
Memories of my ex-yugoslavian neighbors: 1 muslim piece, 2 orthodox pieces.
Michael Rivero - "Fake Terror - The road to dictatorship" (www.whatreallyhappened.com)
6th and 7th grade history books: 1 piece each
CNN News for Europe, CNN News, BBC: as much as possible
Brain and heart: as much as available
hatemail at parmenidex@yahoo.co.uk
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