U.S. Foreign Policy Hypocrisy!

Link to Debs Canton Speech at the Zinn Education Project

As a citizen of the United States I can only wish that our own-literally bought and sold-news media were as honest as this commentary on the mind boggling hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy. Did the working class people here ever decide that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was a great friend of the United States, that socialist Cuba was a perennial enemy, that Israel-simply as another STATE-could do no wrong? After the collapse of the old Soviet Union we find fault with Czar Putin?

I just read Eugene V. Debs' famous, eloquent, and most instructive "Canton Speech". The American plutocracy has always operated under the banner of freedom and democracy. Will young working class Americans continue to die for the same Wilsonian blather that the old socialists ridiculed?

What cant over FREE SPEECH here! "Je Suis Charlie". Humbug, I tell you. Humbug!

EUGENE V. DEBS HOME
 –TERRE HAUTE,
VIGO COUNTY, INDIANA

( comment on article  published in Altavoz ( Peru ) on Jan. 28, 2015 by Editorial, "The Hypocrisy of the United States" , WATCHING AMERICA )

No, Uncle Sam isn't Charlie. How about Orwell's Big Brother?

 

I think too many journalists in the so called capitalist democracies have deluded themselves about the ideal of FREE SPEECH in these societies. May I recommend leftist professor Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States" for a more sober perspective on all civil liberties here?

Wikipedia link to Zinn's book

Was the McCarthy era paranoia all about FREE SPEECH rights even for moderately liberal scholars or political activists? It is well documented how a leftist party with which I was a presidential elector in 1980, The Socialist Workers Party, was harassed, sabotaged, and illegally spied on. The SWP did finally win its lawsuit against the FBI. But the damage was done.

Presently numerous activists who protested Bush's criminal war in Iraq and Afghanistan have their own tales of persecution to tell. And Talk Radio in America is particularly odious for its 24 hour right wing thug view of the world. They always rant about creeping socialism. But they would also silence any intellectually honest-and courageous-militant socialists.

Yes, if they could, the American FBI would love to obliterate my comments here rather than defend to the death my right to say this.

The talk of FREE SPEECH is mostly cant. When the ruling class does not like it they call it HATE SPEECH or just un-American and subversive and unpatriotic.

Even the famous Ralph Nader- now associated with the Green Party–can barely get a fair hearing in the capitalist news media.

And I must point out that too many individuals -even conservative types-have lost their jobs just over something they said.

As Professor Zinn pointed out, free speech is very problematic here. After suggesting that our Memorial Days just might glorify war more than they honor our war dead, he lost his column in a major newspaper. So much for FREE SPEECH in America!

And with the president of Israel coming to America to address the Congress, can anybody here criticize Israel's war crimes against the Palestinians without being branded anti-Semitic?

And so I hear: "Karl Marx was a self-hating Jew!

Forget about democratic DIALOGUE in the United States. Uncle Sam isn't Charlie. He is Orwell's Big Brother!

( published in Le Point ( France ) on Jan. 12, 2015 by Michel Colomes:"Obama Isn't Charlie", WATCHING AMERICA)

No, don't make the same mistakes as the Americans ( WATCHING AMERICA )

As a citizen of the United States and a democratic Socialist , I agree with you completely that you don't need a Belgian version of the Patriot Act or a European Guantanamo.

The FREE SPEECH as ABSOLUTE chants in recent Paris demonstrations were also demonstrations of exquisite French hypocrisy. Could their "socialist" president be completely oblivious to the Marxist view of the limitations of bourgeois "free speech"? And what about the ringing call for the workers of the world to unite? Did the old socialists exclude poor downtrodden RELIGIOUS people of the world? Nothing could be less in the spirit of revolutionary socialism than to mock the great faiths of human civilization.

Those "scientific" socialists -influenced by historical materialism- simply believe that a people freed from the nightmare of capitalist oppression and misery would be more free to rethink their religious beliefs. Of course, it was a great error of the Russian Bolsheviks to make their state officially atheist. Here, America has a better idea: separation of Church and State!

( comment on article published in Le Vif ( Belgium ) on Jan.14, 2015 by Hubert Van Humbeeck , "If Jan.7 was the European Equivalent of Sept.11, we can't make the same mistakes as the Americans")

A truly Orwellian paradox

I am presently staring at today's Providence Journal front page -pondering a truly Orwellian paradox: "After attacks, crackdown on hate speech" (Jan.15)

And it seems that pure HATE can be combated by the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, on its way to terrorize not the fanatical few but the religious many in an Islamic country. But just days ago there was a multitude of people in Paris crying out that free speech is ABSOLUTE.

 

But the good Pope Francis disagrees. Don't insult MY mother! Well I am certainly not holier than the Pope. But I would dismiss any insult to my dear departed mother as being simply uninformed. At least I thought she was a peach.

Does he also mean: "Don't insult Holy Mother Church"? In the good old days there was the not so Holy Inquisition. But the Church has finally repented  of this extravagant solicitude for the Faith. As the late radical professor Howard Zinn said, this FREE SPEECH is very enigmatic in the most democratic countries on earth.

To: letters@providencejournal.com

World wide terrorism: is real life all about lifeless phrases? (Coming Providence Journal demonstration)

Like every other half-alert American citizen, I am following the latest terrorism news from France. Local radio reports that a group headed by a benevolent physician of the Muslim faith will soon demonstrate outside the Providence Journal building. The group supports FREE SPEECH rights everywhere. And so does the newspaper -within the limits of sound business considerations, of course.

But is real life all about phrase mongering? Do real life human beings become terrorists just because the damned majority do not insist that "God is great!" every minute of the day?

Link to "Los Caprichos" – A collection of 80 prints which were an artistic experiment:
a medium for Goya's condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in
the Spanish society in which he lived.

 We are reducing these terrorists to comic book images. All the better to continue to wage an Orwellian war against perceived enemies of the American Way of Life everywhere? Will our obtuse arrogance end this eternal war?

Did not Marx make a good point when he suggested that eating, working, producing and reproducing were the fundamentals of human society? The human struggle for existence pre-dates any holy texts– secular or religious.

Our own Just Judges sit in judgment on these pathetic terrorists as if they never read a word of Marx or Darwin or Freud.



To: letters@providencejournal.com