Home > Into the Hut of Baba Yaga

Into the Hut of Baba Yaga

by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 25 August 2009
3 comments

Wars and conflicts USA Daveparts

By David Glenn Cox

The river of time cuts deeply into the banks, dictating course over current. What is today fresh, muddy ground, becomes tomorrow bedrock. When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal he said that he did so to end our long national nightmare. The nightmare was not ours but Richard Nixon’s. We, as Americans, had just witnessed our Constitution work as its founders had intended.

So what if a sick, old, politically disgraced man was allowed to go home and mend rather than face the courts. He had lost his political life and had been publicly disgraced; so what was to gain by his prosecution? It seemed reasonable at the time, except that what Ford had done was to put personhood over legal liability. It declared that some men were indeed above the law, so-granted by wealth or by station. While Nixon recuperated others who had followed his orders served time in federal prisons.

Several years ago when local police departments began carrying taser weapons, they were introduced to the public as an alternative to deadly force. Police would no longer need to pull their pistols in a last chance use of deadly force. They were going to save lives; yet now we read stories of unarmed students, little old ladies and even pregnant women being tasered, while the company which manufactures the weapon is working on a new model with a multiple-shot capacity. Are we so violent? Do police need to carry a multiple-shot capacity taser to keep from emptying their pistols into the crowd?

What they are allowed to do today to strangers, they will be allowed to do to you tomorrow. The currents of time never stop, and the excuse of waterboarding a suspect to stop a terrorist plot today will be seen as license to waterboard a suspected convenience store holdup man tomorrow.

In 1968 the My Lai massacre of 347 Vietnamese civilians, murdered by US soldiers, brought a huge outcry from the public. The world was outraged; congressmen received death threats. Yet today nobody thinks twice that during the hunt for Saddam Hussein the military dropped laser-guided bombs on a twelve-unit apartment building in Baghdad. The military later announced that their information was incorrect and Saddam had never been there, but no word on the families who once called the building home.

The massacres in Afghanistan, the murdered wedding parties in Iraq, become glossed over as life loses its value. The predator drone attacks continue despite the complaints of the lawful rulers of Pakistan, and yet that isn’t questioned by the media or even by the clergy. We have begun down a road which, if we don’t turn back, will have dire consequences on the future for us all.

We have become so fractured politically that our system ceases to work. The very people who cheered for the Patriot Act, which allows the government access to anything you read or write, or any phone conversations or Email, and even warrantless sneak-and-peek searches, now decry the public option in the health care bill because they fear that their medical records will fall into in the hands of government bureaucrats. They fear any government programs, yet they fully support our troops and law enforcement.

It has often been said that truth is the first casualty of war, and many people forget that we have been at war almost a decade now. So long, perhaps, that we have forgotten why and how we got into these wars. We went to Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to give up Osama Bin Laden after the 9-11 attacks. They were labeled as supporting terrorists and allowing terrorist training camps on their soil. Yet only one year before those same leaders were welcomed into our country and wined and dined by government and oil company officials.

And Bin Laden? He’s not only never been found, he has never been charged with any crimes involving the 9-11 attacks. The former President went so far as to say; “I don’t know where he is. I just don’t spend that much time on it.” This just six months after the 9-11 attack. Bin Laden had been made the greatest international boogeyman of our time, but once the wars had begun he was no longer needed to incite the public.

From Bin Laden to Saddam, Saddam was accused of building nuclear bombs and had mobile chemical weapons labs. Saddam had unmanned aircraft that could fly all the way to America and dump toxic gas on the unsuspecting public. Saddam was evil incarnate; he even gassed his own people. Except that it happened during the Iran Iraq War and the US had supplied intelligence that said Iranian troops had occupied an Iraqi village along the border. Unfortunately the intelligence was out of date; the Iranians had withdrawn their troops and the villagers had returned home.

Saddam gassed them, all right, based on bad intelligence and with chemical weapons supplied by the Reagan administration. Saddam was indeed a tyrant, but he was a tyrant that offered free national healthcare and a free college education to his people. Iraq had the highest percentage of college educated women anywhere in the Arab world and more engineers, as well. But once captured he was quickly executed. No world court would get their hands on him, only a local mock trial with the verdict preordained before the judge was ever seated.

Next on the boogeyman list were Iran’s Ahmadinejad and North Korea’s Kim Jong il. Ahmadinejad told the UN that the European Holocaust was not a legitimate cause for the UN to give away land that it did not hold title to, and Ahmadinejad was labeled a holocaust denier. Ahmadinejad then said that Israel will disappear from the pages of time, which was translated to the American public as the Iranian president had some evil plan up his sleeve to destroy Israel, forgetting that in his office as President, Ahmadinejad has no control over the military forces of Iran.

We have lies on top of lies and wars on top of wars built on lies until the military budget of the United States is 50% of the total budget. How long can this go on? The Ecuadorian government told the US that it would not renew the lease on the single airbase it allowed the US to use to allegedly fight drug traffic. I say allegedly because during the Vietnam War the CIA was accused of drug trafficking, and during Iran Contra Hearings the CIA was again accused of drug trafficking. Hillary Clinton recently negotiated for seven new bases in Colombia where we have spent billions of dollars to fight the cocaine traffic with the son of a drug trafficker and former Mayor of Medellin and former close associate of Pablo Escobar before he became the country’s crime-busting President.

With the election of Barack Obama it was hoped by many that we would turn around and return to a logic-based policy rather than fear-based. Obama quickly squashed the idea of any prosecutions of former officials, save for a few underlings ala the Ford doctrine. Guantanamo is to be relocated further out of sight to Afghanistan, and the one-time law professor developed his own legal theory of “Indefinite detention,” in effect codifying the suspension of habeas corpus. These are not little, trifling things; these are principles of western law that extend back almost one thousand years.

While the tea baggers shout about Obama the socialist, they welcome and wear the new fascism like a fine new coat. Government shouldn’t do anything to help its people! Obama wants to pull the plug on grandma! Obama wants to change our form of government to Communist! It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious, and because we are so divided politically and deluded by the vast whirlpools of political lies, it is hard to image how we can ever get out of it.

But as the river cuts the channel deeper and straightens out its bends, who knows who the next boogeyman might be. Maybe you, Montag! Or maybe someone even more threatening.

"Residents called to complain there was an old scruffy man acting suspiciously," said officer Spencer. "It was an odd request because it was mid-afternoon. But it’s an ethnic Latin area and the residents felt he didn’t fit in."

The man walking through the seaside New Jersey town gave the officer his name but had no identification on himself at the time. The officer then ordered the man into the back seat of her squad car and took him to the hotel where the man claimed to be registered. Upon arrival the man produced an ID which identified him as one Bob Dylan, in town to do a concert with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp.

Baba Yaga is motioning from her door for us to enter into her hut from which there is no return, and somehow we must resist the witch’s entreaties.

Forum posts

  • ["....Ahmadinejad then said that Israel will disappear from the pages of time, which was translated to the American public as the Iranian president had some evil plan up his sleeve to destroy Israel,...."]

    Incorrect, and I can’t read further until clarifying this MOST important MISQUOTE.

    Ahmadinejad has been demonized due to an DELIBERATE ISRAELI MISTRANSLATION. It is absolutely imperative that mistranslation be corrected and spread correctly.

    What Mr. Ahmadinejad DID say is:

    "the REGIME that governs Israel today SHOULD disappear from the page of HISTORY."

    And Mr. Ahmadinejad is right.

    ZIONISM: because white supremacy has an even uglier sister.

    • fight with your enemies and not with your friends

    • Not fighting. The quote is a sore spot for me because it’s the zionist controlled media that deliberately mistranslated it.

      Regarding the dissolution of the US - personally I’ve given up on Americans. They’re too stupid. It’s too late. Sit back and enjoy the ride because there is absolutely nothing you can do to change it.