Michael Parenti - Land of Idols: Lies, Wars, and Empire

"The [neoliberal] goal has been the 'Third Worldization' of the United States:

• an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force;
• a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes;
• the privatization or elimination of human services;
• the elimination of public education for low-income people;
• the easing of restrictions against child labor;
• the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries;
• the breaking of labor unions;
• and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations."

Michael Parenti, Land of Idols, 1993


"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."

Michael Parenti

"Plunderers of the world, when nothing remains on the lands to which they have laid waste by wanton thievery, they search out across the seas. The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola

Iraq was not a unique event.  It is a modus operandi, a template.

Ideology serves to make people blind to their actions.  On one hand they can rail against the Banks, the obvious excesses of the multinational corporations, and the many abuses and corrupting influences of Big Money.

But on the other they can stand up valiantly for the liberating principle of a 'free market capitalism' and the dispensation of the rule of justice in favor of might makes right which, in service to the mythical god of scientific economy, dictates that there be plunder and demands the pillage of the weak, who are justified as being 'the other.' 

And what is particularly poignant, and tragically sad, is when 'the other' finds itself in a position to take up the sword, and wield it without mercy against those whom it now declares to be 'the other,' with many of the same distorted characterizations and obscene propaganda that were used so foully and despicably against them. Truly, we can become what we hate.