Author: gdrthinktank

“We will hunt them down, we will smoke them out”

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President Bush’s War on Terror ends in Disaster for the entire West

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

For twenty years, international troops under U.S. leadership were in Afghanistan with the goal of providing peace and security, including their very own ideas of democracy. Now, the Taliban are closing in on Kabul. They ride in captured American pick-up trucks; a fighting force seemingly from the middle Ages. American interference once again turns out to be a failure all along the line: wherever they show up with their military, only disaster comes out. These days, the allies are rushing to fly out their embassy staff before they too fall into enemy hands. Meanwhile, a human tragedy is emerging for Afghans who thought they could trust the West.

History is often easy to internalize. To do this, you sometimes just need to remember quotes from the past and compare them with the present. Thereby, it would be helpful especially for Americans and their country to learn from history. The only problem is: People who fell for the phrases at that time, fall for all possible charlatanry also today and do not want or cannot remember their own words from yesterday. From which follows: Those are incapable of learning to whom it does not even occur to draw conclusions from the past.

The allegations that circulated and were deliberately spread among the American public even before President Bush’s war on terror began less than twenty years ago were nothing more than the result of obtuse propaganda hammered into Americans almost continuously via the media. It was a typical example of how, even in a democratic country, people’s patriotism was exploited by the cheapest methods.

The following should give pause for thought:

“I’d rather the war be there [in Iraq, Afghanistan] than in our own country.”
I heard this sentence over and over again back then from the mouths of regulars, most of them staunch Republicans. Nobody should want a war anywhere, because it can always strike back and hit you. People don’t believe it until it happens.

“He [Saddam Hussein] is just like another Hitler. We need to take him out of there.”
This was a similar saying from that time, hardly to be surpassed in ignorance to the facts. For comparing a big shot like Hussein with Adolf Hitler is one of the most surprising sentences, while incoherent assessments I have ever heard. Hitler controlled, for a short time, almost all of Europe and kept the whole world in suspense. The German Wehrmacht was the strongest military force of its time, and it took the rest of the world nearly six years in a combined effort to defeat it. Hussein, on his part, had nothing of that sort to display. He never possessed the weapons of mass destruction that were attributed to him, serving as the main reason for a mindless military invasion. If he had possessed them, the USA and its allies would hardly have attacked him – for he would have used them instantly. That simple fact would not go into the heads of most Americans at the time.

No matter how many I talked to back then – the result was almost always the same. The majority of Americans were unstoppable in their euphoria and belief that whatever their government was doing was right. Certainly, a legitimate rage about unprecedented terrorist attacks on their country played a significant role to fume their judgement.

“We will hunt them down, we will smoke them out.”
Remarks by President George W. Bush on September 17, 2001, to employees at the Pentagon. He repeated this phrase as if in a Wild West movie at several other occasions.

In truth, the military invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq made little sense, if only because the terrorist attackers of September 11 essentially not only came from Saudi Arabia, but were also financed from there. Saudi Arabia, however, is the closest U.S. ally in the region, albeit not for reasons of sympathy but of profit from the oil business. The price for this American hypocrisy could be costly: For the disastrous and maybe intended miscalculation of the Bush administration – politically, historically, and geostrategically – could now, after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, carry toxic smoke back to the US. The Taliban, once equipped and trained by the Americans, will in all likelihood find with their present advance sufficient basis and encouragement to launch terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies anew and around the world.

Thus, nothing remains of the goals that President Bush announced less than twenty years ago. To hunt down the real culprits of 9/11, there was no need for wars started by the USA, as the elimination of Osama bin Laden has shown. It is very likely that governments with which the U.S. is friendly are also behind dubious plots against the Americans, just as the Americans once created the Taliban to pit them against the Soviets. It is inconceivable.

The ones who suffer are always the innocent. Large parts of the Afghan people have believed the grandiose announcements of democracy and prosperity and are now suffering the revenge of the Taliban, while the West abandons its promises and cowardly runs away.

The Bible: Without Fault and Blame

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

“We believe the entire Bible is the inspired word of God and that men were moved by the spirit of God to write the very words of the scripture. Therefore, we believe the Bible is without error.”
Creed of a contemporary Church

“Now after Noah was five hundred years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”
New American Standard Bible

Religious quotations like these could be continued at will. The fantasts ascribe the dogma of infallibility to a concoction like the Bible – imagine that.

“Only a Christian person is a good person.”
This was what I heard from an American pastor after I had moved from Germany to Florida in 1998. I cannot remember the name of the church anymore. But my ears went ringing, because like a flash the following came back to my memory:

“Only a communist is a good person.”
The words of a teacher lecturing us in the former communist GDR (“East Germany”); it must have been in 1974. True, the GDR has perished, and the Churches are still there – but that doesn’t make the core of the matter any truer. For there certainly is not only “one good kind of person”, as well as there are true Christians living according to their religious perceptions.

That’s all for now with the quotes.

The Bible, in its essential parts, was written in the first century of our era by a clan of giggling charlatans on behalf of the authorities, with the aim of keeping the common people in line as docile servants. Thus, the Jesus story fits aptly into a time when superstition, witchcraft, and satanic cults were part of everyday life. Over the centuries, this culture has been refined and continued into our own day – from the Ku Klux Clan movement to the lateral thinkers (conspiracy theorists) with their pathological ideas.

Whoever doubts this thesis of the origin of the Bible would have to prove first the validity of the Christian theses, especially this one: How someone can come back from the dead to the living after three days, then walks around on earth for another 40 days and finally ascends to heaven, only not to have been seen again since then. Not even historical greats of the recent past believed in the miracles of resurrection and rebirth: The famous Prussian King Frederick the Great was a flawless atheist who allowed his subjects “to be blessed according to everybody’s own facon.” By which he meant: they could pray to whomever and as much as they wanted, only not neglecting their duties. America’s George Washington believed that Jesus was not dead after the crucifixion and buried alive by the Romans. Contrary to the history-falsifying nonsense circulating in American schoolbooks, in which angels lift the dying president, complete with bed, towards heaven, Washington himself believed that a dead person completely goes nowhere else but straight into the ground.

The easiest way to make people compliant and to use them for one’s own advantage is – then as now – through the tool of propaganda, of dumbing down the masses. From ancient times, religion served as an instrument of power for the rulers, which eventually led to the forcible Christianization of entire tribes since the early middle Ages. In truth, Christianization meant nothing more than a God-given justification for brutal wars of conquest, for the warriors of God came with the Christian cross in one hand and the sword in the other: Those who were not willing to accept the former, got to feel the latter.

In modern times, the churches, apart from minor and major scandals – such as the murder and disappearance of indigenous children in Canada, or the rape of altar boys around the world – limit themselves to political influence and self-preservation as a lucrative business: Although they often pretend to be charitable organizations, they do not forget lining their own pockets with billions while rarely have to pay taxes. On the side, they also tell the faithful who they should vote for – see USA and Donald Trump. All of this only works because enough people around the world are hoodwinked by the church and their Holy Joes. Just like the whoring business, the church business has always worked.

In all this nonsense, it is not at all surprising that people who pretend to be Christians vote for a pervert like Trump, a demagogue like DeSantis, support wars, guns and shooting, thereby arbitrarily interpreting the Bible as it suits their own desires. Of course, in many cases this also includes denying man-made climate change and the existence of the Corona Virus, or baseless allegations about allegedly forged elections. The serious problems of our time can hardly be resolved with people who have a pathologically disturbed relationship to reality.

This explains much, if not all, about the dangerous times we live in.

American Opportunities, American Unscrupulousness

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

It is often said that the USA is the land of unlimited opportunity. For me, this proud claim seems to come from a bygone era. I must have missed that time. And even if this statement was ever in common use – which it was -, it is inherently false: for not everyone has the doors open to them that are opened to others by skill and ability, and not infrequently by pure chance. Perhaps this is called the luck of life, and not everyone is a born academic. The non-academic or someone who has not progressed beyond a simple school-leaving certificate has no less value for society, because there must also be someone who puts his hand in the dirt to produce food. After all, well-heeled people can’t eat their money.

Over time, the sayings about the U.S. that circulated in Europe, especially after World War II, must have relativized themselves. Because the “freest country on this earth” has long ceased to exist. A country in which a very small upper class is allowed to hoard most of the wealth, almost untroubled by any legislation and at the visible expense of the majority of its own citizens, thereby restricting their possibilities, can hardly be considered unreservedly as a free land. A country that allows individuals to outsource entire branches of production to India or China because profit is more important than the well-being of their own compatriots is probably better served by the term “dictatorship of money.” And when it is obvious that any political, federal administration of this country, including the branches of legislature, stand idly by and watch these goings-on because they are part of the deal, then the structure of this country is almost taking on mafia-like forms.

Taking all these phenomena into account, the arc from the American oligarchy mentioned here to the events of January 6, 2021, is not stretched far. For the storming of the Capitol by propaganda-blinded hordes is nothing other than an expression of the abuse of American idealism by the influence of power and money – led by unscrupulous, populist politicians interested only in their own selfish gain. The fact that they are risking the fate of the entire country in the process is apparently not realized by millions of Americans, which no longer rules out Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Critical Race Theory: The Paradox is DeSantis

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

At the instigation of Governor Ron DeSantis, the State Board of Education has banned Critical Race Theory from public classrooms in Florida. Instead of dealing with the unpleasant things of the past, he wants to confront students “with [his and his kind’s] facts rather than trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.” Is the man afraid that American schoolchildren might know too much, ask awkward questions, or even end up becoming Marxists? It is preposterous.

From the historic standpoint, it is hard to deny that the United States of America was built on the oppression of others. From the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, only one never owned a slave (John Adams). Writes US-Historian Edmund S. Morgan: “To a large degree, it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor… The paradox is American, and it behooves Americans to understand it if they would understand themselves”.1

Morgan also wrote: “For the historian it poses a challenge to probe the connection: to explain how a people could have developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution, and at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day.”2

Twelve Nazi years of my native Germany have profoundly damaged our history forever, and in school it became the core of our consciousness – the unimaginable atrocities committed in the German name. The nation of inventors, innovation, poets and thinkers. Should the Germans remain the only nation today to thoroughly come to terms with their past? 3

Of course, remembrance and admonition of evil must nowhere take a back seat – we owe that to the victims, no matter which country it concerns.

Racism is an unpleasant topic and does not lend itself to desired images. Yet, righteous Americans must be careful, not least in light of what continues to happen in their country, that they and their own history are not completely muzzled. Florida’s Governor is one of those dangerous, power-obsessed demagogues who want to distort facts in order to make their own people compliant under the guise of a misconceived patriotism. This no longer has anything to do with freedom and democracy – it only deepens the division of American society.

Notes:

[1] See Edmund S. Morgan: American Slavery, American Freedom, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975, pg. 5.

[2] ibid.

[3] For the sake of historical-political truth, it must be mentioned here that one of the main interests of the communist leadership in East Germany (GDR) was to address the crimes of the Nazi regime down to the smallest detail. After all, Nazis and Communists had been ideological mortal enemies since the Weimar Republic. In contrast, in the other part of Germany – the Federal Republic – the society struggled of coping with German Nazi history until the 1970s, not least in public schools.

The Church of Slaveholders: Die-Hards at the Lever of Mass Psychosis

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

You have to let it roll off your tongue: Founded as the Church of Slaveholders in 1845, the Southern Baptist Convention today forms the largest Protestant denomination in the United States of America. If there was a government-functioning legal system in the US, this Baptist Sect in the South would have been banned as a racist organization long ago.

That the rule of law is seriously lacking in this country is evidenced by the unwillingness to look into the true background of January 6, especially among most Republican members of Congress, who publicly place themselves above the law without being bothered in the least for it. One would not even think such a scenario possible in a true legal system – but that is the way things are.

On a very similar level, today there are business-oriented leaders as successors of slave drivers in this Southern Baptist Sect, adapted to modern times only to an extremely limited extent, who would prefer to impose on society their own ideas on the subject of abortion. The brazenness of hypocrites and agitators in the name of their God knows no bounds: Those who should be hiding from shame for moral reasons open their mouths the widest. Their perversity, including the danger especially for adolescents being exposed to extreme pathological ideologies, can only function because nobody seriously intervenes against it. On the contrary, everything the tax evaders say falls on open ears and wallets.

What is most frightening is the extent of stupefaction of the people. This is the pathetic contribution of the “Christian” die-hards, political arsonists and Trump-supporters, who for reasons of self-interest and greed of power are primarily responsible that society in their country is drifting further and further apart and will probably never find peace.

DeSantis, the Story Teller

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

“The idea that you can just push God out of every institution and be successful, I’m sorry our founding fathers did not believe that.”

It’s laughable: These words actually came out of the mouth of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis yesterday in Surfside, Fla, in the presence of Florida Legislature and leaders in the local Jewish community. The background is that starting next school year, all public K-12 schools in Florida will be required to hold a moment of silence at the beginning of the day. The phrase “Moment of Silence” clearly replaces the intended wording “prayer” to circumvent the American Constitution. DeSanti’s own, historically untenable commentary unmasked the true intentions, allowing no other conclusion.

This feeble-minded person should receive some history lessons, whether with or without silent remembrance – about the past of his own country. For the “Fathers” during their constitutional convention from May to September 1787 in Philadelphia left the question of religion completely aside to not to prefer one religion over another. For similar reasons, the word “God” does not appear a single time in the American Constitution, on the contrary: The framers of the Constitution in their First Amendment’s Establishment Clause explicitly excluded any endorsement of any specific religion over another as well as the preference of religion over non-religion on the side of the polity, thereby establishing the American Republic de facto as the first secular state in the modern Western world.

DeSantis should quote the founders of his own country instead of putting words in the mouths of the dead. But these lies are purely intentional: American adolescents are to be brought into line before they can even read and write properly. Of course, the better one succeeds in controlling the thinking of others, the better such tactics serve to achieve one’s own goals. Liars like DeSantis have no qualms about hoodwinking the Americans, and they don’t even shy away from children and teenagers. And clearly – “provisions” like the one announced yesterday bring easy votes from the clueless.

Not even the communists in East Germany lied to me to such an extent as Americans lie to their own people.

What Did Ronald Reagan Say?

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

“Beyond the Elbe River begins the forecourt of hell.” The man who allegedly said this was Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the USA.

What he meant was the sphere of influence of the communist Soviet Union east of the Iron Curtain in postwar Europe. The Soviet Union – the decisive factor in the war against Nazi Germany – was the ally of the USA in World War II from 1941 to 1945. Only two years before the alliance came into being, Stalin was allied with Hitler’s Third Reich; together they invaded Poland and divided the country and the Baltic States among themselves like hungry predators. The sinister nature of these links can only be guessed at – links to dark forces presented in historiography as a necessity of the time. As is so often the case in normal life, it’s not quite so simple on the big stage, either. Rather, it is probably true that they all had dirt on them – not only Hitler, not only Stalin.

Unless Reagan’s statement from the 1980’s was of a symbolic nature, he was of course not quite right geographically – for the Elbe flowed for the most part on both sides of its banks through GDR territory. Only for a length of 58 miles did the river form the inner-German border (between Schnackenburg and Lauenburg)1, which was 855 miles long in total between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This border was also the interface of the Cold War.

Happy to be who I am – for I was born in 1961 just west of the Elbe River, albeit only by four kilometers (2.5 miles). Otherwise, loosely based on Reagan’s thesis, I would probably still resemble the devil incarnate. Unfortunately, these four kilometers were not enough to bring me to the free West, for the area near Magdeburg belonged to the sphere of influence of communism – left to the Soviets by their American friends after the end of World War II, only 16 years before my birth.2

Notes:

1 I sailed on my small cabin boat downstream on the Elbe River from Havelberg to Doemitz in 1997. The Doemitz lock had been closed during the Cold War; had I been sailing the same route at that time, I probably would have paid for it with my life.

2 By the end of World War II, American troops had advanced farther toward Berlin than had been agreed with the Soviets during the Yalta Conference. As a result, Magdeburg and my later birthplace Wolmirstedt were initially occupied by the Americans. Against the advice of Winston Churchill, the U.S. troops withdrew to their agreed zone of occupation in July 1945. Thus, the entire Central Germany fell into the hands of the Soviets.

Dangerous Mixture

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

The remaining Republican constituency, however numerous, has solidified into an unsocialzed, deluded bunch over a laughingstock like Trump: His followers are filled with a pathetic, populist mindset camouflaged as patriotism, fed by fabricated catchphrases that even the mentally deficient can easily memorize and then parrot as the familiar bird can.

Thematically, most can hardly produce anything coherent from their own thoughts that would make any sense to support their views. Apart from repeating propaganda platitudes, they do not provide any answers to problems that exist in reality. An own fact check with appropriate background knowledge does not take place, because the mental energy is missing and often probably also an honest intention.

It is frightening to observe how much this propaganda-pushed mentality is becoming entrenched in other developed countries as well – but nowhere else as intensively as in the USA. Trump embodies the intellectual decay of much of American society.

There is no end in sight to the dangerous blend of misinformation, lies, conspiracy theories, not-knowing, misdirection, and delusion. For there are millions of people who blindly believe every claim, no matter how abstruse, as long as it only corresponds to their own paranoid fantasies.

Savior on the March

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

There is great news: Now two saviors are on their way to rescue humanity. One has been on the road for nineteen hundred and ninety-one years and is running a little late. The other is expected back this August – reinstated at the White House in Washington, D.C.

Judging by the mental state of a not inconsiderable part of the population and what was experienced under the previous government, nothing would surprise anymore. At this point, however, the smile already ends. There is a possibility that something much worse than January 6 might happen – the lethal mix of gun mania and delusions of lunacy make it possible at any time.

Those who voted for Trump had to know what they were doing. It did not take any special intelligence to realize the potential danger they were exposing their country to. It was and continues to be the danger of putting democracy at risk. The responsibility lies with each individual who supported this lunatic with their vote.

Right now, it doesn’t look like the Republican Party is coming to its senses. Even the use of violence seems to be an option for some of their leading people. In a parliamentary democracy, this attitude alone, including the public call for an armed rebellion, is to be considered as an attempt to legalize criminality – whether one wants to admit it or not.

Who on earth can seriously approve of such a thing and support such politicians? Actually, only those people who are either used to doing crooked things themselves in their lives – or those who are not in possession of a halfway clear mind. People who believe in all possible conspiracy theories, no matter how absurd they may be – from rigged elections and blood drinking politicians to the danger of socialism in the USA.

They may be reassured: Not a grain of socialism is present in the United States of America, not in the form of an Antifa or any other phantom. And as long as the masters of both parties, people like Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer, draw their money from identical sources and the same donors, there will not be even a glimmer of a social market economy in the U.S. Switching to such a system would cost Corporate America far more money than the usual bribing of politicians, for it would be the broad swath of the population that would benefit instead of upper-class individuals. But Christian charity does not go that far.

It is eminently notable that in the face of this craziness, wheels are still turning at all in the land of unexpected possibilities.


Work Ethic is Dying?

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It doesn’t get any more cynical than this

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

See the image below:

This person unknown to me is much better than I am at expressing the American problem in a few simple words. The irrefutable facts he mentions apply to more than half of the US-population with rising tendency, even though the wealth in this country exists to provide remedies that would benefit the society as a whole. To deny this would mean to dispute reality. I’ve been there, I’ve worked at Walmart for eight years, with great difficulty trusting my eyes and ears and at the same time knowing that I’m in the United States of America, which (almost) everyone in Europe considers the leading country in the world.

It should not go unmentioned who pays for said food stamps. Not Walmart, not Corporate America, who are shirking their responsibility because they cannot get enough down their greedy throat. It’s the common taxpayer, you and me, which makes it doubly outrageous. This is how Americans in their own country are being cheated good and proper, and they’re letting it happen to them.

Of course, politicians have a moral obligation to intervene through regulation in the interest of the common good. Multi-billion corporations should pay their employees decent wages, so that no public tax money has to be spent on food stamps. Ration cards came into use elsewhere in post-war times – not at all in the 21st century.

And where are the Churches? Here all of a sudden, where it is about the real, earthly problems of the little man, they do not interfere in politics – that is very strange. Are they afraid of having to pay taxes like their flock of sheep, so that their hypocritical business will no longer yield enough profit? You don’t have to open your eyes too wide to see how representatives of politics and the clergy work together hand in hand to play the little man for a sucker and line their own pockets. This is arranged to keep the masses in line.

After all, one crow does not peck out the eye of another. Amen.