Compromising Morality… America’s Shame! by Philip A. Farruggio

by Philip A. Farruggio
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 29, 2011

Let us imagine for a moment that you live in a country that has tremendous poverty combined with a great polarity between ‘haves and have nots ‘. In this country there are no laws to protect girls from being sold for money by their parents. Thus, poor parents decide to sell their daughters, even as young as 11 or 12, to be made into prostitutes or concubines. Sad indeed, yes? So, you join with others in a movement to do something about this tragedy. You protest and rally and write letters to whomever and wherever. Your passion is exemplary. Soon after, your movement leaders come to you and announce ‘We won! We reached a compromise with the government! A law has been passed that outlaws the selling of any girl under the age of 15. We won! ‘‘Wait a minute ‘, you retort. ‘What about those girls 15 or over?’ So, the question becomes whether you support a law that would make you accept a moral compromise or do you reject it as being not enough?

Our nation’s leaders have taken us down a similar slippery slope for so long now. Vietnam was all about control of Southeast Asia for our empire. Korea before that was the same thing. It was not so much that we feared the Commies invading our shores. No, rather that our corporate interests would lose raw materials, cheap labor and foreign markets in those countries. It was never about national security! Of course, what history showed us is how, after the fact, we are able to make trade deals with those dreaded Commies for our economic interests as well as theirs With the fall of the Soviet Union new monsters were needed. Once again, it was all about our interests in the Middle East… our economic corporate interests. The villain Saddam, who Bush Sr. called the new Hitler, had been a CIA and NSA asset since before he even assumed power. Matter of fact, it was our government that helped put him in power in the first place. We then instigated and helped finance his decade long war with Iran, since Saddam was always the ‘Lesser of Two Evils ‘.  We needed to make sure that Iraq’s oil spigots would always pump out for America’s Big Oil. Our oil companies and oil related companies (Halliburton for one) made billions with Saddam. Then, he was given the old ‘wink and a nod ‘when he decided to invade Kuwait and reclaim the oil they were stealing from him. So, Saddam got sucker punched and we quickly moved to ‘put him in his place’, as long as we kept him in place to keep the dreaded Iranian backed Shia majority from taking control.  So what if we bombed to death, starved to death and caused sickness (and death) to millions of Iraqi children and adults through our sanctions?  So what if their infrastructure would never be the same?

The 2^nd War on Iraq was even more morally reprehensible than the initial one. Hereupon it was all based on lies and misinformation. I need not go over the facts, as finally, after 8 years, most of you know now that Iraq had no WMDs in 2003. Of course, Iraq at one time did have chemical and biological weapons because, as the late British MP Robin Cook stated so eloquently when he resigned in protest from Tony Blair’s cabinet: ‘We ( the UK ) , the Americans, French and Germans built the factories for Saddam to make his WMDs! ‘  Yet, the Bush gang used 9/11 and America’s need for jingoism ( ‘ Remember the Maine, Remember Pearl Harbor, Remember the USS Maddox and of course ‘ Remember the twin towers’)  to drum up support for our illegal and immoral invasion of a sovereign nation. When this writer awoke that morning of March 19, 2003, I cried as I watched CNN’s coverage of Shock and Awe. Watching a modern nation being bombed back into the Stone Age made one realize how so many of us had compromised our morality. The scenes that Canadian television carried of the carnage our attacks caused on Iraq’s civilian population were horrific! As the news filtered out through our own ‘bought and paid for media’ one remembers CBS’s little Katie Couric walking through the halls and singing on camera ‘Marines Rock ‘.   Many Americans had to notice the devastation to Iraq’s infrastructure and the countless bodies of non combatant women, children and elderly that were pulled from the wreckage. Yet, the war criminal Rumsfeld said it best: ‘ **** happens!’

I have no love for any religious fanatics, especially the morally reprehensible Taliban. However Mr. Obama now speaks of them as if they are the second coming of the Nazi regime.  Yet, the Taliban were OK to deal with when Unocal wanted a pipeline to go through Afghanistan.  They even invited those ‘bearded terrorist lovers’ to come here as honored guests, whereupon they wined and dined them.  You see, while the deal was being brokered, our intelligence analysts knew that there were terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. It was only after 9/11 that we decided to go in and take over the whole damn country! Then we could make sure that any future pipeline would be protected by our military. By the way, as far as compromising our morality, guess who we were in ‘bed with ‘while we looked to get rid of the Taliban? The good ole boys of the Northern Alliance AKA the Heroin Thugs! You see, the Taliban’s religious beliefs made them hate it when drugs were used or produced. For decades the Afghan region was the world’s number one source of the poppy that was made into the poison that American users shot into their veins.

So there you have it. Our leaders genuflect at the altar of the moneyed interests, and care not about any sort of moral compass. They have a public so inculcated with propaganda 24/7 on all of our media and throughout most of the religious institutions as well. Sinclair Lewis stated it best in the 1930s when he wrote his famous novel of the Fascist phenomena It Can’t Happen Here: ‘Fascism will come to America carrying a flag and wearing a cross!‘ How many human beings must be destroyed by our bombs, machine guns and other WMDs? How many human beings must be ‘picked to the bone ‘physically and psychologically through tortures worthy of the Inquisition? How much of our national treasure must be wasted to fill the pockets of the Fat Cat corporations that make profit on phony wars? Sadly, how many more of my fellow Americans do and say nothing about what they can sense is going on around them, and ….in their name? Shame on all of you out there who remain silent as the drums of fascism are being pounded louder and louder! What good is living a life of good deeds and concerns about your neighbors and neighborhood when you fail to show the same moral decency for others outside your box? So many of the political persuasion love to trumpet the slogan ‘Take back America ‘and so on. Well, how about ‘Take back our Moral Purpose first, before we take back anything else?

Philip A. Farruggio is son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen. A graduate of Brooklyn College, class of ’74, Philip has been an anti war activist since the Vietnam War.  Philip is now Volusia Cty spokesperson for the nationwide 25% Solution to cut military spending.  Since the 2000 elections, he has written over 250 columns posted on various sites, including, most recently, Dandelion Salad, dissidentvoice.org and progressivepatriots.net, or at his own blog at http://www.opensalon.com. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net.

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