I will get to the topic of that provocative title in a moment, but first, quickly :
Re : the subject of last Saturday’s column :
I made it. Finally. It took a lot of work and a lot of sweat, but I made it.
And I feel much better now. Less tense, more relaxed, more… functional.
I am hoping… hoping… that this means that I have pulled the cork out and things will work more smoothly and naturally and healthfully now.
But if not, at least I know it is still possible for me to get there if I really try.
That sounds a lot better than me than going months without release.
That’s the update. Now, on with the blog.
I have been watching a series called The Untold History Of The United States, and things are getting pretty rough.
It wasn’t all that depressing at first. Sure, America was not perfect, but it was still basically good and meant well, at least in the eyes of Oliver Stone, who created and narrated the series back in 2012.
But according to Stone, everything started going all to hell when FDR died and Truman took over. It was Truman who, on the advice of a hark named General Byrnes, started the Cold War with apparent glee.
There was a chilling sequence about how Truman’s entire demeanor changed when he was informed of the success of the nuclear bomb test at Almogordo. Before that fateful phone call, Truman had been a somewhat weak but reasonable and conciliatory President who professed to have no interest in flexing American military muscle in order to get its way on the world stage or to set things up so that the US called all the shots in the world.
Then he gets the phone call, and his whole attitude changed. Suddenly he was telling the world leaders he was meeting with to go to hell and that the USA would be calling the shots from now on because they had the most destructive weapon in the world.
Now how America is that? The minute they are more powerful than someone else, all sense of civilized restraint goes out the window and they can’t wait to act like demons and crow about how they don’t “have to” do all that listening to others and thinking about things any more. and now they were going to have some FUN.
A civilized nation, or at the least a civilized leader, would have taken the phone call, nodded, maybe smiled a little, and gone back to reasonable negotiations with the Allied powers knowing he had a somewhat stronger hand now.
But no. Americans are fundamentally uncivilized. They have never grown out of the phase where a child behaves not because it’s the right thing to do but because they “have to” or they will get into trouble.
So the minute they feel freed of “having to” behave, they go wild and loot and plunder and rape and destroy just like any barbarian horde.
And of course, things only got worse from there. Stone makes the point that despite what we have been taught, dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one hundred percent unnecessary. The Japanese had offered to surrender. All they wanted was to keep their Emperor, who was a religious figure somewhere between the Pope and God in terms of the level of reverence the people had for him. His role was mostly symbolic at the time anyhow. Letting them keep him would have cost the US nothing.
But no, the hawks were squawking for “absolute surrender” and nothing less. They, too, felt freed of the constraints of civilization and figured it was their God-given right to joyously fuck everything in sight with their big nuclear cocks and anyone who dared to suggest they restrain themselves in the slightest would have been declared a commie and a sissy and no fun at all, and violently ejected from their company.
At one point, someone asked Truman why he was determined to nuke a city in Japan, and he replied “Well what’s the use of building the thing if you’re not going to use it?”.
Ethically speaking, that’s like saying “Well what’s the use of buying the gun if you aren’t going to murder anyone?”
So to me, it’s clear that not one but two cities were nuked into oblivion (and history) purely so that Truman and his hounds of hell could wave their big nuclear dicks in the air adnd have a good old-fashioned jizz party.
And that’s when they started being total dicks to Russia, too, especially after the war ended. Even though arguably it was the Russians who stopped Hitler by being the first to be able to stop the Nazi advance in its tracks and then fighting them in a free for all brawl until the Germans were knocked out, and then ended the war by coming into the fight with Japan (which is what really destroyed Japan’s will to fight… the nukes didn’t figure into it), suddenly the Soviets, who had (as a nation) behaved honorably through the whole war, was vilified and shoved around by the newly empowered USA.
All because a lot of little boys in grown up clothes were having so much fun now that they didn’t “have to” listen to anyone else any more.
Basically, Truman was a very small weak man who fell prey to the manly types’ ability to manipulate someone like him via offering him the male approval he craved.
He would have done anything to keep those asshole’s approval and acceptance.
And the world – the entire world – would pay for that for fifty fucking years. America poured the fruits of the labour of billions into the pockets of a couple dozen defense contractors. It suffered through McCarthyism, a time where every single thing America thinks it believes was violently violated in a very public way.
But the rest of the world had it worse because this is when the CIA was formed and given unlimited license to do whatever it took to protect huge American business’ profits. And that very much included destroying their democracies and putting in brutal dictatorships instead just because those dictators were smart enough to say the magic words “I hate commies!” and thus could get away with whatever the fuck they wanted.
At least in this modern era, it would be very hard to get away with something like that. There are just too many people watching and the cover you would need for large scale horrors like that would have to be huge and absolutely airtight.
It’s not impossible and I am sure some evil shit is still being done by the CIA in the vulnerable areas of the world.
And right now, we are seeing how America reacts when a foreign government interferes with THEIR elections.
Doesn’t feel good, does it?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.