One Nation, under God...?

By Hans Vogel

Photo: One Nation, under God...?

Bush II may be President of the United States, but in fact the man behaves as if he were some ancient despot. Like many despots, he was sort of born into the office. His father was president before him, a distinction he shares with the rulers of North Korea, Syria and Tunisia. The people of the United States may think they are citizens of a republic, but they are wrong. Today they are subjects of what has practically become a military monarchy, like Prussia or Savoy, or perhaps ancient Sparta.

Moreover, the new Obama administration will count no less than three top ranking soldiers, telling testimony to the importance of the armed forces and the power of the military-industrial complex.

US monarchs (referred to as presidents) have pulled their subjects down with them into a deep abyss of moral and political decrepitude and economic disaster. The slide downhill has begun some time ago under God knows which president. It may have been Hoover or Roosevelt II, or perhaps it was Reagan or Bush I, it does not really matter who it was.

The poor extorted and misled people of the US naturally needed some kind of sugary fairy tale to help them accept something they could not even control with the best tools their Constitution had supposedly given them. The particular US infatuation with Christmas, its development into a kitschy binge that has been imposed upon the rest of the world, probably coincides with the beginning of the descent into the abyss.

During the past year, disaster seems to have really begun striking the US. Millions of people have lost their homes because they could no longer pay the mortgage. Many are now living in tents or in their SUVs. Millions have been swindled out of their savings by criminal bankers who are now being rewarded by billions of dollars paid out of public coffers. At least some 60 million people in the US are living below the poverty level. Each day when they get up they don't know if they will eat that day.

Millions more will be cut off from utilities next year for being unable to pay the ever increasing bills. The US has imprisoned more than two million of its own people. They are languishing in jails run by modern private companies such as Wackenhut but are treated no better than prisoners in medieval dungeons. According to questionable official statistics (real figures probably being much higher), some 5,000 soldiers have been killed in colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while hundreds of thousands of veterans have been wrecked psychologically and physically, eaten away by cancers and crazy with fear, often due to radiation from their own depleted uranium munitions.

Yet their current despot keeps on uttering the most appalling nonsense. Laura, the despot's spouse, recently claimed her husband had liberated 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq. This remark was made on the eve of Christmas, as if she wanted to imply her husband was some kind of holy figure. Though one's first reaction to this assertion might be to reject it as drivel (like so many of the lady's utterances), she may have a point. If she meant to say her husband the despot had liberated the Afghans and Iraqis by depriving them of security, education, electricity, water, jobs and by ruining their livelihoods, she is absolutely right. Most Afghans and Iraqis have been thrown back into a material existence comparable only to the darkest Middle Ages. Bush II's wife probably also included in her figure the more than one million Iraqis murdered by her husband, the millions who have been chased out of their country and the millions who have been mutilated and diseased. The Afghans and Iraqis have lost everything and have thus been liberated from their earthly shackles.

Seen in this light, Bush II has also liberated millions upon millions of his loyal subjects. Probably this benighted creature sees himself as a follower of Christ. After all, during his first election campaign back in 2000, he admitted to considering Jesus Christ “his favourite political philosopher.” One wonders where Bush II has read about Jesus Christ. Certainly not in the Bible, but in a pamphlet written by one of the countless fundamentalist fascists in the US. After all, Saint Francis, Thomas à Kempis, Don Bosco, Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa (to name just a few), who also tried to emulate the actions and teachings of Christ, did not exactly go on a spree killing innocent people abroad and depriving people of their homes. It must be doubted whether it would have occurred to anyone to ever throw a shoe at Mother Teresa!

Bush II is certainly not the first homicidal maniac or the first sadist to lead a powerful country. There have been many before him but at a certain point, many were checked by some form of representative institution, such as a council of nobles, sensible courtiers, an alliance of powerful cities or a parliament. However, Bush II is probably among the few to rule absolutely unopposed, or at least with an opposition that has been rendered voiceless and totally ineffective.

Bush II has definitively turned the US into a full-blown religious monarchy. The official religion seems to be a vague, perverted form of Christianity, a deadly concoction of racism, lunacy, ignorance, colonialism, stupidity and greed. The subjects of the US stillcannot believe what they see around them every day. They still cannot accept reality. It is only during the Holiday Season that they can briefly bask in the warmth of what remains of family ties, huddling together in their flimsily constructed, heavily mortgaged homes, threatened with eviction, in fear of being cut off from utilities and unsure how they will make ends meet in 2009. They deserve our special sympathy these days, for without realizing it, they have become so very much like the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.

They have been, or are in the process of being, “liberated!” Yet they dare not even ask if liberation is the work of Jesus Christ or the Antichrist. Poor folks, they are in for some very unpleasant surprises next year! The crisis will further unfold, causing more havoc among remaining US productive industries, and God knows what will happen to the US dollar.

Perhaps the time has come to amend or even drop the preposterous text of the “Pledge of Allegiance” that US children have to perform at the beginning of every school day:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States, And the republic for which it stands, One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all...

What republic?

What god?

What kind of liberty?

What kind of Justice?

How do you define “all”?