Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 406 Editor's Choice: 5
-
we lie to ourselves
[Read the article: John Yoo: Spearhead or scapegoat?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The problem is you're dealing with mythology: the tendency to create a mythology of a demon race is described in 'Animal Farm' as 'four legs good, two legs bad'. For example, most people would say Churchill was a better person than Hitler but the truth is Churchill wanted to drop anthrax on German civilians and was only prevented from doing it because the air force refused to do it out of fear of infecting their own pilots. The whole narrative of European and American history is in love with its lies and refuses to give them up. That's why the Republicans can present torture as heroic and necessary when commonsense says it doesn't work and is morally indefensible. Commonsense said it wasn't a good idea to fly around with a plane full of anthrax and drop it on Europe but it's a bit like what the Germans say about sex: 'When the penis stands up the brain is in the ground'. The first casualty of war is not truth, it's reason. The Second World War was not a black and white good versus evil war as history contends. It was not the 'good war' that historians glorify. The arms industry made billions out of it and the arms industry worked just as hard to bring about that war as it did to bring about the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq. They don't care which side 'wins' because they always win.It's now common knowledge that Churchill and Roosevelt had cracked the Japanese code and knew about the attacks the Japanese had planned for Pearl Harbour and they allowed them to take place and got America into the war. This was the model for 9/11. Get American troops into the Middle East and fix the Bad Guys once and for all. The Wild West with sand and palm trees. The beauty of declaring you're at war is that morality and reason are thrown away. It's like kindergarten with much better toys. John Maynard Keynes told France after World War I that the the result of the Treaty of Versailles would be economic collapse in Germany followed by another war. No one listened. If you want to get into the head of John Yoo and the torturers themselves, think about Reinhard Heydrich, murderous nutcase, who has been described as 'the golden boy of SS sadism'. Psycopaths sometimes wear very nice suits and have very nice degrees and they can also have very snappy uniforms and chestfuls of medals. Still ya gotta laugh. How I chuckled watching that sad travesty of a woman Matlin on 'Meet the Press' calling Dick Cheney 'brilliant' because he's completely altered the role of the Vice President. The thing is, Cheney IS the President and he likes torture lots. He likes war lots. He likes money lots. From that perspective how could any of it have gone differently? Yoo is just their weapon of choice in that instance. The Democrats on 'Meet the Press' were also helpful: suggesting that the electorate should elect two more MEN and that one of them should be a GENERAL. That's like saying that if you've swallowed poison you should swallow more poison and everything will be okay. No one believes a word these idiots say and Russert's cover has been blown, so it's just more greenhouse gas to no good purpose.
-
lazy, lazy, lazy
[Read the article: The technology that will save humanity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]All this lazy thinking! Yes, solar power can't work and the earth is flat and the greenies will be so incredibly opposed to a solution that saves the earth from radioactivity and endless pollution. That makes sense. WAKE THE HELL UP! Solar power is the future and without it there is only more of the same. Oil wars, filthy coal mines, cancer producing nuclear reactors and people like the Bush family and the bin Ladens and the House of Saud all holding hands forever while they screw the human race senseless just one more time. What a clueless bunch of whining ninnies. And stop pretending you know anything about solar power. You don't. You haven't even bothered to inform yourselves. You're just flexing your knee jerk and prejudice muscles. The Chinese are already building, building, building solar plants. The Germans are setting them up town by town and ordinary citizens can sell extra power generated back to the power utilities and make money from their solar plants. It rains a lot in Germany. If America doesn't want to be left in the dark it's time to act instead of rejecting change because you don't like change. There was a time when people thought flushing toilets couldn't possibly work either. Archimedes did use mirrors to set enemy ships on fire. You know how naughty boys use mirrors to burn bees to death on the front path. Yeah, like that. It's not even hard.
The only reason solar power was never used before is because the oil companies and the coal companies ran clever and well financed campaigns against it. And they obviously worked a treat on all of you. The only downside to all of this is that the Pentagon will want to create a death ray and everyone will be too gutless to stop them.