Vote to End Human Sacrifice on November 7

By Dennis Rahkonen
Created Oct 23 2006 - 8:46am

Mussolini, Hitler and George Bush all flimflammed their citizens to sell
wars of naked aggression.

They told huge lies and mounted elaborate deceptions before launching
utterly unprovoked, illegal, immoral attacks on countries that had done
nothing to warrant being violently victimized.

The overwhelming majority of humankind appreciates that undeniable truth,
but some Americans are still lost in propaganda fog and wrongly believe
there's virtue, or legitimate defensive requirement, in staying in Iraq
until "the job is done."

How do we reach those holdouts against reality, those enablers of continuing
sacrifice of both U.S. and Iraqi innocents in a rich man's dirty war fought
to "access" somebody else's oil?

How do we remove their hands from the bloody meat grinder's turning handle?

Maybe the best way is to offer a reverse perspective.

What if an alien enemy from 7,000 miles away had gratuitously invaded the
United States? What if the attackers -- profoundly biased against Americans
and completely insensitive to our culture -- arrogantly patrolled our
neighborhoods in their military vehicles, stopping only to kick down doors
in search of what they categorized as abject terrorists, not insurgents with
a compelling cause?

If we'd experienced both Shock and Awe devastation and Abu Ghraib-style
torture used to overthrow our government and facilitate the theft of our
wealth, many of us would certainly manufacture improvised explosive devices
in secret, then defiantly put them to effective use.

We'd struggle to achieve our country's sovereign self-determination, for
generations if need be, killing occupying soldiers in such numbers that
public opinion within the aggressor nation would ultimately turn, in total
revulsion, against their unjust, unwinnable war.

Identical revulsion must be manifested at our voting booths in November.

Outside my window, I can hear children's chiming voices and laughter. Kids
across the street are playing touch football. They're about ten or eleven
years old, and undoubtedly oblivious to the unrelenting carnage occurring in
Iraqi cities, entirely because "their" president started a senseless war of
choice where no American combat boots should ever have set foot.

85 U.S. troops have died in Iraq just this month, and many more have been
horrendously wounded. Iraqi casualties, of course, are exponentially
greater. Recently, an authoritative Johns Hopkins/MIT study disclosed that
655,000 Iraqis have died since the "liberating" Americans first arrived.

That sum certainly includes many thousands of Iraqi children. What games
were they playing when fire and shrapnel interrupted their carefree fun?

We've seen a National Intelligence Estimate that declares the Iraq
occupation generates more enemies of America than it eliminates. We've read
Bob Woodward's latest book, which documents chronic failures by the Bush
administration. And yet we're also informed, by the Army, that it's prepared
to maintain a 140,000-man force level in Iraq until 2010.

That's insanity!

American parents won't tolerate such prolonged sacrifice at the sanguine
altar of monopoly-corporate greed!

Do the mad monsters in Washington really think they can keep sending our
sons and daughters, eventually including even those still scampering on
playgrounds, to their unnecessary deaths or hideous mutilations in Iraq,
forever?

"Not with my child, you don't!" needs to be -- and definitely will be -- the
outraged, universal sentiment that finally puts this
coal-mine-at-midnight-dark chapter in our history to a thankful end.

There are many specific reasons for going to the polls to send incumbent
Republicans packing. Plus, it's simply not in the best interest of our
workaday majority to be ruled by a scandal-ridden cabal of
profits-before-people toadies beholden to a plutocratic elite.

But it's Iraq that issues the loudest call to electoral rebellion.

At least in antiquity, as high priests performed their gory rituals to
appease nonexistent gods, human sacrifice was occasional and usually limited
to only a few victims at a time.

But in Iraq, with viable exit strategies perpetually deferred by both
stubborn denial and an abiding lust for "black gold" beneath crimson-stained
sand, the sacrifice involves masses of fearful men, women and children, and
is cruelly ongoing.

When we wake up on the morning of November 8, will our spirits be crushed or
lifted?

Will we have exercised our duty to serve the best and most ennobling
ideals -- without which America's future can only be impossibly bleak -- or
will we have bought even more lies, taking each new graduating high school
class to the corporatists' killing floor?

It's our choice; it's our country's destiny.

--
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson