It Can’t Happen Here

It Can’t Happen Here
By David Glenn Cox

Frank Zappa first posed the question sarcastically by saying, “It can’t happen here.” He was arguing with the myth of American exceptionalism. In the song the line is repeated over and over,

“It can't happen here
It can't happen here
I'm telling you, my dear
That it can't happen here
Because I been checkin' it out, baby
I checked it out a couple a times”

The song is both hysterically funny and startlingly more poignant today than when it was written forty-four years ago. Americans blindly believe whatever they are told. There is a channel on Justin TV that replays old documentaries and they were airing a late 60’s documentary about the Vietnam War. What was interesting was knowing what we know today versus what this TV documentary was telling us.

Man, we were kicking ass and taking names; we had Charlie on his knees begging us to let up. Details left out of the documentary were: President Diem and his brother were looting the treasury. Nothing moved in or out of the country without bribes. Supplies were looted and President Diem and his brother ended up with a bullet in their brains in a CIA-backed coup. They were replaced by generals but in South Vietnam the term general only meant people well-connected socially.

Richard Nixon promised Vietnamization, or as George W. Bush put it, “As they stand up we’ll stand down.” What happened in Vietnam was as we stood down they fell down. They had a corrupt government with generals resplendent in medals they earned by being the cousin or brother-in-law of some provincial leader. Promotions were based on who you know not what you know. This meant that the soldiers in the field were being led by know-nothing incompetents. As the Americans withdrew the South Vietnamese army froze.

Republicans fostered the myth that the American liberal media lost us the war. To believe that, you would have to explain why 125,000 South Vietnamese soldiers deserted the army annually. Were they watching Cronkite? The truth was that you had a corrupt government with little public support and no matter how many tanks and planes you gave them they would still lose the war.

President Karzi in Afghanistan is President Diem reincarnated. Already estimates run as high that he and his band of cronies have looted one billion dollars from the treasury. Karzai’s brother is suspected of running one of the largest heroin rings in the world. That wouldn’t be at all surprising as Afghanistan is a full-blown narco state.

In Vietnam the CIA was running opium out of the Golden Triangle and General Richard Secord was delivering suitcases filled with money to Australian banks. In the 80s when Ronald Reagan wanted to help the freedom fighters defeat the Russians, Afghan opium was the Muhajadeen treasury. When funding for Reagan’s freedom fighters in Nicaragua was cut off by the US Congress, it was Richard Secord who raised his hand to say, “You know what we did in Vietnam?”

Studio 54 was awash in cocaine and Donna Summer and the money was being laundered through Panamanian banks. Ollie North asked Manuel Noriega if he could help us defeat the Sandanistas. Noriega says, “Anything for you, Ollie,” and Ollie pays Noriega one million dollars cash. When the Iran Contra scandal broke guess where the money was being laundered? Noriega had the goods on them; Noriega knew where the bodies were buried. Noriega knew too much.

In February of 1988 two indictments for drug smuggling against Noriega were unsealed in Florida. Three weeks later Panama's civilian president, Eric Arturo Delvalle announced the dismissal of Gen. Manuel Noriega as commander of the country's defense forces. The next day, Panama's National Assembly voted to oust Delvalle.

In March Reagan moves to suspend trade preferences with Panama and a week later announces and executive order to immediately block of all property and interests in property of the Government of Panama. Why? Noriega had closed the bank! The bank where the CIA had funneled all that drug money and it’s Iran Contra money and who knows what else. To the American public Noriega was a drug smuggler and he worked all by himself, even though it was the CIA who put Noriega in power in the first place.

“But I'm telling you
It can't happen here
Oh darling, it's important that you believe me
(Bop bop bop bop)
That it can't happen here”

When America drops bombs on civilians, they deserve it. When America goes to war it's because the other guy asked for it. In 2000 the CIA said that Al Queada had 3,000 members worldwide. Yet we bomb and we kill and we kill and we bomb and yet they pop up like gorgon’s teeth. It's the perfect scam. If we want to bomb, say, Sweden we claim that an Al Queada training base is operating there and the American public believes.

We first attacked Afghanistan because the Taliban government wouldn’t turn over Osama Bin Laden. You remember him, don’t you? Seven years on and he doesn’t get mentioned much anymore, but the war goes on just the same. Seven years on and what have we gained? How do we know that we are winning besides being the good guys? The Russian public thought that they were the good guys; even the German public during WWII thought that they were the good guys. The German media showed houses shelled by Polish guns and dead Polish soldiers killed in an attack on a German radio station. Of course the German’s fabricated the attack and the damage. The dead Poles were actually German prisoners in Polish uniforms. The German public believed the stories whole-heartedly.

“But I'm telling you
It can't happen here
Oh darling, it's important that you believe me
(Bop bop bop bop)
That it can't happen here”

Remember all the outrage over George W. Bush’s foisted wars? Remember how they said that Afghanistan was the good war? Anyone remember why that was? Is the war in Pakistan, attacks in Yemen, and support for Somali rebels good wars too? Are they good wars on their own merits or are they good as an expansion of the Afghan struggle. We traded an inarticulate, ersatz cowboy for an articulate, constitutional law professor.

For our trouble we have a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, codifying of indefinite detention, and expansion of the war in Afghanistan to the shores of Africa. We have Bush-era funding levels of the military budget, nuclear power and coastal oil drilling. We have free money for the banks with jobs programs that are 98 percent tax cuts. And record exports of heroin from Afghanistan.

The media talk forever about teabaggers when teabaggers are about as relevant as Sponge Bob Square Pants to American politics. In the 1930s the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily news ginned up the America First Party, backed with corporate money that agitated against Roosevelt’s New Deal and promoted isolationism. Like the teabaggers they were racist and like the teabaggers they were pointless. It wasn’t a movement it was a parade.

How many people have died Iraq and Afghanistan because of war?

How much has the war in Afghanistan cost this year?

Helen Thomas asked the President, “Do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?”

“With respect to nuclear weapons, ah, I don’t want to speculate, what I know is this, that if we see a nuclear arms race in a region as volatile as the Middle East, everybody will be in danger. And one of my goals is to prevent nuclear proliferation generally, I think that it’s important in concert with Russia to lead the way on this.” (Barack Obama)

The President doesn’t want to speculate on who has nuclear weapons in the Middle East? Let’s see, Pakistan does and Afghanistan doesn’t, Iraq doesn’t. Russia does and all these countries surround Iran. But is there another country that I’m forgetting?

“It can't happen here
It can't happen here
I'm telling you, my dear
That it can't happen here
Because I been checkin' it out, baby
I checked it out a couple a times
But I'm telling you
It can't happen here
Oh darling, it's important that you believe me
(Bop bop bop bop)
That it can't happen here
Who could imagine that they would freak out somewhere
in Kansas . . .

Who could imagine that they would freak out in Minnesota . . .

Who could imagine . . .
Who could imagine
That they would freak out in Washington, D.C.

But it can't happen here
Oh baby, it can't happen here
Oh baby, it can't happen here
(AC/DC bop-bop-bop)
It can't happen here
Everybody's safe and it can't happen here
(AC/DC bop-bop-bop)
No freaks for us
(AC/DC bop-bop-bop)
It can't happen here
(AC/DC bop-bop-bop)
Everybody's clean and it can't happen here
No, no, it won't happen here
(AC/DC bop-bop-bop)
I'm telling you it can't
(AC/DC bop-bop-bop)
It won't happen here
Bop-bop-ditty-bop
(I'm not worried at all, I'm not worried at all)
Ditty-bop-bop-bop
Plastic folks, you know
It won't happen here
You're safe, mama
(No no no)
You're safe, baby
(No no no)
You just cook a tv dinner
(No no no)
And you make it
Oh, we're gonna get a tv dinner and cook it up
(No no no no no no no!)
Oh, get a tv dinner and cook it up
Cook it up
Oh, and it won't happen here
Who could imagine
That they would freak out in the suburbs!
(No no no no no no no no no no
Man you guys are really safe

They had a swimming pool
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
They had a swimming pool
I remember (tu-tu)
I remember (tu-tu)
They had a swimming pool
And they thought it couldn't happen here
(duh duh duh)
They knew it couldn't happen here
They were so sure it couldn't happen here
But . . (Frank Zappa)

Yes it can.

869,720 dead, 130 billion dollars for overseas missions, including 65 billion for Afghanistan and 61 billion for Iraq for this year. Plus 700 million for counter insurgency in Pakistan and an additional 1.5 billion to rebuild infrastructure.

In the US 15 million unemployed, estimated 4.5 million home foreclosures. One in ten risk of a child becoming homeless, a 34% growth in homeless living on the streets of New York.

Yes it can happen here, and it has.

It Can't Happen Here
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It Can't Happen Here is a semi-satirical American political novel by Sinclair Lewis published in 1935. It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can't_Happen_Here

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175225/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_afghanistan_as_a_drug_war__

March 30, 2010

Since Afghanistan now grows the opium poppies that provide more than 90% of the world’s opium, the raw material for the production of heroin, it’s not surprising that drug-trade news and war news intersect from time to time. More surprising is how seldom poppy growing and the drug trade are portrayed as anything but ancillary to our Afghan War. Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy has been focused on the drug trade -- and the American role in fostering it -- in Southeast, Central, and South Asia for a long time. In the Vietnam era, the CIA actually tried to suppress his classic book (since updated with a chapter on Afghanistan), The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. He’s been following the story ever since, and now for TomDispatch he offers what may be the first full-scale report that puts the drug trade in its proper place, right at the center of America’s 30-year war in Afghanistan. . . .

Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed strangely unaware that Marja might qualify as the world's heroin capital -- with hundreds of laboratories, reputedly hidden inside the area's mud-brick houses, regularly processing the local poppy crop into high-grade heroin. After all, the surrounding fields of Helmand Province produce a remarkable 40% of the world's illicit opium supply, and much of this harvest has been traded in Marja. Rushing through those opium fields to attack the Taliban on day one of this offensive, the Marines missed their real enemy, the ultimate force behind the Taliban insurgency, as they pursued just the latest crop of peasant guerrillas whose guns and wages are funded by those poppy plants. "You can't win this war," said one U.S. Embassy official just back from inspecting these opium districts, "without taking on drug production in Helmand Province." . . .

The ecological devastation and societal dislocation from these three war-torn decades has woven opium so deeply into the Afghan grain that it defies solution by Washington's best and brightest (as well as its most inept and least competent). Caroming between ignoring the opium crop and demanding its total eradication, the Bush administration dithered for seven years while heroin boomed, and in doing so helped create a drug economy that corrupted and crippled the government of its ally, President Karzai. In recent years, opium farming has supported 500,000 Afghan families, nearly 20% of the country's estimated population, and funds a Taliban insurgency that has, since 2006, spread across the countryside.

To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: in poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to establish the state's authority. When the economy is illicit and by definition beyond government control, this task becomes monumental. If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.

and being used by CorpAmerica to distract our focus away from these issues, and they just want to kill you. We need to convince them and redirect that very useful rage.

Thanks for the thread, Daveparts.

achievements such as the fact that after 1968 something like 80% of the mines US soldiers stepped on in Vietnam were made in the US. The Vietnamese and their corrupt American partners were simply reselling them to the Cong. And that while the US govt and media continually asserted that the FMLN was being supported by the Russians (or Cubans, or Chinese, anyone they saw as evil) the fact was that the majority of material that the Salvadoran revolutionaries used originated in the US and was sold to them by Salvadoran governmental and military sources. The list goes on and on or, should I say, the hits keep comin'.

Their track record is so bad that by the time they invaded Iraq for the second time they could lose, literally lose, pallets and pallets of stacks of American one hundred dollar bills and no one even bothered to investigate (this defies the imagination. When I explained to a Mexican friend that we bought dozens of war planes that cost over one billion dollars each, he refused to believe it). What was the point when it's obvious that the real reason for the conflict was precisely to create a situation where large "defense" profiteers could steal lots and lots of tax dollars?

when people are too complacent