What Kind of Country Are We?

by | Jun 21, 2018

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Photo: Time Magazine.

That’s what Time magazine tweeted this morning. It is trying to place the blame for Trump’s immigration policy—specifically, his separation policy—on all Americans. Time wants us to stand up for the children.

But Time says nothing about the slaughter and starvation of children in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in particular Yemen. The US is assisting the Saudis in their genocidal war against the Houthi. It’s helping the fascists in Ukraine kill civilians in Donbas. It’s selling murder hardware to dictators and sadists.

When was the last time they did a cover denouncing Trump for his bombing campaigns in Syria and Iraq that have killed thousands of civilians? Are dead babies buried in rubble less important than immigrants from Mexico and Honduras?

Time’s publisher, Henry Luce, had a close relationship with the CIA. CIA employees traveled with Time-Life credentials as cover in the 1950s. The Luce family financed efforts to kill Fidel Castro.

“In the 1950s and early 1960s, Time magazine’s foreign correspondents attended CIA ‘briefing’ dinners similar to those the CIA held for CBS,” writes Carl Bernstein. “And Luce, according to CIA officials, made it a regular practice to brief Dulles or other high Agency officials when he returned from his frequent trips abroad. Luce and the men who ran his magazines in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged their foreign correspondents to provide help to the CIA, particularly information that might be useful to the Agency for intelligence purposes or recruiting foreigners.”

Luce is long gone and Time—a staunch Republican periodical during his time—has since embraced the establishment’s shift to “progressive” politics. It is now the preferred political control mechanism.

The rotting piles of corpses—many of them children—in the Middle East and Africa will never make it to the cover of Time magazine. Endless war does not elicit the same kind of squishy humanism on the part of Democrats and liberals as the mistreatment of children crossing the border.

The establishment hates Donald Trump even as he goes along with the agenda—the same agenda followed by Obama, Bush, and Clinton. He’s an outlier. It was Hillary’s turn and Democrats are pissed this brusque former casino and real estate magnate “stole” the election by exploiting the anger of the American people.

Not much has changed. We are still the kind of people who turn our backs on the victims of endless war in the name of a crumbling empire. Our emotions are manipulated by the state and its propaganda media.

Are we the kind of people who will ever wake up and discover the political system in America is controlled by the elite, the financial class and its groomed and paid off political hacks who take money from banksters and death merchants?

The possibility grows more remote with each passing day.

Reprinted with permission from Another Day in the Empire blog.

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