Reply #9: Note on some of the above comments: [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

We must never forget--because the Iranians have not forgotten--that the US destroyed Iran's democracy in 1953, and installed the horrible Shah, who ruled by torture.

We are reaping the fruit of that monstrous deed. When they finally got rid of the Shah--after 25 years of the worst kind of oppression--the country quite naturally fell into the hands of the imams, who have insulated the country from western influence, out of fear and JUSTIFIED paranoia. The Bush Cartel means them no good. They will freely slaughter tens of thousands of Iranians, to get control of their oil (and their oil contract with China), just as they did in Iraq. And the Bush junta is quite deliberately stoking up paranoia in Iran, and driving Iran to desperately seek nuclear weapons for their own protection.

Can you blame them?

The constant repetition of this remark by the Iranian politician (forgot his name) about the Jews, the Holocaust and Europe, among western war profiteering corporate news monopolies, and among western war profiteering politicians, is no accident. Bush has called THEM a third of the "Axis of Evil." There is irrationality and madness on both sides. The hated west bolsters up the imams' power; the hated "Axis of Evil" replies in kind. It is very, very similar to the leadup to the Iraq war. So WE should be VERY WARY of this manipulation of the newsstream. Have we learned nothing? (Does anyone even really know what this man said--that is not a translation by war profiteering corporate news monopolies? I know there was a retraction, by some other Iranian gov't figure. Do the quoters of the first guy ALSO quote the SECOND guy who issued the retraction?)

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As for spoiled, snot-nosed, purer-than-thou, leftist male writers who defend the Palestinians (or take some other position offensive to the Democratic leadership, or find most Democratic Party leaders to be collusive and corrupt ), I get annoyed with these types of intellectual leftists, too. I stopped reading CounterPunch because, while I often agreed with the political analysis, I found NO POSITIVE ROAD TO TRAVEL THAT COULD EMPOWER PEOPLE LIKE ME, people who want American democracy to WORK RIGHT, people who believe in the fundamental fairness of Americans, and their love of peace and justice. Reading CounterPunch, you end up feeling that the only alternatives are to blow it all up or commit suicide. Is there nothing we can do?

My own analysis is that the majority of Americans are disempowered and, above all, DISENFRANCHISED. And so my personal mission is to help correct that--to throw these private corporations out of our election system--and to get a strong grass roots revolution under way, to accomplish that purpose. Revolutions often center around one catalyzing issue. Let it be our basic mechanism of power as a people: our right to vote, and our right to have our votes counted in fully transparent elections.

CounterPunch publishes some very good people--people who have helped educate me on a number of issues (on the Palestinian issue, for one thing, which I knew nothing about). And they often provide a forum for alternative views that should be heard. But the list of American sins and crimes that one reads there--and in some similar leftist publications--is not balanced with a description of the strengths of the American people and possible methods of ordinary people gaining power, here.

That is a big lack.

I found Josh Frank's article a bit shrill--and a bit overwritten. But he has a point. Hillary has allied herself with the Bush junta and with the Likud faction in Israel. That's true, as far as it goes. What next? What do we do when we are given no choice but to vote for Hillary or for some Republican Nazi? And why is it that we will have no choice? And how do we change that?

Those are my concerns. What's is beyond the leftist analysis? Where is empowerment by which to achieve better gov't policy--and real reform, for instance, a dismantling of this horrendous OFFENSIVE military machine that is such a temptation to fascist warmongers? HOW do we change this?