U.S. officials love the idea of “soft power,” a concept that applies non-violent means from propaganda to culture to induce foreign countries to conform to Washington’s wishes. But the arrogance of the approach has alienated, rather than attracted, many people around the world, writes Mike Lofgren.
By Mike Lofgren
A recurrent buzz phrase of the Washington mandarinate in the last two decades has been “soft power.” The term was coined by Joseph Nye, a Harvard academic, in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. What he meant by the term is that “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants [it] might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.”
Soft power he defined as the putatively attractive political, social and cultural traits of a country that induce admiration in a target people, and, presumably, a desire both to emulate those traits and to willingly comply with the wishes of the country projecting the soft power.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifies before Congress on Jan. 23, 2013, about the fatal attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. 2012. (Photo from C-SPAN coverage)
The term has gotten a workout by American politicians and national security bureaucrats, particularly since the manifest failure of military power to make Iraqis love us. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has used the term, saying he would like to augment U.S. soft power by “a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action and economic reconstruction and development.”
As might be expected, the idea is most loved by State Department officials, principally because they believe it could give them a leg up in the Washington budget battles with their colossal rival, DOD, the repository of “hard” power. A Google search of “Hillary Clinton smart power” gets about 3.7 million hits. Smart power is the former Secretary of State’s pet term for a fusion of hard and soft power. John Kerry is also fond of the concept.
It is easy to see why the national security establishment, casting about for some alternative to the usual bluster leading to military action, would be drawn to the magical notion that our presumed cultural attractiveness, combined with a really cool Twitter feed, could advance American interests (as the Beltway elite defines them) throughout the world.
Democrats, in particular, looking for some substitute to the brain-dead neoconservative policies that some of them were briefly enamored of when President George W. Bush was Stockholm Syndroming them, are magnetically pulled to a concept that sounds like the first cousin to the dorm room philosophizing that so many of their kind indulged in during their formative years in the Ivy League.
“If we just explain our policies to them in the right way in a Facebook post, and maybe open an Apple Store in downtown ChiÈ™inău, ordinary Moldovans will be clamoring to join NATO!”
It is surely preferable to think in this manner than to act like a warmongering troglodyte, even if some soft power ploys, like John Kerry bringing James “You’ve Got a Friend” Taylor to Paris to console them after a terrorist attack, seem frivolous if not embarrassing one can hardly picture Charles Francis Adams or George Kennan doing likewise.
Yet soft power, while less pernicious, still springs from the same roots as neoconservative militarism. It arises from the near-universal belief among the Beltway illuminati in American Exceptionalism, the fairy tale that the United States dwells outside the normal processes of history and has a duty as a global redeemer. It is what H.L. Mencken would have classified as “the bilge of American idealism,” and it ranks right up there with intelligent design and a conviction that real estate will always go up among the foolish things Americans have believed in.
Was the invasion of Iraq and the whole Bush-era nightmare really the polar opposite of what the soft power advocates wanted? With the fall of Baghdad, a military campaign that took only a month, the whole soft power apparatus swung into action: passing out soccer balls to children, rebuilding the municipal sewer system, and opening a Baghdad stock market on the assumption that the benighted Iraqi masses were pining for the fruits of American-style capitalism.
In 2015, vastly more Iraqis speak English than in 2003. The Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent $50 billion in the country. Yet has all that money and all the cultural export of Americana accomplished anything? And could we not draw the identical conclusion about Afghanistan?
The whole soft power hallucination was born of the end of the Cold War in a particularly hubristic moment of American triumphalism. It was at that time that Francis Fukuyama wrote his extraordinarily silly discourse prophesying the end of history and the ushering in of a capitalist-consumerist utopia a kind of upside-down Marxist dialectic.
That is the fallacy at the heart of soft power: the belief that consumer goods, or some latent yearning for a Disney-fied lifestyle, or some technological gimmick like Snapchat, will liberate the foreign masses yearning to breathe free.
In the 1990s, one could see the apotheosis of this mentality in the pontifications of The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, who claimed that no two countries that had McDonald’s franchises would go to war with each other a thesis that has proven false several times. But one can see why Corporate America might love the idea of soft power as a way of selling Philadelphia cheese steaks in Burundi. They might even get an Export-Import Bank loan to facilitate peddling their wares because of the alleged diplomatic value.
We have seen the fruits of this delusion in the Middle East. Saddam’s Iraq, a secular if tyrannical government, at least allowed unveiled women to attend university and beer to be served in outdoor cafes. Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s longtime foreign minister, was a Chaldean Catholic. Iraq is now a far more dogmatically Muslim country than it was 15 years ago.
The same could apply to most of the Middle East: blue jeans, smartphones, and contact with Westerners did not make most Middle Eastern peoples more Western psychologically, it did just the opposite. The botched Washington reaction to the so-called Arab spring was a case in point: mesmerized by the fact that the Tahrir Square demonstrators used social media, Foggy Bottom could not quite grasp that the popular democracy demanded by the Cairo throng may have had little in common with the vision of democracy of Kennedy School of Government professors.
The fact that Saudi princes drive Bugatti Veyrons, own flats in Mayfair, and get their cholesterol checked at the Cleveland Clinic, does not stay them from lopping off the heads of those they deem miscreants or sorcerers at a record rate.
It is precisely the money grubbing, pop-culture aspect of American soft power that has made it such a hard sell in the Middle East. Sayyid Qutb, a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood in early post-World War II Egypt, attended university in Colorado, where he was repelled by what he saw as the rampant materialism and superficiality of American life. He went back to Egypt determined to reverse the growing Westernization of his country. So much for the Kumbaya effect of cultural exchange.
It is common for educated, progressive Americans to be appalled by the increasing intolerance of Muslim societies and their treatment of women, and to declare that these are broken, dysfunctional societies. There may be some validity in that judgment. But they ought to reflect that the antics of the Kardashians, Duck Dynasty, and the World Wrestling Federation, not even to mention the candidacy of Donald Trump, do not exactly broadcast to the world the image of America as the Last, Best Hope of Mankind.
We should have known that dressing up the outer man in Gap clothing does not change the inner man. One of the most profoundly exotic societies in the Nineteenth Century, from a Western point of view, was Japan.
Yet in an amazingly short time, the Japanese adopted the outward, physical trappings of a Western society. Their naval personnel donned U.S. Navy-style uniforms and their officers grew addicted to playing bridge as if they were barnacle-encrusted old English seadogs at the Admiralty. Their diplomats strutted around in wing collars, frock coats, and top hats like any respectable gentleman at the Court of Saint James. They adopted the superficial accoutrements of parliamentary rule. The Japanese industrialized rapidly. Babe Ruth turned them into baseball fans.
Yet Japan simultaneously became a violently aggressive country whose militarism astonished the world. Parallel with its outward “Westernization,” Japan’s elites confected a jingoistic Shinto emperor worship that was at once reactionary and yet new: an arresting analogue to the increasingly violent brands of Islam that have arisen in recent decades along with rising contact with the West. And these same Islamic fanatics, namely in ISIS, are now experts in social media, a talent that is giving the FBI director fits.
Soft power, the hula hoop craze of a segment of the national security establishment, is one more peculiar aspect of American parochialism and ethnocentrism, such as hewing to the English system of weights and measures, or the archaic use of a.m. and p.m. on airline schedules rather than the more rational 24-hour clock.
It is no substitute for traditional diplomacy that emphasizes horse-trading, reciprocity, and the fact that other countries just might, after all, have legitimate interests. A bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken is no suitable door prize for peoples whose sense of cultural pride could very well be as strong as our own.
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His book about Congress, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, appeared in paperback on August 27, 2013. His new book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, will be published in January 2016.
Imperialist Powers Prepare Another Military Intervention In Libya
By Jean Shaoul
05 August, 2015
http://www.countercurrents.org/shaoul050815.htm
A joint US-European mission to Libya involving soldiers from six countries is being hatched under the pretext of combating Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and with the aim of establishing a pliant pro-Western government and “stabilising†the country.
On August 1, the London Times reported, “Hundreds of British troops are being lined up to go to Libya as part of a major new international mission.†It stated that the UK soldiers would join “Military personnel from Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the United States…in an operation that looks set to be activated once the rival warring factions inside Libya agree to form a single government of national unity.â€
It is part of an expansion of imperialist military interventions in the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa, coming on top of the war in Iraq and Syria, in which Britain and the other powers are pursuing their own geostrategic and commercial interests.
The Times notes that Italy, the former colonial power in Libya, is expected to provide the largest contingent of ground troops. France has colonial and commercial ties with Libya’s neighbours, Tunisia, Mali and Algeria. Spain retains outposts in northern Morocco and the other major power involved, Germany, is once again seeking to gain access to Africa’s resources and markets.
Freedom is achieved with Wisdom and Truth.
Have the patience to stop, look and listen.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Anonymous February 17, 2013 at 11:55 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y9Ms90Tlyc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROaSt8Uwn4Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTnTIioZYuk
Waninahi February 18, 2013 at 1:02 AM
THANK YOU! I just watched those videos late last night, which convinced me people are right about Gaddafi NOT being hated by “all of his people”, like we were told/sold, & also convinced me that he, or someone near him, had a good grasp on democracy, better than our U.S. Congress has.
I wish we could dispense with links to sites (FP) that let you peek and then lock you out unless you pay up.
“intelligent design” You mean God? Then I guess I’m foolish too Mike. (No, I don’t believe the earth was created in 6 literal days.)
“Washington’s Fifth Columns Inside Russia and China”
Paul Craig Roberts
“It took two decades for Russia and China to understand that “pro-democracy†and “human rights†organizations operating within their countries were subversive organizations funded by the US Department of State and a collection of private American foundations organized by Washington. The real purpose of these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is to advance Washington’s hegemony by destabilizing the two countries capable of resisting US hegemony … ”
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/08/03/washingtons-fifth-columns-inside-russia-china-paul-craig-roberts/
Soft power is often presented as if it’s an alternative to hard power, as if it’s something that can replace it. Be nicer and then you don’t have to be nasty.
In practice, soft power is just the propaganda division of hard power. Its purpose is to put an attractive veil over the brutal military and economic policies that are imposed on unwilling populations.
In Ukraine, US government-financed organisations were acting as if they were simply promoting democracy and allowing the people there to decide their own future.
Victoria Nuland was innocently handing out cookies to protestors in the Maidan in Kiev. Around the same time, in a bugged phone call, she was also selecting the leader of the Ukrainian government, namely the central banker Yatsenyuk. Not long after that, following a coup that toppled the elected president, her wishes were fulfilled.
In the Middle East, the West also tried its hand at promoting democracy for Palestinians as well as Egyptians. Unfortunately those voters did not do what they were expected to do, so we we had to change the rules.
When Palestinians voted for Hamas, it was not recognised as a legitimate government.
When Egyptians voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, it was replaced by a military dictatorship, even more authoritarian than the previous one. After fresh elections, which had a much lower voter turnout and in which the elected Muslim Brotherhood was banned, western governments recognised the military dictatorship as legitimate.
In the end, many people in the Middle East saw western liberal democracy as a fake. So much for soft power.
The message is that you can vote for whoever you like as long as they implement western economic and military policies. The choice left to the voters is like the choice between Big Mac and Whopper, or between Pepsi and Coke.
The US, Leader of the “free world” – The world’s “policeman” – it’s “Sole Superpower” as described by the now defunct “Project for the New American Century” truly emulated “the great satan” when they craftily Manufactured Consent for the creation of A NEW MIDDLE EAST.
A type of Soft Power was used against Americans in the form of lies told and re-told cunningly, softly whispered like whisps of air, then diplomatically increasing the volume until the Drumbeat for war crescendoed into “Kill the Bastards !!!!” —- Those of us who knew the truth and campaigned against aggression were called Anti-American and other nasty terms.
That they had no actual plan for Iraq other than “bombing it back to the stone age” is clearly apparent, it’s a diabolical catastrophe.
The destruction of Libya is equally devilish if not more so. The truth about Qaddafi has to be sought out because the tremendous lies we were fed are so very far from Libya’s reality. The dissolution of that country was and is an act of pure evil.
This “Soft Power” is as the enchanting temptation of Eve in it’s artful, insidious deception. The US/NATO bombing of libya has let loose thousands of migrants seeking safe haven into a Europe that Does Not Want Them. Didn’t they KNOW this would be the result of their usurpation or were they thinking in terms of utter annihilation of the entire population?
The “Color Revolutions” are always a coup d etat, aka the wolf in sheep’s clothing. We exist in a sea of Lies and Damned Lies and perhaps we’re darned fortunate, after all, to live in the belly of the Beast…
UK protesters clash over Eurotunnel migrant crisis
The interior ministers of France and Britain released a joint statement on Sunday that said ending the crisis that has choked traffic on both sides of the tunnel and harmed trade was a “top priority”.
Both countries are committed to tackling the problem together and have beefed up security to deter further bids by desperate migrants to smuggle themselves to Britain, the statement said.
“Tackling this situation is the top priority for the UK and French governments. We are committed and determined to solve this, and to solve it together,” Bernard Cazeneuve and his British counterpart Theresa May wrote in a statement published in France’s Journal Du Dimanche and in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.
The statement came a day after pro and anti-migrant protesters clashed at the Eurotunnel terminal in the British city of Folkestone.
Members of the nationalist English Defence League told Al Jazeera at the protest that they believed there were enough migrants in the UK already.
“We’ve had enough, we’ve got enough [migrants] here at the moment – our country is on its knees, we need to concentrate on our veterans and our homeless and our NHS service,” one protester said.
“Allowing more and more people into this country is going to deteriorate our system even more.”
The truth about Qaddafi has to be sought out because the tremendous lies we were fed are so very far from Libya’s reality.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://havacuppahemlock1.blogspot.com/2013/02/libyas-gold-dinar-oil-for-gold-killed.html
How’s this for an example of American soft power? A minority community with a public park on the lakefront in a factory town attracts the attention of developers and speculators. They recognize the potential to turn it into golf courses, convention centers, gated communities and investment property. Problem is, there are all those annoying black people living there who don’t want to move out so the area can undergo Urban Trumpification. Well, the solution is simple: corporatization. A big corporation moves in and starts buying up assets. Then, it consolidates all the local employment opportunities and begins union busting. Layoffs follow, and people can’t pay their mortgages and utility bills. Foreclosures ensue, rent becomes prohibitive, and the revenue base evaporates. Insolvency attracts the typical speculators. There is the local corrupt political machine run by J. Roaringham Fatback and his lackey, Jubilation T. Cornpone. The local machine is in cahoots with Senator Jack S. Phogbound, who no doubt expects kickbacks. The local sheriff is the morally and intellectually challenged Earthquake McGoon, who colludes with Nightmare Alice at the county courthouse. The community’s moral and spiritual leader (OK, this is actually a real name), Reverend Edward Pinkney organizes a petition to recall Mayor Fatback. Nightmare Alice accuses Reverend Pinkney of forging signatures – a MISDEMEANOR – and he gets arrested. Falsely charged with a felony, he is convicted and sentenced to ten years. American “soft power” has actually come home to roost in Benton Harbor, Michigan. This is a TRUE STORY except for the L’il Abner allusions.
Free Reverend Pinkney – America’s unsung heroic African American political prisoner!
Here’s the story and to help Rev. Pinkney.
http://www.bhbanco.org/
“It’s a modern day lynching,” said Adams, the Benton Harbor commissioner, of Pinkney’s latest conviction. “After hearing the ‘evidence’ it would seem that the decision was made before the trial began. They are looking at Michigan as a glove for dictatorship. And the predominantly black communities are the test tubes. When you stand up against the largest manufacturer of appliances in the world, of course there will be a backlash.”
Pinkney was straightforward in his description of his conviction:
“Here, Whirlpool controls not only Benton Harbor and the residents, but also the court system itself. They will do anything to crush you if you stand up to them. That’s why it’s so important to fight this. I’m going to fight them until the end. This is not just an attack on Rev. Pinkney. It’s an attack on every single person that lives in Benton Harbor, in the state and around the country. We got to fix this jury system. There was not one person from Benton Harbor, not one person from Benton Township on the jury. Anytime a Black man is sitting inside that courtroom and the jury is all white, that is a major problem.”
Michigan is a state where virulent racism followed the Great Migration of southern blacks into northern industrial states in the 20th century. With more than two dozen racist hate groups still active in the state, Michigan has essentially turned into the Mississippi of the North. In fact, Pinkney organized his community against the KKK when they began to hold rallies in Benton Harbor in the 1990s.
Pinkney points out how class intersects with race, when it comes to the oppression of the people of Benton Harbor. “It’s a class war,” he said. “It’s us against them. Rich against poor. That’s what it adds up to. The point is we have to take a stand. It’s about you, your children, and your grandchildren. I never thought for a minute that the system could be this broken and would go to this extreme. They could care less about you, me or anybody else. They only have one thing in mind. That is to make sure they protect the rich.”
Rev. Edward Pinkney Imprisoned for Fighting the Whirlpool Corporation
By Victoria Collier and Ben-Zion Ptashnik
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28050-whirlpool-corporation-sentences-edward-pinkney-to-prison-with-no-evidence
When I think of the U.S. promoting it’s ‘soft power’ I don’t mean that this could be a fine opportunity for the U.S. to use it’s NGO’s to subvert and corrupt it’s host nation. Although, it sure looks this way. How smart, or rather how stupid, does one need to be to realize that by using soft power only to install a covert plan to encourage some kind of half though out regime change, is not away to gain any love. Still I constantly read articles describing the U.S. doing that very thing. Although, I have always though how Billy Joel’s 1987 Russian tour was a good thing, but I was never certain to if his tour was what brought down the old Soviet Union and an end to the Cold War. I also believed that when Elvis was stationed in Germany, that he represented America well. So, let’s just say that by having our rock musicians show the rest of the world how we rock, is nothing unless you have sincerity behind it. Quite honestly I think we scare most of the world when they connect our American way of life to the Kardashians, or some Desperate Housewife show. When I think of this portrayal of us Americans as our only life line to the rest of humanity, it makes me shutter. Is this the best we can do? I am attaching an article I have linked many of you to in the past. This article was written by a Russian, who is informing us Americans to what we have lost. It will better explain what we are doing so wrong, than anything I can write here. We pretend to lead by example, but then we back corrupt leaders who are instructed by our bankers to place austerity economic hardships on their people. Our biggest AID packages, are not meant for new infrastructure programs, or even put in place to feed people. Our most enormous good will is spend on providing these nations with American made (& some foreign made as well) weapons. Our most valued asset that is lost, is when we lose their ‘Trust’. We have become to clever for our own good.
http://slavyangrad.org/2014/09/24/the-russia-they-lost/
BTW this slavyangrad site is a good one to hear about what the people of Donbass are dealing with while defending themselves from the Kiev Nazi’s
The notion of soft power is inherently anti-democratic, relying upon economic dominance of smaller nations by overwhelming local communications, debate, and public support of institutions. It is exactly this anti-democratic influence that forces foreign governments to crack down upon foreign agents, to protect democracy, which the US then claims to be anti-democratic. This utterly cynical anti-democratic strategy shows the complete dishonesty and hypocrisy of the “soft power†oligarchy, both in the US and elsewhere. Their failure to see diplomacy and politics as anything but “war by other means†shows their unfitness for public responsibility.
Technology and affluence no more necessarily lead to virtue and justice in other cultures than in the US, where they often lead to ignorance and selfishness. As in the US, the “foreign masses yearning to breathe free†must be liberated from poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease long before they can be liberated from the “bilge of idealism†within their own cultures. Any “last, best hope of mankind†must have a foreign policy based upon humanitarianism, which emanates from an ideology of sympathy, not competition for resources, an ideology of respect for interests and cultures and self-determination and growth, not the self-justifying demand for cultural conformity. There is no sign of such benevolence among the neocons and soft power democrats.
But it is not a fairy tale that the US has a duty as a global redeemer. It failed in that duty because economic power grew to control the mass media and elections left unprotected by the Constitutional Convention, and its better elements have failed to restore democracy. It has failed to give more than a marketing budget to foreign aid. The fairy tale is that its overthrow of democracies and support of dictatorships were security moves, that the interests of its oligarchy were those of desperate foreign peoples, that its false claim of democracy and its affluence lit the way to progress for others regardless of US selfishness and ignorance and lack of concern for those who suffer.
The ideology of the US oligarchy is anti-humanitarian and anti-democratic, and can never be the best hope for the US, let alone anyone else. Whether its power be soft or military, it is the worst hope of the people, both in the US and elsewhere.
The article is right about a whole list of things. Yet the author does not quite seem to grasp the implications of his own arguments! Consider, for example:
“Yet Japan simultaneously became a violently aggressive country whose militarism astonished the world”.
Isn’t it utterly obvious that the aggressive militarism, too, was copied directly from the USA? All the Japanese wanted to do was be more like Americans. So they decided to treat the Chinese like Native Americans, the Malays like Black American slaves, and everyone else in their part of the world the way Americans treated Latin Americans.
As for the “jingoistic” Emperor worship – as of about 1900 the Americans were rapidly replacing the British as the most jingoistic nation in the world.
Well noted! Japan was new to the Games at that time, and took an unbiased view at how power was being wielded, contrarily to the propaganda then. They didn’t really have a “God” to command the people to their will, but they had a homegrown mystical folk religion. At one point prior to WWII, they declared it “not a religion” but cultural tradition (which it remains officially), and then organized it into a hierarchy, eliminated dissentors, and used it cynically as a propaganda disseminator. Undoubtedly some of the elites believed the jingoistic religion they’d created. They saw their destiny as being among the great powers of the globe. They looked up primarily to Europe at the time, not really liking the boorish Americans as much, but admiring and aspiring to America’s technological prowess.
The rank and file Japanese citizen did not believe the new religion, State Shinto, but they were coerced into giving it lip service. From their standpoint, Japan’s victory over Russia around the turn of the century empowered the military, who made their lives subsequently miserable, similar to what is happening in the US now. I think they were all surprised at America’s duplicity in cutting off their oil supply. They were not willing to take that sitting down. A few of their leaders were aware of what America was capable of technologically and militarily, but they were outnumbered by those who did not, a bunch of whom had basicallty imbibed their own Koolaid.
One aspect that is not covered in the article but quite essential to today’s world is the right to overthrow the government. It is quite clear that USA promotes this rights using “soft power” in other countries (including arming of rebels or military huntas) but it is quite anxious that such right does not exist for American citizens. And they manage to debate it away because those who fight for that right are loonies. Here is the example of such debate http://quietmike.org/2014/04/27/second-amendment-overthrow-government/
At the end it all boils down to simple imperialism “do what I say and nor what I do”. Or more profoundly- Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi
A quote from the Declaration of Independence:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
“it is their right, it is their duty”
“it is their duty”
Of course the Declaration is not a law; but it is the founding declaration of our philosophy and most noble principle of morality, that all are equal and to be provided equal chance and opportunity to the greatest degree possible — which our laws are “supposed to be” derived from and promote.
Upon failure to promote those noble principles contained in the Declaration, having been intentionally commandeered by a systemically corrupting power structure, as legislated by those who increasingly benefit from having corrupted it, I for one take it as our duty to “throw off such government” by any, and I mean any and all available means necessary — if not for ourselves, then for the future generations. And we owe this much to anyone who’s previously sacrificed so that we could be free — it is our duty not to allow their sacrifices to be rendered meaningless by allowing tyranny to extinguish our freedom.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
If the public was informed with truthful information, that alone would enough to easily throw off the fascist cabal that presently lords over us, and through having taken our freedom these same people mercilessly lord over much of the world.
“WE CAME, WE SAW, HE DIED” laughed Ms. Clinton,
in Churchill-like Imperialist Triumphalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw5Ij_RFJ1Q