From Information Clearing House
By Al McKinnis

Dear Uncle Earl,

The American ideals (liberty, justice, freedom, independence) and working peoples’ values (equality, democracy, and solidarity) which you fought and died for as a 20-year-old Marine, at the Death March of Bataan, continue to be attacked. As it turns out, the Empire you fought was not the Empire attacking your humanity, but another Empire, the American Empire, continuing its offensive against world humanity.

I thought of you last week when some coworkers and a company security guard accosted a friend passing out notices for an anti-war rally, exercising the very rights you died to defend and perpetuate for them. Actually the first thing I thought was great, there are Nazis in the building. I’ve also thought of you recently as America’s foreign and domestic affairs continue to create what can only be described with the name history has given your battle, to recognize its horrific event: death march.

Changing domestic opinion through lies and provocation was so easy that, shortly after your passing, we institutionalized secrecy and passed the decision to wage war onto a single individual, the president. Since then there have been some 200 executive-directed military excursions. We now have a “Pro-active Pre-emptive Operations Group” reporting to the Secretary of Defense, whose purpose is to incite terror attacks so the president can order a counter attack “for national security.” As it turns out, Pearl Harbor was a provocation by refusing access to oil.

Your war is sometimes referred to as “the good war.” As it turns out, the only good war, righteous war, is the class war. Government by and for wealthy Americans to control working people has ascended by copying corporate, autocratic power hierarchies, buying the Constitution, giving them power over individuals, and building cadres of boot lickers–”privileged citizens.” Democracy and representation are not possible within that infrastructure. Fear and distraction, through these constant military excursions, corporate America’s theft of individual rights, foreign affairs attacking humanity to take money from the poorest of human beings and pitting us against each other is our new world society of top down social control. A society of corporate values (dog eat dog, “leaders,” and kill to accumulate others’ money).

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