Collateral Damage
By Lloyd Hart
Let's talk about "Collateral Damage". Where did this term come from?
How did collateral damage become the description for civilian deaths in
what have been illegal wars perpetrated by America? Did Madison Avenue
come up with the term as a marketing strategy for helping a war be more
successful? I suppose the bigger question is, is why does the American
public tolerate it? I have heard all the talking heads on the supposed left and the right in the corporate media use
the term collateral
damage as if it were business as usual that civilians should die in the
pursuit of American interests abroad. The fact is, if the Americans
that died on 9/11 were referred to as collateral damage by the supposed
"enemy" ( "This war on terrorism is bogus."
"The 9/11 attacks gave the US an
ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination." by Michael Meacher Saturday September 6, 2003 The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1036687,00.html ) that committed the attack, the American
public would be absolutely outraged. Using the American Standard of
describing the deaths of noncombatants as acceptable collateral damage
is actually a central principle of doing business in general within the
U.S. itself and through America's Global
Economic Dictatorship.
If we were to view the U.S. military to be strictly the military wing
of American corporate business globally and domestically, collateral
damage in practice is the accepted philosophy in dealing with all those
who suffer as a direct result of U.S. Global Economic Dictatorship. In
other words, the 750,000 people who die of cancer every year in America
are collateral damage as a result of the domestic American corporate
dictatorship and that corporate dictatorship's practice of polluting
with carcinogenic toxins the air, the water and the food at will and
with full knowledge of its own corrupt practices. Not to mention all
the
heart disease, respiratory illnesses, intestinal and internal organ
diseases that are caused by these toxins which expands the numbers of
the collateral damage into the millions. And of course we can easily
pile on all those that died as a result of practicing extensions of the
American corporate dictatorship like car accidents, workplace injuries
and deaths and economic stress in general and during downturns in the
economy.
If we were to look deeper and globally, we will find that the U.S.
Global Economic Dictatorship as administered through the IMF and the
World
Bank, the WTO (meeting this coming week in Cancun
http://cancun.mediosindependientes.org/ ) and through agreements such
as Free Trade, NAFTA and the presently negotiated FTAA (
http://www.stopftaa.org/ ) creates all kinds of collateral damage so
great in magnitude that even the most powerful human imagination
collapses under the weight of it. Such as in Kenya when the
IMF imposed school fees upon the children and families of Kenya in
order for the corrupt regime of President Moi to receive a World Bank
loan. The collateral damage from the IMF imposed policy was the
creation of a huge surplus of cheap child labor. Forty percent of the
children in Kenya between the ages of 5 and 14 ended up working in the
multinational corporate coffee fields and many other child labor
institutions. ( http://stolenchildhoods.org )
There is a more insidious and philosophically corrupt form of
collateral damage that illustrates the contempt the U.S. Global
Economic Dictatorship has for and that now threatens to wipe out all
Life on this planet. In 1937 a law was passed in the U.S. Congress and
signed by President Roosevelt. This law was called the Marijuana Tax
Act and was the result of a powerful lumber industry suffering from the
collapse of housing starts in the U.S. as a result of the crash of the
market in 1929. As a result of the marijuana Tax Act the manufacture
of
paper turned from hemp, marijuana's industrial cannabis cousin, to wood
fiber giving the
lumber industry a stable and consistent product but more importantly, a
monopoly on the supply of newsprint and even greater
sway in American and global politics. If you control the news print,
you control what gets printed. The collateral damage from the
imposition of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937 was the chopping down of
over 50 percent of the world's forests since then for
strictly paper manufacture and of course, the truth. (
http://www.globalhemp.com/ )This horrible act of destroying the world's
forests is the
very source of the collapse of the air, food and fresh water supply we
are now experiencing and which has the conservative elite's invading
Afghanistan,
Iraq, taking control of the strategic oil supply so they can simply and
militarily control what resources are left and where and how the
world's poorest will starve to death. Collateral damage on the
grandest scale ever.
My very own father, George William Hart became collateral damage at the
hands of the nuclear industry working at the White Shell Nuclear
Research in Manitoba for the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. as probably
one of the greatest minds in electronics to walk the face of the earth,
But in his attempt to make nuclear power safer he became so
contaminated that his thyroid practically disappeared and he died in
1980 at 58 of heart failure, a common side effect of man made
radioactive materials pollution. And now that I live on Martha's
Vineyard off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, will myself, my family, my
neighbors and life itself above and under the sea become collateral
damage as a result of a million barrels of radioactive waste on the
bottom of the Bay of Massachusetts openning up and distributing high
and low-level radioactive materials throughout the area. Turning Cape
Cod and the Islands into a dead zone where no one will ever be able to
live again. The Department of Defense owns these barrels of
radioactive waste, the very people the use the term collateral damage
to describe the acceptable losses in the advancement of their agenda.
I have wondered constantly why the death of a child in Basra, Iraq or
U.S. sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first illegal invasion of Iraq
that killed 500,000 children is acceptable to the American public. Are
Americans so devoid of feeling that they cannot see what their leaders
have conned them into. Even just watching the corporate media there's
enough information to draw the conclusion that what is going on is
morally and practically all wrong. How long will the American Public
go along with the general day-to-day process of the destruction of life
on this planet chalking it all up to collateral damage in the
maintenance of it's material well being. The rest of the world outside
the U.S. has already begun the process of turning away from this
self-destructive behavior but the U.S. remains the single most powerful
influence in the world, militarily and economically.
A good question to ask now is, is America's foreign and domestic policy
truly reflective of the majority of American people or is American
foreign
and domestic policy as a result of the American public not even
participating by a simple majority in shaping the policy in America? Of
course one could now argue as Governor Dean of Vermont did yesterday in
defending Governor Gray Davis of California from the continued
corruption, that the American Economic
Dictatorship has listed democracy as collateral damage. Prove it wrong
America! Register to vote in record numbers and vote in record numbers
for the most progressive Democratic Candidates in the primaries coming up
this winter. Vote Ambassador Moseley Braun, Al Sharpton and Congressman
Dennis Kucinich. Vote, if only to prove the existence of the Global
American Economic Dictatorship and to draw it out into the open for a
scrap we know we must fight in order, at just a minimum, to survive the
damage we have done to this beautiful planet. But god damn it, VOTE.
http://dadapop.com