NO QUARTER FOR CORRUPTION (Focussing on The Fed./FRBS)

[Vexari]

america, is your soul dead?


http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/nolan-m3.html


by Michael Nolan
[e-mail]

Then they came for the Jews,
But I was not a Jew,
So I did not speak out.

The three small lines bear witness to the Holocaust.
They stun.
They make us look inward to gauge
our own capacity for passive, complicit evil.

The poem in which the stanza appears is thought to have originated
in various postwar speeches of German Pastor Martin Niemoller.
Likewise, who cannot be stunned when the following statement
is uttered by popular shock-jock commentator
Michael Savage over America’s Talk Radio Network?

"They say, ‘Oh, there’s a billion of them.’ I said,
‘So, kill 100 million of them, then there’ll be 900 million of them.’
I mean, would you rather die – would you rather us die than them?"
He was talking about Muslims – all Muslims – in his April 17 broadcast.

Okay, Savage is a nutjob, right?
A worst-case example of the failure of the human soul.
He’s not like the rest of us.
But, apparently, he’s like a lot of us here in the United States.

The Michael Savage Show is the third largest syndicated radio talk show
in the country. As U.S. media continue their slide into the moral sewer
of ultra-right propaganda, Savage’s brand of hate talk is rather routine.

U.S. evangelical leader Pat Robertson labels Islam,
"a bloody, brutal kind of religion," on the Christian Broadcasting
Corporation’s televised 700 Club.
Commentator Ann Coulter writes in the Jewish World Review
that "[T]he government should be spying on all Arabs,
engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport."

Civilized people would like to believe that Coulter is an anomalous
hatemeister, lurking from the shadows of an ill-designed blogsite,
with iron crosses and ads for assault knives in the sidebars.
But Coulter is a welcome guest on cable TV giants like Fox News,
MSNBC, and CNN, and her column is syndicated by UPI.
James Madison, a founding father and fourth president
of the United States, wrote,

"When tyranny and oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

For the sake of the republic, Madison would have been unswayed
by the tinhorn patriotism and the anti-Muslim
(in effect, anti-American) rants of today’s media.

Consider a hater from another era:
"Let us make a new beginning today so that we can annihilate the Jew."
That was Julius Streicher, in a speech given in Nuremberg, 1925.
Streicher was publisher of Der Stuermer,
a viciously anti-Semitic newspaper.
He was a favorite of Hitler in the buildup to the Third Reich.
Like the United States’ Talk Radio Network,
Der Stuermer was a key player in the mass media of its day.
And, like Julius Streicher before him,
Michael Savage serves up a constant, genocidal background
chant for an administration bent on imperial war.
Now the president claims that Iran’s nuclear capability
is a threat to the United States.

Those who love this country will remember that he said the same thing
about WMD in Iraq before sending the country’s sons and daughters
into the slaughterhouse.Hardliners in Washington
and Jerusalem cheer as the president announces,
"You bet, we’ll defend Israel," from Iran.

But informed observers, like Israeli military expert Martin van Creveld
and U.S. physicist Gordon Prather, have assured us that Iran
is years away from creating a nuclear weapon if, indeed,
they are creating one at all.
Lacking a legitimate casus belli, the administration knows that
in order to wage war it must make the people hate.
In order to control them, it must make them fear.
So the administration offers up a decades-long war with "terrorists."
And who are these terrorists?
Why, "Islamofascists," according to media cheerleaders.

In its demonization of Jews, Nazi Germany bet on the moral
somnolence of the German people, and it bet right.
But the Third Reich collapsed under the weight of its own hatred
and under the military might of the civilized world.
U.S. citizens should pay heed.

If Pastor Niemoller were speaking today, would he add 3 more lines
to his poem, for the sake, not only of Muslims, but of all humanity?

Then they came for the Muslims,
But I was not a Muslim,
So I did not speak out.

The Nazis deadened the soul of a nation.
America, will you heed the genocidal call
from the likes of Savage, Coulter, et al.?

America, is your soul dead?

=========
July 6, 2006
Michael Nolan [send him mail] is a freelance writer from Taunton, MA.
His recent work has appeared in The Vermont Guardian,
LewRockwell.com, Common Dreams.org and OpEdNews.com.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com