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Do you have children in high school? If so, you should be afraid! You should be VERY afraid! Bob Keeler of Newsday writes:
And one should be clear here; it's not just in Iraq that American soldiers are dying; but loses are being incurred almost daily (and very, very COVERTLY) in other countries around the world as well: in Afghanistan, in Kuwait, in Thailand, in the Philippines, in Colombia, and in other places you've probably never even heard of or ever imagined we had troops in. As we suggested in our article, "Now Is The Time To Do Something; It May Be Too Late Tomorrow" (see "main article" above):
Colbert King of the Washington Post writes:
IT'S NOT SO MUCH THAT THE UNITED STATES NEEDS A BIGGER ARMY IN ORDER TO ENHANCE ITS ABILITY TO MAKE WAR; "BIGNESS" DOES NOT NECESSARILY EQUATE TO POWER IN TODAY'S WORLD. THE UNITED STATES ALREADY HAS THE MOST POWERFUL ARMY IN THE WORLD - AND POSSESSES MORE THAN ENOUGH STRENGTH TO CONQUER THE REST OF THE WORLD SEVERAL TIMES OVER. NO NATION - OR COMBINATION OF NATIONS - ON EARTH CAN CHALLENGE AMERICA ANY LONGER, and for people to think otherwise is to expose themselves as simpletons and na�s. NO! - THE PROBLEM DOES NOT LIE IN THE ARMY'S CAPACITY TO WAGE WAR AND CONQUER TERRITORY, IT LIES IN ITS ABILITY TO GUARD WHAT IT HAS ALREADY CONQUERED. Indeed, it is precisely as sentries standing guard over the oil wealth of Iraq (largely for the benefit of corporations like ExxonMobil and Halliburton) that most of our soldiers are being killed. It's for this boring but exceedingly dangerous job that the U.S. needs "grunts" - lots and lots of "grunts," and it needs them DESPERATELY, not only in Iraq, but elsewhere throughout its huge, unwieldy empire. This has led military recruiters to forsake sitting behind their desks at local recruitment stations around the country and AGGRESSIVELY enter high-school campuses, contracts in hand, to seek recruits, often without the knowledge of parents and high-school officials. Keeler reports that they come loudly emphasizing the best points of their "product" (job training) and mumbling inaudibly about its pitfalls (grisly, horrible deaths or mutilations). They'll say that the military offers money for college, but they won't emphasize that only a narrow band of enlistees ever gets the maximum college benefit. They'll offer assignments that teach skills useful in civilian life, but they won't give a lecture on Paragraph 9 (b) of the enlistment agreement, which makes clear that the military can change its mind at will; in fact, some former recruiters have told journalists that lying to enlistees is common. So predatory has the activity of the military recruiters become that many school officials - at the insistence of distraught and even panicked parents - have banned recruiters from their campuses. And most have done so not because they are left-wing pinkos as Rush Limbaugh and others like him imply, but because they are genuinely fearful of the predatory tactics these recruiters are using - tactics which do not allow parents to meaningfully participate in the formidable, life-changing decision these students are making. But to David Vitter, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, this kind of "anxiety" on the part of school officials and parents regarding the tactics the recruiters are using is "unpatriotic," and has led him to propose legislation (now passed) that denies federal money to any school that forbids army recruiters from coming onto school grounds. Not only that, the legislation COMPELS schools to give recruiters the addresses and phone numbers of ALL its students so that they may be pursued off campus as well. Now, one might fairly ask, Did Vitter propose this legislation because he fondly remembered his own military service? Hardly! Keeler writes:
No! - Vitter's legislation had nothing really to do with patriotism as such; or the "threat from lefties" or any other such made-up bugaboo, despite his protests to the contrary. What he was really doing was acting at the FRENZIED behest of American multinational corporations that rely heavily on the protection of the U.S. military in order to do business in the Third World - American multinationals that (surprise! surprise!) contribute heavily to his re-election campaigns. And whose kids are being targeted? - the kids of the ultra-rich? No! - it's YOUR kids that are being targeted. They're the ones that ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Bechtel want to sacrifice on the altar of corporate profits. And don't think - even for a minute - that they care very much about what ultimately happens to them. They don't! - they plan simply to use them up and throw them away just as they would discard or "trash" an obsolete machine in one of their factories. You think that's not true? Well, think again! It is said that the measure of a nation's true affection for those who have served it well is not necessarily gauged by patriotic speeches, military parades, or battle ribbons and medals, but by the way the men and women in uniform are treated after they have been released from active duty. If that's the case, than the Bush administration and the elites it serves do not have much REAL affection for those who are serving in the military at all, contrary to what most people (especially Christians) believe. Take, for example, what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield recently did to DISABLED veterans (think about that - DISABLED veterans): strip them of their disability pay by deducting that pay from their retirement benefits dollar for dollar. Rumsfield reckoned that by doing so he could save an estimated $58 billion over ten years - money that he and the elites he caters to feel could be better spent on future wars THAT CREATE MORE DISABLED VETERANS. All this to say nothing about the way the military has dodged its financial obligations to those veterans that suffer from "Gulf War Syndrome" and the ravages of depleted uranium. The fact is, adequate care for veterans subtracts from the money needed for new weapon systems and a bigger army. No! - they don't care about your children; the fact is, after all the folderol and hype are done and over with, and the medals have been passed out (and I had a lot of them pinned on my chest, including the bronze star), the welfare of your children really doesn't count that much in the boardrooms of Halliburton and Bechtel; again, they're just so much cannon fodder for the American Empire and the needs of the elites the Empire serves. And, SADLY, by the time you find that out, it will be too late. All you'll be left with is a gravestone or a son and daughter broken in body and in spirit - and all your tears and remorse insofar as your earlier enthusiasm for America's wars of conquest won't be able to rectify that. The Bible says:
Brothers and sisters in Christ, take it from an old veteran of the Vietnam conflict: there's NOTHING noble about war. The Bible says that -- despite all the high-sounding rhetoric about patriotism and "God" that emanates from the pulpits of Christian leaders like John Hagee and D. James Kennedy [both of whom never served a day in the military (during Vietnam they both cowered tremulously and fearfully behind "religious deferments")] -- wars result from our LUSTS; "Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not ..." AND MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT: THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THE AMERICAN NEW WORLD ORDER SYSTEM THAT YOUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS WILL BE FIGHTING FOR IS ALL ABOUT: THE LUST ON THE PART OF THE ELITES TO ACQUIRE "THINGS." And what brutal, rapacious wars (and resulting occupations) we have unleashed on the world! Take, for instance, what's happening in Colombia where - to hear the elite press talk about it - Americans are fighting to save the country from the drug trade. But the war there has very little or nothing to do with drugs (the fact is, the biggest drug traders in the country are and always have been members of the Colombian government) and everything to do with a peasant revolt against the takeover and impoverishment of the country by American multinationals. [Please see our article, "Colombia: America's New Vietnam - And Your Sons And Daughters Will Be The Ones To Fight It - All In The Name Of Christ."] And what a dirty little war this is: it's a Phoenix-type war fought using death squad methodologies developed during our war in Vietnam. The largest of these death squads is the United Self-Defense Group of Colombia (AUC) which works closely with the Colombian military and U.S. advisers - and there are a lot of them (i.e., U.S. advisers): for example, there are currently over 5,000 U.S. uniformed military personnel in Colombia, and probably another 10,000 U.S. "contract employees." You didn't know about this? - well, the government hasn't exactly been advertising this war to the American public. But you should know about it because it's one of those "little places" around the globe where your sons and daughters may find a grave - all for the sake of multinationals like Phillips Petroleum, Conoco, Swift and Company, etc. And just how brutal these death squads your sons and daughters may be "TEAMED-UP" with is made clear by the bloody tactics the AUC uses. For instance, in April 2001, paramilitaries (i.e., death squads) massacred almost a hundred people, some with CHAIN-SAWS, and displaced thousands more in a days-long operation along a river near the home of Gloria Mendez, a poor peasant woman who lives near the Pacific Coast of Colombia in the village of Santa Elena. Mendez knows perfectly well who was responsible, as does almost every other peasant in Colombia: the AUC SUPPORTED AND TRAINED BY THE U.S. MILITARY. She naively believes that if Americans, especially American Christians, knew what was really happening in Colombia, they would put a stop to it. As a result, she has traveled to the United States on many occasions speaking in churches. But the only churches that will hear her out on this matter are liberal churches. Conservative evangelical leaders won't allow her to speak in their churches; it would reveal their alliance with Bush's American New World Order System for what it really is: a partnership with a ravenous BEAST (nation) that is prowling the world seeking victims it can devour - a nation that the Bible says is "... DREADFUL and TERRIBLE, and STRONG EXCEEDINGLY with great iron teeth: that DEVOURS and BRAKES IN PIECES." (cf. Daniel 7:7 and Is. 28:18) [For a detailed Scriptural identification of this great "Latter Day" nation, please see our article, "In Search of Babylon" What Does the Bible Say?] And the truth as to the association the U.S. has with these death squads is there for anyone who wants to see it. There exists ENORMOUS amounts of documentation and eye-witness accounts of how these death squads - death squads that have been formed and trained at the U.S. Army's "School of the America's" at Fort Benning, Georgia - have forced their victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives, including children. Former CIA official John Stockwell - a highly decorated CIA officer who became sickened by what he was seeing "in the field" and quit (and there are quite a few like Stockwell) - commenting on the huge amount of evidence of direct American involvement in the use of torture throughout its system of client-states, writes:
Stockwell continues:
Is this the kind of thing you want your sons and daughters involved with? Leaving aside the devastating impact this kind of thing can have on one's psyche, your children will eventually be killed if they continue in it for too long. The burning hatred of people all over the earth for the soldiers of the American New World Order System is causing millions and millions of poor peasants and urban slum dwellers to pick up arms against them. Take what's happening in Bolivia where the American puppet government of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada is being besieged - even right now as you read this article - by thousands and thousands of demonstrators protesting the government's giveaway of the country's rich gas reserves to American multinationals. One demonstrator, who gave his name only as Valentin, called the gas export plan -
Sanchez de Lozada says demands for his resignation by the protesters are part of "a seditious plot" supported by drug lords and leftist guerrillas. That's par for the course. That's the EXACT same excuse the Colombian government uses to prosecute its war against its own people - all in the interests of the American multinationals. [Please see Part I of our article, "Today's Church: Making Zombies our of Christians." It describes what's been going on in Bolivia, specifically in Cochabamba, involving the Bechtel Corporation.] A U.S.-educated mining executive and multi-millionaire, Sanchez de Lozada is the American New World Order System's puppet in Bolivia, having been elected in a typical "rigged" election guaranteed to produce results in the interests of the American multinationals doing business in that poor, impoverished country. Lozada has implemented an aggressive "privatization" program that aims at the TOTAL confiscation of Bolivia's state-owned industries by American multinationals for pennies on the dollar. The poor of Bolivia are being robbed of their patrimony, and they know it. [Please see our article, "Inside the American New World Order System" for a detailed description of how "privatization" works - YOU WILL BE SHOCKED AND SHAMED.] As support for Sanchez de Lozada has ebbed - he is now supported only by the army and the Bolivian elites - the United States has issued a statement warning that -
Undemocratic means? - the chutzpah of it all; the crass brazenness; the vulgar audacity! - as if Lozada was anything more than a puppet of the United States installed in a shamelessly rigged election in the interest of corporations like the Bechtel Corporation. And exactly who is it that will be called into Bolivia to "restore order" if the Bolivian army fails to do so? - the soldiers of the American New World Order System. It's YOUR sons and YOUR daughters who will be ordered to fire on the sons and daughters of the Bolivian peasants. It's they that will be called upon to do the elites' bloody work - all for the sake of American multinationals bent on bleeding Bolivia's wealth for themselves. And finally, and even more than that, it is YOUR children that will be killed and mutilated in the guerrilla war that will inevitably follow, not for the sake of "Christ and the church," but for the sake of a beast nation that the Bible says is "... DREADFUL and TERRIBLE ... with great iron teeth: that DEVOURS and BRAKES IN PIECES." (cf. Daniel 7:7 and Is. 28:18) Brothers and sisters! Listen to me carefully here: You need to understand what's going on. Your life, and the lives of your sons and daughters are at stake. We URGE you to take action now - get out while there is still time. Read, and re-read our newest "main article," "Now Is The Time To Do Something; It May Be Too Late Tomorrow" - and think carefully about the "action corollaries" we propose at the end of the article. God bless you all! S.R. Shearer |
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