Descending Into Madness

Michael Rozeff writes:

Over the decades, I have watched the U.S. government descend further and further into stupidity. It has now gone into madness. The U.S. is power mad. It insists on throwing its weight around. Part of this is no doubt due to factors like the Jewish vote in critical U.S. states and the irrational thinking of certain evangelical elements in America and on Capitol Hill. Part is due to a grossly exaggerated idea of national security. Another important part is an attempt to remake the world because of a belief, which is mistaken, that the U.S.  has the power and capabilities to do this; and even more fundamentally because of a belief that the U.S. is RIGHT in doing this, or that it has some kind of "holy" obligation or duty to alter other societies and bring them some sort of unique "light" that Americans possess. The rhetoric used against Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and now Assad follows this pattern. The idea is that these are bad guys and the good guys have a right to bring them down. Then too Americans have for a long time had the belief that they are superior and needed to "clean up" trouble spots and rescue, for example, the good Europeans from the bad Europeans, as in the two world wars.

The contradictions between these rationales and the U.S. causing and supporting wars that wreck countries, kill their inhabitants, cause religious killings and refugees, and bring down governments are evident.

All the U.S. wars, whether on poverty, drugs, ill-health, or terror, are evidence of power madness. The basic idea is always the same. "We" know what is right and we are going pro-actively to MAKE things right using force. This is what is both stupid and mad. It's stupid because it doesn't work. The world doesn't work that way. It's madness because it disregards the reality of how we progress and refuses to acknowledge that the pro-active attempts to make things right using force produce the opposite results. The Prohibition era results taught the U.S. government nothing. Its failures in Haiti, Iran, and Vietnam taught it nothing.

Read the entire commentary here.