When People Ask...

Why didn't the Germans do anything about Hitler in the early 1930s? Or how do people allow totalitarianism to take control over their lives? Or how do they not recognize hate when the see it right in front of them and do nothing about it?

I've been forwarded an email with the following text. It is long, but worth reading to try to understand a particular slice of an ideology who views us as "the enemy."

"Statement of Arab and Anti-Imperialist Organizations Regarding the Katrina Disaster."

Note: Please distribute widely. Although this statement was written up by a group of American, Arab, and Arab-American activists, it’s open to all groups who agree with its contents.

“A man-made disaster” is how the New York Times, the flagship of American imperialist and Zionist propaganda, described the catastrophe on the American Gulf Coast. Not even the mainstream US media try to deny the fact that neglect of the New Orleans levees and the gutting of funding for preparedness for such repeatedly predicted disasters were the result of the US government’s systematic plunder of the country’s resources for the purpose of its wars around the world, spearheaded by the Zionist Neo-Conservative clique at the helm in Washington.

The legacy of cuts in social spending, the subversion of the Social Security system, the tax bonanzas for the wealthy are only one side of the US imperial picture – the other side being the so-called “war on terror” – the war of American terror that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and is aimed at seizing uncontested control of the entire globe.

For days following the arrival of Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005, hundreds of thousands of poor families, especially Afro-Americans and other minority groups, in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were left to die of hunger and lack of medical attention as the US administration continued in its mode of social indifference at home, coupled with military offensive abroad.

Lashed by a hurricane, then flooded out of their homes and abandoned with no food, drinking water, shelter, or medical attention, the people of the American Gulf Coast died, probably by the thousands – victims of the imperial war machine just as surely as if they had been bombed in al-Fallujah or rocketed in Gaza.

Shocked and amazed at the indifference of the American administration to the plight of victims in its own country, leaders around the world stepped forward to offer help. Even presidents of countries targeted by the regime in Washington for destabilization and assassination, Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, offered to send in doctors, medicine, oil and supplies for the victims of US government indifference while Bush offered little more than suggestions that private charities fill the breach left by the imperial war deficit.

Shamed before the entire world, the Bush administration then reversed course and within a couple of days smoothly evacuated half a million people – whom it was earlier prepared to leave to drown like some rats in a sewer.

But even if the Bush administration has for the moment removed itself from the hot spotlight of international condemnation, the economy of the US has been dealt a blow that will put before the United States a critical choice – to continue its campaign of world conquest or to tend to the deteriorating social and economic conditions at home, where the most dynamic region of the country is now burdened with the same refugees and ruin that US imperialism has been rampantly inflicting on the rest of the world for decades.

At this critical time, all possible pressure must be brought to bear on the US imperial and Zionist leadership. As Americans demand explanations and investigations into why thousands perished needlessly on their Gulf Coast, the reality that imperialist war is waged at the expense of the masses – both at home and abroad – can only become clearer.

Popular demands for immediate relief for the hundreds of thousands of victims of the storm and for the millions of casualties of the impending economic recession must be widened to include a demand for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq, for cutting off aid to ‘Israel’, and for an end of the mad drive for global control that operates under the signboard of a “war on terror.”

The winds of Katrina have swept away the camouflage hiding the fact that the young men and women of America’s working classes who put on American uniforms serve only the narrow interests of a greedy elite. It is a matter of supreme indifference to that elite whether the working people and their families drown at home or blow up in the deserts of Iraq or Afghanistan so long as the economic and geo-strategic interests of imperialism and Zionism are advanced.

No more! The imperialist and neo-Conservative Zionist elite in Washington must be driven into a corner by the united power of all their victims.

Using all the appropriate means at our disposal – from the guns and rockets of the Iraqi Resistance fighters, to the protests and strikes of displaced and exploited American workers – we must join hands to form a world-wide front.

Together, in every theater of the struggle, we must escalate our common fight for an end to the global imperial adventure and its world of man-made disasters!

The Editorial Board of the Free Arab Voice (FAV)

North American Committee Against Zionism and Imperialism (NACAZAI)

In case you can't see it, there is a hidden glee within this email that the diaster occurred...and you ask how totalitarianism takes hold, how it happens, it happens when enough people stand by and read something like this and say, "I think they have a point."