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The original title for this piece was going to be “No one wants to fight for Israel!” Veterans for Peace member and Green Party candidate for US Senate from North Carolina Brian McGinnis shouted, “No one wants to fight for Israel!” as he was violently dragged away from a recent Capitol Hill hearing, his arm severely broken in the process.
I find the video of Brian’s protest very hard to watch, wincing when I witness how cruelly injured he was for standing up for his rights of free speech. But his words and the images of the protest have been incorporated into an heavy metal song video. It’s really good and gets his message across beautifully. Click on the link to watch it and see what I mean:
I considered using Brian’s quote as a title, but I figured the blog would be shadow-banned even more than usual if I did. A day or so later, I had another idea for a title when the following meme popped up on my feed on UpScrolled.
We
the unwilling
Led
by the unqualified
To
kill the unfortunate
Die
for the ungrateful
Talk about poetry in motion!
“To die for the ungrateful” echos Brian’s fervent cry of “No one wants to fight for Israel!” Because war is hell—particularly when it’s a completely avoidable conflict that serves no one’s interests except the capitalist-elite class. You can call them the “Epstein class” if you prefer, but I hope you realize those files don’t contain an extensive list of all capitalists who have caused much suffering in the world. And, surprisingly, pedophilia is not a qualification to become a capitalist or member of the ruling elite.
I imagine even now that “We the Unwilling” (that is, US troops) are composing their poems as they’re being forced into a ground war against Iran on the behest of the apartheid regime of Israel with the assistance of the wealthy investors of the military-industrial complex (MIC) and Big Oil. To paraphrase Brian’s memorable quote, “Nobody wants to die for a bunch of rich Zionist assholes to make them even richer!”
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Bill,
a.k.a. “Bill S. Preston,
Esquire”,
shuffles
into a
suburban
garage music studio where his friend, Ted “Theodore” Logan, is
busily grinding his ax. That
is, he’s
playing
anelectric
guitar,
loudly and poorly.
TED:
(Puts down his guitar.) Dude! What did Rufus say?
BILL:
(He throws his backpack to the side and sits behind the Wyld
Stallyns
drum kit and hits a few beats in frustration.)You’ll never guess
this, dude, but Rufus says he needs us to time travel back to the
dark ages.
TED:
You mean to the time where the princesses came from?
BILL:
No, Ted, even further back. He wants us to go back in
history to
1961 and
borrow President Eisenhower and
help him writea moreexcellent
farewell speech before
he leaves the White House.
TED:
Whoa...1961?
That
is
dark! But Bill, Rufus
knows
we can’t spell,
so that’s not going to happen.
BILL:
I
told him, but Rufus
says
we gotta do it to save humanity or something like that. He
gave us a
copy of the
speech he wants Ike to give.
TED:
Awesome!
(Frowning.)
So, who’s like “Ike”?
BILL:
Ike’s the president’s nickname, like yours is “Theodore.”
TED: (Shaking his mop head.) I like Ike!
BILL: I do too. Well, it’s a
bodacious
speech that could stop
a lot of egregious stuff and
do a lot of good according
to Rufus,
so
I told him we’d
do it.
TED:
No way!
BILL:
Yes way!
TED:
What’s this speech supposed to be about?
BILL:
It’s about how we shouldn’t trust the military-industrial
complication
something
or other. All they want to do is start wars so they can sell more
bombs and guns and stuff and make lots of money by killing people.
TED:
Whoa.
That’s
totally bogus, dude.
Killing people should not be
makinganyone
rich.
BILL:
Right you are, dude.
(He hits a few beats on the skins
and then hits
on
the cymbals.) That’s why I told Rufus we’d agreed to do it.
TED:
(Shakes
his head repeatedly.) Okay.
So we travel back and give Ike the speech he needs to give in 1961
and everything
will be totally gnarly,
right?
BILL:
Correctomundo. (He puts down the drumsticks.) We just gotta be extra
careful not to forget to tell Ike to not forget the last couple of
paragraphs that Rufus told me to tell him. They’re real important.
TED:
What are these so-called “paragraphs,” dude?
BILL:
Rufus said that we should
tell Ike to tell the
folks
not to trust the government when it lies to them about why the wars
are starting all the time. Ike has to say, “I’m
lying because
I’m the government, and I’m caught up in all the
military-industrial complications that
make a
lot of money
for
rich dudes.
Don’t
believe me.”
TED:
Dude, that doesn’t make any sense. Aren’t we suppose to like Ike
and believe him because
he’s the president?
He wouldn’t be lying to us, right? He
wouldn’t want us all to be
heinous
and
go aroundkilling
people for money.
BILL:
(Scratching his chin in thought.) You
make
a good point there, Ted.
I was a bit confused with what Rufus said about the
censorship-industrial complications and how the government would make up stuff
just to keep folks from shutting down the wars and killings and all.Let’s
skip that confusing part about the government lying. I don’t have
enough room in my backpack for all the papers Rufus gave me anyway.
TED:
Excellent, dude! Should we get going now so we can get home in
time to
rehearse with the princesses when they get home from their jobs
later?
BILL:
Right you are, Ted! We don’t want to keep our most bodacious babes
waiting a second longer than absolutely necessary.
(Bill picks up his backpack. The
duo exit the garage and head toward a beat up phone booth sitting
askew on the driveway.)
TED:
Wyld Stallyns will be burning up
the airwaves before too long once we get 1961 all straightened out.
Won’t we, Bill?
BILL:
(Gesturing
widely.) Dude,
we’ll make an explosion of sound that will wipe out all this
“Don’t
trust the president and the government lies” heinous
stuff in
the speech about making money and
killing people in starting
wars.
TED:
(Shaking his head energetically.) Rufus will be so proud of us this
time.
(The
two look at each other and smile as they play a riff on their air
guitars.)
BILL
and TED: Excellent!
Party
on, dude!
END
To see where Bill and Ted went wrong in their mission to save humanity, check out President Eisenhower’s actual speech above.
Americans are indoctrinated from childhood to believe that authority figures would never lie to us and only have our best interests in mind. To be told that the public needs to be warned against trusting everything they’re told by government officials and spokespersons goes against our earliest training. Throw in a scary scenario like 9/11 and you'll get the Patriot Act before you know it.
If
anyone had told Eisenhower
back then what we now know
about how US government disinformation agencies work to keep the public in the
dark about the machinations ofbillionaire
capitalists in the 21st century, I doubt
Ike
would have believed it. I know it’s hard for me to believe even with that excellent graphic in the Report on Censorship-Industrial Complex article and reading all about the Homeland Security's new "Political Police" program to teach us all how to snitch on our neighbors.The
sheer lack of ethics evident in these Behind The Curtainstyled
machinations
is mind-boggling.
George Orwell's 1984 couldn't have put it any better!
Consider where we’d be today if Americans had learned in 1961 not to trust every government narrative on world events. Would we have continued warring in Vietnam as long as we did if we had known the truth of what was really happening there? Knowing the US military-industrial complex's self-serving goals, would Americans have considered going along with invading Grenada, Iraq, or Afghanistan? Would we have sponsored the Maidan Coup of 2014 that kicked out a democratically elected president and set up the current money-laundering/people-killing operation in Ukraine? Would Americans have agreed to harsh economic sanctions in places such as Yemen, Iran, Cuba, Syria and elsewhere that have starved and killed more people worldwide than our outright military interventions have?
Time travel as a sub-genre in science fiction has always intrigued me. The temptation to go back in time and “fix things” or to journey into the future and see if we’ll even still be here, alive and well on planet Earth, is so tempting. Until we’ve perfected time travel, however, we’re stuck living a linear existence.
We can’t take back what we’ve said or done to provoke a war. But we can do the ethical and compassionate thing and sit down at the negotiations table and discuss peace terms. We can halt the current wars and prevent any future conflicts from ever starting. We can cooperate and work together with our neighbors on this globe to gain and maintain harmony.
If
only Americans weren’t quite as “brilliant” as Bill and Ted! If
only we used our critical thinking skills instead of blindly
swallowing whatever false narrative those in authority want us to
swallow. We’d be living in a peaceful world now, today, and not
vainly wishing for a
chance
to go back in history to
do it over again in
order to garner better results.
Armageddon
need never come then—just excellent adventures of the most awesome
and bodacious variety. It’s time we put down our air guitars and
journey forth from our garage studios and spread truths to counter
the lies. Right, dudes?
No matter how paranoid or conspiracy minded you are, what the
government is actually doing is worse than you can imagine. ~William
Blum
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