Friday, July 02, 2004

It's a beginning

Ted Rall often strikes me as a bit of a left-wing nutcase, but I can appreciate the feeling behind his latest screed
We are at war, but the terrorists aren't foreigners. We are fighting for our nation's soul. The right-wing Republicans who control the government and the media have no intention of sharing their power. Thus they present themselves and their ideas--that we should spend our national treasury on invading oil-producing nations but not on national healthcare, that it's acceptable to throw people into concentration camps--as the living embodiment of what it means to be American. Meanwhile the neofascist bullies slime everybody else--the majority--as 'anti-American.' The United States is living under ideological apartheid. There are a many more of us than there are corporatist neofascists, but as any prison inmate can attest, numerical superiority does not assure victory. Excluded from access to mainstream politics and media, measured and even-toned opponents are ignored and marginalized. The current situation calls for radical, loud, even ugly, tactics. Nelson Mandela, fighting the racist white minority government of South Africa, resorted to building bombs to loosen the grip of apartheid. Here in America, one unfair, dissembling movie by a liberal loudmouth like Michael Moore, no matter how successful, could never be powerful enough to counter the millions of conservative lies disseminated by thousands of talk radio stations and newspapers every minute of every day of every year. But it's a beginning.

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