Despocracy USA 2006

[razors edge]

Run time: 09:59 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eGkx9cFALo   Posted on YouTube: December 08, 2006 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: July 14, 2007 By DU Member: razors edge Views on DU: 1143

 
I'm guessing this won't make it into the curriculum in American schools again, too bad for us.

[A HERETIC I AM]

1. Interesting that about 1:10 in, a short clip of people saying the Pledge of Allegiance is shown....

and they say the original version! "...To the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible,....etc"

This is obviously pre 1954. No "Under God" in there at all.

[razors edge]

2. You caught that too,

I was born in 64, so I'm beginning to think the the downfall of America started about a decade before I even got here.

[A HERETIC I AM]

3. Yeah. Kind of jumps out at you.

I was born in '59 so yup, you and i have similar experience. I remember watching all kinds of films like that one in Elementary school. Gotta fill those little minds up with the right info.

I remember how disappointed i was when i learned that Mt. Everest was not in the USA. After all, we are the greatest country on earth and we have the biggest and best of everything! Just goes to show you how perceptions are easily formed and guided by education/propaganda.

[razors edge]

5. That whole segment

on teachers really got me, I had flashbacks (only did the LSD twice, long ago with no lasting trauma) of all the crap I was taught and how some teachers were a mirror of the one shown.

We need to find a reasonable platform to teach our children, without the old stereotypes, about all the forms of government and their respective shortcomings.

I love this country and I want all to love it as I do, not for what the pols do, but what we deliver in freedom of views and discussion at every level, the rest will work itself out, as it always has, When rationality is the civil model that is practiced and blatant bullshit can be exposed and banished.

Sort of like what John Stuart did with Cross Fire.

[JHB]

12. Copyright MCMXLV, if I make out the blur right...

... so it's from 1945.

[DaveJ]

4. They really took freedom seriously back then...

Not like today, when everyone is discouraged from thinking. The whole video is outstanding, and I especially appreciated the end which encourages people to rate their communities on each scale. I'd say Chicago rates okay on most scales except for income distribution and power scales. That's still a big problem. I think we were in danger in the respect and useful skills scale until recently when the nation thankfully decided to move away from *...

[razors edge]

6. Critical thinking skills are dangerous

to those who would enslave us, or continue that enslavement.

To me, any person who respects the rights of others, yet is not free to say "NO" about any issue that requires them to support an agenda or have a gun put to them, is a slave.

That will not be a popular opinion here on DU, for many reasons, but it is true on a base level that many here will use to justify resisting unwanted intrusion of their rights, if it suits them.

If the Bush admin instituted a draft, however unlikely, the howls would shut down the board for a month.

The loss of rights for one conscripted to serve in uniform would somehow be more outrageous than requiring someone to work daily for a government who uses their tax dollars for nefarious purposes.

[thereismore]

7. Outstanding. nt

[libodem]

8. We sure seem to be moving toward despotism

in this country. Power in the hands of a few, higher taxes on the poor, and Faux news. How ironic we are using the battle cry of Democracy to occupy and rob a country of it's natural resources and main means of economic support.

[razors edge]

9. Yet I can't help but notice

the vids on the home page don't need a single reply to make the big time. Whats up with that?

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

10. Certainly drives home the point that...

...what we're dealing with is nothing new.

On the last statement in the clip: "As communities go, so goes the nation," I'm reminded of an interview Gore Vidal recently gave appearing in the Progressive. It's a good interview:

http://www.progressive.org/mag_intv0806

Here is the relevant part if you don't wish to read the whole interview:

Q: Talk about the role of the opposition party, the Democrats.

Vidal: It isn’t an opposition party. I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party—the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

Q: What can people do to energize democracy?

Vidal: The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn’t take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state
legislatures. That’s what Madison always said. I’d like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.

Q: Do you see any developments on the horizon that might suggest an alternative?

Vidal: Newton’s Third Law. I hope that law is still working. American laws don’t work, but at least the laws of physics might work. And the Third Law is: There is no action without reaction. There should be a great deal of reaction to the total incompetence of this Administration. It’s going to take two or three generations to recover what we had as of twenty years ago.

[Elspeth]

11. This is a great old tape. I wish I could have recommended it.

:kick: