Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China is being held prisoner as a traitor and a war criminal in the People’s Republic of China. While in detention, he encounters a peasant one day who recognizes him. Instead of assailing the Emperor, which would have been the natural reaction of an oppressed subject to the encounter with the parasitic dictator-turned-Japanese- collaborator, the peasant kneels down to tie the Emperor’s shoes.

How many times have we seen this scene repeated in American politics? Didn’t we vote for Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats to deliver our antiwar message to Congress only to be stabbed in the back by them? And what about when we told Congressman John Conyers and others that the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney should be on the table? Do we have any idea why, despite our protests and manifestations, both the Democrats and Republicans plan to continue squandering our much needed tax dollars by dragging on the Iraq War and perhaps even expanding it to Iran, Syria, or Lebanon? Why don’t we, the informed citizens hold our “representatives” accountable for their actions?

Would this be the residue of a culture of slavery which continues to linger on in America? After all, of the tens of thousands of southerners who fought with the Confederate army and gave their lives to preserve slavery, only a small handful was actual slave-owners. The majority were poor, ordinary citizens conscripted or brainwashed to consider it an honor and a duty to fight for and sustain the southern plantation way of life.

I think, however, the problem goes beyond that. The tragedy of many American liberals and some in the left, in my opinion, is their persistent denial of the existence of classes in the society and the role of class war which continues to dominate and shape the American politics as in any other society.

A natural outcome of such a denial is that the crimes and acts of hostility of the owning classes towards the people are then often taken as “misinformed”, “misguided”, or “mistaken”. That’s when you hear silly comments such as: “I can’t understand why despite our economic woes, President Bush insists on tax breaks for the rich” or “I am so shocked to find out that Nancy Pelosi had been aware of the practice of torture against Guantanamo detainees.”

“We just don’t understand why Democrats don’t stop the government’s spying on US citizens”, and a million dead Iraqis later, Bush is still not a mass murderer who is acting on behalf of America’s corporate interests but a confused and incompetent president who “mistakenly” believes that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and of course, Adolf Hitler was just some mad man …

Today, America is left with an economy in shambles. The neoconservatives (who by the way, did not just fall from the sky) have greatly eroded our personal liberties and made a mockery of the Constitution and the concept of separation of the branches of the government. Our educational infrastructure is in dire condition. The country’s healthcare system is near collapse and quite unaffordable to millions of Americans. Thanks to the neoconservatives, America is now viewed and hated as a symbol of torture, arrogance, and thievery around the world, and on and on, and yet there are those in our progressive midst who naively believe that Hillary or Obama are going to bring about significant changes. Imagine President Obama or Clinton carrying on the legacy of the Bush signing statements or initiating the bombing of Iran to appease Israel.

Can a system that does not even allow a presidential candidate to say that the people are “frustrated and bitter”, which is quite an understatement, in any way reflect the aspirations of the majority of the American people?

Don’t get me wrong. I myself have often voted for many of these Democrats, in hopes of creating some breathing space for the common people and as a tactic for bringing about divisions among the owning classes, and I do believe that there are genuine differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, but looking at the picture from the perspective of “us versus them”, I view the Democrats, just like the Republicans, as true representatives of the corporate and the owning minority and therefore not friends of the American people. They might utilize different methods than the Republicans, but when it comes down to class interests, they sell us out without hesitation as they always have in the past. To paraphrase this, in a good cop, bad cop performance, the Democrats have generally played the role of the good COP.

How meager are our aspirations for the future of our country! Would we be content with someone who can perhaps close down one or two of the many torture chambers for which the US is now infamous, bring back a portion of our troops from Iraq, or maybe sink us even deeper in the Middle East, and continue snooping through our phone calls and email messages while increasing the dictatorial powers of the government in the name of “war on terror” and “national security”?

Today’s world is facing some unprecedented and life-threatening challenges: the crisis with fossil fuels, the global warming disaster, the resulting poverty, disease epidemics, and the imminent decline of an empire. The Republican and Democratic response to these challenges is international belligerence theorized under the so-called “War on Terror” and tightening the screws inside the United States: increased spying activities against US citizens, eroding personal liberties, internment camps, and drastic cuts in public spending. Needless to say, such policies can only increase the gap between the rich and the poor, augment social tensions, and bring about further worldwide insecurity. The only ones benefiting from such policies are a handful of corporations that control the media and other pillars of power, the likes of Halliburtons, KBR, Blackwater . . . . The people in their millions, on the other hand, will be condemned to a life of increasing austerity and misery.

When the citizens of France sent Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793, theirs was not an act of savagery but one of culture and resistance, for you either witness the majority of the masses at the bottom get crushed while the society sinks into a culture of corruption and despair, or you help crush the few at the top and hand power to the people. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the French were able to rise up to the occasion.

More than two centuries later, here in America, the people are in the grips of yet another despot, much more brutal, corrupt, and destructive than King Louis XVI: American corporatism. This one is bent on destroying, not only America but the environment and the world with it. Just like King Louis, the corporate rule has to be dealt with to save the humanity.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in November 1787. Six years later, the rising masses in France took up similar slogans when they rebelled against the tyranny of the King.

This is by no means an invitation to violence of any kind, for I am a man of peace, but it is the people’s inalienable right to decide the type of society they would like to live in, its economic infrastructure, and the culture and democratic institutions that go with it. I realize this is easier said than done, especially since the “when” and the “how” is not so clear and still needs to be worked out, but as long as our focus is the farcical electoral process, we will never be able to strategize any meaningful and far-reaching changes.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with going to the polls and voting for your favorite candidate – the one that you think can do the least amount of harm, but as Noam Chomsky put it in one of his interviews, “the election is a marginal affair, it should not distract us from the serious work of changing the society and the culture and the institutions, creating a democratic culture.”

Unfortunately, America has sustained enormous damage during the years of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations. With the merger of corporatism and the government, we are well on our way down the slippery slope of dictatorship and fascism, American-style, as much as many of us hate to admit. It is only in this light that the actions of the US intelligence agencies in spying on Americans, the suspension of personal liberties, and the establishment of internment camps (under the pretense of apprehending “illegal aliens”) can be viewed and understood. We should not accept such a dismal future for our children. We cannot swallow the big lie and remain silent. With every passing day we are losing our ability to reverse the mishap more and more.

The movie is certainly based on a true story, but there is very little reality that has not been distorted in the scenario presented, perhaps other than the true face of corruption in the US Congress and its politicians.

For starters, the film depicts Pakistan’s former dictator General Zia Al-Haq, who murdered the country’s president, Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfaqar Ali Bhutto, as an anti-Communist hero dedicated to helping the poor peasants of Afghanistan. This would be stretching the facts quite a bit. In reality, the General was an American-trained dictator whose acts of brutality did not spare even his own fellow countrymen. To Zia, the Afghans were nothing but a tool in his jihad against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan.

The hero of the movie, Congressman Charles Wilson, as another example of distortions, is shown to be deeply affected by his first visit to an Afghan refugee camp inside Pakistan. In the scene, the sight of mutilated bodies of the victims of the war with the Soviets almost brings tears to Wilson’s eyes. This is such a hypocritical scene as there is no mention, that Mr. Wilson himself (and many other US politicians, for that matter) were responsible for torture, mutilation, and murder of thousands of women and children in other trouble spots in the world, such as Nicaragua (at the hands of the US-funded and trained Contra terrorists), Angola (at the hands of UNITA assassins funded by the CIA and the Apartheid regime of South Africa), El Salvador (at the hands of US-sponsored death squads who wouldn’t even spare Jesuit priests and nuns), Guatemala, etc.

There is no mention in the movie that the same Afghan Mujahedeen forces that were armed against the Soviets by the CIA and called “freedom-fighters” and likened to America’s forefathers by Ronald Reagan, later organized into so-called terrorist groups of the Taliban, the Northern Alliance warlords (who are part of the present Afghan government), and other militias. I think the movie consciously attempts to hide that connection. When the very same movie depicts US politicians who do not seem to know the difference between Pakistan and Afghanistan, do you think ordinary viewers will be able to put two and two together? I rather doubt that.

Take a closer look. The costumes of the Afghans in the camp have been designed to make them look slightly different than the “terrorist” Taliban; I think purposely so. Some scenes show a few men with shaved faces. Proper and devout Moslem men do not usually shave their faces that closely, and none of the women in the camp seem to be wearing the traditional face-covering burqa which is quite common in Afghanistan. Is that so we would not be reminded of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda while watching scenes of our victory against the Soviets?

You can even notice the difference in looks and features if you compare the staged camp scenes with the actual news clips in the same movie.

There is no mention of the Afghan Arabs or the madrasas (religious schools) in the film. The truth is that the war against the Soviets was conducted with the financial backing of the Saudi royal family and Saudi jihadists, such as Osama bin Ladin and his followers who are not recalled in the movie at all. The madrasas (or religious schools) were setup to mobilize the villagers and provide ideological justification for the anti-Soviet crusade.

This war was made possible with the full participation of the Pakistani Intelligence Services (ISI) that provided logistics and training to the Afghans who, by the way, in contrast to the film’s distortions, were not ordinary peasants but warlords and feudals who conscripted villagers and peasants in the interest of the United States and their own fundamentalist jihadist goals.

In contrast to the feel-good theme of this fairy tale, the reality on the ground is that America is sinking deeper and deeper in Afghanistan and Iraq today. The Afghan and Iraqi resistance are only fighting to drive out the occupation. They are not the ones that are bleeding the country to death. The real enemy of America resides in the White House and walks the halls of the US Congress. Most probably, the next president of the United States, a Democrat or a Republican will continue the bloodletting and avoid making waves. Instead of indulging in the pleasures of Charles Wilson’s triumphs, we need to have our voices heard.