Appeasing America

Appeasement is one of those dirty words we learned from World War II history. Often it is used to denote cowardice, as in the cowardice of 1930's Europe in refusing to confront the expansionist campaign of Hitler and his Nazi Party as they began swallowing up countries left and right. The appeasement of Nazi Germany came to an end when the government of Great Britain decided to draw a line in the proverbial sand by announcing that they would fight to defend Poland. The rest is, well, history.

Today a similar obligation now falls upon the world as the United States pushes forward to attack, possibly invade, the country of Iran. And while folks like Dick Cheney and Norman Podhoretz confuse the issue talking of Iran's President as a Middle Eastern Hitler, it falls upon the international community to ask whether it is time to stop appeasing the United States?

Martin Luther King once described the United States as "a society gone mad with war". Today that seems prophetic under the leadership of the current American Administration. Since 2001, the United States has invaded two countries and deposed their governments, and it has engineered two coup d'etats, one against the elected government of Venezuela and another against Haiti. All the while the world governments have stood aside and allowed these actions and their accompanying crimes against humanity, to happen with little opposition.

There should be no question that if the United States is allowed to attack Iran, there will be others who will be attacked subsequently. Syria and Cuba immediate spring to mind. At some point someone must draw a new line in the sand and proclaim these actions to be criminal. Self-determination and human freedom cannot be allowed to be dictated by Washington, D.C., for their interests are not those of a peace loving nature. The Bush Administration is a leviathan that seeks to impose itself as the sole absolute sovereign over the earth, and is quickly moving to that end.

Despite the rhetoric from the Administration, there is no evidence of Iranian wrongdoing, there is no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in development, there is only the willful and continuous deception of the American people; who for all their strengths easily fall frail under fear. Fear as a manipulation, fear as a tool of government, fear as a resource of war. The people of America are stuck in this muck without any respite thanks to a press and media which refuses to discuss and denounce these actions by the government and have instead become mouthpieces for official policy.

The question then lies with the international community; who will draw the line in the sand and be the first to stop the appeasement of America's belligerent policies? Make no mistake about it, history will judge this generation on this question just as harshly as it has judged Europe in the years prior to World War II.