The Insurgency
for release 09-20-05
Washington D.C.
Have you ever asked yourself what you would do if there were thousands of Iraqi troops garrisoned in our country? Suppose they managed to seize Washington D.C. and topple the government because the National Guard was up to its ears in sewage in New Orleans, and what if the Iraqis erected a povisional (read puppet) government and set about to train a gurkha police force of turncoat Americans to pacify and subdue the rest of the population while Iraqi companies got the contracts for destroying our WMD's and exploiting our resources?
You would probably do the same thing I would do--join the Resistance. We would take to the hills and meadows and regroup to fight the invaders even if we had to harass them to death with small arms fire and improvised explosives.
That's exactly what many Iraqis have done, joined the Resistance, which our government still lovingly refers to as The Insurgency. I don't know what's so hard to understand about this. If your country is invaded and your land and your culture and your resources are usurped, you fight to regain what you feel is yours.
Recent history is replete with examples of this. During WWII, when the Nazis were occupying much of Europe, there were resistance organizations in every occupied country. People don't like to have their lands occupied by foreign armies. Call it human nature. The struggle in Northern Ireland, Vietnam, the Palestinian situation all come to mind. You could even classify Tiawan as a State of Resistance. Even the Taliban began as a resistance movement against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. We called them Freedom Fighters then. People will fight, and fight for generations if necessary, to regain what they view as their birthright.
In our own country, The Sons of Liberty was a resistance group. They thought of themselves as patriots fighting for the land they were born upon but I'm sure that the British called them insurgents. And the Underground Railroad were resistance fighters but I'm sure that the slave staters saw them as foreign terrorists or mad, religion-crazed abolitionists bent on destroying the Southern Way of Life because, "they hate our mint juleps."
America begins to look more like the British Empire than The Land of the Free and Brave. In the seventeen hundreds the sun never set on the British Empire. And that was their problem. They were stretched too thin. You know, like you get when you are trying to fight three wars and also battle a natural disaster? So, they contracted the management of India to a private company, The British East India Company. For the next century and a half or so, this company was the virtual government of India. It took that long for the native 'insurgency' to prevail and for India to claim its independence.
Imperial Bushco is going in the same direction as the British Empire. Halliburton and Bechtel and Lockheed are the new British East India Company. The colonization of Iraq is being run much like the British colonization of India. First you invade with overwhelming military technology, then you train a local gestapo commanded by company officers to maintain order and keep the population at bay while you rape the local resources. Classic Imperial Colonialism.
The Poet's Eye sees that the sun has set on the British Empire like it will on every empire. Imperial megalomania will always consume itself. The boys at BushCo think that the pump will never go dry. One of the definitions of hubris is the presumption that you can talk to God.
Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Tho' I've belted you an' flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
----Rudyard Kipling
