CONNECT: In New Hampshire, vehicle number plates carry the motto "Live Free or Die". Had Spartacus or another slave leader uttered such words, they would mean something, writes Eddie Holt
Attached to thousands of cars and juggernauts, the sentiment collapses into cliché. In fact, if the motto were taken seriously, New Hampshire would now be a boom state for undertakers.
Americans, despite the shrill "freedom" rhetoric of Washington and its cheerleaders, do not now live "free" lives. Sure, like everybody else, their "freedom" was always relative, but they are conspicuously unfree now. Lumbered with a ruler most voters didn't want, the US appears, despite its wealth and technology, deplorably impoverished in an age of plenty.
American minds are under intense attack. It is probably true that Europeans, ourselves included, have underestimated the depth of the trauma to Americans caused by the mass murder of September 11th, 2001. It is undeniably true, however, that the depth of propaganda to which Americans are now subjected must not be underestimated. It is poisoning the world.
Even allowing for the expected rise in sentiments justifying "military action" against Iraq, the figures emanating from the US are alarming and depressing. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, 42 per cent of the American public believes Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
An ABC News poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaeda. There is, of course, fear, a muddled desire for revenge and much wishful thinking swelling such figures. Nonetheless, the verbal poison of so much US government and media propaganda is killing not only Iraqis. It is killing America too.
It's true, of course, that everybody is propagandised during war. There are degrees, however, and the potency of contemporary US propaganda is at least as shocking and awesome as its killing technology. There is much we don't and can't know about the attack on Iraq. There is also much we do know. We know that no link between Saddam Hussein and September 11th has been established. We know that, if it were, the attack on Iraq would be much more easily justified by George Bush and his hawks. We know that they repeatedly infer such a link.
Listen, if you can bear it, to Bush's speeches - time after time he links, through syntax, the charged words "terrorism" and "Iraq". That's to be expected from a warmongering president. He's not the only politician who does that. But the appalling poll figures mentioned above could not possibly be achieved without the complicity of powerful elements of the media.
In a fair world, some of the liars masquerading as journalists would eventually be tried as accomplices to war crimes. They could, of course, plead that they were so propagandised to begin with that they were unable to distinguish between normal patriotic bias and gleeful mendacity. A benign view of their deeds could conceivably accept such a defence. Were it to do so, however, the entire information apparatus of their "free" society would be indicted.
It was a feature of Nazi propaganda that it was spectacularly influential within Germany and its coalition of the willing. Abroad, it was generally seen as so hysterical and ridiculous that it was mercilessly mocked and parodied. It was, simply, unbelievable. The hallucinatory levels achieved by current US propaganda are no different.
There is, to be fair, a distinction to be maintained between Adolf Hitler and George Bush. You might argue that linking them in the same sentence with a simple conjunction apes the syntactical device of linking "terrorism" and "Iraq". It does, and perhaps no disavowals can change that. Bush is not Hitler, but he and his project display nascent and alarming similarities.
The bid for world domination through military means; the pernicious propaganda which is isolating the US and its lapdogs from world opinion; the changing or sidestepping of inconvenient laws - all of these measures should make us wary. Even so, ordinary Americans are the most crucial constituency in the world now.
They can effect a regime change in Washington. They are so heavily propagandised, however - their minds carpet-bombed by the regime and its media B-52s of Fox News, CNN, Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Rupert Murdoch tabloids - that there can be no guarantee they will remove Bush and his risible hawks.
If ordinary Americans choose not to or cannot stop endless war, the options for doing so become nightmarish. What happens if the leaders and public of other nuclear powers decide they've had enough of the US cowboys and their British sidekicks? If other powerful countries decide that they too want to live free or die without a new global imperium, they could offer an ultimatum to that effect.
Just because the Cold War ended, the possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction didn't go away, you know. If Bush attacks another state after Iraq and gets re-elected, the MAD doctrine could be taken out of Cold War storage. Will people, as some are indicating already, be bored with the "war" then?