What? The Land of the Free? Whoever told you that was your enemy!

Since George Bush made his evil second inaugural speech last week, everyone columnist who lives in the reality-based universe has been shaking their fist at it (See Here).

Although I can sense a great deal of anger at his hypocrisy, sanctimony and righteousness, I've yet to come across a piece that can express the bile I feel towards this monster who's undoubtedly the worst thing to happen to the human race since Hitler.

The conventional view on the two figures is that the guy with the moustache was an evil genius while the one who inherited the presidency is a bit of a buffoon, but George Bush, or whoever it was that wrote his speech, knows one thing that slipped Adolf One-Ball by, and that's that if you're trying to take over the world, the very, very last thing you do is tell people this, which the Nazis did in extremely unsubtle ways.

By doing this the Nazis only won a few allies, mostly among countries that had little choice but to support them until they lost the war, like the perverted old Italian man in Catch-22. In contrast, if you tell people that you're on a mission to spread freedom, some leaders of other countries might be gullible enough to believe you.

This is why George Bush mentioned the words "Freedom" and "liberty" so many times in his speech, without ever mentioning any specifics. It's hard for anyone to disagree with the notion that freedom is, generally speaking, a good thing, but it's sickening for anyone who's aware of what an opressive country the United States is in many ways to hear it's leader telling the world he's on a divine mission from God to spread freedom around the world.

According to Dubya, all Americans eventually hear the call of freedom in their soul. This is a good thing for many of them, as the soul is about the only part of their being in which they can enjoy freedom.

Lots of Americans are in jail. Some of them are on death row, many of them in increasingly brutal, privitised boot camps. In fact, at any given time, one out of every 100 Americans is in jail at any given time. For Ireland, the corresponing figure is one out of every thousand. One of the archly ironic things is that it's one of the few unique freedoms that America enjoys, that right to bear arms, that causes crime to be so high. What's even more ironic is that many of those in jail are in there for things that aren't a criminal offence in many European countries, like smoking marajauna. Even more bitterly ironic is that in many states, anyone who's ever been to jail can never vote, a key factor in Dubya's first election win. Many of them are never allowed to leave the state in which they were incarcerated. Of course, you're far more likely to be put in jail if you're a part of an ethnic minority, which is why so people listening to Dubya quoting Lincoln to the effect that those who deny freedom to others do not deserve it for themselves will have been so sickened.

Americans love to boast that there's complete freedom of speech in their country, but this right, allegedly protected by the first amendment, is being increasingly eroded by legislation like the Patriot Act and increasing consolodation of the media. Astonishingly, in the so-called land of the free people have been arrested and put into jail on the mere suspicion that they might be terrorists, and people have been barred from boarding a plane for carrying left-wing books. I hope these people were able to smile when Bush claimed that when the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In any case, whatever freedoms they do have in this regard are more honoured in the breech than in the observance, as a survey shows that most Americans would rather get their news from TV than from independent media.

I normally put up hyperlinks just to make myself look web-savvy, but that survey from people press is well worth checking out. Flick through it and you'll find out astonishing stuff, like that 15% of Americans don't always have enough money to buy food, and 26% don't always have enough to pay for health care. In the Czech republic, country with around a fifth of the US' GDP per capita, the corresponding figures are 8% and 6% respectively. Even more staggeringly, only about twice as many people in the Ivory Coast, a country wracked by civil war, say they often don't have enough food as Americans. Of course, there's many in America who'll tell you that by protecting us from starvation and disease, European goverments are meddling in the lives of their citizens, and that the fact that more of them are dying of starvation or preventible disease is a sign that their society is more free than ours.

But there's the rub. Freedom means different things to different people. To an American, the right to buy a gun to protect yourself from other people who exercise the same right might be genuinely more valuable to right to smoke Marajauna or have an abortion, a freedom American women are soon going to lose. During the American Civil War, both sides sang a song called Battle Cry of Freedom. The Yanks claimed they were trying to free Negroes from slavery, the rebs to free themselves from a federal government that imposed it's abolitionist laws on them.
Dubya never tires of telling the American people that "Terrorists" hate "freedom" but does he really think that Arabs see it that way, or is he smart enough to realise that many of them see Americans as occupiers in their land and themselves as the forces of liberation? That's what's so scary to the rest of the world about Bush's speech, the idea that they have a monopoly on the definition of freedom, and that many of them genuinely don't appreciate that other nations may not want to have a social system that results in so much excess, inequality and incarceration imposed on it. Trying to downplay the scale of the conflict in Iraq, one fox news reporter pointed out tha the homicide rate in California was higher. To which people might legimately ask, why are the Americans trying to export such a flawed social model, though the only answer they're likely to get is "Shut Up!"

Meanwhile, Cheney and Condoleeza Rice are busy filling the rest of the world in on the specifics of Bush's policy. It's hard to argue with Rice when she claims that the Burmese government aren't so nice, but where is the criticism of places like Uzbekistan, where around 30,000 people have been brutally murdered? It's possible that when America no longer needs that country's bases to attack Iran and Iraq, they'll become part of the Axis of evil as well.

Cheney, as is his forte, has been coming out with more scaremongering. Apparently he's been lecturing European leaders on the danger from Iran. Apparently we don't understand these dangers ourselves, as Europe has never been attacked by anyone from Asia in the course of it;s history. Cheney says that Europeans tell him that Russia was pointing nuclear warheads at them for forty years and we're all still here to tell the tale, but he insists that Iran is different.

Of course it is, as Russians are people with low pigmentation who practice a form of Christianity, while Iranians are hot-headed, dark-skinned people who're willing to attack countries with independent nuclear deterrents at the possible risk of annhilation.

I wish there was a European leader brave enough to ask Cheney to his face what a fat, bald Wyoming hick is doing lecturing Europeans on their security, especially when his information on Iraq was so blatantly false. He has his work cut out, though. Scaring Americans is like shooting fish in a barrel, as fear was the thing that led many of their ancestors to leave for America in the first place, and scaredy-cat genes have been reinforced and strengthened over the generations. Even the religous people there describe themselves as being "god-fearing", which is fair enough, I'd be fairly shit-scared of any transcendental deity that would do something like that tsunami as well.

We're not that easily scared over here, knowing that if there was an attack of 9/11 magnitude in Europe, our chances of being killed would be infintissimal. In any case, Europe has had enough real theaths to it's peace and security to know the difference between danger and irrational fear-mongering. And to paraphrase Rosie O' Donell, I may not know that much about Cheney, but as A European, I know he's lying.

One final statistic from that survey which really astonished me. One freedom Americans really do have more than most countries is the freedom to borrow money to invest, which is why they lead the worlds of music and movies. Yet it seems other nations enjoy the fruits of this freedom more. Asked if they enjoyed American movies and TV, as much as 80% of people in various countries in Europe, Asia and Africa said they did. In America the figure was a mere 48%. 37% said they didnt, a little lower than the figure that said they were concerned with "moral values". How many of these people want more censorship? Quite a few, I'd wager. And yet Dubya wants us to believe that all Americans are bound in Unity and Frienship