On Haleakala, someone I respected said to a tourist, “You know what Mana means? It means power!” Inside I literally cringed. I am not an expert on the Hawaiian language, and words meanings change over time, sometimes to mean even its opposite a few generations ago. But no, that I could not accept. As she pointed out correctly later, it depends upon the context. In certain contexts Mana can mean power, and my aversion to that definition I know is due to the misuse and subversion of power recently to mean bad things; the power to go against the public will, the power to kidnap people and torture them in secret, the power to rig elections and conduct black ops, not only on ones own public but governments committing terrorist acts in countries they do not like and then threatening them with invasion based up “terrorist acts” it is doing far more that they. Maybe the word and world of power has been subverted into something else. Mana to me remains something higher.

        As I understand it, and how I used it with PolSci 9 ('Aumakua born, mana built without fear of the sadists who rule this world), Mana means strength. Mana means spirit. In a sense, that is power, but a different kind of power. The power over oneself. The power to rebel. The power to stand against the wrongs being done in and by your society. It is not “soft power.” It is not political power, though it can trigger more just political movements. It is the opposite of political power, particularly the power to oppress, which has become the very definition of how political power is being used in world affairs.

        The worst aggressions being done in the world at this time are by my own country, the United States. Not that other countries are saints, far from it, it is just that for now, they are not in the same position of power to do them. Were the tables turned, too many would be doing the same things. That is the danger with that kind of power. It creates its own rules. It makes those who wield it or would wish to wield it interchangeable in what they would do with it. Most often, that is to make their definitions of things the only allowed or preferential definitions of things. They try to control the terms of the debates on their actions and make their views of their own excuses for taking away the rights of others to dominate them, to limit their ability to dissent or challenge them, and obscure or condemn all alternative points of view, particularly those of their victims.

        The blind patriotism which political power cultivates, and upon which it depends, teaches that we can do no wrong. That when we destroy a country, its infrastructure, towns, its previous legal orders and governments, we do so to help them, to make their lives better by giving them “democracy.” Yet the “democracy” we give them, so pointedly clear as in the case of Iraq, is one where vast majority of the people even when united against us cannot oppose us or our presence and bases there. Not only do they not want us there, but a slimmer majority believe it right to shoot us on sight as invaders, as occupiers, and as thieves of their economy and resources. To this our blindness responds, “That is the thanks we get for giving up our people's lives for their freedom.” Our minds have been so warped by such constant unchallenged and virulent propagandizing that the peoples own views as they are dying, starving, by what we did to them and are still doing, are considered not only irrelevant, but thankless, and unable to comprehend the “good” we are doing for them.

        We are not the first country to use patriotism to build an empire based upon the most convoluted of double-think “facts” fed to an unquestioning public eager to be told what it wants to hear, nor unfortunately unless we actually do destroy everything else, are we likely to be the last. However, it was not supposed to be this way. Like all those who come to abuse their power, we got there by degrees and ignored or missed the warning signs along the way.

        That we were too full of ourselves had no doubt a major part to play. Circumstances played a part also, but those who think it was simply “fate” or “providence” ought to review the facts. We have always been selective in what we see when we look at ourselves or our history. The nation which prides itself on giving the world equality was in truth the nation which held on to the slavery of human beings at all cost long after England and “lesser” systems of democracy had abandoned it, and they did so peacefully. We not only “accidentally” committed genocide to take “our inheritance from God” away from the Native Americans, but genocide actually was the official policy in some Western states with some of the worst offenses being committed by our official armies and militias.

        We are not a nation which remembers these abuses without papering over them with holidays and good feelings at how great we were only to become greater later, and cannot see that we did some of the worst things done in human history unfettered during the run of our “sacred” Constitution (now completely ignored by our Presidential administration and corrupted courts) which did not prevent them, nor is it preventing more horrific things now. But our “power” prevents other nations from calling us on our hypocrisy They may say things even amongst themselves on how we have gone wrong, but are polite enough to keep it out of their nations official discourses toward us and our government, at least as far as our public is aware. As bad as we have become, much of the rest of the world, based upon not unwarranted fear of us, have become not only enablers of our abuses, but also have joined in when possible to profit from both our now unrestrained looting, as well as positioning themselves to take advantage after our fast approaching implosion of debt and malfeasance.

        But as I said, it did not have to be this way, nor to a lot of us in this country still yet, think that it should be this way. During the Cold War, the US did have reason to assert itself to counter a growing polarity against Western interests threatened by Stalinism, lingering Fascism, and other after-effects of Europe's own meltdown and decent into madness based upon the same unbridled quest for control and power. Yet many could not see how this polarity was playing into the needs for profit and power. Eisenhower's farewell address, prominently replayed in the documentary“Why We Fight” by Eugene Jarecki, was stark truth-telling but not taken to heart; that we not only were a part of the reaction to the Soviet aggression during the after World War II, but we fed into the polarity because in it, within that insane arms race, there was far more profits to be made, and more “power” to be won.

        Without the ideological gulf which was the supposed source of the Cold War, both systems could have improved and learned from each other, as indeed much of Europe did with Democratic Socialism, universal health care, better social programs decades ahead of the US, and higher standards of living than either of the primary “combatants” of the Cold War era. They were on the front line between both sides, yet they were able to look at both sides objectively whereas the US and Soviets were trapped by their rhetoric of being unable to grow, both of which to varying degrees using the enemy as a reason to consolidate power to itself and limit dissent.

        Anyone who thinks the US never limited dissent is a testament to how useful and effective our propaganda has been. From lynchings of innocent labor organizers as “Communists” in the 1800's and 1900's, mass arrests and political crackdowns around World War 1 and after World War II during the McCarthy Era, the “enemy” is always effective at growing the power of the military and tying the hands of the politicians to make peace. George W. Bush has merely pushed it to greater heights, calling any who would question his illegal wars to be a “helping the enemy” while sympathetic “journalists” and pundits muse about how critics and opposition members should be shipped off to our now no-longer-secret torture chambers, for some “education” as traitors.

        But with the death of the Cold War, the idea that the best of each of the previous types of systems could be administered to all regardless of blinding ideologies was a real risk to those of great wealth and those who had profited from and had become dependent upon Cold War arms sales, not only within the US, but within Russia, Britain, and France as well.

        New conflicts were not only desirable, they were required to maintain the status quo and existing industries. No “peace dividend,” no downsizing what Eisenhower rightly called the “dangerous military industrial complex,” and certainly no movement toward universal health care, toward universal free college educations as other nations have (to create stronger, brighter, more intelligent societies), nor other increased benefits to the poor, sick, or homeless. All forgotten and abandoned by all parties of power. No, it would be instead a no-holes barred disparaging of any who would stand against perpetual war against whomever got in our way with ever escalating military budgets for ever expanding wars. Without any credible normal state threat to attack against yet, we would go on “offensive” and take out threats before they could occur.

        And pointing out that this is illegal by our own laws, all international laws, and dare I say it, the very notion and principle and concept of having international laws in the first place; to prevent any one country from thinking it can attack any country it feels threatend by upon its say so alone. Silencing such “potentially treasonous” statements of common fact as well as common sense has been breathtaking in its scope, not only among what passes itself off as journalism these days, but in the halls of academia as well. To this by my studies, I can attest. And it is not just one Presidential administration as the cause, but the efforts of both political parties headed by the “bipartisan” Lieberman / Cheney university thought-policing (the American Council of Trustees and Alumni blacklists) which has silenced political science and philosophy departments, not to mention law departments, far more than I could have ever thought possible.

        So to keep any movements at bay to limit military approaches to diplomatic solutions, the first line of order was to militarize the State Department. The War in Iraq did a good job to wipe out anyone of conscience in high place positions in the career diplomatic corps, and to put in place those who would sabotage any glimmer of peaceful solutions before they could even begin to arise.

        And now, after a very brief truth telling by former CIA department heads and some leaked genuine intelligence reports unsupportive of bogus Bush claims to justify military aggression against Iran, the military's intelligence branches now dominate news reports and political “policy” making because they are far easier to control, and at least for the moment, are more effectively politicized with Generals knowing their path to promotion and advancements comes at the cost of saying whatever must be said to advance the aims of their Commander-in-chief, even at times hinting that his is the only opinion that matters anymore. So much for their oaths to uphold the Constitution, what is left of it anyway.

        So where is the good in all of this? In the reaction. Where there is an overwhelming degree of criminality and injustice, where lies and disinformation have displaced truth and legitimate information, there is a strength that arises in us all to stand up to it. Repression and suppression are untenable in the long run. They overreach, and by overreaching create opportunities for advancements which cannot be done when times are good and people are content.

        Probably the most victimized nations on this planet, other than in Africa, are found in Latin America. They have suffered death squads, ethnic cleansing, political repression, and all with the approval of “the world's greatest superpower,” (now a junkie on RedKryptonite) and have bred a people unafraid to stand up against overwhelming odds, pervasive fears and threats, and have a strength which Americans sorely to say do not. (If you think this an exaggeration, compare Mexico's and other southern nations' reaction to potential rigged elections to the near complete non-reaction within the US to the election in 2000. How many in the US are cowered away from protesting because of fear of retribution, surveillance, and loss of jobs?)

        People forget the things they celebrate most are those who stood up against the wrongs of their times, or the ones crushed by heartless and oppressive empires who thought they could write their own rules, and previous laws or the rights of others did not matter as much, and could be subverted or gotten around. As much as the US and others have looked for a magic bullet to break cultures, make them loyal to leaders who do not represent the interests of their peoples, they have not yet succeeded in total and hopefully never will.

        All the twisting of words to make another country's leadership subservient to your own government's will, unable to economically or militarily stand up to them without fear of being attacked, threatened or destroyed, these are becoming blanks which are making no marks. Thus the need for ever more shrill rhetoric, ever more torturous convolutions of reason and “thought,” and the need for more prevalent and indiscriminate threats and deliveries of torture and death.

        It is a spiral that has its end when one realizes that those being repressed now will write their own histories one day. Every one of the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions, of innocent deaths done, "collateral damage," by our present criminal wars of aggressions, any one of them could be that nation's Christ, that innocent victim of barbarous injustice to rally their culture for generations upon generations against what we have put them through, that hell, while we literally piss on their graves when saying it we were doing it to “help” them. They are waking up. Their sense of history will show their truths, truer than the ones we try to plant in their media, stronger than the leaderships or types of governments we “approve” of for them, and they will prevail where they should, in their own lands, as hopefully we, the self-critical ones, will one day prevail again in our own.