The Enemy Is At The Gate: The Big Hoax

And, because “the enemy is always at the gate” Americans, and sovereign nations and governments around the globe, can exclaim, effusively, they don’t have the money for, so can do nothing about: universal health care, homelessness, crumbling infrastructure and public school systems, tax-supported college and university education, poverty that accompanies income and gender inequality, infant mortality and child well-being, mass incarceration and extrajudicial police murders (especially of unarmed black males) mass school shootings or renewable energy – a Green New Deal. And, because “the enemy (for decades fear of Communism, now fear of Russia and China, of Iraq and Iran and any country that can be labeled Terrorist, or Enemy or even Competitor) is always at the gate” Americans are petrified in a state of fear while over half of United States discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon. Money spent for death, not life.

“The Russians (or Communists) are out to get us” is such an old and tired American hoax you would think Americans with their supposed and assumed exceptionalism would have matured, outgrown such infantilism… evolved by now. This Russian “Bogeyman” foolishness perpetuates the infantile refrain, “The enemy is at the gate.” It allows sovereign governments around the world to choose their “Bogeyman” and prioritize military spending over the needs of its people: “There just isn’t enough money for people’s needs and to fight the “Bogeyman.”

Appeal at UN for human rights turned away by U.S.

In Eyes Off The Prize (2003) Carol Anderson tells the story of The United Nations and the African American struggle for Human Rights, 1944 – 1955. Not Civil Rights but Human Rights. As World War II drew to a close and the world awakened to the horror produced by white-supremacists in Nazi Germany, African American leaders of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, Walter White and Thurgood Marshall, seized the opportunity to launch an offensive against the conditions of Jim Crow segregation and inequality in the United States and take the case of 22 million Black Americans to the United Nations.

The “prize” they sought was not civil rights; it was human rights. Only the idea of Human Rights, shaped by the Holocaust and defined by the United Nations, contained the language and the moral power to address not only the political and legal inequality, but also the education, health care, housing, and employment needs of America’s Black communities. But, by evoking the spirit of “Communists (enemies) at the gate” U.S. leaders were able to cast Human Rights as Soviet-inspired and a threat to the American “way of life.” This same “tactic” was repeated in the 1960s and, now, again in the 2000s. A popular song in the 60s asks: “When will we ever learn…when will we ever learn?”