A Modest Proposal

By Anton Chaitkin, copyright Anton Chaitkin

A Modest Proposal*: To attack ALL ambitious or defiant nations, and to impose new global rules, for our safety.

Our bombs have already fallen on Russia, on Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Gaza. We have economic sanctions against a large portion of the globe.

But Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina all have the capability to develop without limit, thereby taking resources that we and our friends could have. And they are learning skills and acquiring scientific knowledge which they may in the future use to overpower us and destroy us.

Therefore let us lay down new rules to govern the world --

That all science and industry that moves a country above the state of ignorance and savagery be prohibited.

That all pride in one’s own country be stamped out, wherever it is associated with the unauthorized and dangerous elevation of the power of the menacing nations.

That we ban and crush out all religions and philosophies which teach the dangerous notions that one God has created all men, or that all men are created equal, or that all men are brothers, or that nature has infinite richness which may be tapped with creative discovery and cooperation, because such notions may lead us into fatal weakness to carry out with necessary vigor the extermination of our enemies.

That all vestiges of the history of the United States be erased, and all records that such an INDEPENDENT NATION ever existed be destroyed, so that no one may ever believe that America defied the British empire’s rules which prohibited Americans to develop manufacturing; so that no country should believe and spread the dangerous notion that it was the Americans who brought electricity, and nuclear science, and space travel into the world for the common use of mankind. Without the dangerous image of such an America having existed, the stupid presumption that the poor and downtrodden have the right to rise, and that others should help them to rise, will more quickly fade from human memory.

Finally, that any person be imprisoned as a threat to order, who communicates to others in any way about the policies and practices which the Authorities see fit to impose. The Authorities are more capable of ruling us than those who don’t know the secret truths which our vast array of enemies would like to spill, in order to destroy us.

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** The title is borrowed from Jonathan Swift’s 1729 SATIRE.

Swift had written in 1720, “A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture.” He urged the Irish people to boycott English goods and develop their own industry, to rise out of the poverty imposed on Ireland by British rule.

Swift exposed the savage philosophy of the British empire in his 1729 satirical essay, “A MODEST PROPOSAL.” In it he called for the children of the poor in Ireland to be EATEN by their English landlords. This would save the British kingdom the expense of keeping alive the starving masses whom their imperial policies had prevented from productively working.