Valenzuela's Veritas

In ominous times truth always finds a way out from darkness into light. Always. Through truth knowledge grows into the power and strength to question the actions of governance. In times that try men's souls it is those who seek enlightenment who are truly free. Given the choice of possessing ignorance or knowledge, even when ignorance would lead to an easier life, I would choose knowledge,thus escaping the life of sheeple, escaping the bondage of not knowing, not caring and not understanding.

Name: Manuel Valenzuela

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, commentator, Internet essayist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. His essays appear regularly at various alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. He encourages readers to surf the collection of over 100 essays he has written which can be found visiting his archives and by searching the Internet. His next book, Beyond the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on America and Humanity, a collection of his essays, will be published in early 2007.

Saturday, July 04, 2009

We the People versus a Government of, by and for The United Corporations of America

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Originally published in July 2004, this essay remains as relevant now, if not more so, than it did then. We the People's true enemy is corporatism, predatory capitalism run amok, emasculating the corporate world to levels never before seen. It is this world, composed of profit margins and cost-benefit analysis, that ignores the human soul and cherishes the Almighty Dollar, engendering creative chaos, war and complete catharsis of the individual spirit, that is the true enemy of humankind, the true terrorist entity upon which the People's War on Terror must focus upon.

If we continue lethargic and pacified, the corporate Leviathan will swallow us whole, making of us one more morsel of a gluttonous appetite that is destroying Earth and imprisoning billions of human beings. This enemy, already killing millions of individuals on a yearly basis, all clandestinely buried six feet under, all in the name of profit and power, all ignored and obfuscated, hidden under the noses of the world entire, will in the years to come become an even greater threat than it is at present.

In the last century we battled totalitarianism; in this century we will battle corporatism. The following essay should be interpreted as a call to action, following in the footsteps of those words of the past, stated by wiser men and greater principles. For if not today, when? If not when, then our failure will be the purgatory of those inheriting the tomorrow. The coporate world has become our tyrant, our mass murderer, our brain and puppetmaster. When we wake up to this reality, then perhaps our planet and our destiny will find salvation in the incredible potential of this the human race, this primate with the capacity for so much good, and so much evil.

We the People, the people of the World entire, not just those residing inside the bowels of predatory capitalism itself, must accept that there is a war against us, and we must resist, rebel and alter the course of human events before the course of corporate events shackles us to the prison of our minds and the domain of serfs, slaves and the destiny of so many that have come before. Viva la Revolucion! The Revolution of We the People, 6 billion strong.


Zapatista Manifesto:

TO THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO:

TO THE PEOPLES AND GOVERNMENTS OF THE WORLD:

BROTHERS AND SISTERS:

The flower of the word will not die. The masked face which today has a name may die, but the word which came from the depth of history and the earth can no longer be cut by the ears with its cannons.

Our fight is caused by hunger, and the gifts of bad government are lead and paper for the stomachs of our children.

Our fight is for a roof over our heads which has dignity, and bad government destroys our homes and our history.

Our fight is for knowledge, and bad government distributes ignorance and disdain.

Our fight is for the land, and the government gives us cementaries.

Our fight is for a job which is just and dignified, and bad government buys and sells our bodies and our shames.

Our fight is for life, and bad government offers death as our future.

Our fight is for respect for our right to sovereignty and self-government, and bad government imposes laws of the few on the many.

Our fight is for liberty of thought and walk, and bad government builds jails and graves.

Our fight is for justice, and bad government consists of criminals and assassins.

Our fight is for history and the government proposes to erase history.

Our fight is for the homeland, and bad government dreams with the flag and the language of foreigners.

Our fight is for peace, and bad government announces war and destruction.

Housing, land, employment, food, healthcare, education,
independence, democracy, liberty, justice and peace. These were our
banners during the dawn of 1994. These were our demands during that long night of 500 years. These are, today, our necessities.


Foundations

Thunderous booms echoed throughout the vast expanse of the land known as the United States, from the conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest to the magnificent Charles River flowing through historical Boston. An amalgam of bright lights bursting in air filled the night sky as Independence Day arrived yet one more time to remind us of the long ago birth of a new nation through the defeat of oppression, tyranny and exploitation. Millions of Americans raised their heads upwards into stars long since forgotten, hidden by our man made lights, blanketing dark skies yet unseen by human eyes. Instead, resounding echoes of exploding fireworks filled the sky, captivating us with their vast array of colors and shapes.

Independence Day in America is a remembrance of times long past and gone, a time to give thanks to those who came before in time and space, placed by fate to fight for freedom, against domination and despotism, towards a new dawn in human civilization. All men, it was believed, were created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, among these Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, a government is created deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed. This government, it was believed, was to be of, by and for the people.

Never did the Founding Fathers envisage what love and devotion to the Almighty Dollar and his sister greed would unleash upon the once heavenly and diverse lands of their fledgling nation. Never did they comprehend the erosion of democracy the latter stages of American capitalism would bring forth, nor the cronyism, corruption and loss of integrity and honor at the highest levels of governance. Like a flashflood rushing down a dry-river bed devouring everything in its path, American capitalism has been an unstoppable and furious calamity, eroding democracy and the very foundations America gives thanks to on the Fourth of July.


An Enemy Like No Other


The growth of the corporate Leviathan over the last hundred years has coincided with the diminishing rights and power of the people. When out of the 100 richest economies in the world over 50 are corporations, it is easy to decipher what entity has contributed to our dwindling freedoms, rights, democracy and power. The tremendous growth of the Leviathan has spawned new generations of unscrupulous capitalists eager to exploit entire populations, hundreds of millions strong, in order to continue the exponential growth of the Leviathan, its minions and masters.

Never before has humanity faced an enemy like the Leviathan, oozing power and control, owning the mechanisms by which the masses are brainwashed and programmed, having fused with a government that now acts as one more tentacle by which it controls the citizenry. We have become the blood injecting oxygen into our enemy, the food that sustains it and the nutrition that grants it energy. Humanity’s greatest threat has become a beast demanding global empire, molded out of our own clay, exploiting our own laws and rules, thriving off our easily manipulated and controlled minds.

Behind it, masked in power and thriving in orgasmic levels of control sit the elite, the oligarchs, exploiters of humanity and high priests of the Almighty Dollar. At the altar of greed they sacrifice their fellow human beings, at the temple of their god we are all made pawns. The engine of exploitation called capitalism enables them to prosper; the control of government grants them the purple robe of power. Over the last hundred years they have waged war against us, winning battle after battle, making lost powers the masses once possessed. Controlling those who govern, those who entertain, those who decide and those who create has given them unlimited means by which to assault us.

From all directions we are being bombarded, slowly being transformed into beasts of burden, unthinking and indifferent, ignorant beings programmed to consume what we produce, albeit at inflated prices, allowing our rights and freedoms to be eviscerated, our happiness to
be manipulated, our minds to be numbingly conditioned by media and chemically oppressed by a plethora of pharmaceutical pills.


War Being Waged Against the People


What reality once was has disappeared into the fog of what the Leviathan deems it to be. We are being used and abused, serving the few at the top, becoming the four course dinner the elite succulently feast on. We are at war, or, rather, it has been declared against us. We just do not know it yet. Every battle lost sinks us deeper into the belly of the beast, gripped to the dungeons of the nadir we continue to breathe. Invisible shackles envelope our every appendage as unsuspecting slaves we have been made to be.

Battles have been and continue to be waged against our freedoms, destroying more of them each passing year. We might believe America to espouse the most freedoms in humanity but in truth it grants its people some of the least in the developed world. It is only our belief because we want to make it so, because those in power reinforce the illusion of it being reality. And with the continued marketing of dark-skinned bogeymen lurking in every corner, eager to inflict ‘evil’ on America’s sons and daughters, these freedoms will only continue to disappear, until the day arrives our progeny have nothing left to fight for because there is nothing left to remember.

The noble experiment of democracy our Founding Fathers birthed over two centuries ago has been malevolently turned into a charade hiding the sinister fangs of debauchery and crony capitalism. This exercise in futility is now more a vote over who will become the grandest corporate puppets in the land than an endeavor to empower the population. Government in Washington has become an oxymoron, a place where legions of lobbyists rock the cradle of representatives, showering the mechanisms of power and control at spineless, malfeasant and immoral individuals.

It is in the halls of power, where once noble and just men walked, that the war against the masses begins. Where virtuous blood once flowed now tainted and smeared toxins now pollute, becoming an insult to a long gone tradition of enlightenment. An Almighty Creator has been replaced by the Almighty Dollar, flooding the great Potomac and its surrounding banks with the hypnotizing captivation of greenbacks polluting all minds that drink from the blessed chalice of corruption. It is so-called American democracy – another oxymoron – that grants cover to crony capitalism and corporatism, simply the latest reincarnation in a long and undistinguished line of ruthless and exploitative governance to help decimate the masses.

Worker rights, healthcare, education, Jeffersonian equality and liberty are now but mere drops falling from the once fluid faucet of American ideals. The ‘peoples’ representatives selling themselves to the highest bidder in the whore house named Congress continue to degrade the office they hold, becoming champions of corporations, not people, condemning millions for billions in profits.

At every level the American people continue to be swindled and cheated by the same government implicitly designed to serve the People, not the Leviathan. Corporate and foreign government lobbyists help feed addictions to money, power and control by presenting fat coffers of the Almighty dollar into the pockets of those wretched souls captured by greed, enrichment, power and exploitation. The Almighty Dollar is the ticket that grants access to power, suddenly transforming seemingly busy individuals into attentive listeners. It is here that average citizens cannot compete, and it is why laws and regulations favor the corporate dominated world and the elite that comprise it.

The privileges granted by wealth not only buys off our ‘representatives’ and their inherent powers to shape the direction of the nation but also assures the continued domination by corporations over every aspect of our lives. Suppressed wages continue to decline relevant to inflation, working hours continue to increase, powers once embedded in the working masses have vanished, benefits are slowly being made harder to attain and well paying jobs are being outsourced and replaced by minimum wage opportunities. In the land wishing to export equality abroad, the gap between rich and poor only continues to increase, all the while the middle class is subjected to disproportionate sacrifice in time of need that places a heavy burden on its capacity to save money and that in effect lowers its status relevant to that of the rich.

Education in America is becoming an endangered social necessity thanks to the apathetic cowardice and pathetic submission by our chosen ‘representatives.’ Millions of children are purposefully being made ignorant energies devoid of free-thinking minds. Schools are becoming conveyor belts of incurious and unquestioning children whose future is being decided before ever attaining even a semblance of opportunity, or chance. America’s education budget is being decapitated, its diverse curriculum being shredded to pieces, making extinct art, music, philosophy, social and natural sciences, redesigned to create slaves and future members of the working class instead of the enlightened torchbearers carrying the prospect of hope through the keys of opportunity.

Higher education is being made harder to attain as increases in tuition and costs places a heavy handed burden on working and middle class students. Universities are slashing programs and courses in order to meet expenses, thereby offering students a less fruitful all around education. The barrier to entry has purposefully been elevated so that blue collar workers exist into perpetuity. Higher learning, a necessity for the richest nation on Earth, is being denied to millions, being made more expensive and less able to educate. Instead of encouraging America’s children to pursue enlightenment, the government and the elite hinder their capacity to learn. There is something terribly wrong when a nation places so many obstacles to its citizens in pursuit of higher learning. The effects, however, are as naturally devastating as they are encouraged.

When the Leviathan controls, slave labor and a working class majority is exactly what America strives for. The assembly line spitting out products and services must continue churning out profits at the expense of the working class. Subservient armies of workers, underpaid, underappreciated and uneducated, transformed into drones unquestioning and compliant, must exist in large numbers in order for the economy to expand and the Leviathan hegemony to grow. Denying millions of Americans a worthy education assures this spring of success from ever drying up.

The Leviathan needs legions of citizens to produce its goods cheaply; it needs mindless drones that will without conscious purchase its products at inflated prices. It needs uninformed and incurious millions to vote for its puppets, ask not a question and seek no accountability. It must be allowed to continue clandestinely waging war against the American people without interruption, without the knowledge of the citizenry and without awakening the placid condition of our existence. Gentle ripples cannot be allowed to become enraged tsunamis.

The Leviathan and the corporatist form of governance needs soldiers to help pilfer, conquer and exploit the lands and people of the world. It needs cannon fodder to wage war, well-trained grunts to press triggers, direct tanks and press the buttons launching carnal death onto the peoples of the world. It is from our children that the Leviathan gets its power to exploit foreign lands, robbing them of precious natural resources, and condemns billions to slave like existences in wages, labor and life. From the poor of America the poor of the world are subjugated, enriching the elite and making more powerful the putrid seeds of American capitalism disguised as benevolent democracy. War is but a sad tale of exploited poor condemning subjugated poor, for the benefit of the few and the hegemony of the exploiters.

Poverty stricken boys and girls from rural and urban settings, already denied equal and worthy education, thrown into the rotting cesspool of lost opportunity and purposefully robbed of a fruitful future are socially engineered to desire entry into the elite’s armed forces, pushed seemingly from birth towards servicing the death machines of the military industrial complex. Thus, the poor from one nation will be trained to kill the poor of another, and together the explosive Molotov cocktail called war will they form.

America’s poor and working class children will sacrifice life, limb and mind for the benefits of the few at the top. From the bottom the rich feed, destroying lives and minds, condemning thousands to live altered lives and destitute futures as they struggle to understand the evils forced upon their consciousness. Our children are maimed in body and their minds infected with the inner demons of war. Back home, it is the masses that help finance the Leviathan’s battles and wars; it is us building and designing the very same instruments of death and human evil our children kill and die with. It is from our pockets, purses and wallets that weapons of death and destruction come into existence. From our wages our children are trained to kill, to destroy and wage human evil onto the world. Our sacrifice helps make our children obedient, compliant and brainwashed soldiers of death, becoming a plague of virus wrapped in blind patriotism, believing everything those who govern espouse, willing to die not for freedom and democracy but for enslavement of their kind and the imposition of corrupt capitalism through the barrel of a gun.


Sinister Correlation of Power and Terrorism


A Leviathan comprised of terrorists runs amok, perpetrating crimes against humanity and the planet that is killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. Yet these terrorists control power, and are instead labeled industry and corporations. From their evil is spawned environmental degradation that penetrates lungs and bodies, creating cancers and disease. From their evil are spawned fabricated foods, chemicals, additives, preservatives and hormones that are altering our behaviors, our bodies and perhaps even our genetic composition.

Corporate terrorists are polluting waterways, the air we breathe, the land we live on and the Earth we dwell in. These miscreants care nothing about us; to them we are but the consumers from which to harvest profits and the assembly line from which to garner the next generation of producer and consumer.

Their policies have and continue to eviscerate futures, talents and opportunities, condemning untold billions to lives living in perpetual castes. It is from this careful and methodical social engineering that once promising human energies are transformed into the pawns of those in power, becoming exploitable and subjugated entities remaining in their predetermined lot while enriching the few at the top.

Corporate terrorists send our children to war, sent to die or get maimed in body and mind. They ruin us with interest payments, riddle us with growing debt and deny us medical attention needed. They help turn healthcare into an exercise in class warfare, dividing us into the treated and untreated, the rich and poor. Playing God, these terrorists determine who lives and dies, who heals and who withers. Putting profits over people, money over morality, these charlatans get rich off of others misfortune and suffering. Disease is their mistress, their reason for being. To them, it seems, healthcare cannot be universalized, communalized or socialized. To these terrorists it is a privilege, not a right, available only if fate has endowed you with the ability to pay.

While Arab terrorists are marketed as those we must most fear, it is the corporate kind that kills hundreds of thousands each and every year. It is they who are committing mass acts of genocide, it is they perpetrating crimes against humanity and the planet. It is they whose policies help impoverish hundreds of millions worldwide, using their mechanisms to create a mass slave labor workforce. It is they who do not allow peace from evolving that should be called terrorists. It is they whose pursuit of perpetual war for perpetual profit that sleep and dwell in caves of human evil.

It is those who purposefully instill fear into our minds for political reasons who we should fear most. It is those robbing us of treasure and of loved ones that belong in The Hague. It is hypocrites who spawn death of innocents and destruction of lives under the rubric of claiming to rid the world of evil that are evil themselves. It is those who torture and semantically bend the rules of international law who are terrorists. It is those who decapitate and maim thousands through missiles and bombs that have the same moral cavity as those who behead on video. Just because they govern America does not make these criminals less of a terrorist than others. Simply because they claim victory does not make them champions. Because they can foster unrelenting propaganda does not mean they are saviors to the world.

It is those who see War as Peace, Ignorance as Knowledge, Lies as Truth, lack of Education as Progress, Occupation as Liberation, Death and Destruction as Moral Superiority, Greed as Good, American Capitalism as Freedom and Democracy and Poverty as Wealth that the world should be fighting and purging from power.

Are we to label as terrorists individuals who decimate futures and abilities by preventing opportunity, increasing indigence, eviscerating education, polluting land and humans, manipulating minds, exploiting their brethren and controlling us through fear and insecurity? Should the Leviathan be labeled the greatest threat facing humanity, the ultimate cold blooded terrorist? To many of us, the answer is yes.


American Democracy a Sham


The feces stained hallways of Washington are slowly rotting with the defecation of what America once stood for. Democracy is now controlled and dominated by the rich and elite, the few at the top addicted to greed and the Almighty Dollar. Ordinary citizens can no longer enter the corridors of power, either as constituents or as representatives. The bar to holding office continues to be raised, millions of dollars are needed to win and keep a seat of power. Today only the most unscrupulous vermin, those elite few with special interests to uphold and wealth to increase can sit in the hallowed domes of government.

You think democracy as we believe it to exist still lingers? Not when over forty Senators and one-hundred Representatives are considered millionaires, many placed in office to help expand their own interests; not when certain lobbies determine and in essence select who will win elections through pressures and contributions; not when the corporate media pushes us to vote for whomever they want in office through distortion, manipulation, deceit and coverage; not when laws and regulations are passed that only favor corporations; not when cherished buildings of governance are beset with corporate executives, lobbyists and puppets running the mechanisms of the nation’s management; not when freedoms, rights and social services are being made extinct, destroying what took decades to achieve; not when corporations dominate our daily lives through their vast array of tentacles; not when government has morphed with corporations to create a new corporatist world washing away centuries of what ‘We the People’ have struggled to attain; not when our choice for President comes down to two elites molded from the same clay, in many instances espousing the same interests; not when democracy means choosing from two parties battling each other for who will become the puppet to those in power; not when money determines who runs, who loses and whose interests are furthered; not when America is being dumbed down so that an informed and questioning citizenry no longer exists.

We the People are systematically being turned into We the Sheeple. Our government is now of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation. Our Founding Fathers are no doubt turning in their graves, unable to comprehend what has become of the cherished principles of We the People, of democracy, of American ideals and of the once noble institution of American government. We the People are being used and abused, bamboozled into believing the corrupt vices of our so-called leaders. We the People are now nothing more than hundreds of millions of hungry bodies and ignorant minds, manipulated to pursue materialistic worlds that exist only in the realm of fiction, programmed to instill in our society the vices of greed through the attainment of the Almighty Dollar and molded to stay silent even as war is waged against us, killing scores through environmental poisoning, ceaseless contamination of foods, educational evisceration and healthcare indifference.


We the People


Republican, Independent and Democrat, it does not matter from what spectrum we derive our beliefs, all of us are pawns in a game of hegemony and wealth. Many of us vote against our own self-interests, losing wealth, power, freedoms and rights, preferring instead to vote based on ideology. Those in power know this all too well, which is why they concoct these seeds of division from which to garner votes. Democracy in America is now a scam, a cynical manipulation of the masses that serves not our interest but those of the hand that controls the puppets.

We the People are all in this together, caught in the middle of thunderous cannons attacking us from all directions. Those in power need to divide us, they need us to split into conflict-laden entities that will never unite. They understand that strength in numbers must not be allowed to occur. They know that divided we all stand, blind to our common enemy, bereft of communalism toward each other, eager to fight ourselves instead of our masters. Not since the Civil War has this nation been so divided; yet not since that time has the nation been in such peril. America as we have known it is being melted away; the beast called the corporate Leviathan controls us more each day. It now owns a government that fails to serve ‘We the People’; our interests have been vanquished, our rights trampled on. Laws, rules and regulations now only help to increase corporate power over our lives.

War has been brought to us and our children. The coming struggle for our future is of necessity, not choice, and we must heed the warnings being trumpeted before all that remains is an assembly line called human procreation whose conveyor belt spits out willing automatons and serfs without meaning, without happiness, without freedom and without free-will. Together we must stand, marching in unison, fighting a common enemy, providing for the common defense, struggling for our way of life, a future devoid of chains and for descendants still able to breathe the air of freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is time. If not now, when? We the People stand at the threshold of a momentous decision, one whose decision will determine fates and directions. A growing storm gathers energy, its power derived from our existence and indifference. In its ominous blackened clouds can be seen the energized lightning charges ready to continue the devastation of America and its citizens. An enemy the likes of which humanity has never been privy to gathers in our midst, eager to continue the usurpation of what we hold to be most cherished and absolute. Like a freight train it continues to storm through; whether we stop it dead in its tracks is a choice for us to decide. We the People are all in this together. Perhaps the time has come to take our government and country back, returning this nation to what it once was, and to the greatness its potential once espoused.

The course of history changes many times, in many ways, taking many forms using many actors. One more fork in the road is upon us. Whether we choose the right path is up to us. Together, united as one, Americans of all colors, creeds, religions and ideologies can help defeat the greatest threat to ever attack this great nation. For our children, for their future and that of the entire planet we must act in unison. This is our greatest challenge, our biggest battle, where the collective future of humankind now rests. Unhindered the Leviathan will splurge on us, gorging on its exploitation of our existence, making itself more powerful, exerting tremendous hegemony over our lives. The Other Superpower must awaken. It must rise from its doldrums. We are the many, they the few. If Together we stand, then Together we will survive.

America’s Founding Fathers saw the gathering storms of tyranny and oppression fast approaching over the horizon, compelling them to write the powerful words below that declared a monumental Independence spawning an evolved and progressive form of human governance. Wanting to escape a corrosive and exploitative system, they bequeathed to their descendants a future devoid of the form of government they so abhorred. The question thus becomes: will we have the courage to act as they once did?e

Declaration of Independence

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature´s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

The Stupefaction of a Nation: Corporate Media Propaganda and its Weapons of Mass Distraction

Originally written in December 2003

For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility... They [American news] should be balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other…Telling people what they want to hear is not doing them any favours. It may not be comfortable to challenge governments or even popular opinion, but it is what we are here to do.

-- Greg Dyke, BBC director general on American news organizations coverage of the war in Iraq

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands... [Propaganda] must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect... The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses…[Propaganda] does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way …But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over….The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince… the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.

-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf


[Propaganda in this nation has never been more incessant than today. From the hundreds of lies, misrepresentations and deceits being told to us by both government and corporate media about battles, deaths, injuries, the resistance, security and the deteriorating state of the occupation of our quagmire in Iraq to the distortions and chicanery the Bush administration seemingly launches at us in wave after wave of lies to the purposeful distortion and omission by corporate media of the corrupt going-ons of the embarrassment and scandal that is the bordello called Congress, propaganda, it seems, has never been used so systematically and methodically. While the corporate Leviathan launches war against us its media merrily downplays or ignores its truth or consequences or our daily lives. With the growing power of the Leviathan becoming ever stronger, in essence becoming our government, we are witnessing propaganda, conditioning and manipulation on a scale never seen before. Our nation is being devastated by both government and business propaganda. As a result, we are being made brainless puppets attached to the willful strings of the powerful elite. What follows is an examination of this growing phenomenon and how it is affecting us all, our democracy and the direction this nation is headed in.]

He who controls the media controls the masses. Today, America’s media is controlled exclusively by fewer than a dozen multinational conglomerates and their many interests. NewsCorp, AOL, Viacom, General Electric, Disney and others have formed a media oligarch that reaches into every American home and most every citizen. These few omnipresent entities hold as paramount the belief in assuring for themselves perpetual loyalty from as many of the masses as possible. Revenue and profit, corporate growth and power, executive pay and ego, these are all determined by us, the masses, and helps explain why the oligarchy has decided to invest and take an interest in all forms of media that reaches and influences us.

We are the lifeblood of the conglomerate, of vital importance, and, as such, it is in its best interest to control as much of our lives as possible, transforming us into obedient servants of obliviousness. Is it no coincidence, then, that the United States has become a nation whose masses no longer question authority or the propaganda that passes for news? Is it any wonder why we seem so ignorant as to what is being done to us and incurious as to what is happening in the world, readily and naively accepting as true everything that is spewed out of our televisions and newspapers? We have allowed the oligarchy to hide the keys of democracy while we carelessly follow it on the road to fascism, where the elite have control of all aspects of our lives, including our mind.

We live at a time when capitalism’s inner demons are beginning to be exhumed from the catacombs of the human ego, when love for the almighty dollar and her sister greed blinds those basking in the hypnotizing light of greenbacks and materialism. This phenomenon, combined with the addictions spurred by power and pomposity, has created in the last several decades a need by the powerful elite to manipulate and condition the masses; to transform and mold us into subservient drones that neither think, question, participate or demand.

Through the use of the television – the most influential instrument of control and propaganda in present day America – conglomerates can direct and sway public opinion on virtually every subject they see fit. The television has become an opiate for the masses and a conduit from where conglomerates can dictate how society thinks, acts and evolves. Our habits and ethics are manipulated, our ideas and beliefs distorted. We are but pawns in a game of corporate capitalism played by a few elites whose economic interests lie in making us docile, conformist and oblivious creatures of mediocrity ingrained with the need to shop and consume. The system instills a sense of paralysis, isolation and uniformity among the masses. We are assimilated to conform to society, to incorporate how the oligarchy wants us to live. The derailment of democracy as we know it is the end result of the reality we are presently experiencing.

As captives to their propaganda, our ears become theirs, our mouths spout their distortions and our minds contemplate what they want us to believe. To the capitalist elites, we are but a product, hundreds of millions of worker bees addicted to televison, easily persuaded and exploited, wishing for the escapist fantasies we see, sold like shares of stock to other corporate entities interested in our existence, in our captive audience. They are the strings by which we move, the drill instructors by which we march and the brain by which we think.

Propaganda, both corporate and governmental, has seemingly exploded with the ever-increasing consolidation of the media. Today few interests own the majority of our nation’s airwaves, newspapers, Internet access, print media and television stations. One company can in essence control everything you hear, see and read on a daily basis, every year of your life. From coast to coast our sources of information are increasingly being sold to wealthy multinational corporations that more and more are mingling into our daily lives, transforming our beliefs, views and goals. American society is guided by them, evolving through the commands that help shape the direction opinion will take. Diversity of opinion and thought is disappearing faster than biodiversity on Earth.

There is nothing more ominous than peering into the not-to-distant future and seeing Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp – one of the world’s largest media companies and owner of the Fox network (We distort, We decide) – have majority ownership of DirecTV, the nation’s largest home satellite TV company that in many ways represents the future of entertainment and information delivery. If the deal is allowed to go through NewsCorp could incessantly shove down our throats its right-wing, pro-Bush, pro-Murdoch business propaganda while shutting off truthful and diverse sources of information. With Bush’s FCC enamored with consolidation it is a good bet that the deal will go through.

Guided by measly crumbs of ten-second news flashes, in paltry thirty-minute news capsules loaded with a potpourri of deceptions and distortions, the masses are subjected to a blitzkrieg-like summary of that news which the elites deem necessary to serving their own interests. These drops of news and information we are granted are designed to quench the already conditioned low level of curiosity among the masses. These morsels have no intellectual worth, no capacity to inform and act more to exacerbate ignorance than to educate. What tidbits of news are allowed to fester are an amalgam of contorted half-truths, cheerleading subjective diatribe and porous reporting that is biased in favor of those conglomerates that employ the reporter. This assures that the decisions and interests of the wealthy and powerful are maintained and accepted by the masses.

What information does not serve the oligarch interest is either suppressed by omission or attacked. Government and corporate interests, such as those prevalent in our occupation of Iraq, prevent realities and truths from surfacing. Instead, propaganda is disseminated that will distort and manipulate the masses into believing exactly what those in power want. Corporate media caters to military interests because in many instances they are part of the military industrial complex. Simply look at General Electric, one of the world’s largest military contractors and owner of NBC and its sister stations. Helping manipulate the masses in time of war allows both the corporate media and the government advance their respective interest in subverting public participation and discourse while advancing a perception of consent around the nation. Forming a symbiotic relationship, both now fused into the same two headed beast, one the master of the other, their combined actions undermine the reality of a world not seen by the American public.

Corporate media, an extension of its mother company, reports pro-business, pro-corporate and anti-labor positions on a constant basis. News bits lean towards those interests that will help the corporation achieve its goals of profit maximization, whether from pushing conservative, right-wing views onto a gullible public or from conditioning audiences towards those views it sees as paramount in securing allegiance. News reports are created not to be right but to have the highest ratings, which in turn means greater profit. The interests of the masses are ignored and exchanged for that debate which will fit the interests of the elite minority. Today, growing reports of an economic recovery linger on the evening news, but can we see it in our lives and in that of our friends and neighbors? No, but good economic news benefits the elite who depend on your wallets to fatten up theirs.

Many low and middle-class citizens, through propaganda, manipulation and constant bombardment by incessant repetition of sound-bite slogans and visual imagery end up supporting those interests that are contrary to their own socioeconomic well-being. These people have in essence been brainwashed into believing that by assenting to the will and opinion of the elite their lives will be made better. Unfortunately for them, their lives are made worse as the continued exploitation and subjugation of their class continues by the same entities they so fervently believe in. This is a system where the powerful few command the weak majority and where the most important decisions are made to the benefit of the elite at the detriment of the rest.

Manipulation of the masses has been made easy with the advent of television. Populations, many made ignorant by pervasive and purposeful determents of education (itself a different article altogether), naturally believe and blindly place their confidence in those "trusted" entities they watch on a daily basis. Television is made an all-comforting apparatus as we warmly welcome home the many celebrities we become enraptured with, each manifesting inside us our desire to partake in the small fictional fantasy world they inhabit. We become numb to reality and its consequences, failing to analyze and question the actual world we reside in due to conditioning we have undergone since early childhood.

Over time we become robots incapable of discerning or even seeking the truth in the news that is provided us. We have been stupefied into believing the garbage blasted from the monitor. We have been trained to never question, always accept and to always flip the remote when our attention runs dry. News is decided on the basis of ratings and on the advertisers paying for commercial spots. Corporate media is but a business where profit is king and where the seeking of customers – other corporations buying ad space – is of primary importance. We are but a means to an end, mere statistics in the earnings game. Shows are designed not for our enjoyment but to attract and retain as many souls as possible from which to harvest revenue from advertisements and product consumption.

The corporate media inundates us with promotion, news, gossip, tabloid, rumor and innuendo from those celebrities placed high above the pedestal of sanctimony. Our heroes’ daily lives, loves, mistakes and exploits are absorbed into our psyches through the constancy of corporate media’s assault on our brainwaves. Hollywood-hero news is designed to distract us from real world events such as war and recession, keeping our minds pre-occupied and away from information that might wake our slumbering conscious. While showcasing for our viewing pleasure the present tribulations of our halo-anointed superstars of the moment, so-called journalists dissect, analyze and comment about hairstyles, appearance and supposed crimes with award winning passion. Yet real, pertinent and important news is given minor and oftentimes erroneous insight. Throughout the channel-horizon we see the same news, headlines and marketing package. The oligarch’s WMDs have been unlocked; weapons of mass distraction fester like noxious gases in every state, city and home.

Repetitive sound-bites, facetious imagery, verbosity and one-sided and frivolous analysis and commentary by pundits, spinsters, newscasters and recycled "experts" is a daily and rampant occurrence on corporate channels, each spitting out talking points and the company lines and opinion, never forcing the viewer to actually think for herself. Relevant news is brushed aside in seconds so that the latest up-to- the-second news on "Wacko Jacko" is aired. Stories that have no relevance other than to stupefy a nation into ignorance are played and replayed, trumping that news that affects most people. We are witnesses to a form of propaganda that is transforming this nation from a once bright-shining pulsar of informed democracy into a dark nebula of nothingness where everything that matters is neglected and all that degenerates and indoctrinates prospers.

Without an informed and participatory citizenry democracy begins to stumble. Our government is being taken over by the corporate Leviathan and we are indifferent as to its consequences. Crony capitalism is affecting tens of millions through lower wages, layoffs, longer hours, lost savings, tax burdens, lack of health care, increased pollution, perpetual warfare, electoral fraud and the gradual elimination of social services. Yet we remain passive and loyal, ignorant to the Leviathan’s war against us. The oligarchy uses its powers of manipulation to divide and alienate us from each other. The divisive and passionate topics of class, race, culture, religion, party affiliation, immigration and education are constantly hammered into our collective mind, announcing as real myths and stereotypes, classifying peoples into groups and imputing on them the necessary ingredients by which society will marginalize and disdain them. We are told our way of life is in peril, that we must vote against our interests in order to preserve that which we most cherish. As usual, fear is used to attain the Leviathan’s interests. A united society is a threat to the establishment, which is why we are separated and corralled into distinct clusters, conditioned to segregate ourselves from those deemed different and to fear those labeled a threat to our existence.

In its never-ending campaign to control us, corporate media instills fear into our daily lives. It has found a gold mine with the war on terror, becoming yet another fear-mongering profiteer and looter of the American public. Abusing our still fragile memories of 9/11, the corporate media unleashes the vast array of products it manufacturers onto us, using fear as its principle marketing tool, hurling diatribes about our supposed imminent threats looming in every city. Consume, consume, consume the Leviathan commands, knowing full well that our fear will eventually succumb to their perpetual warnings of apocalyptic zeal.

America has become a nation of obedient drones, aimlessly walking empty streets devoid of an informed and participatory population. Our nation is being pillaged in front of our eyes, the government is now in the hands of our masters. Apathetic puppets we have become, free thinking minds we have none. The light that once shined so bright has disappeared in a fictional world of fright. The elite that pull our strings are becoming stronger, objective information is disappearing. The powerful few now control the nation’s media and its ideas, and soon our free will and freedom to think as well. Democracy is disappearing, the Leviathan is swallowing us whole little by little, assuring itself of allegiance from a people who once questioned, were once curious and who once had control of this great nation.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

The System: Capitalism and its Role in American Society’s Plunge into the Abyss. Part I

Breaths of Freedom

For one brief moment of life, when light enters our eyes for the very first time, we can claim to be the embodiment of innocence and human goodness, the essence of human perfection. It is also the only moment in our lives we can claim to be free.

In birth awakens the wonderment of humanity, the hope of civilization and the positive energy of our future. In birth are we all born unclothed, unmarked and uncorrupted, and, for at least a second, engendered with the same promises of ability and opportunity theoretically endowed to us all. The promise of a new tomorrow lives in the curious smile and ever-innocent eyes of tiny humans born in the today.

At birth new life has breathed freely for the first time, no longer attached to the love and nutrition of a mother. With the severing of the umbilical chord a virgin child becomes an entity upon the world, individual and independent, resplendent in energy and captivating in perfection. The promise of a new day is captured in the beauty of new life. At no other moment is the greatness of humankind magnified so bright, flashing before the world the vast potential of Man, the end result of our existence at its most perfect moment of splendor. The awakening of hope is displayed by the opening of eyes seeing the world for the very first time.

The fusing together of man and woman, at our moment of pure animal instinct and brilliant human union transcends society’s demons to form an intertwined tango of symphonious attachment that spawns the continuation of the human species. For millions of years we have procreated, spreading our seed to all corners of the only home we know, hoping to improve on the gains of previous generations, hoping to make better the lives of our future civilization.

At birth the radiance of freedom is exhibited by the first gasp for air a newborn takes. It is at that moment that the human condition is at its most free, before the constraints of society are enabled or the corrosive tentacles of the caste one is born into are put in motion. It is at that moment that humanity is nearest perfection, combining innocence and goodness before the evils of civilization are thrust upon newborn life.

With the first few breaths a newborn’s freedom will be proclaimed to the world, before American society begins to submerge yet another victim into the cesspool of capitalistic exploitation that, from cradle to grave, enslaves a citizen and defines his or her existence. It is the minor escape from our capitalistic destiny, manifested in the form of our first gasps for oxygen that is the purest form of freedom, allowing us to hope that a better world is indeed possible.

Yet these moments of true freedom are measured in seconds, for the human condition called capitalism descends like an invisible spirit to lay claim to incarnations of purity and hope. From the near moment of birth, you see, mechanisms in American society entrap our most precious creations, enveloping them with razor sharp claws that both blind and scar on a long, arduous journey through time and space.

Realities begin to emerge that even immediately after our birth we are destined to be unequal in future, destiny and opportunity. The unbridled potential might be the same for two newborns born to different mothers, yet American society, in its present capitalistic form, assures that for the coming decades two similar children possessing the same abilities and talents will in most likelihood diverge into polar opposites. The American caste system assures us of this most troublesome truth.

Survival of the fittest has ceased to exist in human civilization. Our concrete jungles function using an entirely different set of rules than those of nature. Today, fates are determined based on survival of the richest, the luckiest and the less exploited, on the collective successes or failures of family and ancestors, the prosperous or deprived conditions of the environment we live in and on the genetic and ethnic predisposition of a newborn that labels and stereotypes during the course of an entire lifetime.

The system that has been created at the hands of capitalism is altering our society for the worse. It is a system whose inherent goal is the exploitation of the masses for the benefit of the few. They system is robbing us of our individuality, our happiness and freedom. An evolved form of enslavement is its end result, packaged and marketed as an enlightened instrument of human evolution. In reality, however, it is transforming our lives for the worst, sending us spiraling backwards in time to the days of feudalism and enslavement. The system is at work.
Our society is not what we think it to be, it remains hidden in a charade of smoking mirrors. Reality is being concealed, the fiction espoused, and our eyes have been made blind to the truth of our existence and the existence of the lie we continue to live.

Evolution in Time and Space

Human civilization has escaped the laws of nature but the laws of nature have yet to escape us. Implanted in us remain the many vestiges of our animal selves, deeply entrenched in both our psyches and the human condition. Modern man we might claim to be, yet the reality of our existence differs to the contrary. We are made to believe that our species has evolved past the primitiveness of our ancestors and that sophisticated beings we have become. Evolution, however, does not listen to the self-aggrandizing diatribes of our delusional selves. On the contrary, it plays under its own laws, no matter what the rulers of the planet do or think. We can control most everything on this planet, except our own mental, psychological and physical evolution.

In a planet billions of years old, human existence is but a mere hiccup in the life of Earth. Encompassing a split second in the twenty-four hour time-clock of Earth’s long history, human habitation in this home of ours is infinitesimal, insignificant really. A few million years of ape-like appearance and intelligence living in Africa was followed by a few hundred thousand years of tribal meandering of the planet. It has only been the last 10,000 years, out of a few million of human existence that has encompassed what we know today as civilization.

During this long journey of human life, we have become the rulers of the planet, slowly transforming a once pristine land into our scarred home. We have left behind nature for the cities. We have forgotten where we come from, not understanding who and what we really are.
Instead, we have created our own set of rules living in artificial environments of concrete jungles and steel-glass canyons. A species that for millions of years thrived in and according to nature has in the last 10,000 years planted itself in our new ecosystem: the city. Nature has become but a distant memory to the human condition, taken for granted and exploited for our own purposes.

As such, society’s understanding of the human condition has ceased to exist, becoming an island onto itself, absorbed in self-adulation and pompous coronation, claiming superiority to all living things. Yet in arrogant delusion our animal selves remain, no matter how mighty we make ourselves out to be, no matter what our religions and leaders say. We are the ape of yesteryear and the mammal that no matter how hard it tries, cannot escape its reality.

Evolution on Earth does not transpire at the same level as our fast paced world of today. Indeed, organisms evolve in epochs, over tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. Evolution is not a quick fix approach to solving an organism’s problems. Meticulous and protracted, the evolution of a species, both physically and mentally, cannot be achieved in centuries or decades. As much as we would like to believe, the human condition is not beyond the animal world it has – when compared to the long history of the planet – only recently escaped.

Many of our behaviors and emotions remain the same today as they were millennia ago. The only thing that has changed is civilization, technology, our vast numbers and the understanding of the world that surrounds us. Only now, through evolutionary psychology, are we beginning to understand who and what we are, our behavior and our animal selves. Human evolution has not changed much in hundreds of thousands of years. Our brain size has not shifted, our physical selves remain the same. Animal instincts and behaviors, societies and psychology, hierarchies and necessities have remained stable for a very long time. Our animal urges and needs have not deviated much since we became discernible human beings, capable of thought and advanced intelligence.

It can be argued that our civilization, society and technologies have superceded our capacity to evolve alongside them. In our quest to advance the cause of humankind we forgot that evolution does not work as fast as we would like. We would need to allow mankind’s evolution hundreds of thousands of years in order to catch up to today’s civilization, society and technologies. Sadly, we are seeing the effects of this failure in our most advanced societies.

Today’s world moves at the speed of light, bombarding us with a hydra of stimuli and environments humans had up to now never been confronted with before. Our civilization is advancing at breakneck speed, surpassing our psychological ability to keep up. Our psychology has not evolved for hundreds of thousands of years; we remain what we think ourselves not to be.

Never has the human mind and body been subjected to the kinds of stresses and stimuli we face on an hourly basis thanks to our society. Take, for example, the imposition of the television into our lives. It is now being found that television might be one of the leading contributing factors in attention deficit disorder in children. Scientists have found a direct correlation between television watching in toddlers up to two years old and increased propensities towards ADD. Why is this so? It turns out that television presents the young and developing brain with rapid successions of stimuli, bombarding the mind with a plethora of images, sounds and movement that affects the developing processes of the brain.

Never before had the developing human brain been subjected to something remotely close to the television, and today we can see the effects of this technology on our children. Evolution has not caught up to our ever sophisticated technologies and ever-stressful civilization. We have changed the rules of the human condition without fully understanding its ramifications on us. The consequences of our actions are beginning to be felt the more we understand who and what we truly are and the more we subject ourselves and our children to mechanisms our evolution cannot keep up with.

The degrading effects of our capitalistic society, with its stresses, frustrations and exploitations, are thus having a tremendous effect on the human condition, especially in brain development, psychology and physical disease.

The Caste System

Social classes have always existed in human societies, yet to accurately portray what has occurred in America over the last 200 years, a much more realistic term must be borrowed from other societies.

The caste system, a much more accurate semantic exploration into our reality, has been unleashed onto our collective experiences, helping to seal our fates and cement our futures through the immovable concrete barriers of our present capitalistic society. Through castes we are defined, living our role in the exploitative society we inhabit. Mechanisms at work help keep us in place, from cradle to grave, subjecting us to the consequences of our birth and the socioeconomic conditions of our parents and grandparents.

American society has in many instances become a nation of castes, much like those in India, though less transparent. Capitalism has separated the haves from the have nots, the lucky from the condemned and the perpetually wealthy from the eternally indigent. The castes we are born into as a result of the life circumstances of our parents and ancestors helps determine the order we will take in the hierarchical chain of exploitation. Few are born lucky; most are born with tremendous obstacles at their feet. These barriers, placed by capitalism and its society onto much of the citizenry, make it almost impossible for the masses to ever escape the chains of bondage clenching their bodies.

Other factors such as the macabre effects of slavery and the introduction of immigrants have also led to the establishment of castes. Slavery set back the black population 200 years, sending its society into the perpetual abyss of enslavement. While many in the white population enjoyed the fruits of free labor, enriching themselves and their progeny for generations to come, blacks became pack mules, not even considered full human beings. Many white companies flourished thanks to slavery, building themselves into prominence riding on the backs of generations of slaves.

When blacks were made free they had to overcome barriers of discrimination, racism, poverty, lack of education and integration into an already established white society. In essence, millions of blacks had to start from scratch, and only in the last decade are the fruits of their struggle starting to filter in a still mostly white society. Poverty has kept the black community down, destined to never eclipse the glass ceiling placed at its head, banished to reservations called ghettos and urban jungles from which there is no escape, no employment and no education.
Whites arrived in America and were allowed to build up a society that evolved for centuries. They were allowed, through the passage of time, to makes mistakes and exploit land and labor. White society took possession of all the lands of the indigenous populations, enriching itself through the mechanisms of free land, free labor and free society, itself free of racism, discrimination and those hindrances that constantly push back black advancements. Blacks have only tasted so-called freedom for 140 years, though they still struggle to escape the caste the effects of slavery has had on them.

Unable to escape their urban reservations, the masses in the black community seem condemned to the caste thrust upon them by the years of subjugation, oppression and exploitation at the hands of the white majority. Without adequate and equal education, access to a semblance of fulfilling jobs, equality in standards of living and the unhindered right to escape their perpetual chains those living in urban squalor will be unable to call freedom into their lives. Equal access to American society, free of the many barriers that have historically been used to curtail assimilation is needed for blacks to say they are on equal footing with their white counterparts.

The above example of the black caste is but one of many that grip American society. The convergence of a child’s family income level with the dastardly quality of education combined with corrosive environmental factors associated with lower castes help create exploitable slaves, gushing out of the conveyor belt of capitalistic opportunism, that are purposefully oppressed for purposes of transforming blue-eyed babies into blue collar workers.

When education is dismal and blatantly unequal in many parts of the country, completely different than those of rich neighborhoods, a child’s future becomes his worst nightmare, but a capitalist’s dream come true. While many children enjoying the great schooling wealth provides will go on to higher education, trained to become the exploiters and oppressors of the lower castes, those clustered with the masses will be squeezed of once vibrant energies, their hopes and dreams squashed through the corrosive cancers of negligent and appalling levels of education. It is these many that will in most likelihood become the slaves of the past and the automatons of the future, exploited for their energy and labor, subjugated by capitalists to continue the vicious cycle of exploitation passed down from generation to generation.

In the wealthiest nation on the face of the planet a seemingly sinister mechanism is at play. It is the vastly different levels of education afforded to our children. Based on where a child lives and on the socioeconomic status of her family, her education will in large measure determine her future. If it wasn’t so obvious, one could argue that what is taking place is the deliberate dumbing down of schools through financial and moral bankruptcy for purposes of making worker bees out of vast segments of the population.

Those in power know that education equals liberation, that knowledge is power. Yet they also know that in order to continue expanding their wealth and power, the masses need to become the exploitable entities that have historically enriched the capitalists’ ancestors. They know that in order to achieve this, the masses must be subjugated and controlled, kept under ball and chain, never being allowed to escape the grip of indigence or the ignorance of enslavement. It is for this reason that the sorry state of education is today nothing but a sinister ploy to oppress and dominate the masses. The calculated dumbing down of education continues the downward spiral of the masses. It keeps us from advancing, from prospering and from knowing what is being done to us and our children.

This vicious circle of exploitation begins at birth and continues into childhood, conditioning the mind and the body for the eventual enslavement of human energy. As adults, our energy drained of hope and dreams, we seem to accept our fates as the slave of the few elite capitalists. Years of conditioning breaks our back as the figurative whips lashing our bodies take its demoralizing toll. From cradle to grave, the caste system prospering thanks to capitalism is succeeding in making us the disposable pack mules of the elite. And through our submissive acquiescence to this feudal apparatus of personal destruction we allow it to continue, to be passed down to our progeny as the system gains momentum, energy and power. With each passing year the system grows, becoming an unstoppable monolithic entity whose life is enhanced through the absorption of our energy and spirit.

Capitalism has made the system perverse and eviscerating. At our and our progeny’s expense the system grows, mutating in power, enhancing the wealth of the few elite, making us exploitable and easily replaceable slaves. After all, an entire assembly line of workers continues to be procreated, slowly programmed through years of environmental conditioning to accept their fates as the machines, mules and eventual slaves of our corporate and capitalistic masters.

The evils inherent in our capitalistic society make it so. The inescapable conundrum hundreds of millions find themselves trapped in is the ultimate devastator of lives, condemning before birth, conditioning during childhood and exploiting for life. The system is at work, forming castes and ruining lives, making us believe in the virtue of an American Dream that has over the years turned into our nightmare.


Originally Posted April 2004

The System: Capitalism and its Role in American Society’s Plunge into the Abyss, Part II of III.

The American Nightmare


Social classes are today an illusion designed to create the impression that upward mobility, even in this age of capitalistic exploitation, can be easily achieved. The American Dream is one such instrument of deception that, while at one time a functioning reality, now assures those who exploit of the hard and ceaseless work of those seeking to escape their lifetime subjugation. For decades the utopian idea of the American Dream has captivated the masses. Indeed, it is the psychological cog that runs the American capitalistic engine, making hundreds of millions nothing more than obedient producers and consumers whose enslavement is the backbone of the effervescent and continually expanding economy.

The American Dream is the slogan to strive for, the mantra to hum in our misconceived perception of upward mobility even as we delve further into our predetermined caste. It is our battle hymn as we march merrily to work, eager to jump into the next stage of our caste-filled lives. The Dream, implanted from birth through television and culture, has become ingrained in our hypnotized minds as we seek to emulate the perfection we see on the screen. We have become Pavlovian dogs drooling at the fiction we think is within our grasp. Yet the fantasy we desperately crave and the reality we want to escape are mutually exclusive, never attaining the former and never evading the latter.

The American Dream is the nightmare we cannot seem to wake up from; it is the mirage that grips us until death. In its potential most everyone has been made to believe in; in its promise our minds seem to dwell, unable to escape the wonderment of its hollow assurances. Espoused as the greatness of the American nation, the Dream is but a vacant fantasy for hundreds of millions that cannot, and unfortunately will not ever escape the destiny of their creation nor the predicament of their environments.

Perfected over the last century, the Dream is but that most perfect marketing tool designed to capture those who seek better lives. Espousing the greatness of escaping the caste we have been born into, inculcating into our minds the benefits of a better life, it dictates that our lives become the stress-inducing calling of a drill sergeant. It dictates that we become marching grunts and soldier ants, never ceasing in our commitment to work tirelessly for ourselves, the state and especially the capitalists enriching themselves through their exploitation of our energies and at the expense of our lives and happiness.

By exploiting our emotions, fantasies and dreams, not to mention the greed and materialism capitalism unearths in our minds, the purveyors of the Dream foster in us a sense that what we see is attainable and what we were born into escapable. Like black widows capitalists and exploiters wait for us to become trapped in the web of lies they market, only then striking us down with their venomous poison running through our veins. Our primitive wants and needs become the tools the capitalists use in pushing us towards greater productivity and consumption. We are pursuing that most noble of American institutions, we are told. The American Dream is within our grasp, if only we work harder and consumer more.

The American Dream furthers the enslavement of the poor and working class, entrapping them further into the bowels of exploitation. It advances the enrichment of the oligarchs and capitalists, allowing them increased production through lower wages. Belief in the Dream pushes us toward commitments of greater working hours and harder sacrifice. It fosters the abandonment of individuality and happiness, forcing us to choose our jobs over our lives, our career over our family. But, we are told, if we sacrifice long enough, if we work hard enough, if we give our last breath of air and our last vestige of energy we will move up in the hierarchy, only to realize after years of servitude the futility of it all and the untenable fiction we were led to believe.

In the end we become aware that the Dream has become the nightmare, that our energy has been drained, not for our pleasure and happiness, but for the bulging pockets of the capitalist exploiters. Before we realize where time has taken us, the vigor of youth has given way to the frailty of age and the wisdom of experience opens our eyes to the enslavement we have lived in for dozens of years.

Through the years our masters treat us like the slaves we have become, discarded unappreciated and expendable. If we do not cater to the capitalist demands an entire assembly line of worker ants eagerly awaits to take our place. To our capitalist masters, we are nothing but entities without human emotions or feelings, without lives and families, robotic automatons waiting for the final guillotine to end our working days. They shed not a tear when our Dream becomes a nightmare. We have become complacent and submissive thanks to the tortured lashings of a life working excessive hours, sacrificing our greater good for that of the capitalists, dominated by frustrations and the ever-present demon of exploitation extending its many tentacles over our feudal lives.

Society has deemed it so, for capitalism needs exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, master and slave. The divergence of polar opposites gives capitalism its nectar and nourishment to continue the vicious circle of perpetually unhindered inequality that keeps the difference between poverty and wealth from ever disappearing from our conscious. Capitalism breathes, lives and thrives through the creation of the pyramid of exploitation, where the few at the top enrich themselves at the expense of the many at the bottom. The charade called the American Dream is the illusion needed to continue our exploitation.

After our first few gasps of air our freedom is relinquished and the assembly line of slaves welcomes in a new energy. Those born in wealth and power go on to become the future exploiters of the lower castes, becoming masters destined to rule those born into the lower strata of society. Those born to be exploitable entities, on the other hand, must suffer the consequences of a society that in their childhood prepares them for enslavement, indigence and inequality. This is the reality of the American Dream, a cruel fiction espousing wealth, mobility and happiness but offering only lies, torture and subjugation.

We are born, luckily or not, into a series of castes, from those untouchables at the bottom to those of privilege at the top, each determining our role in a capitalistic society that engulfs our every inhalation of oxygen and assures that the vast majority will forever be relegated to the chains of enslavement. Thus the necessity of the Dream, of the idea of upward mobility that very few get to ever experience. As long as the fiction of the Dream lives in the hearts and minds of Man, the nightmare will be shielded from ever seeing light. As long as the fantasy that is the Dream lives it will envelope society, making us blind to the dungeons of our workplace and deaf to the shackles dragging behind our feet.

Through the brainwashing of our minds the illusion of what we believe we are is enforced, yet the reality of our circumstance contradicts our dreams and lives. In the end the dream we believe to be living disappears with the awakening of our long slumber of escapism. By then, however, age has overtaken us, our bodies are now fragile and the sands of time have claimed the vivacity of youth as the pulsating energy we once possessed has been usurped by our capitalist masters.


The Drill Sergeant Syndrome


It is only natural that a society enamored with violence, its military and the wars, death and destruction it spawns would ultimately espouse a drill sergeant mentality in the functioning mechanisms of daily life. With capitalism acting as drill instructor, shouting commands and demanding obedience from it hundreds of millions of grunts, American society has been conditioned to function in an unsustainable, fast-paced lifestyle that is giving rise to a myriad of psychological, emotional and physical problems amongst the citizenry.

The purposeful manipulation of an entire society in order to make it perform at exceeding levels of rapidity has in the last few decades produced the world’s most powerful economy. Yet hidden in dark closets of silence are the ramifications of embarking on such a fast-paced excursion. At the sacrifice of people’s lives the economy thrives, and to a greater extent the capitalists that run it, having created an engine run on human blood, sweat and tears.

This smooth running machine depends on an exaggerated level of production and consumption that has affected the poor and working classes in severe ways. From birth the masses are conditioned that in order to partake in American society, one must sacrifice life, energy and happiness by joining a non-stop, rapid-paced, never resting, unchallenged and unquestioned way of life. With capitalism yelling commands and exerting control over our minds and lives, we grow up knowing only that which has been implanted into our thoughts by a society that has lost all attention span and curiosity, having been trained to think in terms of fifteen second sound bites, flashing visual imagery, channel surfing and Hollywood endings.

Through television children are blitzkrieged and inundated with stimuli that causes drastic changes in our developing primate brain. Images bombard the mind, fiction moves at the speed of sound, and in the sponge-like capacity of the child’s brain a sense emerges that real life is a consequence of the fantasy being watched. The Dream produced on television thus transcends the screen and becomes a compartmentalized image of reality in the young and innocent brain.

As children turn into working adults, the conditioning already deeply entrenched, the idea of a fast-paced, breakneck speed way-of-life becomes second nature. The transformation of innocent child to subservient and unknowing slave has commenced. The robbing of mind and individual thought has been achieved after years of constant propaganda bombardment. With television and society shouting instructions those graduating into the real world become automaton robots whose fluid movements resonate the guiding principles of factory machines. The time to enrich our masters has arrived; the time to become subservient workers is upon us.

Yet what our masters do not want us to know is that with our ever-growing productive lifetimes still more working days can be engendered from our trapped energies. Living more and more each decade, our productivity continues to increase as we remain in the labor market for a protracted number of years. This only benefits the greed-mongering capitalists that squeeze every last ounce of energy from our bodies, milking us for everything we’ve got. Yet if 60 is the new 40, shouldn’t 30 be the new 20? Our working lifetime formula still retains the ingredients of those created 30 years ago, when those aged 60 were considered old and those aged 20 were seen as being in the prime of their working lives. Why when we are living so long today are we still under command of those beliefs of yesterday?

America’s drill sergeant syndrome pushes us straight into the workforce. No time is given to see the world or understand its complexities. No permission is granted to pursue a voyage of self-discover or to take advantage of the vivacity of youth to embark on a most monumental and necessary expedition. Instead, society calls us to arms, pointing us down the road of marching ants and worker bees, automatons and slaves. Drill sergeant syndrome commands us to work, oftentimes for the remainder of our still-energized lives. And so we abandon the world of the unexplored for the world of the slave.

Waking up in the morning, our switches turned on, we robotically perform our daily routines. The engine begins heating up, programmed to never question the reason behind its actions nor the inherent struggle to fight our conditioned minds. As we leave our front doors and garages, escaping the feudal cookie cutter homes we have been provided, we enter the ever-clogged arteries of the capitalistic beast. Rush hour is upon us. Our fast-paced life has been recycled for yet another day. The drill sergeant syndrome once more rises over the horizon like a hypnotizing beam to guide us on our way.

Bumper to bumper, we are forced to endure a river of congestion, breathing in contaminated carbon emissions emanating from the highway saturated with vehicles. Oxygen has been replaced by poison; frustration and stress fill the air. These known carcinogens and catalysts to disease rising from the exhausts of our gas guzzling contraptions are diminishing our years. The stresses of the morning contribute to the lowering of our immune systems, the advanced aging of our bodies and the deteriorating condition of our minds. One and two hour commutes are the rule, not the exception, to be methodically endured morning and evening. We are sacrificing our lives for the benefit of our capitalist masters, sacrificing our precious time on Earth for their profits, power and wealth.

The drill sergeant syndrome affects us every second of every day. With capitalism calling forth commands from its minaret called society, we rush through our daily lives, working non-stop, shedding sweat, tears and blood for the meager wages we receive. Rushing to work, wolfing down disease-ridden fast food, sacrificing family, children, happiness and love for the benefits of our fast-paced society, we are meddling with a human evolution that has not had time to adapt to its changing circumstances. Our psychology cannot handle the speed of our existence, the stress of our experiences or the emotions of our frustrations. As such, the cycle of perpetuating anger and frustration keeps rolling down the mountain of capitalism like an exponentially growing snowball.

Ours has become a society in which time is of the essence, where to simply waste time is frowned upon. As a result, we are filling our bodies with ever abundant supplies of fast-food that are making America the most obese people the world has ever witnessed. Our reluctance to slow down from the always-on-the-move mentality has deviated us away from healthy, though time-consuming nutrition. Our inability to stop and breath is condemning our children to premature disease and prolonged obesity. The vicious cycle of velocity is being imputed onto them as they learn our behaviors.

At no other time in human history has a people consumed so much fattening food. Our bodies have not had time to evolve to this growing phenomenon, nor to the sedentary circumstances of our society where the car has supplanted our legs. Children have never been subjected to such unhealthy meals, and this results from our preoccupation with time, with moving at the speed of light, thereby ignoring our kids’ emotions, health and developing psychology.

The drill sergeant syndrome is transforming our minds and bodies. Living to work and not working to live has become our slogan. The concept of “mañana” (tomorrow) espoused by Mediterranean and Latin American societies that reduces the levels of stress and increases the attention to children is being ignored in America. Looked upon unfavorably by those entities brainwashing us clean, the concept demands a more relaxed lifestyle, devoted to happiness and life, not work and money.

Mañana entails the principle that everything will eventually get done, if not today then certainly tomorrow, that stress is corrosive and that life is to be enjoyed, not abandoned. Ignored in America due to the fact that production, time and work are not maximized or that the belief in not wasting time is not espoused, mañana is marginalized as a method of the lazy, the uninterested and the uninspired. Yet it is those cultures living its philosophy, not America, that can claim to live less stressful and healthier lives, warmer and relaxing societies, and increased levels of happiness.

Drill Sergeant Syndrome is slowly sending American society plunging down into the abyss. Our “Move it! Move it! Move it!” way of life, combined with the “Now! Now! Now!” mentality is altering the capacity of our slow evolving brains to deal with new environmental stresses. We must remember, this Syndrome is rather new, encompassing the last fifty years out of the several hundred thousand of homo sapien’s existence. Our dynamics are shifting, our bodies and minds are not evolving to increased stresses, pressures and environmental factors and the road to the abyss is getting much closer than we are ready to acknowledge.

The human condition demands that we corrupt our future through the sins of the past. It demands that the unstoppable momentum of the human snowball continues on its precipitous sojourn downward, granting the inheritance of all things wrong to those who through no fault of their own are burdened by the massive and ever-accumulating weight of preceding generations.

The drill sergeant syndrome and American nightmare that envelope our society are growing, not diminishing, becoming omnipresent and all-encompassing, capturing our lives and our essence, and entrapping our past and ensnarling our future. American society has been hijacked by capitalism, benefiting only the few at the top looking down at the decrepit view of a people controlled more and more in body, mind and spirit. We are being lied to, deceived and manipulated. The essence of our human existence is being occupied and oppressed by those trying to make automatons of the American public. American happiness is dissipating, giving rise to growing frustrations and resentments, remedied by the vast array of mind-altering drugs our masters kindly provide us so we can forget the reality of our existence and the defecation onto our lives.

The nebula hovering above our minds is slowly drowning us into the deep trenches of the abyss. Whether we swim back up and once more gasp the sweet, crisp air of freedom is entirely up to us.

Originally Posted April 2004

The System: Capitalism and its Role in American Society’s Plunge into the Abyss. Part III

The Poisonous Tentacles of Capitalism


A living poison embedded inside us fills our lungs and brains, clogging our lifestyles and rendering us unable to stop its progression through our impotent minds. We have been contaminated by the demons of capitalism, and throughout our existence its permutations seep out of our porous bodies to wreak havoc on our lives and those of our loved ones. Unable to excrete it from our lives, the poison grows over time, from our childhood until death, making us feeble creatures under control of the tentacles of capitalism. We seem powerless to stop its thriving energy inside us, allowing it to command and control, influence and exploit. The mighty tentacles have us wrapped in their powerful grip, sapping away our verve and plunging us down further into the dark abyss.

Living in the most prosperous nation in the history of the world has made us immune to the troubles afflicting billions of human beings around the globe. Our lands, from Pacific to Atlantic Oceans, have for too long been immersed in the apathetic trivialities and ingrained ignorance engendered by our nation’s excessiveness, lavish wealth, comforts and capitalistic philosophies. America’s superfluous lifestyle has flourished while that of the developing nations we exploit and plunder diminishes. As a result, we have become detached from a planet that is on the retreat, mostly due to our voracious appetite for land and labor exploitation.

A plague of locusts we have become, devouring Earth’s natural resources, polluting its air and exploiting its human inhabitants. Our appetite for material goods is insatiable, our quench for property and possessions suicidal. The fault, however, lays not at our feet but at a capitalistic society that conditions, almost from birth, the dogma of perpetual consumption. For no reason we shop, for no purpose we purchase. American society has been programmed to work ceaseless hours only to spend and return our wages to our corporate masters.

A materialistic society like ours thrives on the consumption patterns of its citizenry. When we give back our wages the economy prospers, when we hold back it flounders. Witness the months after 9/11 when our own government pleaded for us to return to our consumerist, materialistic ways. Make no mistake, our conditioned minds will, at the drop of a hat, sound of a jingle and view of a fictional perfection impulsively and seemingly without analysis or logic consume for products that make no sense owning.

Ours is a society that feeds off our consumerist tendencies, giving rise to an exploitation of our wallets and our insatiable hunger to riddle ourselves deeper into debt. Credit cards give the misguided psychological impression that a purchase does not cost money, since no cash transaction takes place, thereby becoming the greatest ploy creditors have ever invented to exploit less sophisticated shoppers. As a result, Americans are bombarded with credit cards, making the US a nation up to its nose in personal debt.

Yet when society compels us to consume, debt is but an afterthought to fulfilling our materialistic dreams. Unfortunately, our nirvana is born in sin as billions of world citizens, enslaved and exploited in labor, environment and wages, produce the products we most want, sold to us cheaply and conveniently. It is their counties’ lands, also, that are exploited as their forests, jungles, waterways, fauna and air are eviscerated at our expense. The tentacles of capitalism indeed ensnarl the world as well as America.
The poisonous tentacles of capitalism absorb themselves into the caste system, creating ever-worsening levels of inequality and as a result becoming a purveyor of crime. Millions of low-wage laborers are born thanks to the purposeful inequality in education that is despicable at best and criminal at worst. Schools are poorly financed in poor neighborhoods, offering appalling resources and levels of education, thereby exacerbating poverty as the many who pass through their doors will be unable to escape the environment and the caste fate has placed them in. The horrendous level of education in so many American schools is creating a caste of millions, growing daily, that have no option but to become the exploited slaves of the capitalist and corporatist elite.

Unable to escape their predicament thanks to the same government created to help them, millions must survive by working low-wage jobs, seeking welfare or turning to crime. Higher education is an impossibility, thanks to morbid education; escape from their malignant neighborhood futile, thanks to poverty and inequality. Trapped in the reservations they were born into, millions become unemployed as the level of jobs available is outnumbered by the number of despondent citizens. Without doing the math, it is easy to see that scores will live lives unemployed and many, productive, bored, energetic, materialistic and pressured, will out of necessity turn to crime. Combined with the ignorance lack of education breeds, a life of crime will invariably lead to a life associate with the criminal justice system, resulting in the hugely disproportionate numbers of minorities incarcerated today.

To the ones born in such dire environments that are nothing more than assembly lines harvesting slaves, furthered by both government and capitalists, a vicious circle inevitably becomes a living hell, unable to escape, unable to get something other than a token education and unable to find meaningful employment. For those lucky few who can muster work, a life living under the meager salaries provided them only serves to contain a further decline into the abyss of the American capitalistic system.

For the children of millions, the same cycle that befell their parents will be repeated, year after year, knowing that a system of, by and for the people is contributing to their slow and gradual decay. Neighborhoods full of ability and talent, devoid of opportunity and hope.

Hidden behind the misery and reality lies a sinister indifference by those who govern and those who employ to preclude the escape of millions from the caste and reservation destiny has maliciously placed them in. This purposeful ignorance of the plight of millions is to be expected, however, as corporations and governments feed off of the same human beings they are helping to condemn. Capitalism needs to exploit, it needs to disembowel, for inequality, injustice and poverty allows it to prosper and enrich its masters.

Love of the almighty dollar has altered our way of living. It has made us tireless workers that have sacrificed our personal time for the benefit of the companies we work for. Granted, slaving ourselves at work might also mean professional satisfaction, yet at whose expense? The most innocent among us are the ones suffering and being severely affected by our willingness to sacrifice family and the vital attention children need in order to satisfy our thirst for power, promotion or the almighty dollar. It is our ceaseless pursuit of money, for those not living paycheck to paycheck, that is threatening the basic fabric of our lives, family and society.

It is greed, selfishness and materialism that are destroying American society, helping it implode in spite of its potential for greatness. Always busy or on the go, parents are leaving the rearing of children either to the television or strangers. The television has become parent, teacher, role model and babysitter to our children. The attention, instruction and discipline humans have historically afforded their progeny is disappearing at an alarming rate, becoming an endangered parameter of society. This inattention that capitalism has created is transforming children’s development patterns, altering their psychology and emotional makeup.

The necessity of parents in a child’s life has, during the course of human existence, facilitated their entry into society and civilization. The young learn, see and hear everything, their brain basically a giant sponge absorbing the world around them. They learn behaviors, discipline, how to function in human societies. They must attach to their parents, feeling the love and affection engendered in the relationship between parent and child, thereby ensuring proper brain, emotional and educational development.

Today, more and more, this is not happening. As parents sacrifice their traditional roles in child rearing for lives devoted to work, children are growing up by themselves, educated by the corporate media, unable to fully attach to a parent. The debacle in public education today can be partially blamed on parents who have failed to educate, discipline and properly rear their children. Also, the long hours a child devotes to the television is having profound effects on their development, as their immature brains are conditioned to fantasy, subjected to excessive imagery and visual/audio stimulation, and as their developing, naïve and innocent minds are brainwashed by corporations in order to create lifetime loyal customers.

It is these factors, combined with other external conditions that are transforming our children’s brains and ways of thinking. Attention deficit disorder in children has now reached epidemic proportions, and, when combined with less parental supervision, is creating severe emotional and developmental problems. In order to control this troubling manifestation, a child is subjected to Ritalin, Valium or other pharmaceutical drugs. These pills are robbing children of their childhoods, numbing their creativity, curiosity and intelligence while repressing normal development. The effects on their adulthood can be drastic. Yet when pills create the solution teachers and parents desire selfishness replaces common sense and logic. It is the children who suffer; it is their childhood lost and adulthood condemned.

The poisonous tentacles of capitalism are omnipresent, affecting us in every way, reaching into every home, discriminating against nobody, afraid of no neighborhood and ready to continue its nefarious control over American society. The examples above are but a few of a vast multitude surrounding our lives, eroding the very fabric of a heterogeneous society. The past has erred, the present continues the vicious circle and it is America’s future that will suffer the gravest of consequences.


Symptoms of a Disease: Pill Popping for Happiness

A fundamental disease has risen from the massive roots of our capitalistic society. From the underground world of hidden truths has emerged a tangible extension of debilitating symptoms that should signal a radical shift in the way our society has evolved over the last fifty years. It has manifested itself, wanting to be made known, sending us a warning over the couse we have taken before our way of life plunges forever into the abyss. A people, lacking inner happiness, robbed of once beaming energy, manifesting increased levels of depression and having everything yet seeking escape through wanting more is a nation calling out for help.

A citizenry that more and more is depending on pharmaceutical pills to alleviate stresses, depression, unhappiness and low levels of energy is a society in trouble. America is undergoing an enormous increase in the number of people who are depressed and unhappy. Millions now resort to one pill or another for a temporary escape that allows demons to subside and frustrations to be shelved away.

Yet the relief is temporary as the chemical effects of the pill subside, releasing from prison the demons that return to once more haunt an ever growing number of Americans. Trouble this way comes when the call for help is millions of prescriptions to help contain the demons unleashed by a capitalistic society that is affecting hundreds of millions of citizens. Turbulent winds of concern are fast approaching, wanting to warn about our self-defeating ways that are eroding American minds, bodies and spirits.

Something is amiss in this great nation, with increased depression, unhappiness and ever-growing consternation. The symptoms of a disease are readily apparent, capitalism and its exploiting tendencies are altering our psychologies, behaviors and lifestyles. Pill popping for happiness is a giant hint that the system is not having the intended consequences we all thought existed.

Happiness is the greatest virtue to strive for, depression the greatest vice to avoid. When a society and people cannot be made to enjoy life and discover perpetual happiness then the mechanisms of the system responsible for such failures need to be replaced. For hundreds of millions capitalism has been a system imposed on them, from the moment of first gasps until the time of last rights. We have known nothing different. A chance to see if something better exists has been denied us. Surely a better way exists, encompassing sustainable development, not egregious consumerism, equality, not castes, humanity, not selfishness and communalism, not individualism.

Too many people are left behind, denied a chance of ever developing their natural abilities and talents. Too many people become exploitable energies, not much different than beasts of burden. For too long the gap between rich and poor has existed, ever-widening, ever-corrosive to the fabric of society. Humanity’s history has been defined by slave and master, exploiter and exploited, rich and poor. The oppression and subjugation of human beings only creates violence, frustrations, anger and a society devoid of love and peace.

Capitalism is the culprit. It grabs onto our raw primitive emotions, squeezing every ounce of vice available. Our selfishness emerges, our greed perseveres and the humanity we are capable of having vanishes into the dustbins of lost opportunity. The many are being devoured by the few, as has happened through time immemorial, and we are losing out on a multitude of talent and ability that can have a positive affect on us all. Einstein’s are being lost; Mozart’s never see the light of day and in the meantime, ability is hidden while opportunity denied.

Like women, who are finally allowed to prosper and show us the wonderment of their incredible talents, the billions who are forever stuck in their misery and dehumanization must be allowed to escape their perpetual castes. Capitalism only serves to create and expand them. It only serves to divide, to ruin and to enrich the very few. Pill popping for happiness should never be the end result of a system of living that does not serve the many and only contributes to the plunging into the abyss of a society.

Something inherently wrong exists when a symptom of a disease is the unhappiness, depression and pill addiction to the millions who seek to escape the devastatingly psychological effects unleashed by the workings of capitalism. This system destroys dreams, squashes hopes, condemns billions and erodes the very foundations of human existence.

When a child’s idealist dreams of a future job must be scrapped in adulthood as a result of the perceived need to associate money with happiness a wrong exists that must be alleviated. How many of us fantasized in childhood of someday becoming that which we most cherished, only to have our dream dashed when in adulthood we realized that in order to live comfortably money had to be made? Only in jobs that did not suit our talents, likes, abilities, predispositions and dreams could we live the American Dream.

Only by exploiting others could our perceived happiness be assured. Only by selling our souls to the demons of the capitalists could we thrive. Yet inside us remain the last glimmers of hope and the last vestiges of childhood dreams, trying desperately to escape the dungeon they have been chained to for our entire lives. In these dreams lies happiness and fulfillment. In these dreams lies the strength to forever flush down the toilet the pills that fill us with imaginary, temporary and artificial escapes from a reality our minds want desperately to escape.

Capitalism, the demon of modern man is called, meticulously robbing us all of happiness, independence and freedom, evaporating our energies, transforming our lives and slowly plunging us down into the dark confines of the abyss.

Originally posted April 2004

Friday, January 23, 2009

The Untermensch Syndrome: Israel’s Moral Decay

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The labeling as anti-Semitic of anyone critical of the state of Israel’s policies in the continued destruction of Palestinian identity and the increasing domination into American foreign policy no longer has the sting of threat or intimidation it once mastered. For too long this masquerade has been used to silence those opposing anything Israel, shouted at anyone disseminating truth and seeking justice. Like the boy who cried wolf, this charade has lost its power or hypnotic control, and today only serves to breed more anger and resentment against the apologists and smear mongers protecting the cancerous tentacles of Zionism and the crimes against humanity it spawns.

A once powerful marketing tool used to sequester valid criticism and deny truth to millions has been eroded thanks to its overlords’ continued over abuse and labeling of the term ‘anti-Semite’ to anyone even remotely critical of anything associated with Israel and the tentacles of Zionism. To criticize Christianity does not make one anti-Christian. To criticize Islam does not make one anti-Muslim or anti-Arab, just as uncovering truths about the Bush administration does not make one anti-American or unpatriotic. To speak truth about any government in the world does not make us racist or xenophobic to the people of that nation. Why then should criticism of Israeli and/or her government’s policies subject us to false labeling and acts of intimidation whose only purpose is to silence truth into submission and hijacking justice from ever emerging and being served?

The time has come to stop bending over to the dictates of intimidation and scare tactics used by Israel’s protectors, defenders and apologists. The time has come to say “Never Again” to such fictional libel and slander whose only purpose is the continued subjugation of truth and awakening. The labeling of “anti-Semite” does not bother us, nor does it stop us from writing truth to justice and reality to intimidation because we refuse to be frightened into submission and silenced into acquiescence by a mechanism we know to be false.

Our convictions, search for truth and want for justice supercedes the trash invented to protect the malfeasance ruining humanity and the crimes perpetrated against our fellow human beings. The time has come to stand up and be heard, refusing to believe the smears and the labels, instead living life in truth, devoid of veiled threats and intimidation tactics whose power over us continues to erode thanks to its incessant overuse and abuse. So smear if you must, defenders, appeasers and apologists of human wickedness, continue to blindly believe in the majesty of a fiction you know to be false, ensuring your daily complicity in the crimes against humanity being committed by those you protect and defend.

We are above your labels, above your intimidation and smear tactics, following the path of truth in the voice of our writings and in the convictions of humanity. If pursuing truth, fighting criminality and awakening justice makes us anti-Semites, then guilty we are. If seeing the dehumanization, exploitation and utter destruction of the Palestinian people makes the voices of reason anti-Semitic, then guilty we stand. To defend the humanity of other Semitic people is to defend humanity itself. To speak out against injustice and dehumanization makes us human, to defend it makes you complicit.


An Unbearable Likeness of Being

Here we are, living in the first decade of the 21st century, and still the violent animal in the human condition exists, thriving inside our carnal passions and still primitive mammalian brains, oozing out of humanity to release the demons of evil that only homo sapiens are capable of wielding.

Persisting in our primate selves as it has for millions of years, the greatest symptom of our disease remains uncontrolled, dominating the far reaches of man’s Earth, turning barren once fertile soil and forever despoiling the utter beauty our civilization possesses. Man killing man, erupting violence upon our fellow humans, destroying what our own hands create, decimating energy and beauty, life and opportunity, this is the story of what our species has become. Through tribal affiliation and identity, which the nation state now is, (a tribe on steroids) the potency of violence and ill-treatment against others seen as different or alien is manifested.

The human condition dictates that auras of superiority appear with every tribe. What is nationalism today but a belief that our tribe is the best in the world, that the group of humans we are attached to in unity, be it of ethnic, racial, religious or regional (nation state) parameters, is the preeminent assembly of all humanity? Beliefs of supremacy of one’s tribe and inferiority of others have marked man from the very first cluster of family clans. In order to achieve this most human psychological need, other subgroups have to be considered lower in stature, considered third-world, savages, barbarians and lesser humans, while others must be conquered and subjugated.

In the minds of those groups seeking to invade, conquer, pilfer and exploit, the invaded and conquered must be seen as sub-human, creatures not worthy of protection or life. The human mind, in order to justify the ruthlessness it will inflict on less able peoples, creates the impression that those now controlled are sub-humans and therefore not immune to the restrictions of human morality. Sub-humans are not humans, after all, and can be treated like animals or worse, like dirt.

The Nazi ideology of placing its Aryan blood above all others, believing its Germanic peoples the pinnacle of civilization, reflects a perverted mass psychosis brought on by a malevolent leader and a hypnotized tribe – namely Germany. In the delusional world of the Nazis, Jews, Gypsies and Slavs were considered inferior. These peoples were labeled ‘untermensch,’ the German word for sub-human. As such, labels became reality and reality became a holocaust, resulting in millions of deaths and untold levels of suffering. When a group of people like the Nazis begin to believe in the sub-human label they propel, the group afflicted becomes the equivalent of animals, free to be killed, tortured and dehumanized, free to be robbed of freedom, opportunity and happiness.

The Nazis, however, are not alone in exacerbating this phenomenon. On the contrary, it has been as pronounced in human history as advancements in technology. As long as there have been competing tribes the concept of untermensch has existed, released over and over through centuries and millennia. No nation or culture is immune; no epoch is innocent. With every war, invasion, occupation, domination, enslavement, oppression, exploitation, genocide and ethnic cleansing that has marked human time on Earth untermensch has been implemented, used by the powerful to justify the crimes, rapes, murders and dehumanization inflicted upon innocent fellow human beings. Untermensch is the tool used by the human brain that grants man the power to destroy humanity and all its virtues while inflicting untold levels of misery onto men, women and children without the interference or burden of human guilt, laws, theology, morality or righteousness getting in the way.

Yet our minds cannot fathom the long reaches of a history marked by incessant war, death and violence. Understanding the constructs of time and space are not talents we have evolved. Grasping the enormity of the passage of time, with the rise and fall of tribes, clans, city states and empires, the evolution of human society and spirituality from cave to metropolis, the genetic altering and evolution of diversity coming together and adding to the human spectrum, and the conquests, genocides and environmental changes created by our ancestors is not a skill endowed into our primate brains, and thus the enormous jigsaw puzzle that is human history remains a mystery. We can barely put together the pieces of our own eighty year existence on the planet, even as it is a puzzle that we experience first hand. How then are we to fathom hundreds of thousands of years of modern human existence, generation upon generation, century after century?

In an existence estimated at five million years, from primates living in trees to the dawn of living in one-hundred story skyscrapers, man has not deviated from our mammal selves. Our passions, emotions and behaviors yield to the animal inside us, and throughout our existence it has come out again and again to unleash terror on our unsuspecting species. For millions of years our species has consisted of one continuous epoch of aggression against each other, with periods of calm in between, – controlled at the individual level but becoming an unleashed monster at the tribal – destroying all we have achieved and the beauty inherent in our existence. Mammals we are, and mammals we will remain, yet the ego of our existence and the theology of our beliefs will not let us awake to our greatest truth.

Humankind’s greatest demon is also our greatest threat, condemning us to continue a long history of self-inflicted war, death, suffering and subjugation. In this quandary we find ourselves trapped in, much like every generation that has come before, and, if we fail to learn and evolve, every generation that has yet to come. The worst of humanity opens the books of history once more, and in Iraq and Palestine we find what has been, what is, and what will become. The Reign of Terror upon ourselves continues the slow erosion of our existence along the inevitable path of self-destruction we traverse.

Is it any wonder that the virus attached to us since we left the jungles of east Africa keeps reappearing again and again, stomping its seal of death, violence and misery
on the face of human civilization, especially when we punish our own kind with the tools of despair, suffering and dehumanization? Can we expect the microscopic reign of modern man to purge an evil that primitive man could not exorcise in hundreds of thousands of years?

Untermensch is part of the disease we possess, or rather possesses us, attached to the constructs of fear and hatred, ignorance and superiority, emboldened by the tribe or nation state. The mega-tribes of today only serve to strengthen and release the fury of human evil onto those less fortunate. It is a syndrome that, until now, has yet to be contained. Its vicious mechanisms erode the basic foundations of humankind, birthing suffering and human destruction, both in spirit and in life, rendering all six billion of us less human every day. Into the depths we descend, living the misery of Iraqis and Palestinians, feeling the pain that the powerful inflict on the weak, losing energy with each drop of blood that is shed and cowering in shame with each act of decaying dehumanization.

The Untermensch Syndrome is alive and well, resilient as ever, surviving as long as humans exist, thriving off our own shortcomings, evolving with each passing generation and festering once more to infect yet one more amalgam of human tribes from which enlightenment seems never to arrive.


Unholy Land


In the land claimed holy and promised the madness of humankind persists, extending the perpetual violence and oppression of the weak by the powerful. Palestine today tells a story of human evils past and present, of the worst actions capable of being manifested by the human phenomenon. Lands ancient and strategic, crossroads and focal points of man’s brief history, once more seem engulfed by competing claims and boiling hatreds.

Malevolent crimes against humanity, those activities that repulse and anger, are methodically being perpetrated against peoples who have been raped of all their ancestors once possessed. Atrocities and dehumanization on an unparalleled scale are being committed, becoming the present reincarnation of the past’s dreaded evils.

In no other place on Earth is the suffering of our brothers and sisters so prevalent. In no other region is the tyranny and wickedness of humanity so present. For the lands holy and promised have been cursed by archaic fables, beliefs and myths, by fictional claims of days long extinct, condemning its native inhabitants to the bowels of Hades and the desolate realities from which loud cries go unheard.

To be Palestinian Arab in the land usurped by European Jews is to be considered untermensch in the territory your forefathers once called home. The devastation fifty-five years of invasion, occupation and state terrorism has had on both people and land has created the conditions by which Gaza and the West Bank can today be called Hell on Earth, pockets of destitute emptiness where opportunity is extinct and any relevant future is a but a hollow fantasy.

Unearthed from the colon of the planet Palestinians dwell, the squalor in the occupied territories is beyond compare, instituted and exacerbated by the state of Israel in acts of unhindered and systemic malevolence. The intent of such inflictions of emotional distress and incessant pain and suffering is the breaking point of millions of Palestinians, the realization that it is better to leave the land you know and love rather than live in perpetual imprisonment of spirit and humanity.

The desire to expand borders and territory, an addiction to greed and the aspiration to cleanse Palestine of Arabs manufactures in the Israeli government a policy of wicked objectives bursting with cold and calculated cruelty. Thus, the ill-treatment of Palestinians by Israel makes life so unbearable, so hard and depressing that it is a triumph of the human spirit that so many remain, unwavering and strong, even as the weight of utter wickedness is enforced generation to generation.

Living in the occupied territories is like living in Warsaw ghettos of the 1930’s and South African Bantustans. It is akin to dwelling in Indian reservations, those cesspools of nothingness in the lands of America from where millions rotted away their once vibrant existence. Gaza and the West Bank are squalors of humanity acting as giant prisons, where dense refugee camps are considered cities, their perimeters encircled by fences, walls, Israeli tanks and the ever watchful eyes of trigger-friendly snipers. Enormous prisons within occupied lands, preventing contiguity, freedom of movement and any semblance of a sovereign state are the true definition of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

To live inside these vast prisons and internment camps is to struggle with the daily existence of Israeli suffocation and dehumanization that you know is purposeful as it is deliberate. It is to feel Israeli claws strangulating your esophagus, denying you of the air to breathe and the sustenance you need to survive. Life under Israel’s merciless rule means that sixty to seventy percent of your people are unemployed, unable to provide for their families, as commerce is almost non-existent and access to Israeli business almost impossible. It is to live in worlds of child undernourishment and lack of healthcare, as Israel’s policies make indigent millions of families who desperately need to feed and treat their children.

To be Palestinian is to be trapped in a vicious circle that refuses to let you escape. From birth your undernourishment outmaneuvers your development, stunting your growth, making your immune system weak and altering your ability to learn. Lack of nutrients and perpetual levels of stress make your environmental upbringing unlike anything on Earth, a constant battle being lost by both your body and mind.

Psychological behaviors associated with extreme levels of stress and dangerous levels of undernourishment affect hundreds of thousands of your fellow brothers and sisters. Feelings of imprisonment and virtual subjugation, not to mention the extreme hatred of anything Israel your environment forces upon you creates unsurpassed hatred in your mind. Education is limited, resources to tap the oasis inside you is but a dream and the talents and abilities ingrained in your being get eroded more and more with each passing year.

You see the vanishing energies of neighbors, acquaintances and family that die at the hands of the IDF and the Israeli government’s callous disregard for your people. After all, to them you are nothing but untermensch, lower to or on equal par with animals. From an early age you realize that, since you are seen as sub-human, IDF soldiers treat you with impunity, allowing themselves the pleasure of taunting your friends, shooting your cousins, demolishing your home and dehumanizing your mother, all done knowing that accountability does not exist.

Growing up Palestinian is to see with one’s eyes the hatred boiling inside the cities you live in, where the fruitless throwing of rocks towards tanks by dozens of youth is the only vent from where their bursting fumes can be released. Later on in life, these youngsters will become members of the resistance, graduating to Kalashnikovs and home-made bombs, lurking at night to defend their ever disappearing homeland. In this society, death at the hands of the Israelis is so commonplace that it is celebrated, becoming both a rallying cry and mechanism of strength. Martyrs are elevated to the skies above, becoming the role models of the very young and the heroes of the populace, their faces plastered on posters lining streets and walls.

In this society, born of occupation and seething hatred, the only way to keep living is to keep dying, and the sadness of such reality is that just as our children wish to become pilots and firemen, theirs strive for nothing more than martyrdom. It is this that Israel’s policy of untermensch has created, a mechanism where every day creates new resistance fighters and revolutionaries seeking the triumph of the human spirit and the dawn of independent freedom.

Collective punishment upon millions of Palestinians goes hand in hand with the Untermensch Syndrome, where the acts of a few result in the decimation of the many. When millions of Arabs are considered sub-human, long living in lands claimed by false divinity and thousand year old fables of peoples primitive and unenlightened, their death, destruction and prolonged suffering is inconsequential. It is state sponsored terrorism that has lasted more than eighty years in a pre-emptive attempt to ethnically cleanse by subjugation, dehumanization and cold and calculated suffering.

Breeding of fear by the intimidation of army incursions, tank deployments, sniper killings, Apache helicopter missiles and fighter jet low altitude flyovers is state sponsored terror, stressing out millions and making life under occupation an unbearable existence. Imprisoning millions and subjecting them to perpetual indigence, without ability to traverse their own lands or go one day breathing tranquil airs of calm and freedom is collective terror upon a populace. Not knowing if your home is next to be demolished by monstrous Caterpillar bulldozers, usually with a few minutes warning by the IDF is state terrorism, robbing families of their homes and their belongings, leaving thousands without the only dignity they ever possessed.

Treating Palestinians as untermensch allows young Israeli soldiers, most of whom are born hating Palestinians, to walk over innocent people only trying to survive day to day. Stinging verbal abuse, humiliating body searches, purposeful closures and damning delays at checkpoints, where the Untermensch Syndrome can be seen in full bloom, exhibits the wicked treatment of the powerful over the weak. Selected closures that can last days that in effect prevent Palestinians from getting to work, indiscriminate authority to harass and stop anyone from passing, the apartheid mechanism of different license plates for Jewish settlers – with unhindered passage through checkpoints – and Palestinians – who oftentimes wait hours in line before being allowed through – are all symptoms of the sub-human treatment and collective punishment of Palestinians.

Even ambulances, oftentimes transporting gravely injured or sick people, many of them pregnant women on the verge of giving birth, are forced to endure long hours waiting at IDF checkpoints, with the full knowledge of soldiers. Many of these people, not unexpectedly, end up dying while waiting, as precious time is squandered and criminally left to pass. If this is not terror, then what is? If this is not collective punishment and a symptom of the Untermensch Syndrome, then where has our humanity gone?

When an occupying power gives carte blanche to its military to treat the occupied as sub-human, crimes against humanity are not too far behind and the moral fabric of those imposing the will of the powerful through the barrel of a gun quickly vanishes. In Palestine, and as has become quite apparent in Iraq, indiscriminate and methodical dehumanization, without regard for human rights, has flourished through the aura of ethnic, state and cultural superiority and the invincibility of modern military might.

Pitting rock throwers against Apache helicopters and Abrams tanks is nobody’s idea of a fair fight, and in this unequal capacity to wage war we can see how the Untermensch Syndrome is furthered. One side seeks independence using only the weapons their dwindling land provides while the other is provided with the most sophisticated and lethal technology known to man. It is a battle of primitive versus modern, the Arab animals versus the Israeli westerner. And so, in order to try evening out the fight, suicide bombers, with the desperation, hate, thirst for vengeance and hopelessness ingrained in their atrocious actions, compete with the state sponsored terrorism of guided missiles raining down from the sky, artillery from tanks and incursions by an infantry trained and supplied with the best equipment American money can buy.

The equation of occupied and occupier has been the same for time immemorial, with the subjugated resorting to the creations of the human imagination and the resources at their disposal for weapons while the conqueror uses rationales of untermensch to deceive its own morality and unleash the fires of human hell with the grand weapons of war that riches provide onto the people invaded.

In Palestine, untermensch has meant the demolition of thousands of homes without regard for human life. It has meant the dehumanizing conditions by which millions live under, usually in poverty and lacking meaningful education, healthcare, infrastructure, opportunity and future. Israel’s treatment of an entire race of people has destroyed the fabric of society and the aspirations of its citizens. The Untermensch Syndrome has resulted in centuries old olive trees bulldozed for no reason other than to make miserable the lives of the farmers who owned them. It has categorized Palestinian as inferior to Jew, marginalizing millions who are expropriated of their land and homes.

Because of the Untermensch Syndrome Palestine has been carved up into dozens of enclaves, separated by walls or fences, imprisoning people in their towns and refugee camps. Traveling from town to town is virtually impossible. Children have been separated from their schools, university students from their colleges, workers from their jobs, families from each other and farmers from their fields. This has been accomplished by Israel systematically and without remorse, serving no purpose other than to dehumanize and make unlivable the daily lives of millions.

Lands with higher ground are routinely expropriated, as are those with fertile soil and abundant water aquifers. These stolen lands are then granted to the swell of settlers rushing into once Palestinian lands and farms. In other instances, Palestinian land is taken for bypass road construction that now dissects the West Bank into easily controllable blocks. Of course these roads can only be used by Israelis and Jewish settlers, while the Palestinians, whose land is now covered by asphalt, can only watch as Jewish cars circumvent the last vestiges of a land they once flourished in.

In the course of the present intifadah 3000 Palestinians have died compared to 1000 Israelis. The terrorism has been mutual, one modern and technological, the other born out of hatred and desperation. Palestinians see their native contiguously- inhabited land being gobbled up by Israel and the never-ending stream of European and American settlers. Their water is being taken, their crops destroyed, their livelihoods eviscerated. An enormous apartheid wall is being built, separating camp from camp, robbing them of still more land as it snakes deep into occupied territory, making the West Bank an amalgam of Bantustan-style reservations and internment camps. The Untermensch Syndrome has been unleashed by an Israel that is intent on ‘transferring’ out an entire race of people.


Like a Virus the Syndrome Spreads


Like an enormous wave crashing on shore, the Untermensch Syndrome is devastating everything in its path. In order to maintain a Jewish majority, which demographics tells us is impossible if Arabs remain, Israel is making the life of Palestinians a virtual dungeon of misery from where air and light are squeezed out of the dark, damp caves where Palestinians now dwell. The goal is as simple as it is macabre: the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the ‘Promised Land’ by means of starving millions of a life worth living and through the self-exodus of Palestinians who cannot take the severe punishment and dehumanization any more. This clandestine maneuver would thus be seen as self-inflicted and as an independent move by the Palestinians, yet it is Israel pushing them off the cliff through its criminal acts against humanity.

Much is said of physical torture, yet it is the mental kind that truly kills and maims, condemning the millions of Palestinians to a life unbearable at best and cruel at worst. For many decades now Israel has waged collective war against the native inhabitants of Palestine, slowly but surely implementing the means by which it can achieve its ends. Mental torture is a crime against humanity, in direct contradiction to universal principles of humanity. It has been persistent, incessant and coldly calculated. If the treatment of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel is not terrorist in nature and evil in substance, then we have vanished underneath a rock of shamelessness and barbarity, becoming that which we most loathe.

What is occurring in Palestine today is nothing short of criminal, reminiscent of the Nazi treatment of Jews and all other untermensch during 1930’s Germany. It reminds us of the extermination and subsequent incarceration of Native Americans by a fledgling US government riding the coattails of Manifest Destiny. Reservations are today a sad reminder of the cruelty and inhumanity by which the American government methodically eliminated the indigenous peoples from the birth of a new nation. Parallels with the South African Apartheid Bantustans are being made as more truth emerges from the cages of the West Bank. The worst in humanity is now compared to the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people, and not without merit.

The Nazi ghettos and treatment of all untermensch in 1930’s Europe during the reign of human malevolence, which caused untold levels of suffering, anguish and mental torture, lasted about a decade. The Palestinian ghettos, Bantustans, reservations, cantons, prisons, gulags or enclaves, – however you wish to call them – on the other hand, have withstood the sands of time for several decades now. Under virtual imprisonment, unable to move freely, without rights, liberties and freedoms and increasingly under a state of siege and apartheid, Palestinians find themselves struggling to survive and remain living in the lands they have continuously inhabited for thousands of years. Their very existence is being threatened; their society is being imploded. Mental torture has become their way of life, like an unrelenting leash controlling their lives, ceaseless in time and devastating in magnitude.

They are, if you will, an endangered species, considered sub-human by their occupiers and the Israeli puppets in the White House and the Congress, who, even after the International Court of Justice overwhelmingly condemned the Apartheid Wall as illegal under international law, voted overwhelmingly to support Israel and condemn the Court, also pressuring the cowardly UN to prevent the imposition of sanctions on Israel. If our elected leaders in Washington show such solidarity with the state of Israel in its inhuman acts of criminality, do they think of Palestinians as untermensch as well? The implication sure makes it seem that way, as does their treatment of the Iraqi people.

Those who were once called untermensch are today subjugating those they consider untermensch. The sub-humans of decades past have become the subjugators and exploiters, spreading the disease that once tormented their ancestors. Those who once suffered enormously are today inflicting untold levels of suffering onto an entire group of human beings. As if committing human evil on those it considers sub-humans will exorcise the demons of horrors past, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians serves no possible purpose other than to devastate millions who are rotting away their existence in sewers of hopelessness, hoping an entire people will simply disappear or pack up and leave, thereby springing forth a final solution to the Palestinian question.

The Untermensch has become the Übermensch, the Nazi word for overlord, or supermen. The cleansed have become the ones doing the cleansing, and those upon whom human evil once enveloped are today reincarnating that same malice onto a world trying to never again repeat the errors of past generations. Yet the Untermensch Syndrome refuses to be laid to rest, living like rats among humans, forever to follow in our footsteps, feeding off our crumbs and forever destined to haunt our inner demons. If those it was once inflicted upon are today its conductors and proliferators, does there exist hope for the human race?

As long as we let it control us, the Untermensch Syndrome will linger, separating us from each other, seeing ourselves as superior and others as sub-human. The situation in Iraq is a truth to this reality, it simply repeats itself, no matter how enlightened we think we are and no matter how modern we claim to be. If the pattern persists throughout our existence, is there reason to hope for its demise?

What makes us human is not our ability to kill and destroy each other but our vast potential to bring goodness to our fellow beings. Killing, maiming and inflicting misery onto ourselves is nothing new. It is rather easy for humans to do this. Just look back at history. What is hard, and what makes us human, differentiating us from the animal world, is the ability to turn the other cheek, see each other as equals, accept our incredible diversity and stop the madness before we all end up smoldering from the fiery hell we have contained in silos and missiles. If we can create nuclear technology, enough to destroy this planet thousands of times over, can we not put our heads together and get along?

What is happening to the Palestinian people is a travesty, one more black mark on an already bruised human society. It is up to the Other Superpower to seek change, helping to bring an oasis of humanity to a suddenly barren strip of earth. Our elected leaders will not act, and neither will world organizations. It is up to us, the people of the world, to stand tall and shout with one united voice from deep within our bodies that we are in solidarity with those considered as untermensch, that if Palestinians are sub-human, then so are we, because they are human just like you and me, deserving of a life lived in happiness and opportunity, free of occupation and tyranny.

For the moral high ground cannot be usurped as easily as Israel robs Palestinian lands bearing higher ground, strategic locations, water aquifers and fertile land. The moral high ground in this battle is on the side of the occupied and subjugated, of justice and humanity, of those resisting and fighting for land they once possessed and freedom once enjoyed. It is void and non-existent in the grip of the occupiers, exploiters and criminals who produce life unbearable and dehumanizing. For this battle they cannot win because the travesty of the Palestinians is the reality billions of eyes and minds now see. Is it any wonder why the rise in anti-Semitism worldwide coincides with the escalating campaign to destroy the Palestinian people? Can we not see why Israel is considered the most hated nation on Earth, from opinions resulting in the last few years, and why its policies are endangering innocent and peace loving people of Jewish faith worldwide who only want to live free of the hatreds of the past and in full acceptance of the happiness of the years to come?


Never Again, Never Again


The time to boycott Israeli products has arrived. Let the sanctions imposed by the Other Superpower begin, unleashing the economic might of billions to punish those few who care nothing for international law or the universal declarations of human rights. May the cancer spreading dehumanization and misery on our fellow human beings stop being spread by the power and medicine of the people of the world. We succeeded once before, halting the destructive forces of apartheid South Africa, now a nation evolving forward in time, not regressing backwards in history. We will once more quash wrongness, wickedness and human evil. It is the echoes of justice and human rights emanated by the voices of truth that will tear down yet another wall of shame being built to imprison and condemn.

Let us punish American and multinational corporations that help arm the IDF, those that help bulldoze homes and lives, those that profit from human misery and those that through their instruments of death and destruction contribute to the murder and slaughter of innocents. Let us pressure our so-called representatives to stand for human rights, dignity and justice, not tyranny, misery and subjugation.

What is transpiring in the Holy Land is anathema to human civilization; it is an embarrassment to six billion people who are good, decent human beings. If our governments refuse to act, then so we must, for the sake of innocent and peaceful Palestinian and Israeli people, for the sake of human decency and for the sake of our future generations. Walls and fences that imprison and dehumanize cannot stand, for they help set mankind back in time to days dark and repressive, unenlightened and barbaric. Together, united as one we can become the massive tremor that helps bring walls and tyranny down.

“Never Again” should not just be a catchy slogan, an artifact at museums, a banner espoused but never practiced or a phrase attached to nostalgia. It should mean what it says, and, as the Other Superpower, we should interpret it literally, enforcing it upon those whose crimes against humanity make us all less human by the day.

In numbers we find strength; in conviction, reason to exist. Those seeking freedom can never be defeated; the triumph of the human spirit can never be erased. The seeds of justice have been planted, let us reap its bountiful reward. Let us once more make a beautiful oasis of a land both holy and promised, devoid of barren intentions and evil inclinations. Let olive trees grow anew, let children play and laugh, may the light of day return and once more bring forth skies of blue.


This essay, first published in August 2004, is dedicated to the over 3000 Palestinian and 1000 Israeli dead, who, in the last five years, have perished thanks to the sickness of human nature, as well as to the hundreds of Lebanese civilians and tens of northern Israelis slaughtered by the latest wave of Middle East violence. This essay is also dedicated to the thousands of injured on both sides, the thousands more who have lost loved ones, and the peace-loving, tolerance-striving, justice-seeking peoples of the Holy Land, all of whom have suffered enormously for the last four years. May you have the strength to put an end to madness and the worst in the human condition. May your troubled land find the peace you and the world desperately needs.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Into the Valley of Catastrophe: Crusade of Surge and Siege, Part Four

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Read Part Three


Barbarians At the Gates


From the very beginning, the American crusade of surge and siege – with much of it predating the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; think to early 20th century agreements with Saudi royalty of protection for petroleum, or the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected nationalist leader, or CIA coups and installing of tyranny, or support for Saddam, or provocations of war, or fanning the flames of violence, or importation of billions worth of weapons – has been a catastrophe for the people of the Middle East. For years the United States has guided policy and fates in the region, with its unchallenged domination of and immoral support in the regimes of the Middle East causing a complete devolution of a dynamic, intelligent and proud amalgam of peoples, continuing a stagnation of a civilization that has given humanity so much, and which has so much yet to offer.

It has been the support of tyrants, dictators, generals, kings, princes and sheiks which has had the most profound effect in the lives of tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims, altering, perhaps indefinitely, the very foundations of a culture, and religion, that has for centuries been bombarded by the Judeo-Christian values of the western world. From Napoleon to Hitler, from the British Empire of old to the American Empire of today, from French domination of the Levant to the ceaseless criminality of Little Sparta in Palestine, the Middle East has been invaded, colonized, raped, pillaged, oppressed and exploited by western powers for decades.

It has been divided and torn apart according to the desires of colonial powers; it has been invaded countless times by Christian Crusaders seeking some combination of god and glory, power and control, hegemony and imperialism. Throughout European, and later American, interventions in the region, countless numbers of Arabs and Muslims suffered and died. It has been the west, and not the peoples of the Middle East, that have for centuries been the aggressors, the barbarians at the gates of Muslim cities, those doing the invading and occupying, those raping and pillaging, those with the messianic delusion to convert and civilize and control the Arab world.

It has been the west that thinks itself the superior race, thinking Middle Easterners inferior, sub-human heathens. It has been the west that ignores the plight of the dehumanized and the oppressed, all the while enjoying the spoils of plunder, over time becoming morbidly obese with the gluttony and greed cheap oil engenders.

The people of the Middle East were not, after all, the ones responsible for the Napoleonic Wars, nor the creators of two World Wars, nor the destroyers of entire cities, nor the barbarians giving rise to Holocausts, or thousand year old persecutions, nor the ones responsible for the death of tens of millions of human beings during the 20th century. The people of the Middle East were not planting puppet regimes throughout Europe and the Americas, nor were they wishing to convert, civilize and control the western world. They are not the ones in pursuit of imperialism and hegemony.

They were not bombing and killing and seeking vengeance outside their region until after the Second World War, after America, with help from her allies, decided the Middle East was to become part of its sphere of influence. Indeed, for centuries living in peace and respect, in the same lands, cities and neighborhoods, Arabs of Muslim, Christian and Jewish faith have long maintained a balance of tolerance between Muslim majority and Jewish, Christian minorities that has only been disrupted with the arrival, and the manipulations and gross injustice, of the western colonial powers.

For decades preferring to control the region by proxy, in a clandestine manipulation of populations and territory, the United States has become a catastrophe upon the peoples of the Middle East. Its vast assortment of puppets and castrated proctors have proceeded to decimate the lives and futures of millions, over the years maintaining a firm grip over nations through the devastation of freedoms and liberties and rights, along with the implementation of authoritarian and despotic policies. Unwavering in its support of these tyrants, America has condemned millions to the brutality of dictatorships, to the censorship by despots, to the corruption of incompetents, to the regressive policies of control, to the backwardness of monarchs.


Sponsoring Tyranny


Possessing the largest, most plentiful and best developed oil fields known to man, one would be inclined to believe the Middle East a bastion of equality and justice, with standards of living equal to or surpassing those of the industrialized world. We would expect a thriving democracy pregnant with the freedoms and liberties inherent in wealthy nations. We would also expect, as we do with rich European and American nations, that the countries of the Middle East would possess a high degree of education among its population, allowing for rule of law and foundations of secularism to prevail. We would expect a thriving middle class, with employment at levels supportive of such dynamics. We would expect peace and balance.

Instead, in the land of black gold there exists not a shred of democracy, nor an ounce of freedom and liberties, nor an appearance by redistribution of oil wealth. In the lands where humankind first developed civilization, Machiavellian authoritarians rule, police states flourish, and backwardness prevails. Here, where a few elite are reaping the bountiful rewards of having oil below their feet, or having the lands deemed strategic to the Empire, accumulating millions and billions of dollars in profit, building majestic palaces and living the lives of gods, the vast majority struggle to survive and make a decent living. Here, in the land of kingdoms and fiefdoms and gold-plated palaces, the majority of Arabs and Muslims live in indigence, finding work only as the serfs enabling their Arab lords to live in luxury. Millions manage to survive only because their masters throw a few insignificant crumbs and bones their way, a minute sum of the enormous oil and gas windfall they greedily ensnare for themselves.

While millions subsist on meager jobs, millions more struggle to find meaningful employment. Unemployment in the region is therefore high, with military-age males the hardest hit. Without employment there is no source of income to survive; there is no morale to feel proud of; there is no sign of opportunity, no sign of a future. With an education that is insignificant, for that is how kings and dictators want it, millions have no option but to become easy targets to the propaganda and the manipulations of their lords.

Indeed, in order to better control the population, education has become a tool of indoctrination, with millions of dollars invested by the elite into religious institutions that brainwash and mold vulnerable minds to the fantasy of theology and the backwardness of extremist ideology. Subsidized and sponsored by the same kings and tyrants, these schools, rather than move society forward towards progressive goals, instead succeed in devolving into backwardness and fundamentalism. Many Muslims simply have no choice but to attend these schools, for oftentimes they are the only schools around, in the process helping indigent families cope with the realities of daily life.

So long as ignorance prevails, and as long as knowledge and leanings of modernity are sequestered and mired in the inescapable grip of poverty, the Middle East’s despotic leaders will remain secure and without fear of their own people. So long as their people are not educated to the methodical condemnation of their lives by kings and despots, leaders will reign, sitting on the thrones of gold, feasting on the spoils thrown at them by the Empire. This reality the Empire tolerates and even encourages, for a controlled, undereducated and powerless people are more likely to remain compliant and passive than those who see with open eyes the pillage of their land and the injustice of their leaders.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon of fundamentalist religious indoctrination, together with lack of education and feelings of injustice, oppression and inequality lends itself to the fomentation of extremism, just as it does in any culture, especially a form of extremism which lashes out both at domestic despotism and foreign control and support of that same despotic rule. Using fundamentalist theology to manipulate desperate minds experiencing desolate, unfulfilled lives, radical men of Islamic faith reach out to the many whose lives have been castrated by leaders supported by the Empire.

Radicalism in the Middle East, born of frustration, oppression and lack of opportunity, growing due to inequality, unfairness, injustice and persecution, nurtured by a corrupted and hijacked interpretation of modern Islamic faith, and manifesting itself through violent acts of terrorism, is a symptom of the disease called market colonialism, of an imperialism that cares nothing for people living in misery and perpetual suffering, where the west props up and supports and finances its cadre of despots and tyrants in the region, with their full array of crimes against humanity being protected by the Empire itself, at the expense of the native populations, in order to control the region’s, and the world’s, most valuable resource. Turning to Islamic extremism, then, is a symptom of anger, of hopelessness, of the presence of the Empire itself.

Islamic fanaticism, like its American, and Christian counterpart, thrives on the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the ignorant, and in those searching for meaning to lives heavy in suffering and pain. Like all forms of fanaticism, the Islamic variety grows and thrives by listening to the angry and the oppressed, providing answers and solutions that help maintain a semblance of understanding in a cruel world. It is those who have become easily manipulated and easily deceived that fanaticism aims to reach, for in these lost souls new, molded flames can be lit.

Thus, by combining the fanaticism all theologies possess with the living, walking carcasses left behind by America’s propped up tyrants and kings, gorging on the spoils of oil, too greedy to share with their people, together with American interference in the region, a grassroots resistance is birthed that finds solace and solutions in the beliefs of the past, thinking, rightly, that the devastation of their lives is a result of modernity –albeit a debased form of it – and its corruption by authoritarians sponsored by the west.

Deceived by extremism to hate all things western, because the root of their ills is indeed a product of the western world, they fail to see the reality that true fault lies not in western progressiveness, which is humanitarian, communal and universal in nature, but in the despotic character and oppressive policies of leaders that will not free their subjects to the great virtues of real democracy.

Here, America and her puppet allies in the region have made a vital and egregious error, for in inducing high levels of indigence, uneducation and dissatisfaction, in allowing despotism to rule and the voice of the people to disappear, thereby creating a Molotov cocktail of anger and resentment aimed at the Empire and Arab leaders, they have fostered instability and resistance, some in the form of anti-Americanism, some in the form of terrorism, most in the form of a society that grows more eager for change every year. Together with a perception that America has embarked on a Crusade of Surge and Siege against the Muslim world, and that her armies are engaging in mass murder and destruction of Muslim peoples, the only avenue for change is being found inside the mosques of radical ideology.


Error Personified


Instead of giving Middle East populations a larger share of the oil bonanza pie; instead of decreasing the verticality of the hierarchical pyramid, thus making society more just, fair and equal, with better standards of living, better education and more progressiveness; instead of allowing the Empire a just, balanced and reduced access and control to oil; instead of banning the pillage of revenues and resources, where capital benefits only the elite; instead of investing in enlightened education, helping to bring out of darkness millions of minds; instead of using oil revenues and investing in the wellbeing of their people; instead of halting billion dollar purchases in the west’s defense industry, amassing arms for wars that will never come, using weapons sales to funnel petro dollars back to the Empire; instead of alleviating hardship, resentment and anger; instead of sponsoring freedom and liberty and greater rights; instead of abiding by and protecting human rights; instead of encouraging an open, democratic society, the American amalgam of dictators, tyrants, kings, princes, sheiks and generals have done the complete opposite, thereby cementing in stone continued resistance, continued acts of terror, continued anti-Americanism and continued efforts to violently overthrow the region’s rulers.

In order to suppress, repress and control those elements seeking to bring down the region’s tyrannical regimes, the leaders of these states have created a ruthless police state based on oppression, fear, intimidation and paranoia. To combat the anger prevalent in the population, America’s puppets must enhance a surveillance and spying society, creating a police state that has perfected the art of despotic rule. Torture, disappearances, the evisceration of human rights, unlawful arrests, persecution and false imprisonment are but some of the weapons used by these rulers. Yet the Empire maintains firm support of these leaders, a fact not lost on the population at large.

Right to assembly, right to free speech, freedom of the press, the right of habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial, the right of due process and of protections against unreasonable search and seizure are freedoms not afforded to the peoples of the Middle East. These are freedoms and rights America does not care to ask or demand of its puppets. Free elections and the will of the people are but hollow dreams that cannot be given to the masses, for if allowed to vote, tyrants and kings and dictators and generals would be thrown out. To the Empire, democracy is only democracy when the people elect America’s chosen leaders, her new puppet upgrade. If the masses elect someone other than America’s champion, democracy becomes null and void, the will of the people become obsolete and collective punishment becomes policy, and state-sponsored terror. To the Empire, democracy is valid only when fraud or theft returns to power her most loyal and obedient proctors.

The people of the Middle East do not hate the Empire for its freedom and liberties, nor for its way of life. On the contrary, they would love the same freedoms and liberties, the same respect for human rights, and perhaps a better standard of living than they presently enjoy. They hate the Empire for its transgressions in the region, for its continued support for tyranny, for its hypocrisy in talking democracy and systemically supporting despotism, for its rape and pillage of both land and people, for its addiction to oil that has brought nothing but ruin to the people of the region, for its one-sided support for Israel and its apartheid and state-sponsored terrorism in Palestine, for its genocide and destruction of Iraq and its people, for promising Afghan reconstruction but only succeeding in furthering a decline to a failed state, for its quite obvious indifference to the misery and suffering of Arab and Muslim peoples, for its continued Crusade of Surge and Siege that only threatens to engulf the region in flames and further decimate the lives of millions.

Democracy and freedom cannot prosper in these conditions, for despotic rule and free societies are mutually exclusive. In fact, the populations of these nations have very few, if any, freedoms and rights to speak of, and millions are handcuffed to the heavy handed rules and regulations of the state, many of which resemble those of the Middle Ages. When democracy is spoken of, it represents illusions and mirages, not the will of the people, but the charades of the elite. In the Middle East, democracy is a whispered demand, yet an unfulfilled reality. It remains a dream of millions, and an enemy of the few. In the Middle East of reality, and not that of American fiction, tyranny dominates and democracy is nonexistent and all the while, American hypocrisy festers in the mind of the disillusioned.

Of course the United States is fully aware of the methods used by its tyrants to control the population, yet the support, whether diplomatic, financial and militarily, is as constant as it is unwavering. This tacit support of tyranny by the Empire, even when it speaks of bringing freedom and democracy, speaks of the high level of hypocrisy and duplicity inherent in the Empire. That American sponsored tyranny has catapulted the region into backwardness, that it has furthered the evolution of fanaticism, that it has given rise to resistance and terror, that it has made impotent the infinitesimal attempts at building democracy, and that it has created decades of suffering, poverty, oppression and lost opportunity can only be denied, as it usually is, inside the Empire itself. Inside the fires of imperialism, that is to say inside the Middle East, this truth is well known, and understood.

That human beings resent despotism and tyranny is a self-evident truth; that they build resistance and resentment to colonial machinations and imperialist assaults on their lives is earthly reality. That most human beings want simply the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness without barriers or hindrances or the control of the state is an absolute manifestation of who we are. To be human – and yes, the people of the Middle East are, in fact, human – is to seek and want justice, fairness, equality and fundamental human rights. It is to fight oppression and stand for dignity and honor.

What we abhor as a species are illegal, aggressive invasions and brutal occupations of innocent states, exploitations and repression of the individual and criminality and mass murder that is allowed to transpire and go unaccountable. What the people of the Middle East want is exactly what the western world already has. What they want is freedom from imperialism, freedom from tyranny, freedom to exploit their own resources, for their own benefit, for their present and future generations. What they seek is a chance to be human at the dawn of the 21st century.

What they ask is that they be seen the same as any other person in this planet, possessing the same emotions, fears and opinions, the same behaviors and desires. What they seek is the empathy and understanding for the lives they must endure, the tyranny they must live under and the Crusade of Surge and Siege the Empire has imposed on them.

So close your eyes, contemplate reality and not spoon-fed fantasy, envision and empathize, try to understand alien pain and suffering, put yourself in the shoes of the millions being strangulated by the Empire, and prepare to enter the fires of imperialism.

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Inside the Fires of Imperialism: Crusade of Surge and Siege, Part Three

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Due to the great response and interest "Crusade of Surge and Siege" has had over the last week, I have written a fourth and final part to the series. Along with part three, "Inside the Fires of Imperialism," part four, "Into the Valley of Catastrophe," has now been published.

For those wishing to read more about the brutality of America's occupation in Iraq, along with its consequences, I suggest my previous essays, "Operation Iraq Forever," "Holocaust Redux," "The Killing Fields:Ghosts of the Walking Dead," and "Dear Terrorist Child." These essays convey aspects of America's Crusade that are not covered in this essay.

Also, it should be noted that the Israeli/Palestinian issue has largely been left untouched in this series. That topic is an issue reserved for its own essays, some of which have been written already, and so which are yet to come. For those interested, please see "The Untermensch Syndrome: Israel's Moral Decay," "A Malignant Tumor On the World," and "The Walls That Divide Us."

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Read Part Two


Through Middle East Eyes


In order for the peoples of America and the West to understand what has been and is currently being done to the peoples of the Middle East we must envision ourselves as human beings living and going through life in that most troubled of regions. We must exercise a humanist form of empathy that places us squarely inside the lands of desert and sand, the lands of the people of the Bible, of terrain full of mirages and complexities, of alien and unfamiliar cultures and languages and religions, of a history that predates any western beginning or thought, of a complexity we know almost nothing about.

We must see through the eyes of peoples we do not understand and are completely ignorant of, of peoples we have been conditioned through ceaseless propaganda to disdain and oftentimes hate. We must, in order to see into resurrected Crusades, know the unknown, so that we cease to fear what is foreign and alien. We must contemplate life as it currently exists for the people of the region, not the life we are made to believe in, nor the hazy reality imagined in our minds. For the sake of the millions now dead and dying, for the sake of the dispossessed and the suffering, the maimed and mentally destroyed, we must have an understanding of life in the Middle East, life inside the fires of imperialism.

We must, in order to comprehend the catastrophe befalling the peoples of the Middle East, imagine ourselves as people living under tyranny, under occupation, under oppression and modern day colonialism, in lands where the devil’s excrement abounds, where it makes blind monsters of men, where conflicts are born from the interpretations of fables and mythology, where theological differences succeed in both dividing and conquering, and where western colonialism has and continues to inflict great damage on millions of Arabs and Muslims.

If we are to understand the suffering and oppression of the Arab and Muslim people of the Middle East, we must confront the Empire and its omnipresent grip over the region; a powerful nation with omnipotent control over lands whose resources are needed to run the engines of hegemonic power; a hegemonic Goliath that methodically and calculatedly rules over dozens of little David’s by proxy, intimidation and through puppets. Indeed, to fully understand the 21st century’s version of yesteryear’s crusades, we must journey to the lands where greed and petroleum mix, where neoliberal capitalism and market colonialism fuse, where economic genocide and hegemonic drive intermingle and where the grand pieces of the global chess match collide.

For this present Crusade is not about reclaiming Jerusalem or the Holy Land, or of converting the heathens and barbarians into good Christians. It is not about conquest in the name of a god or a religion, nor a crusade to determine a clash of civilizations. No, this Crusade is about conquering and controlling petroleum, a resource unknown by past Crusaders. This Crusade is about conquering and controlling geostrategic land, about appropriating for the Empire the region’s vast fields of oil and natural gas and the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates.

This Crusade is a neoliberal one, designed to inject American style debauched democracy and corrupt capitalism into the Middle East. This Crusade, this invasion and occupation, this folly into mass murder and mass destruction, this criminal enterprise to appease the gods of greed and of the Almighty Dollar, is an ideological struggle initiated by the masters of neoliberal economics, who, together with those enamored with American Manifest Destiny, have for decades decimated the lives of the people who inhabit this condemned region.

As such, as much as we must see ourselves through Arab and Muslim eyes, we must also look inwards, towards our own selfish way of life, searching our self-centered egos and our ethnocentric bubble of delusion. We must learn to see and accept the role we have in the great damage done in our name. We must learn to understand, and acknowledge, that so much of the Crusade of Surge and Siege is a direct consequence of our gluttony and greed, our insatiable hunger for wealth and materialistic goods, our addictions to comfort and convenience and our complete and utter abandonment of humanist values as death and destruction is rained down on Arab and Muslim peoples.

In many ways, we, with our ever-expanding demands for better and greater standards of living, for more complete comfort and luxury, are the engine that runs the Empire’s economy and thus its power, and that of its rulers. It is the People that give sustenance to the Empire’s actions, and it is us who inevitably depend most on Middle Eastern petroleum. Indeed, every engine needs energy to give it life, to keep it operational, to maintain its many parts in harmony, to make sure of sound performance and of engine health.

This energy, of course, the energy we depend on for the continued survival of our “way of life” and our “values,” -- by which we naturally mean greed, comfort, gluttony and the standard of living no other nation enjoys – the energy that helps guarantee our “democracy and capitalism,” -- by which we mean the exploitation of the people of undeveloped nations and the market colonialism holding them hostage, all to maintain our “way of life” – as well as our addictions of mass consumption and materialism, comes directly from the black gold that permeates beneath the surface of the lands we inhabit, mostly from the nations of the south, whether it is the lands of Arabs or Muslims or Latin Americans or Africans.

The Crusade of Surge and Siege is thus a natural manifestation of our own vices and sins, of our unwillingness to part ways with a life no other people can claim to possess, and which becomes ever harder to simply abandon the longer it lasts and the more it continues to grow. Our gluttony has continued its devastation on the peoples of the region, decade after decade, because those living inside the Empire refuse to part ways with an unsustainable way of life due to an uncontrollable addiction to greed and a plague-like, insatiable appetite for materialistic goods. In the end, while we can feel good by blaming corporations or leaders, it is We the People who ultimately shoulder the blame for an indifference and a gluttony that stoke the flames that grant life to the engine of the Pax Americana.


Region Condemned


At the crossroads of humanity, connecting east and west, located in vitally geostrategic positions, the Middle East has long been a prize for any aspiring Empire. Many powers have invaded and occupied these lands and peoples, only to inevitably be violently thrown out over time. History is saturated with the hubris and folly of Empires long since disappeared, whose arrogance and wealth ended up but rotting, decaying carcasses when their adventures with the Middle East came to a less than triumphant conclusion.

The Middle East has always been resistant and hostile to invasion and occupation, with its people using the accumulated wisdom of generations, and that of thousand years old civilizations, together with a silent patience that buys time and studies how best to defeat its enemies, preying on its victim like stealthy lions on a hunt. Over time, these peoples have developed guerilla warfare and the experience of multiple occupations, slowly, and methodically, castrating the invader, one soldier, one supply line at a time. In a region that has seen much suffering, destruction and death, a war of attrition against these peoples cannot be won. Ideas of time, of black and white thinking, of the definition of victory, of analysis and reason, of the necessity for vengeance, of death, and of war and battle are interpreted and seen differently from western views. The failure to understand this reality has ruined the armies of powerful empires.

Many of the now defunct powers, it seems, failed to learn and understand human history, only to repeat the mistakes and the delusions of predecessors. They failed to read between the lines, failing to see a cornucopia of red flags. The region is as dynamic and as complicated as it is tempting, with theology, history, culture, society, territorial claims, commerce, ethnic and tribal affiliations mixing in a cocktail of fiery anger, aggression and turmoil against those powers that have tried to tame such a varied and mysterious land.

With the short-sighted machinations and the complete ignorance of the region of the last century’s western European powers the fate of the modern day Middle East was sealed. Like Africa, the Middle East we know today is one of artificiality, one that never before existed until the west imported the fictions of imaginary lines of division. Western, colonial power exceptionalism, with its belief in Judeo-Christian superiority and its belief that it was civilizing the inferior, “sub-human” Arab and Muslim peoples, created imaginary borders out of thin air, as always in its ignorance and hubris and geopolitical self-interest, carving nations where none dared exist, and where none should ever have been birthed.

Dividing lands, sects, ethnicities, tribes and peoples based on colonial powers’ interests and intentions was a mistake that condemned millions of people and resulted in a contemporary Middle East whose volatility, and importance to the world’s powers, makes it a region of immense conflict and of potential danger to the world entire. Colonial follies have led to the region’s greatest animosities and injustices, together with its greatest crimes against humanity, fating millions to live inside a geopolitical puzzle carved by the hands of the west.

Failing to take into consideration tribal, sectarian, ethnic and cultural dynamics, or the realities of Islamic theological differences, or centuries-old territorial claims to land, or the longstanding resistance to foreign invasions and occupations, or the injustice of claiming and stealing the land of continuously native peoples, or the sensitivity of the Islamic faith to and resentment in foreign entities occupying lands deemed sacred and holy, European powers set in motion the inevitable clash between the rich north and the resource rich, geopolitically necessary Middle East.

Of course the indigenous peoples of these lands had their destinies, and that of their descendants, decided for them by yesteryear’s colonizers. Today’s Crusade of Surge and Siege owes its genesis to Europe’s indifference and ignorance, to its catastrophic errors. In its short-sighted appetite for power, the long-term volatility of the region has been compromised. Yet since only sub-human infidels would feel the consequences, the west continued adding fuel to the fire.


Claws of Control


When the volatile liquid of petroleum, together with that of natural gas, are included into the Middle East cauldron – a reality that escaped all previous powers exerting force in the region before the turn of the 20th century – what emerges is a geopolitical and geostrategic prize on a scale not seen by emerging Empires before. Indeed, control of the region and of its resources – for oil, natural gas and water are today and will invariably be into the future of great strategic importance – will decide the fate of the present Empire, as well as those waiting in line to rise when America begins her decline, as she is presently doing. It is in this region where the destiny of the modern world will be decided, and it is those who dwell there who will be forced to endure the grand chess match played between powerful competitors.

Control of the region, while signifying control of its resources, also means control of the spigot, of the pipelines feeding and fueling economies, of access to these same resources by other nations, as well as control of the waterways granting passage to tankers headed to all corners of the globe. Control the Middle East’s oil fields and you control the world. Controlling the Middle East, especially having a firm grip on those lands where oil and gas abound, virtually guarantees that the Empire’s oil and gas companies, today gorging on the profits that war, insecurity and control engender, will assume major investments in, and the enormous profits from, extracting, refining, transporting and selling the Middle East’s resources. It guarantees the continued plunder of the Middle East’s oil by American energy giants.

Through control of resource-rich nations, the Empire’s energy conglomerates are granted access to and possession of these precious and finite resources, such as oil and gas, that would otherwise escape their colossal grasp. Such was the purpose of illegally and aggressively invading and occupying Iraq, where, years prior to invasion, the state and the industry unilaterally, and in secret, carved up Iraq’s existing and potential oil fields. This symbiotic relationship between the state and the corporate world, whereby the muscle and the power of the state are used to protect and further the interests of the energy industry, at great detriment to the people of the resource-rich nation, along with the knowledge, capital and resources of the industry being used to impregnate the Empire with cheap and abundant oil and gas, to the great benefit of its economy and hegemony, to the great detriment to all other potential rivals, is a classic example of corporatism, the fusion of state and profit.

The state thus secures for the energy industry those nations possessing large amounts of tapped and untapped oil reserves, only to later receive the benefits from conglomerates in the form of subsidized petroleum prices, control of oil and gas supplies, along with tax revenues from these companies and their products which, thanks to rising petroleum prices, further enhance the state’s coffers and further enable a transfer of resources, in the form of paying exponentially higher prices at the pump, away from the pocketbooks of the American people and towards the corporate and establishment world.

With a government saturated with corporate executives, lawyers and lobbyists, many from the energy and defense industries, and a revolving door of opportunity between the halls of power and the halls of profit that never seems to stop and in fact only continues to gain momentum, it is easy to see why America’s foreign policy in many ways mirrors the interests of the corporate world, especially those of the energy-industrial complex. Thus, the Crusade of Surge and Siege is a reflection of a corporate world swarming the Middle East like vultures ready to feast on the spoils of war. It is easy, too, to foresee where America will be focusing its muscle and its might in the near future, for one simply needs to follow the trail of black gold, the trail of greed and money.

As such, Central Asia, with its collection of despotic Stans, together with Iran, with its vast oil and gas fields, will most likely follow in the footsteps of Iraq – with her oil – and Afghanistan – with her strategic location and pipeline route – as the next targets of the Empire, whether militarily, through buying off of leaders or through market colonialism. Already on the radar screen are the countries of Western Africa, with valuable proven and potential oil reserves, with nations such as Nigeria already feeling the strain of possessing the devil’s excrement, already reeling both from western energy conglomerates meddling in the domestic affairs of these governments and through the pillage of their natural resources. It is the people of these lands which are at present already feeling the effects of oil and its many vices and corruptions. As usual, it is the native people inhabiting oil rich lands that will never see one drop from the massive profits oil creates.

The thirst and addiction for oil is also the reason Venezuela has become of such importance, for Hugo Chavez has become the exception, not the rule, to the Empire’s demand that a nation’s oil not be used for the good of the people. He has not sold out his nation, and his people, to the dictates of the Empire. With enormous reserves of proven oil, said to rival or even surpass those of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela is an obvious choice for American intervention, and will most likely become a victim of the Empire’s hegemony before too long. Its intransigence against the Empire’s commands will not be tolerated much longer.

Its crime, indeed, Hugo Chavez’s crime, which no oil-rich nation or leader is allowed to commit, is redistribute the nation’s oil profits to its citizens and to the state’s growing treasury. Venezuela’s crime, and why she is now a target of the Empire, is having the audacity to use its own resources for the betterment of the population, and the state itself. What has made the Bolivarian state a pariah of the Empire, placed in the waiting line for the Empire’s firing squad, is that it refused to comply or sacrifice its people to the demands of America. Her great error, in the minds of the American establishment, was to destroy the cancer of neoliberal economics, the so-called Washington Consensus, the disaster of debauched capitalism and market colonialism. For this indiscretion, together with its decision to keep oil revenues within the interests of the nation, instead of allowing American energy conglomerates to pillage oil and revenues, Venezuela is now a target of American hegemony.

The lessons to be learned from the harsh teachings of the Empire have been absorbed by the Middle East’s kings and dictators. The oil beneath your sand belongs to the Empire, not your people. It belongs to America’s energy-industrial complex. You will sell your oil at the prices selected by the Empire, at the supplies it seeks, as always in American dollars. You will increase or decrease supply as the Empire sees fit, as always to the benefit of America. The spigot ultimately is under the control of the Empire and, if your oil supply is threatened by an enemy of the Empire, your nation will be invaded and occupied by America’s legions. You will be protected only because the Empire protects its lifeblood.

If you obey and remain loyal to the Empire, not your people, you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams, allowed to rule over your lands, allowed to remain a viable Middle East leader. If you fail to learn the lessons of those who no longer rule, or those no longer alive, you will cease to rule, cease to exist and cease to be a friend. You will be overthrown, replaced and forgotten. From Mossadegh to Saddam, from Iran to Iraq, to question or challenge the Empire is to seek the wrath of blood and the full might of America’s military. To even think of nationalizing your oil, or of retaining its wealth for the benefit of your people will unleash shock and awe on your land. These lessons have been memorized and incorporated, never to be broken, never to challenge the dictates of Empire and never to interfere with its unquenchable thirst for the devil’s excrement.


Empire Unhinged


What is transpiring in the Middle East is, more than anything else, a symptom of a disease a long time in the making, of the natural tendencies of Empire to accumulate for itself the blood that grants it life and the oxygen that makes it grow. Empires old and new have always sought to maintain and indeed expand their power, their hegemony, their standards of living, their “way of life.” They never seek to reduce their influence or minimize their footprint on the world; they can never lower the expectations of their population nor slow down the engine that has brought them to such power. They almost always seek to expand their economies and their domain, always trying to increase growth.

As such, with sustainability being anathema to their chosen path, with Empires becoming victims of their own hubris and success, with greed and thirst for power consuming its elite, with comfort, laziness and gluttony possessing its people, the Empire, either willingly or forced, must stay on the present course and must retain and ratchet up the same machinations that have for decades assured supremacy. Thus, caught in a vicious circle of its own making, the Empire must increase its power and domination and must continue its path of imperialism, of conquest and of pillage, all in order to satiate its people, its elite, its economy and its own power-induced, greed addicted ego.

Failure to maintain the ever-more difficult course of Empire would allow rivals the fresh air to grow and challenge, it would result in the growing unease of its people, and it would open the door for maturity and decline. The Empire is akin to a massive corporation succeeding under a neoliberal capitalist model, where to survive and thrive, expansion and dictatorial power are the rule, not the exception, where return on investment is demanded, with expectations of profit and returns higher every year, with market share growth part of the formula, with success ultimately lying in the exploitation of worker and Earth, of the uncompromising, merciless crushing of competition, and the buying, or acquisition of, smaller potential rivals.

By placing high barriers to entry, by possessing unmatched capital and profit, by integrating vertically and horizontally, by accumulating the infrastructure, resources and relationships its challengers need to grow, by dominating the market through its sheer size and strength, and by securing the unilateral power of monopoly a corporation can maintain its dominance and power, thereby keeping potential rivals at bay, and its stockholders happy. Failure to grow and expand exponentially usually means failure to survive, with investors fleeing what is perceived to be a sinking ship, and competition ready to cannibalize a dying company. Without growth on an almost annual basis, decline is sure to follow. Such is the reality of empire, much to the detriment of the empire itself, much to the detriment of humanity, and much to the detriment of Earth.

Empires continuously seek to maintain and grow, not slow down and shrink. For this reason America will not slow down its imperial ambitions, just as it will only demand that its hegemony be allowed to expand. It will seek to crush all competition, just as will try to grow at the expense of the rest of the world. The Middle East, the breadbasket of the world’s energy needs, is a region, and a prize, that no modern empire can be without, and thus, of paramount importance to those elite for whom imperialism and Empire is the next logical step in the evolution of America. The pursuit, protection and control of Middle East oil and gas is the only logical answer to the question of why America has established permanence in the region, why she invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, why she seeks to impose her will on Iran, and why she supports, finances and helps maintain in power the cadre of puppet kings, princes, sheiks, generals and dictators that rule the nations of the region.

What is occurring today, and will continue to intensify well into the future, is the expropriation of the Middle East directly into American hands, with the Empire planting the seeds of hegemony and control over the region’s vitally important natural resources, as well as its vitally important geostrategic terrain, for a permanent – or “enduring” in Orwellian speak – and unchallenged stay. Every new military installation or base already or presently being built confirms to the thinking world, which excludes the American masses, that the United States seeks not only complete control of the Middle East, but the exclusion of all potential rivals. Through its actions, America has let it be known that the Middle East is off limits to Russia and China, with Europe allowed inside the fringes, that it is the sole domain of the Empire, and that she will be in the region for as long as oil and gas flow freely from the inner organs of the Arab and Muslim underground.

The American flag has firmly been planted in the great majority of Middle East nations, with the Empire’s military establishing permanent Crusader castles and garrisons and bases, in dozens of countries, to secure for the realm the spoils and rewards of the region. At present, in the Middle East is where the lifeblood of the Empire lies, along with that of the industrialized world, where its energy for the foreseeable future is secured. Naturally, then, it is this region, more than any other, that must be protected and defended and taken off the grand chessboard before emerging rivals rise and old challengers think themselves resurrected. It is in the Middle East where a permanent footprint must be established, where the Empire must claim the divine right to plunder, rape, destroy and subjugate. The great catastrophe of the Middle East will thus continue well into the future.

It is the black energy that lies below humanity’s feet that propels the Empire and its people to unmatched wealth and power. And so, in order to understand the Crusade of Surge and Siege, in order to give prominence inside the conscious mind of billions to the genocide inside Iraq, the crimes against humanity in Afghanistan and the human rights violations throughout the Middle East, we must come to an understanding that as long as petroleum fuels the human condition, as long as carbon-based engines and products dominate our civilization, wars and invasions and occupations and the oppression of entire peoples will continue unabated by today’s present Empire, with its corresponding brutality and barbarity and violence and destruction and mass murder continuing to haunt us until either we put an end to our insatiable thirst for oil, or our insatiable thirst for oil puts an end to us.


Read Part Four

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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Crusade of Surge and Siege: Part Two: Cages of Conquest

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Hear No Evil, See No Evil


Americans’ ever-enduring, catatonic sleepwalk through the Empire’s vast array of bread and circus, as always produced by the Ministry of Truth and the Department of Propaganda, better known as the corporatist media, has succeeded in the creation of an ignorant, incurious and dumbed down populace completely bereft of knowledge of what is done in its name. With no concern for or understanding of geography, cultures, history, alien societies, the outside world and of the imperial aspirations of the Empire, Americans have proved easy targets to the manipulations and deceptions of the corporatist world. Seemingly unwilling to gain knowledge of anything outside American Idol or the weekly NASCAR rat race, the soldier ants and worker bees of the Empire are content to circumvent the horrors of war and the myriad crimes against humanity committed in their name in order to maintain their beautiful minds at peace.

Indeed, the corporatist media has triumphed in completely erasing America’s two disastrous occupations of Muslim lands from the peoples’ conscious and concern, in effect shifting the ongoing debacles away from the daily reality of Americans and towards the abyss of a most cavernous memory hole. Methodically and systematically, the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, with all their inconvenient truths, with all their disturbing realities, with all their corresponding death, suffering and destruction, have virtually vanished into a vacuum of nothingness, transported by the corporatist state into a clandestine and secretive reality, making of these disasters non-existent nightmares that vanish upon the waking of a new day.

This propaganda by omission, this “out of sight, out of mind” machination has virtually erased from American reality the disasters unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan, thus guaranteeing in the public mind a complete ignorance in or understanding of a barbaric continuation to occupations stuck in the quicksand of fierce resistance and never-ending guerilla warfare. Thus, America’s aggressive wars, its imperial occupations, its crusade of surge and siege that has done so much harm to millions of people, not to mention to the moral standing of the nation, have become non-existent memories under cover of fog and haze.

To the American people, the hegemonic occupations now descending further into quagmire have become invisible creations that only surface in the rare instance that a branch of the corporate media goes off script and produces footage of death, destruction or suffering. Otherwise, the war against West Asia remains a figment of our imagination, a reality when our beautiful minds want it to be, an inconvenient truth that becomes fiction the moment we decide it is so.

As such, having been conditioned through the corporatist media’s ceaseless dehumanization propaganda to believe Arabs and Muslims sub-human enemies, having been manipulated into hating America’s new enemy and having the corporatist media erase Iraq and Afghanistan from the memory hole, the American people have developed a disturbing, almost criminal indifference for the millions of human beings dying, suffering or otherwise being affected by the Empire’s wars and occupations. To a vast majority of Americans, the malignant tumors that are Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, together with what they represent, are as hazy and as far removed from reality as last week’s episode of a favorite sitcom. These cesspools of immorality rarely, if ever, register in the beautiful minds of most Americans, only bothering the conscious when photos, video or whistleblowers surface to incriminate torturers, leaders and patsies. Only then are we forced to confront one of the myriad number of inconvenient truths the red, white and blue does across the globe.

When truth does not surface, however, we revert back to willful ignorance, aided by the fictions of television and the comfort of consumerism, for deep down, inside the dark recesses of our mind, we know exactly what is done in our name, though we chose, willfully, to erase it from memory, to suppress the reality of American criminality. Using denial and delusion in conjunction with conditioned brainwashing and manipulation, we have decided that crimes against humanity do not exist if those crimes are done to sub-human enemies. Thus the barbarian horde at our gates becomes undeserving of human rights and international laws protecting human beings because they do not fit our definition of human.

Thus, never do we seek to know the ugly realities of places like Guantanamo, nor how America’s gulags, with their brutal methods and tactics, will inevitably affect our way of life, or question why they exist in the first place. For us, America’s black sites are reserved for the evildoers wanting to destroy our way of life. Little do we realize, though, that our way of life is being eroded at these very same sites, one right at a time, done not by terrorists, but by those managing our descent into the breadbasket of despotism. Remaining passive, obedient, silently acquiescent and possessing the attention span of a gnat, hundreds of millions of Americans thus concern themselves only with what new toy they can add to the family collection, or what new product they can obediently purchase next, or what new reality show will entertain them the most. After all, we must preserve our “way of life”.

If Guantanamo and what it stands for does not directly affect us, if torture and perpetual suffering and dehumanizing conditions and sadistic treatment and the destruction of habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights only affects the dreaded dark skinned Arab or Muslim, then America’s beautiful minds need not concern themselves or have empathy, they need not contemplate the inflictions of wickedness on their fellow human beings, they need not realize the crimes done in their name, nor the evisceration of American morality, nor the new normal being established, nor the precedence beings set, nor the trial and error being conducted, nor the techniques being experimented and refined, nor the machinations of tyranny being perfected.

Thus, through our transcendental customs, our American “way of life,” of methodically following the exploits of celebrities dead or dying, of aimlessly producing and consuming, as always becoming hypnotized by modern day court jesters, jousters, gladiators and chariot races, as well as exhibiting idol-worshipping, messianic-like followings and tendencies over the Corporatist Party’s current crop of presidential contenders, we have chosen to ignore the plight of the innocent – for most prisoners are – in Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and other places of ill-repute. We have thus chosen to be good Americans, seeing no evil, hearing no evil, mistaking ashes for snow, and pretending the evil done in our name does not exist.


Reincarnation of the Habitual


To look inside one of America’s gulags is to look back at dark history, to times of brutality and primitiveness, using the tunnel of hindsight to peer at the dungeons of the Roman Empire and of the Middle Ages, with their chained and caged collections of dissidents, enemies and scapegoats, their persecuted and tortured, and their sadism and thirst for blood; it is to step back in time to days of Inquisitions and torture chambers, to eras of witch persecutions and heretic trials, of silencing threats to power and spawning a black cloud of fear and intimidation throughout society.

It is a return to days when humans had no right, to nights of barbarism, to the depravity and indecency of our mammalian past, to the possession of the human mind by the wicked demons inherent in man. Looking inside America’s gulags helps us remember that over and over, for as long as humankind has walked the plains of Earth, when authoritarians rise, as always carried high on the shoulders of fear and insecurity, morality, integrity and human rights become lost in a sea of tyranny. These institutions of immorality help us see beyond the veneer and the hypocrisy that those espousing freedom and liberty propagate, helping erase the fog of deception those claiming to be defenders of human rights engender.

America’s archipelago of gulags proves, once again, that the “western” mantra of values, modernity and morality is nothing but an empty shell built on self-adulation, delusion and echoes of ethnocentrism and exceptionalism. This hollow and cynical vociferation falls flat upon the challenge of evolving human rights, for in its claim of moral superiority, hiding behind the theoretical wonders of Judeo-Christian tradition, supposedly progressing away from the primitiveness of our past, the “western” tradition has been one of continuous mass murder, repression, tyranny, oppression, exploitation, suffering and destruction, most aimed directly at the peoples of the “south,” most directed at people not possessing the genetic mutation that turned skin color pale.

American gulags and its system of extraordinary renditions, green lighted at the very top of the food chain, proves to anyone not blinded by delusions and propaganda that America is not now and has never been morally superior to the rest of the world. From the very beginning of the republic, morality has given way to imperialism. Whether done through proxy, by puppets or by America’s own hands, control over the peoples of the world has usually involved some form of tyranny, as always dependent on the vast funding, financing, political support and training of the Empire. However, where once hidden under the veneer of democracy and freedom, under the ruthlessness of puppet dictators, America’s sordid, though clandestine, past has come to the surface thanks to the exposure of its methods and techniques, becoming an open acknowledgement of past indiscretions and present malfeasance.

From the School of the Americas, to research into psychological and physical torture at McGill University, to perfecting the art of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to support of every tin pot dictator and junta in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, to the training of their thugs, enforcers and torturers, America has always possessed the wickedness of human malevolence. Its claims of being the defender of human rights is and has always been hypocritical at best and farcical at worst. Today we can see the real America at Guantanamo and its extension of gulags and torture chambers, the America the world entire has known for the last century but that Americans are just now waking up to. For today’s gulags are evolved creations of yesterday’s criminality, just as they will be the inspirations for tomorrow’s tyranny.


Entrapment


Guantanamo, with its cages and sensory deprivation and barking dogs and dehumanization and its stress positions and forced feeding and extremes of cold and hot and its isolation and its medical/psychological experimentation and its waterboarding and its darker, more sinister methods of torture yet to be exposed magnifies American tyranny and her hypocrisy, her injustice and depravity, her criminality and arrogance. It exposes, more and more, the charade that the war on terror is, how the purpose of Guantanamo is not the imprisoning of terrorists, for most there are guilty only of bad luck, persecution, retribution and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, but the methodical evisceration of the Constitution.

For Guantanamo, and its siblings, are a culmination of desperation, an attempt to rationalize the supposed existence of Arab and Muslim evil, an attempt to validate a fictional war on terror by incarcerating people falsely labeled “terrorists.” It is as much a torture center as it is a public relations and propaganda institution, a way to manipulate the American public both that Arab and Muslim terrorists exist, and that the American government is succeeding in bringing the terrorist threat to justice. It is a Hollywood-style set with its corresponding fictions and illusions of reality, a scam to convince Americans that a war that is concocted is indeed real, that it is being won.

The reality of the gulags exposes how an initial hunger for vengeance immediately after 9/11 has led to the imprisonment, suffering and torture of thousands, and how, knowing the falsity of charges and the innocence of men, America steadfastly continues shackling injustice, deciding to stage-manage the illusion of guilt as well as sacrifice the innocent to the continued myth of the so-called war on terror.

Kidnapped, traded in for money, picked up by a giant net of vengeance and imprisoned thanks to false accusations by rivals, the men at Guantanamo have become patsies in a world unconcerned for their rights. They are caged in a land of limbo, lost to the outside world, made to disappear, their lives practically an empty shell of their former selves . They are the scapegoats of American mendacity, labeled “terrorists” so that we can feel secure and protected, so that we can believe that evildoers hate us for our freedom, for our way of life. They are the poster children that grant the military-industrial complex a perpetual stream of blood money, a ceaseless parade of war, an endless flow of propaganda. They are, quite simply, the bread that gives authoritarianism sustenance, the wine that makes drunk with joy the enablers of fascism. They are, for all intents and purposes, dead men walking, ghosts without closure, phantoms forgotten by humanity.

Innocent of criminality, these individuals have been subjected to brutal and sadistic torture, as always leading to false confessions, their barbaric imprisonment and systemic dehumanization more a manifestation of American culture than of their resistance and human spirit. Many have been physically tortured, yet it is the more corrosive damage of psychological torture that has destroyed their minds, and their lives. Many will never return to normalcy, for what their minds have surely been subjected to no human brain should have to endure. Many have become the guinea pigs of psychologists and doctors experimenting with various methods of torture, trying to make torture more effective, more efficient.

Many have quietly, and conveniently, under cover of darkness or media blackout, been returned to their native countries, their innocence confirmed by their release, and by the silence of America. Forced to sign papers preventing them from speaking of their horrors, or from suing their torturers, they return a shell of their former selves, damaged beyond repair, scarred for life, forever to relive the horror they experienced in their nightmares and flashbacks. Yet many remain, shackled to American propaganda, held hostage to the illusions of the war on terror. As long as the fiction lives their guilt is assured, their imprisonment guaranteed. As long as tyrants fear persecution and imprisonment for criminality, they will live in cages. As long as they are used as the meat feeding the dogs of tyranny, they will remain encaged. As long as the authoritarian leadership seeks the continued erosion of the Constitution, and of our rights and freedoms, they will linger in perpetual purgatory, becoming the rotting carcass fed to the vultures of fascism.

Guantanamo’s cages cannot yet be opened and made empty, for to do so would be to expose the fictions, the charades, the method to the madness, the sheer immorality of the Empire. It would be to acknowledge injustice of innocence, the depravity of liberators, the criminality of leadership. Guantanamo’s gates cannot yet be closed, for the Crusade of Surge and Siege must continue, the enemy must exist, profits must remain, our rights and freedoms and liberties must be destroyed. New precedents of American legality must be established, kangaroo courts must convict, enemies must be punished, propaganda must manipulate and the innocent must be executed in order to increase leadership popularity, to refresh propaganda, to feed fear and to politicize elections.

America’s leadership is fully aware of the innocence of the vast majority of prisoners, yet cannot force itself to act against its own inhumanity. For to do so would be to admit mistakes, acknowledge criminality, condemn policies and destroy the authoritarian dream. Closing Guantanamo would expose the façade, the hall of smoke and mirrors, ending the subtleties of fear and intimidation being built around the American public. Perhaps more than anything, freeing the innocent and closing America’s torture centers would confirm the monstrosity of what America has become, destroying the foundations of a new normal being developed, maybe even shattering the bubble of manipulation cast over the population.

As long as Guantanamo remains the motives of fascists will survive, and the indifference of the American people will be assured. As long as its cages are occupied, as long as its torture rooms resonate with the screams of agony and suffering, Guantanamo will be the symbol of a new Amerika, one at war with the Arab and Muslim world, an Amerika at war with its people, and itself. As long as it remains a stain on humanity, America’s clandestine past and her immediate present will be exposed to more and more people, thereby freeing truth and knowledge, liberating the brainwashed and emancipating the manipulated.

Inside America’s gulags the future of the nation is being determined, one malevolent policy at a time, one sadistic interrogator at a time, one tortured soul at a time. It is here where our way of life is being altered, perhaps forever, not by terrorist evildoers hating us for our freedoms, but by fascism’s enablers doing the work of those domestic evildoers that hate us for our freedoms, for our way of life. In this Crusade of Surge and Siege, the Arab and Muslim victims have become a bridge of precedence set and normalcy born reaching out towards America, becoming the scapegoats and patsies granting access, and an omnipresent reach, to tyranny rising over that city on a hill once known as the United States of America.


Part Three: Inside the Fires of Imperialism, to be posted 25 February, 2008

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Monday, February 18, 2008

Crusade of Surge and Siege: Part One of Three

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Homeland Born and Bred


Sojourn into the outer recesses of a nation bordering on madness, into a land deeply disturbed and emotionally bewildered, a world of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, of fanaticism and fundamentalism, entering a case study into fantasyland and escapism, taking a pilgrimage into realms both of purposeful ignorance and blindness, , of electing lifelong incompetents based on wanting to have a beer with them, walking through the dark valley of indifference, climbing the monolithic mountain of hubris, finally reaching the hallowed halls of smoke and mirrors, a place where only the blind lead the blind and where the deafening roars of death and destruction are easily suppressed in delusion and denial. Journey, if you will, into a nation that lost its moral compass inside the dungeons of fear and hatred.

Enter what fascists call the Homeland, what patriots used to call the United States of America, now named, simply, and appropriately, Amerika, a place where corporations enjoy more rights and protections than the People, where corporations – through their products and policies – help kill hundreds of thousands of human beings every year in the name of profit over people, making them mass murderers on a scale reserved only for humanity’s worst; a land controlled by the military-energy-industrial complex, with war the engine for unimaginable profits; a nation now without a Constitution, nor a moral standing; a country that has developed a thirst for human blood and an appetite for destruction; a land of Manifest Destiny leaving death, suffering and destruction in its wake; a sadist entity that develops and refines its crimes against humanity it inflicts upon the people of the world by first practicing them on its own citizenry.

It is inside the bowels of the Homeland that the malignant cancer that afflicts the country can be seen. The inner tumor inflicting constant pain can be seen through the eyes of a people so psychologically damaged by the never-before seen pressures on the human mind caused by capitalism run amok— conditioned to live to work and not work to live, thinking that work will set them free – that no nation on Earth has more citizens taking anti-depression and mind-numbing drugs in order to bandage an otherwise perpetually open gash. It can be seen through a people so internally despondent that only escapism through hours of fantasy-television watching or ceaseless consumption of materialistic goods, a modern version of bread and circus, can alleviate the stress and the pressures and the fatigue and the frustration and the anger developed in the pursuit of empty promises, of fictional dreams, in a world of the unreal.

Crisscross the land of the free and the home of the brave to see those who serve and protect abuse the people they serve. Tour Taser Nation, a land where authorities routinely inflict electroshock torture on the People, pulling the trigger first, asking questions later, as always enjoying inflicting pain and suffering on both innocent and guilty. Students, suspects, the infirm, the handicapped, pregnant women, motorists, the elderly, those asking questions, those protecting their rights and yes, now even children, all can be electroshocked into submission in a legalized form of torture that seems to grow by the day.

Taser Nation has become Torture Nation, zapping one unsuspecting citizen at a time, conditioning the population towards the new normal of police brutality and state-sanctioned intimidation. Welcome to the Land of the Brownshirts, a place where respect for human rights and loving your neighbor as yourself is now frowned upon, a place where bullying, intimidation, harassment and a budding police state are the new normal.

Take an excursion into the vast hinterlands of the Empire’s prison system, a network of concentration camps holding over two million human beings, most imprisoned for petty drug violations, most black or Latino or working class white, many suffering serious mental health problems, many trapped in a vicious circle of indigence, unemployment, incarceration and oppression at the hands of the state. Ostensibly designed to rehabilitate, these jails do the opposite, exacerbating mental anguish, frustration and anger, easing the transformation of human beings into rotting manifestations of lives lost and altered. It is here where Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib find their genesis.

These prisons, these cages of solitude and loneliness and madness and survival and violence, are where American society discards itself of the unwanted, the undesirable, those not comporting to the mores of Puritanical code. America’s vast prison system is where those fated from birth to the lower echelons of society’s caste system end up, those millions tattooed with the shackles of American society’s perpetual enslavement, destined to forever live in ghettos, inner city reservations and Bantustans, devoid of opportunity and a future, forced to dwell upon the realities of metaphysical imprisonment, desperate to survive either by illegality or escapism, oppressed and subjugated by authorities, marginalized by society, discriminated against by the state.

It is here, in these rotting machinations of rusted iron, metal bars and decrepit institutionalization, of fetid squalor and sadistic reality, where America’s brigade of automatons makes its problems disappear, creating an entire state and privatized prison-industrial complex dependent on crime, guilt, sentencing and prisoners. It is inside these penal institutions that America’s sadists and authoritarian personalities work, brutalizing and torturing inmates, oppressing and exploiting individuals, fomenting racism and hatred.

It is here where America trains her torturers and her malevolent warriors, her “bad apples” and her fascist enablers, exporting lessons learned abroad, infecting the innocent of occupied lands with the cruel and inhuman punishment that is as American as apple pie. It is here, in these creations of human hell, that crimes against humanity are perfected. It is inside the gates of hell that experimentation becomes indoctrination and where brutality becomes legalized torture.


Rise of a New Crusade


Enter the periphery of the Empire, where fear and hatred together form silent acquiescence to myriad crimes against humanity, where indifference and unconcern leads to war crimes going unpunished, where ignorance of the outside world leads to ignorance of forgotten occupations, where ballots cast help ease into power corruption and criminality and mass murder, where the two headed hydra of the Corporatist Party colludes to condemn millions in Muslim lands to premature death and wretched suffering, where critical thinking is shunned and backwardness embraced, and where progressive, humanist ideals find castration by the knives owned by those living inside the bubble of primitive and extinct days long since passed.

Traverse a nation conditioned to hate the Arab and Muslim world – a land of a billion strong – with its corresponding depravity of jingoism and xenophobia boiling beneath the surface, ready at a moment’s notice, or upon the happenstance of new Pearl Harbor events, to explode in searing anger, for a populace injected with the venom of fear and ignorance easily unleashes its wrath on the chosen dark-skinned scapegoats of the undeveloped world. Programmed fear and molded hatred born of inside jobs and false flag events have unlocked the flames of bigotry from the inner demons of the Empire, creating sub-human scapegoats whose only crime is inhabiting lands the vampire of hegemony needs in order to satiate its ceaseless craving for power and control. Thus, in the lands where black blood flows and the devil’s excrement spills you will find the Empire’s dripping, black stained fangs.

Enter, if you will, the land of Christian soldiers and born-again leaders, a terrain belonging to the army of Jesus and to the vengeful, disastrous deity of Old Testament belief, marching off to victory with a cross in one-hand and an M-16 in the other; a nation of bible camps, bible conventions, bible thumpers and Bible Belts; of mega-churches, mega- proselytizers and mega-hypocrisy; of fanaticism and fundamentalism; of illogical – and damaging – belief in the myth of creationism and the delusions of abstinence; of agents of intolerance, thirst for conversions and theocratic fantasy; of protection and respect of life only if life is that of a zygote, not an actual human being caught in war, terminal disease or endemic suffering; a place where belief in myth and fable and of the never seen is given prominence over reality and reason and modernity’s treatises; of blind faith trumping sound science; of a nation self-professing and monopolizing blessings by humankind’s archaic and historically grossly incompetent divinity; of extremist theism, evangelical psychosis and reactionary emotion; and of evangelical sheep being led to pasture by wolves dressed in shepherd’s clothing.

Indeed, enter the eye of the Middle East storm, the creator of hatred and blowback, the father and mother of the fictional war on terror, the epicenter of the crusade of surge and siege, the fulcrum of Christian extremism, the home of the American Taliban, the disseminator of the self-fulfilling prophesy of a so-called clash of civilizations. From the Cathedrals of Consumerism to the Enormous Edifices of Evangelism, from the Hubris of Imperialism to the Arrogance of Righteousness, it is the Empire itself, holding debauched neoliberal capitalism in one hand, the mutated, distorted principles of the Cross on the other, that has birthed this latest of Crusades into the lands of ancient history.

For it is America, through military might and the power of its weapons, though financial intimidation and market colonialism, that has proclaimed itself heir to the throne of Western imperialism, arrogantly declaring itself the next in line, of humankind’s great historical powers, to reach the apex of Empire. And so, as the maker of mankind’s new reality, as the molder of human destiny, the Pax Americana, through its legions of neoliberal capitalists, religious extremists, corporatist stooges and delusional neocons, has created a collision all its own making, a vicious cycle of hatred born and vengeance sought, of cause and effect, of boomeranging blowback, of making an enemy where none existed, of declaring war on an entire region of the planet.

Thus the fictional war on terror builds the momentum for it to invariably become real, for one billion Muslims – the vast majority peaceful and moderate – to see, and firmly believe, that a Crusade of Surge and Siege has thus been thrust upon them by Christian and uber-capitalist Amerika. By this method the fictional war on terror feeds itself, growing from an invention of fascist Amerika in search of enemies into a mature manifestation of anger and hatred, a true, and artificially engendered clash of civilizations gorging on the boiling animosity of East versus West.

Through momentum that has been building since September 2001, the architects of creative chaos, the designers of bogeymen, the fathers of shock capitalism, and the makers of artificial fear have coalesced into an amalgam of malevolence, planting the seed they hope will sprout a perpetual battle between Muslim and Christian, America and Middle Easterners. In the desert landscape of Muslim lands they have found an oasis from which to plant and grow a modern day crusade, not to reclaim the Holy Land, but to simply claim the vast fields of the Devil’s Excrement; not to rain freedom and democracy on uncivilized people, but to firmly plant permanence in strategic lands; not to bring Christianity to barbarians, but to violently force neoliberal capitalism down the throats of the Muslim world. Such is the method to the madness of the Crusade of Surge and Siege.


First they came for the Muslims…


Navigate from coast to coast, witnessing the persecution of Arab and Muslim groups, most set up by the same government that later concocts charges and smears against them in the usually unsuccessful attempt at maintaining the illusion of insecurity within the greater population. The state propagandists realize that in order to maintain the chimera of an enemy, that in order for the idea of terror to coagulate in the minds of the people, the illusion must be maintained that indeed an enemy exists. It must be made to look as though the enemy lives among us, that it is domestic as well as foreign, that it is planning to attack our way of life. This, of course, also creates the fantasy that the state is our protector, and that in order to protect us, we must sacrifice even more rights and freedoms for security.

The use of scapegoats, in this case the use of naïve, oftentimes incompetent, illiterate, indigent and sometimes even mentally deficient groups of Arab or Muslim men, usually with no political power and no financial resources, is part of a formula of fear designed inside the rubble of the Twin Towers that has been used to terrorize the American people into submitting to a fascist, despotic state. With every persecution of Arab and Muslim groups, charged with planning terrorist activity, usually with little or no proof, usually later found innocent by a court of law, the state further cements the fiction of fear and the illusion of perpetual insecurity in the citizenry. Propaganda makes bogeymen of scapegoats and scapegoats make obedient cowards of us all.

Of course every new persecution is met by a thunderous manifestation of corporate media coverage, bombarding the airwaves with the fictions and illusions of the charade that is the war on terror. There are enemies in our midst, we are told, dreaded bogeymen intent on killing us, trying to shoot up a mall, or blow up a building, or murder our children. Yet, as usually happens, when the alleged plot is discovered for the lie that it is, when the state is forced to drop charges, when a court of law throws out the case, when the innocent’s voice is validated and the condemned are once again free, there is not one camera or reporter or journalist ready or willing to bombard us with the truth. The blitzkrieg of guilt is suddenly replaced with the utter silence of innocence.

The damage, however, has already been done, for in the eyes of tens of millions the parade of fictions and the presumption of guilt that has so readily been beamed by the corporate media have already established the fear and insecurity that America is under siege by the barbarian horde and its evil religion. The illusion has thus been established, the excuse to erode yet more liberties has been successful, and the scapegoat has again been made the object of growing hatred. The people have again been manipulated, conditioned to hate the very idea of a Muslim or an Arab. The enemy has again been vilified, dehumanized and ostracized, the very term “Muslim” becoming denigrated, its practitioners and believers made to wear an invisible crescent moon on their breasts, becoming in many eyes unwelcome pariahs in the land of immigrants and the home of freedom.

Every new so-called uncovered plot, every new so-called uncovered threat, every new depiction of evil incarnate is, of course, used by the Ministry of Truth to validate the belief that the state is protecting us, that our sacrifice of freedoms and rights, that our submission to a police state has been of great service, that it is indeed working and must therefore continue, no matter how intrusive it becomes, no matter how much it destroys the Constitution and no matter how large Big Brother continues to grow. In the end, the formula of illusion, of imaginary enemies, of chosen scapegoats, works to create a harmonious narrative of terror abroad and terror at home, of a war on terror that must be perpetual and ceaseless, of a state working diligently to secure our freedom, our way of life, the American way.

The formula creates a submissive, compliant and acquiescent citizenry, one that does not blink at the mass murder of millions in the Middle East, at innumerable war crimes, at the use of torture and the creation of gulags. The scapegoating of Arab and Muslims by the state and the corporatist media has succeeded in fomenting a xenophobic hatred and anger against those people emanating from and residing in the Middle East. The mission has been accomplished, for the masses, thinking that the shredding of the Constitution has not affected them because they are not terrorists and have done nothing wrong, have voluntarily eviscerated their own rights and freedoms, for eventually, the crimes and horrors and human rights violations and erosion of liberties committed against the scapegoat class inevitably is imputed onto the majority. In a proto-fascist nation such as America, it is only a matter of time.

First the state comes for the chosen scapegoats, using them as the key to unlocking the rights and freedoms of the masses. The scapegoat is the excuse, the mirage to eviscerate the Constitution in the shadows, with the masses blinded to reality, and creating a new normal of fascism and tyranny. Thinking they are safe from the claws of the state, the masses eagerly give up more power and freedom and liberty in the belief that only the enemy is being targeted. Eventually, before the blink of a collective eye, the masses themselves are being eavesdropped, spied on, surveilled upon, interrogated, harassed, controlled, tortured and disappeared. Eventually, it is their rights and freedoms and liberties that no longer exist.

Told today’s eavesdropping and illegal wiretapping by the state is to spy on the few Muslim terrorists, and that immunity for state and corporations is needed for our vital security, we later learn that all Americans have been illegally spied on, that Big Brother is watching and listening and monitoring us all and that we have no recourse to halt or file suit or seek accountability against the same companies doing the spying. Thus yesterday’s malfeasance and criminality become the present’s new normal, and the closer we approach the precipice of despotism.

The formula works every time authoritarian entities are determined to destroy the fabric of a free and democratic people. It is written in humankind’s history books, yet it remains ignored and unlearned by those who refuse to know the history of man. It is in our history that our tendencies are deciphered. It is in our past that our patterns can be anticipated. In the end, compliant Americans become good Americans, freedom is replaced by tyranny, rights and liberties are usurped by a police and surveillance state and a constitutional past becomes a new normal of authoritarianism and corporatism.

This is what happens when the majority ignores the plight of a scapegoated minority that is powerless to fight the claws of a despotic state. This is what happens when the first signs of smoke over the horizon are seen and ignored, only later realizing, much too late to escape its wrath, that a raging inferno enveloping everything in its path has arrived. First they come for Muslims, then they come for us all.


Part Two of Three, "Cages of Conquest," will be posted on Tuesday, 19 February, 2008

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Tuesday, February 05, 2008

The Year of Living Dangerously: Part Two of Two

Read Part One


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An Absence of Will


Under constant manipulations, lies and propaganda, a nation of courage has become a nation of cowards. A nation that once questioned its leaders now falls lockstep behind them, blindly following criminality and corruption. A nation that once stood for protests, strikes, marches, sit-ins, challenging the government and seeking accountability now prefers sitting comfortably on couches or chairs, watching the world pass by through television sets or laptops, some becoming arm-chair activists, most simply rotting away their lives, preferring the life of a couch potato, passively ignoring the destruction of rights and freedoms, silently acquiescing to myriad number of crimes against humanity, and obediently shopping, purchasing and consuming according to the dictates of the corporatist world, their new god the Almighty Dollar commanding them to congregate at the Cathedrals of Consumerism, the Malls of Materialism, told to do their job and be good consumers, spending what little they have, even consuming with money that they do not have, and must therefore borrow.

What dreaded dark skinned bogeymen could never achieve Bush, the Congress and the mainstream media have succeeded marvelously at implementing. Under the constant threat of terror, we have failed to see the fusion of government and corporations, now more than ever, as well as the mutation of government into the instrument of profit, revenue and the bottom line. We have failed to see who, in fact, the true terrorist entities are, what the true threat to our way of life, our liberties and our rights is. We have become blinded to the political duopoly, the two-headed hydra, working in synergy and collusion, not in the interests of the people, but for the corporate world.

We fail to see that there is no choice, that elections are predetermined, and oftentimes orchestrated by the Ministry of Truth, that an opposition party is but a façade, that only the Corporatist Party exists, its two hands simply performing a juggling act, each taking its turn running the three ring circus we know as government. In our delusions of grandeur and exceptionalism we have become blinded to the reality that democracy is a sham, that real democracy is a threat to the corporatist element, that America has done more to destroy real democracy around the world than any nation on Earth.

“Democracy,” it turns out, is a synonym for American imperialism, a disguise to ram neoliberal devastation down the throats of billions, a method of controlling populations through puppets disguised as leaders. It is only democracy if our corporatist elite approve of its victors, only if they pledge allegiance to the Empire, at the expense of their populations. Hypocritically, the nation that espouses freedoms, rights and democracy tolerates and supports dictatorship and tyranny if it protects our interests, but libels and slanders real democracy if it audaciously protects the interests of the people. Thus, in the halls of smoke and mirrors only illusions do we see. In the desert of delusion only mirages can be reached.

The dark recesses of fear have made us forget that the Constitution is not just a piece of paper, that its principles are the foundation of the nation, that in its words and meanings are the cornerstones of what and who we are as a people, and what we as a species aspire to reach. Its contents are the eternal spring that secures our liberties and rights and freedoms, yet we have forgotten that it exists, and thus, have allowed its meanings and principles to be castrated. Today, the Constitution gathers dust in the annals of history, now a forgotten remnant of humankind’s past, becoming a relic reserved for a museum, its words no longer read, or understood, or defended against the agents of tyranny who have always tried to destroy what it stands for. Sadly, the Constitution has been disappeared, both in practice and in the imagination of the very people it was designed to protect and inspire.

Unfortunately, in our euphoria of comfort, mass consumption and materialism, in our concern for security and protection, in our myopia of short term happiness at the expense of long term vitality, in our hatred of those different than ourselves, in our haste to seek revenge and deliver wrath on those scapegoated for our suffering and emotional train wreck, in our complete abdication as informed citizens and knowledgeable human beings, and in our demonstrated cowardice and silent acceptance as American-style wickedness is delivered to millions of innocent human beings, we have forgotten who and what we are as a people.

We have allowed ourselves to fall hypnotized for the myth of egoist-induced exceptionalism, basking in our perceived greatness, claiming ourselves the greatest country on the planet, as if it is true just because heavenly deities make it so, even with our complete ignorance of the world outside our borders. We have used our unchallenged, unrivaled power, which we have simply chosen to abuse and mismanage, to arrogantly destroy our standing in the world, in the process eroding international relations, international law as well as the sisterhood of nations.

Our unquenchable hunger for imperialist expansion, which the masses nonchalantly approve of through our indifference, is conveniently excused by our historical call from the heavens above to a manifest destiny seemingly promised us by humankind’s gods. If we ever looked deep into the mirror, we would see that America suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, bordering on megalomania, becoming an insecure, paranoid, schizophrenic nation that must resort to allocating military budgets that annually exceed all those of the entire world combined. In our reality, might makes right, peace is secured through perpetual war, we are made safer by creating enemies, not alleviating their grievances, and talking to your enemies is seen as cowardice. In no other country on the planet are the teachings of Jesus Christ so hypocritically preached, but never practiced.

In our view, happiness is secured, not through living life, but by consuming and producing in ever-increasing and unsustainable levels. In our reality, slavery equals freedom and work will make you free. We are so happy, in fact, that we consume the most psychotropic pharmaceutical drugs in the world. Depression, stress and feeling unfulfilled, it seems, are keys to nirvana and heavenly bliss.

We continuously fall for the lies and the propaganda, the manipulations and deceit, believing ourselves blessed by unseen deities, living in a city atop a hill, showing ourselves off as a beacon of light upon the world to behold, and aspire to become. We have been blinded by a false patriotism that condemns those questioning the state while celebrating those sheepishly following its every command. We have been entrapped by jingoism and xenophobia laced in blatant bigotry and racism, thinking ourselves superior to all other people on Earth, even when we are comprised of representatives from all peoples of Earth. We are sheep, lemmings and followers, always mesmerized by talking heads, pundits and the so-called “experts”, never thinking on our own, always doing what media propagandists spit out.

We have done nothing to stop aggressive wars, the ultimate crime against humanity, resulting in the death of well over one million innocent souls, all of which we could care nothing for. Only American dead, of course, need to be mourned, counted and considered human. Only we are worthy of life, and death, and recognition. The suffering we have allowed our government to inflict is not of our concern. We have shamed ourselves in our passive acquiescence to torture, executions, gulags, extraordinary rendition, untold levels of suffering and the disappearance of thousands. We bask in indifference at the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and at countless other secret prisons worldwide.

We did nothing in the abandoning and discarding of the Geneva Convention, the Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international law and in the trampling of the Bill of Rights. Yet the very nature of what we have chosen to ignore, to erase from our beautiful minds, is rapidly coming to our own land. We ignore what our nation has done to the majority of the world at our own peril. For the tyranny so pronounced, today and in recorded history, where America has vital interests to protect will soon reach us. We have taken the bait, almost continuously swallowing the hook cast by the corporatist world of profit and state, falling for each dirty trick reeled our way, assiduously falling for the propaganda of the corporatist media. We have allowed corporatism to run rampant, allowed ignorance to prevail and America to be altered, forever. Perhaps, then, we deserve what we get.


The New Normal


As we followed the tunes of the Pied Piper straight into the river of megalomania, as we slept through violence and destruction, as we sleepwalked the Constitution to the incinerator, as we dreamed the impossible dream, as we basked in the vices of greed and the Almighty Dollar, as we dined on denial and delusion and deception, our nation has been stolen from under our feet, transformed into a nation that has clandestinely spawned a growing police state, with a burgeoning surveillance society, becoming an authoritarian enclave, reared by indifference, nurtured by ignorance, protected by jingoism and xenophobia.

America is slowly, yet inevitably, becoming a country of repression, suppression, oppression and persecution; of perpetual fear and perpetual war; of growing militarism and fascism, of the entangled fusion of state and profit; of an absence of rights, freedoms and liberties; of so-called democracy that is today but a sham, a concoction of snake oil and farce where choice is but a fleeting illusion, where candidates are selected through the manipulations and illusions presented by the Ministry of Truth, where elections are but a mechanism of control, and of deception, where decisions are made not by those who cast the votes, but by those who count them; and so-called representation of the people a mirage to hide the selling of government to the highest bidder by a two-headed hydra whose dual purposes of expanding power to corporations and unleashing further imperialism for the empire, both at the expense of the people, have furthered the steady decline of the nation into the grips of corporatism.

The corporatist war against the American people thus continues unabated, its slow, yet assured, manifestations and reverberations crisscrossing the country like an invisible tsunami. With giant clandestine waves crashing ashore, the tsunami of the last seven years has eroded, with reckless abandon, the foundations of the Constitution and of the nation itself. All that is needed for authoritarians and corporatists to complete their project, all that is needed for America to descend fully into the depths of Big Brother and complete surveillance and a thriving police state and martial law and tyranny and a final shredding of the Constitution, and thus our freedoms, rights and liberties, is another shock to our senses, whether it be economic or societal collapse, whether a depression or through another false flag operation or yet one more preemptive war in the Middle East. All that is needed for this evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing, just as has been done for the past seven years, just as has been done for the last several decades.

For without so much as a protest or a whimper, the blood of liberty and freedom is hemorrhaging from the soul of every American. Paralyzed by corporatist-induced fear and ignorance, catatonic to the clear signals of an approaching cyclone of American style-fascism, hypnotized by the warmth and comfort that consumerism and materialism provide, the American people have become blind to the war being waged against our interests, and our lives. Yes, the crusade by corporatists, neocons, neoliberals and natural born authoritarians against the citizens of the nation has gone largely unnoticed, albeit with a few clusters of informed patriots desperately trying to sound the alarm of the coming storm.

The infrastructure of tyranny has meticulously been built, deeply embedded within the system itself, under the radar from the majority of the people, in complete collusion by the political duopoly and all three branches, its foundations created by the decimation of the Bill of Rights, the destruction of civil liberties, the construction of draconian laws and regulations – sometimes birthed in secret or in full openness – ,the insertion of precedence or opinions validating criminality and tyranny, and by the conditioning of the populace, in order to insert the “new normal” into the consciousness, of propaganda meant to indoctrinate us into accepting all levels of wrongdoing and criminality both by the state and the corporate world acting in unison, from torture to executions to mass murder to the need for constant surveillance of our streets, of our communications and our daily lives, and to the refusal to prosecute mercenaries guilty of crimes against humanity.

The new normal has penetrated our nation, and our psyches, since that dreadful day in September 2001, making sure that the political pendulum shifted further to the right, further to the tendencies of authoritarianism, making the Democratic Party a reincarnation of yesterday’s Republicans and mutating the Republican Party towards a full embrace of the tendencies of fascism and authoritarianism. Gone, perhaps forever, is a valid progressive ideal in politics, a left of center belief that was once evolving and leaning towards the social democracies of Europe, with an emphasis on doing what was best for the whole, not just the individual.

Shifted, too, are the political leanings of tens of millions of Americans, away from the values of progressiveness, and hence those of Jesus Christ, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., turning instead towards the comforts of security and protection, albeit false comforts, finding solace in extremist and predatory theology, in the scapegoating of the different and the unknown, in the groupthink emotions of nationalism and tribalism, in the ignition of flames inherent in jingoism and xenophobia, in voluntarily placing blind, loyal faith in media and the state, in embracing Big Brother security, in welcoming authoritarian false promises, and in freely, and gladly, giving up freedoms and rights in exchange for protection by the state.

Indeed, sacrificing an entire nation’s freedoms and rights, both in the present and future, in exchange for a false sense of security -- born and bred by corporate and state propaganda, of an enemy concocted and over-exaggerated – and purposefully looking the other way as the country becomes more and more corporatist, in essence abandoning our citizen role in preserving to our progeny what we inherited, will forever denigrate our generation’s legacy. In history’s future volumes, today’s American generation will be forever recorded as having fulfilled a complete and utter collapse in the face of cowardice, ignorance, indifference, fear and materialistic comfort, becoming incapable of preserving and fighting for the foundation of the nation, namely, the principles embodied in the Constitution.

For the generation that so easily gave away the rights, liberties and freedoms that had been preserved for centuries, fought in blood, sweat and tears, in bravery and courage, in wars and battles, and instead allowed itself the pleasure of getting raped by American corporatism, only negative connotations will be recorded. America, sadly, has devolved from the Greatest Generation to the Coward Generation, – or the Failure Generation – in only a few short decades, in only a few mutations of the gene pool, in the span of nothingness in the realm of history’s vast plethora of sad stories.

With the arrival of the next shock to the system, the next catalyzing and transformative event, the next preemptive act of aggression, the next Gulf of Tonkin-like staged event, the next false flag act of terror to scar our psyches, or the next economic strangulation designed to pillage ever more wealth from the working and middle classes, the elaborate and carefully implanted infrastructure of authoritarian rule will be allowed to awaken.

All the laws that have been put in place validating martial law and a surveillance society and Big Brother and warrantless wiretapping and intrusive invasions of privacy and domestic spying and dissident arrests and torture and a police state, as well as those laws that have destroyed habeas corpus and due process and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and all freedoms, rights and liberties we used to hold dear will emerge like a malignant virus that has laid dormant inside a body for years, cautiously hiding and buying its time until that day when chaos reigns supreme, when fear induces stress, suddenly springing to life with the onset of a weak immune system, launching an onslaught against antibodies made impotent to fight off its orchestrated and calibrated assault by years of conditioning, brainwashing, gluttony and fear.

All that separates America from Amerika is one shock, one event, one opportunity for those whose enemies are freedom and democracy to orchestrate the Amerika of their sinister dreams. Most do not know the seriousness of the threat, nor the perilous danger roaming among us, nor the sinister ideology of our so-called leaders, nor how imminently close we are to a vastly different America. For this cabal, this domestic enemy, the people are the obstacle, the real, and true, enemy. It is this group that is our greatest threat, our real enemy.

Until we realize that we have been led to believe for the last seven years is but a charade, that the “war on terror” is but yet one more method of control, that our pursuit of terror has led us in the wrong direction, that the real terrorist entity is domestic, not foreign, that we have been unleashing hell on Earth on the wrong, and innocent, people, and that it is this internal threat that hates us for our way of life, we will never stop the hemorrhaging of our freedoms, rights and liberties.

One day we will awaken to a nation we will not recognize, a nightmare on a hill, a beacon of tyranny, a land of the meek, a home of the slave. Every day that passes is a day corporatism advances, and we retreat, a day it grows in power, and we lose strength. Every day that is allowed to transpire in favor of the corporatist element is a day the People’s chains of bondage grow stronger. Every day we let pass is a day we slide further down the corporatist black hole, allowing our minds to become more ignorant, our reality to be created by the Ministry of Truth, our lives to be further shackled to the invisible dungeon of Amerika’s tomorrow.

One day, in the not too distant future, we will awaken and open our eyes only to see that what we once took for granted no longer exists, what we assumed would always exist has been made extinct, what we forgot even existed has been washed away, what we failed to study and understand has been revised, and what we failed to cherish and defend has been destroyed, forever.

We will finally realize what our fathers and mothers and grandparents and great-grandparents found out only through the spilling of blood, sweat and tears, experienced through many years of activism, bravery and the uncompromising power of the people united. We will realize, after it is all too late, that those in power give nothing and, if given the chance, take away everything; that everything the people at present have, that every freedom, right and liberty embedded in the foundations of America have been sought, demanded, struggled, fought for, defended and protected.

It is only because of generations of Americans past that we enjoy our privileges, with each successive generation safeguarding what was once gained, and fighting for what needed to be attained. This trans-generational wall of solidarity built the accumulated freedoms and rights we had at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Sadly, if we fail to act, if we fail to wake to the sounds of alarm, the wall will come undone, eroded by what we have become as a people, the unbreakable brick and mortar, constructed over 200 years of struggle, crumbling and succumbing to the powerful tsunami of corporatism and authoritarianism fast approaching our shores.

The Year of Living Dangerously is upon us. The sorrows of empire have arrived. In this struggle, America entire is Ground Zero. The clock is ticking, the time is wasting. Would we rather live in tyranny, or fight for freedom? Live in our America, or the corporatist Amerika? In this fight for our way of life, which citizenry will show up: yesterday’s version of the People, or today’s? The choice, as always, is ours.


Read Part One

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Monday, February 04, 2008

The Year of Living Dangerously: Part One of Two

Read Part Two


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Manifestations of Intent


Can you smell the smoked fumes of a discombobulated economic engine that has ceased to function, its synergy spitting and sputtering, its many parts thrashed by the claws, and vices, of neoliberal capitalism? Can you feel the dismantling of the economic spark plug, the American consumer, as our livelihoods are sacrificed to the greed, and incompetence, of the establishment and as the value of our lives is further enslaved to the Almighty Dollar and its puppet masters?

Can you hear the roar of authoritarian Machiavelli-types, of which many exist, cheering as the Constitution is discarded like yesterday’s trash, its principles and foundations burned inside the incinerator of fascism? Can you hear the searing of one of the greatest documents of governance ever created by man as it goes up in flames thanks to the kerosene thrown at it by American corporatists in power, its ashes slowly scattering into the realm of nothingness?

Can you see, if not blinded by tele-trash and infotainment, by the propaganda we call news, by the lies and deceit and censorship of the corporate media, by the comforting glow of television, by the charade that is American democracy and by the myriad distractions of bread and circus, the approaching finality of American liberty and freedom, soon to be replaced by Big Brother, a surveillance society, a police state and full-fledged corporatism?

Can you sense the growing momentum of militarism and imperialism rampaging across the nation, and the globe, leaving nothing but hatred and animosity in its wake? Can you sense that imperialism and empire abroad and freedom and democracy at home are mutually exclusive, that to attain the former the latter must be sacrificed, and that inevitably the people must, for imperialism to function, be immersed in tyranny? Do you realize that we are one major shock, one major event away from catapulting our lives into the headwaters of an altogether different America?

If you are not angered, indeed enraged, by the current state of the United States, then you have not been paying attention, or you just do not care enough about the future your children will inherit, and have to live in. If you are not alarmed at where, at present, this course is invariably taking us, then you have abandoned the responsibilities of an informed citizen, preferring the comfortable warmth of ignorance to the absolute frigidity of a most ominous reality.

Indeed, it has been our passivity and acquiescence, bred of comfort, distraction and the erosion of critical thinking, that has facilitated our decent into authoritarian and corporatist waters. It has been our indifference and our “can’t happen here” mentality that is inevitably guaranteeing that it does, in fact, “happen here.” It is our inexperience with tyranny at home and our lack of exposure to authoritarian tendencies such as surveillance, secret police, torture, spying and disappearances, prevalent in many American supported states, encouraged by our government, though until recently non-existent here, that subjects us to a methodical assault by Machiavellian ideologies.

What billions of humans have first-hand experience in, oftentimes thanks to our government’s sponsorship, funding, training, backing, protection and encouragement, we have not yet fully been subjected to. The dirty little secret that the people outside our borders understand fully, and which has been kept from us, is the principle that if America wishes to maintain its empire, it must then continue acting like an empire. This, of course, means maintaining a firm grip over its vassal states, by proxy through its puppets, using the methods any aspiring empire must use, namely tyranny, oppression, and repression along with the tools at the disposal of any credentialed authoritarian.

As the empire expands and seeks more control over lands, resources and people, its methods become more and more brutal, as native peoples become more resistant, with growing imperialism and addiction to hegemony needing greater amounts of military weaponry, violence and tyranny to squash and threaten resistance movements. In order to maintain its overstretched empire, America must therefore become openly fascist, a reality that cannot be fused with the freedoms, rights, liberties and democracy of its own people. The two principles, empire and liberty, are diametrically opposed, incompatible elements in a struggle to determine the future course of the nation.

Given that historically the nation’s elite and its establishment have consistently chosen imperialism, expansion and empire building, there is no reason to believe that this hegemonic drive will decelerate. On the contrary, in a world of finite resources, eager and growing competitors, a globe that only seems to get smaller, with an ever-increasing population and with Washington enraptured in arrogance, self- aggrandizement, self-exceptionalism and greed, it is certain that the elite will invariably chose to sacrifice the Constitution, and the foundations of American society, and hence the freedoms, rights and liberties of the masses, in order to maintain and expand the realm of American hegemony. This paradigm is occurring today, in real time. The transformation is under way, right before our eyes.

For between the coup that was the 2000 general election, allowing entry into the executive branch of corporatists and authoritarians, and the first hours of the American Reichstag, or 9/11, that most catalyzing and transformative of events, the neocon Pearl Harbor, America, already a most vicious and evil empire in the decades before then, seemingly elevated its level of arrogance, unilateralism, defiance, wickedness, inhumanity and violence against the people of the world.

Whereas the 2000 stolen election introduced an era of open hostility, unilateralism and a “we will do what we want” mentality regarding the United States’ view toward world relations, including the planning and green lighting of the attacks, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq and other Middle East nations, 9/11 was the shock introducing the world to an America intent on global hegemony, now open and transparent, the new normal, the maker of humanity’s new reality. The inside job of 9/11, aimed as a psychological attack on the American people, designed so the masses would become subservient and acquiescent to otherwise unpopular methods of empire building, also allowed the Pax Americana to begin its quest for hegemony on a more transparent, and thus easier, basis.

Before 9/11, as has been described above, America’s elite were forced to rely on mostly clandestine methods of hegemonic expansion, as well as to at least give the impression of following and adhering to international law, its activities kept secret from its population only to maintain control on the home front, given the unpopularity of tyranny and all its tools. This made it much harder for the empire to achieve its goals. With the end of the Cold War, with its threat of an external bogeyman gone, which was used as an excuse to justify America’s imperial aspirations, supposedly to defend freedom and democracy, new excuses had to be concocted, new enemies had to be created that would engender in the population acceptance towards a continuation of Manifest Destiny.

Hence, new methods of manipulation, such as 9/11, were implemented. The opportunity that was 9/11, a catalyzing and transformative event, allowed American fascists to continue their previous drive forward, only this time in a more open, methodical way, with the full engines of American societal and military might fully behind the endeavor to conquer the strategic lands, resources and peoples of the world in favor of American corporations, particularly the military-industrial-energy complex, and its elite. Today, much more than in the past, the criminality and control is done in full and open arrogance, not caring that the world becomes witness to an imperialism that is as systemic as it tyrannical.

9/11, for all its terror and fear inducing stupor, guaranteed compliance, passivity and even ignorant encouragement on the part of the American people. After all, an external, dark-skinned, unknown bogeyman had dared to attack the empire. It was only natural, then, that the empire fight back, even if those lands of the bogeyman were conveniently also those that had been preemptively chosen months and years before for invasion and attack due to the strategic locations and natural resources claimed by the empire itself. Under this rubric, along with the frivolous claim of bringing “freedom and democracy” to the Middle East and Central Asia, the American people were easy patsies to the maniacal ideology of American fascists in power.

What we call American-style imperialism has thus evolved, with 9/11 acting as its birth pangs, in open arrogance and unilateralism, in open state sponsored terrorism and hostility, in open defiance of and in direct confrontation with the peoples of the globe. Where once clandestine mass murder, violence, war, coups, repression, tyranny, executions, assassinations, disappearances, collective punishment, dehumanization and torture dictated the empire’s maneuvers to control the people and places of the world, with its assortment of dictators, tyrants, juntas, kings, proconsuls, ministers and elite fraudsters helping maintain and expand the fields of empire, the next stage of the empire’s temerity has brought imperialism into plain sight.

Today the world entire can see, with the exception of those living inside the empire itself, -- for most citizens choose a cocktail of delusion, denial, beliefs in exceptionalism and the inherent goodness of America, an absence of reason and self-imposed ignorance in order to secure an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality – what millions of human beings have experienced for decades. American imperialism and empire building has become an accepted reality, a “new normal,” with its attempts at building and securing hegemonic power throughout the world, through threats, violence, war, economic strangulation and market colonialism, as evident as cold in winter and as real as sunrises in the east.


Transformation


What is new, and what is not fully understood by the vast majority of the 310 million people it affects, however, is that the empire has brought clandestine corporatism and authoritarian rule inside the very shores of America. It has begun importing the very essence of the imperial methods it has and continues to use abroad, most of which have been very successful in controlling its domain, and thus expanding its global hegemony.

This has been achieved by the criminal manipulation of psychology; by the induction of fear into the populace; by the mass propaganda of sacrificing liberty for security – which achieves neither – ; by conditioning the masses to think only in foggy black and white, good versus evil reasoning; by gutting of the economy, thus creating hardship, financial insecurity and a need to scapegoat (classic divide and conquer strategy); by destroying jobs and wages, slowly destroying the middle class, in essence making this group slaves to debt and predatory capitalism; by waging perpetual imperial wars designed to control resources and strategic locations and transfer trillions of dollars from average Americans toward the pockets of the establishment; by the exponential rise in militarism, the military-industrial-energy complex and the subsequent allocation of ever-expanding budgets towards the Department of War and away from other government services; by the decline of critical thinking and reasoning skills by the purposeful decimation of education; by the systemic pattern of lies, deceit, propaganda and brainwashing endemic in corporate media; by the wholesale auctioning off of all branches, departments and agencies of government to the corporate world; and by the embedding of corporatists and fascism’s enablers into all sectors of the United States government and its propaganda apparatus.

With a more than malleable citizenry conditioned for obedience and passivity, it is easy to see why corporatism rises like a phoenix in the nation of the Founding Fathers. It is inside the belly of the beast itself where the empire has declared open war against the American people, in the span of a few years unleashing a devastating assault on the rights, freedoms and liberties of every American. It has been in the last seven years where the policy of eroding the power, strength and wealth of most working and middle class Americans has had its greatest success, thereby creating an almost impotent subservient class of serfs and slaves. It is inside the bowels of the empire itself where the people are under constant attack, with the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people being gutted and eviscerated on a daily basis.

The objective, of course, is simple. Using fear mongering and scapegoating of an external enemy, a dreaded dark skinned bogeyman of unquestionable “evil”, preferably one that is unknown and different, therefore, the very object of fear, one that coincidentally inhabits the lands whose resources and locations you covet, thereby validating war and destruction and conquest and occupation, the populace is bombarded with the recipe of engendered hatred and, of course, perpetual fear. Straight out of the Orwellian playbook, then, the concocted fear of the Arab and Muslim is used both to conquer resources and land needed to expand hegemony, with the acquiescence and passivity of the people, as well as to eviscerate the freedoms of and better control the lives of the population.

A populace in constant fear of “its way of life,” of its cherished “freedoms and liberties,” which the catapulted propaganda spews mercilessly on a daily basis, making the repeated lie a certifiable truth in the eyes of tens of millions, will inevitably place unbridled faith, even if blind, on the elements of government which, by definition, are entrusted to protect and defend the people. If hundreds of millions have no problem placing blind faith in a god that has never before been seen, heard, smelled or felt, relying on the stories and language of our primitive past, refusing to use reason and critical thinking to combat myth and fables, how can we expect them to not place blind faith in a tangible unitary executive acting as father figure – or alpha male for that matter – that offers promises of security and protection in a terribly uncertain and frightening world – albeit a fictional charade at that – while preaching from the bully pulpit?

Along with an approaching economic meltdown – which inevitably causes anger, hatred, scapegoating, false patriotism, xenophobia, racism, crime, hardship, hunger, suffering, poverty, fear, division and insecurity in a large segment of the population, thereby making tens of millions easy targets willing to accept authoritarian and tyrannical rule over their lives – the use of an external enemy as convenient scapegoat the riled masses can concentrate their wrath on virtually guarantees national compliance and acceptance of the erosion of Constitutional guarantees in favor of a police and surveillance state under corporatist rule. This formula has worked wonders for many of modern history’s most ruthless authoritarians.

This combination of economic shock fused with fear of terror and of a very dangerous external enemy that wants to destroy the peoples way of life is a recipe for a successful implementation of corporatist and authoritarian doctrine throughout the nation. The anger, resentment and negative energy of the masses, most afflicted by the hardships of a severe recession or near depression, is easily corralled into an amalgam of anger that can be manipulated and channeled in whatever direction the corporatist elite chose. Under these conditions, and having a scapegoat by which hatred and anger and emotions can be directed at, the corporatist element in leadership can dictate empire’s follies and aggressiveness with reckless abandon.

Together with a spineless and colluding legislature, – nothing but a collection of fraudsters, snake oil salesmen, charlatans, professional liars, opportunists and corrupt politicians, each bending over to the thrusts of the corporatist world, their powers decimated, their significance diminished, having now become but an insignificant opinion-generating entity, firmly under the control and power of the unitary executive, unable to enforce or keep the president-emperor in check – the government in Washington has become the very entity destroying freedoms, liberties and rights and helping to build and secure the infrastructure needed for a permanent corporatist, surveillance society, a police state, an authoritarian reality.

What no terrorist organization could ever accomplish has over the last seven years been done by the same government most Americans believe incapable of wrongdoing, the same government we place blind faith and trust in, the same government we actually believe has an opposition within its ranks. Ironically, what the external bogeyman could never take away is being methodically plundered by our internal “protectors,” and with our unbridled, yet ignorant support and enthusiasm. Taking candy from a baby is a much more difficult endeavor. With the state and corporations colluding together, the masses are left to fend for themselves.

In fact, it has been the government, with the help of the corporate media, that has terrorized the citizenry in an open and continuous act of psychological warfare. It has been the government, along with the Ministry of Truth, that has instilled fear and insecurity into the population. It is they who, under any definition of terrorism, have become our terrorists, our real enemy, our internal bogeyman. Fear mongering has never been so easy and, when the collective trauma of 9/11 wears off, all that is needed to reinvigorate the senses of the masses are lies of further attack, more dehumanization of the enemy, propaganda of imminent threat and insecurity and, if all else fails, one more false flag event.


Read Part Two

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Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Unearthing: An Awakening Has Arrived

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Article originally written in April 2007.

Since then, the Truth Movement has continued to gain momentum, contrary to everything Truth deniers and obstructionists do and say to try and stop Truth's exponential surge. Like the snowball effect, the movement continues to grow in numbers, reaching unprecedented gains, seemingly catapulting expectations and offering proof that the more people see Truth, the greater the hunger for Justice and the search for Change. The Truth Movement has begun to reach critical mass, in spite of the system's hurdles and vast propaganda apparatus, in spite of its entrenched censorship and gatekeeping machinery.

Truth, it has now become apparent, cannot be contained, it cannot be silenced, it cannot be imprisoned. The subsequent search for Justice, the second quest in our Movement, just like her sister Truth, likewise cannot be squashed. For Justice for 3,000 murdered victims and for those 9/11 First Responders now dying and suffering is a thirst our species seeks to satisfy. Attaining Truth and Justice, when both have been hijacked, are principles embedded in every decent human being, for these are part of what makes us what we are, what makes us, though at times primitive, a great species to behold, with so much to offer Earth, with so much potential and universal capacity for good.

In 9/11 Truth and Justice we see how millions of us seek a better way, a clean break from our present course of being, an opportunity to alter the course of a sinking ship. The Movement grows because, deep inside, we abhor corruption, criminality, malfeasance and tyranny; we detest injustice, inequality and oppression of the mind. We understand, as all people with free thinking minds, that 9/11 represents a clash between true freedom of the human spirit, not its charade or its myth, and continued enslavement of our lives and minds. This battle between two mutually exclusive destinies lies at the heart of our pursuit for Truth and Justice. We are at war, We the People against They the Powerful. In this battle the future of America, indeed, of billions of souls, will be decided. In this battlefield, they have propaganda, infrastructure, media and power. We have Truth, energy, momentum and Strength in Numbers. We have an unquenchable hunger for change, for discovering the possibility of our potential, of escaping what has been, of reaching what can be.

What the impotent antiwar leadership cannot offer, the Truth Movement has surpassed tenfold, a result of cooperation among hundreds of professions and disciplines, each containing millions of minds and eyes, slowly deciphering the charades and the lies, eviscerating manipulations and propaganda, methodically constructing a Tower of Truth no government institution or neocon shill can demolish. The Net has become our weapon of mass awakening, our printing press hammering down the cathedrals of control and long-embedded power. Through it we are one enormous collective brain, one giant body created from an amalgam of tens of millions of human beings, moving in unity, in synchonization, with the understanding that we are one indivisible whole, altering the balance of power like never before, slowly strangulating the criminal element in our society, robbing it of oxygen and energy.

Springing up in all corners of America, indeed, the world, the Movement grows and grows, unstoppable even in the face of continous smears and censorship, in spite of every obstacle the criminal element throws our way. Their methods no longer work, for Truth is a million times stronger than anything they can throw at us. Truth, it seems, is the flame, the fire that cannot be extinguished. 9/11 Truth, it seems, is the catalyst, the genesis, of a new way forward, a new beginning to a nation that has become an evil onto the world. For it is when the People fight back that Power backs down. It is when we rise that they fall. And it is when we take to the streets that they relent and bow down to our demands. Freedom is never simply granted, it must be sought and fought. And so it is with Truth and Justice. Alone, power gives nothing. Challenged, it gives you everything.

The system's apparatus is entrenched and strong, of that there is no doubt, but somehow, in spite of monolithic barriers, obstructions, hurdles and gatekeepers, Truth is spreading like wildfire, like a virus that has no man-made vaccine to stop its spreading. A fire inside us grows, unable to be extinguished, unable to be contained, spreading from person to person, eye to eye, mind to mind, hurdling over propaganda and manipulation, smear jobs and our lifelong imposed conditioning. Slowly, our chains are eroding, our minds are becoming free, our eyes see Truth, beyond the curtain of fiction and brainwashing. 9/11 Truth is setting us free, it is allowing our lungs to once again breathe the pure oxygen deprived to us for decades. Millions join our cause, millions see reality for the first time in their lives. It is invigorating, it is addicting, it is powerful and it is enthralling. Truth is setting us free, it is helping us climb up the mountaintop, from where a new beginning can be seen, from where Truth and Justice for what was done on 9/11 can be found.

An awakening is indeed upon us, we simply have to make it so. We see wrong and seek to make it right. We see change and want to continue on our path. All roads lead to a new America, a new world, an Earth where humanity finally decides to evolve beyond its primitiveness, beyond a humanity of many different worlds, beyond the catastrophe that has befallen us in the present. The system offers only smears to our evidence, it offers pundits and lackeys to our experts and witnesses, it offers propaganda and a controlled media to our Truth. Their methods no longer work, for our army of eyes and ears and legs and minds has come together, in unison, becoming an unstoppable momentum whose time has come, whose idea is finally upon us, having reached critical mass.

It is in this context, then, that the essay below should be read. An Awakening is indeed upon us, let it guide our way.


With Truth Comes Awakening


The suppression of truth has long been among the highest priorities for the upper echelons of power and authority. For a minority elite that clings to power by the manipulation of the masses using an omnipresent cocktail of lies, deception, mass-produced ignorance and ingrained propaganda, the destruction of truth is an essential method of control. It is a formula that has worked to unmitigated success for the elite throughout history, whether the shadows of power stretch from ancient pyramids, marble temples, castles, mansions or halls of governance. Those holding the levers of power and control understand, better than most, that the dissemination of truths to a blind majority could spell the end of their reign, for truth brings sight to the blind.

These entities understand that truth is like a massive breath of fresh mountain air, pure and energizing, refreshing and invigorating, and that once inhaled by the masses, the balance of control can easily be disturbed and seriously threatened. Revolution of the many against the few oftentimes results, mostly to the enormous detriment of the powerful. They know that widespread circulation of the truths of what they have done in the past and are at present doing to the majority could light a flame onto a massive cauldron overflowing with dry kindling, sparking an enormous inferno of anger. Truth, in short, could lead to an awakening of hundreds of millions of human beings who for too long have had their minds held captive by the instruments of control used by those in power.

It is for this reason that truth is hidden, fought, ridiculed, destroyed and suppressed, why it is emaciated and torn to bits, why its advocates and defenders are smeared, ostracized and silenced, their reputations purposefully shattered, their lives picked apart and criticized. Truth must never be allowed to gain momentum or be exposed, which is why truth seekers must be made examples. Those in power will fight tooth and nail to destroy the messenger of truth, yet will never answer the questions or investigate the proposition presented by the message itself. Better that truth remain a microcosm of darkness in the American subconscious rather that it be allowed to sprout from the fertile soils of free-thinking minds.

Thus, as can readily be seen on a daily basis, both in the corporatist stenograph called the mass media and inside the halls of governance – for those willing to open their eyes and see, for those that have escaped the slavery of thought – is the perpetual attempt to make extinct all traces of inconvenient truths that might upset the long-standing balance that maintains the few in mastery over the many. The crimes of the elite over the masses must never see light of day. Truth, therefore, is and always will remain the true enemy of those in power; lies, propaganda, manipulation and ignorance are their weapons, the methods by which they have always ruled over the masses, the master key to control.

So it comes as no surprise that over the course of the last sixty years, since the inception of television, since the rise of the military-industrial-energy complex, since the growth and corruption of the corporate world, since the marriage of government with the corporate world, better known as fascism, that all manner of truth has been hidden in the deep recesses of America’s black holes and tight-locked vaults.

In order to keep the beautiful minds of Americans from being distracted, upset or informed, in order to prevent truth from ever reaching the cauldron of mass awakening, the corporate media has purposefully been mutated into a propaganda and manipulation machine unlike the world has ever seen. Mass media has become, in the course of a few decades, a tool of dumbed-down distraction, suppression of truth, creator of ignorance, disseminator of disinformation and a stenograph for the corporatist elements that rule America. It is, quite simply, the elite’s evolved mechanism of control that maintains the masses in quiet and unknown servitude.

There is no innocence and altruism with the corporate media; it has been designed for one purpose: to control human beings, from cradle to grave, to the dictates of our corporatist masters, making us over the course of our lives obedient consumers, producers and slaves to the corporate world. It has been designed, through years of trial and error, to make of us all a grandiose army of good Americans, compliant, acquiescent, passive and ignorant, a nation of serfs in feudal servitude to corporatist lords.

Make no mistake, to those governing over our lives, we are nothing but the cogs in the system of consumer and producer, nothing but the energy that feeds the giant engine of mass production and consumption that only serves to fatten the wallets of the corporatist world and the levers of control over our lives. Thus, inconvenient truths about their methods of control and manipulation will always be massacred in favor of charades and fictions, in favor of propaganda and dumbed down infotainment, lest the truth of what America has become be allowed to permeate throughout the dormant minds of 300 million citizens.

Yet truth always has a way of unearthing itself from the mass graves of suppression, for its virtue, and by consequence its pursuit, is inherent in the minds and spirit of billions of human beings. The thirst for truth is as human as the hunger for justice. It is an absolute of the human experience, especially in the wake of lies and known deceptions, when those in power seek to squash it or when evidence proves incontrovertible. Thus, truth is a passion sought when experience, knowledge, research and the naked eye tell us that the lies and deceits bombarded into our lives do not make sense. For truth does not lie, as evidence and facts and the unmistakable laws of science point in a certain direction, toward a certain reality. Truth in the usurpation of justice compels the human spirit to pursue it unequivocally, in an attempt to right what has been made wrong, to restore justice where it has been trampled.

Human beings do not respond well to lies and deception, and the bigger the lie, the more malignant the truth, the greater is the quest to uncover what has been hidden, especially when the truth is as self-evident to common sense as to logic and reason and analysis and research. Humankind, by and large, craves the truth in everyday life, detesting lies, charades and manipulations. We also seek the concepts of justice where injustice dwells, desiring to bring justice to a world we know is full of injustice. The quest for truth and justice compels us forward, brings us strength, mobilizes energy and unites truth seekers.

It is our love for humankind, our respect for life, our desire for a better world, our hatred of wickedness and injustice and deception and all the evils the truth we seek has created and brought forth that compels in us the responsibility to bring honor and dignity to those whose voice and energy have been silenced, to bring justice to criminals and murderers and malfeasant evildoers, to restore balance to a tilting world, to awaken those yet to see the grand lie for what it is, to bring bravery to those still too frightened of the consequences of knowing the truth.


Catastrophe of a Post 9/11 World


Most importantly, perhaps, those that already know the truth – as horrible as its reality is, as mind bending as its ramifications are – those whose minds have been emancipated beyond the lies, distortions, manipulations and massive propaganda, fight to expose the truth and free the minds of tens of millions of Americans because they see what it has wrought, what it has spawned in the name of every American citizen. They see new Pearl Harbors leading to perpetual war and perpetual fear for perpetual profit, power and control. They see a century-long war on concocted dark skinned enemies from alien lands, conveniently scapegoated as America’s new bogeyman, conveniently living atop billions of barrels of petroleum, their lands strategic and vital for the aspirations of a delusional empire. They see the purposeful murder of their fellow countrymen as the marketing ploy by which empire seekers unleash hell on Earth, resulting in untold death, suffering and ever-growing levels of hatred against American citizens.

They see the destruction of America as we know it. They see the decimation of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, the shredding of civil liberties and rights, the rape of Lady Liberty, the extinction of habeas corpus and due process. They see a future saturated by a police state, a place where neighbor spies on neighbor, where children are programmed in the tenets of fascism. They see once cherished freedoms criminalized, the ability to think freely eviscerated. They see a nation controlled by perpetual fear, with a corporatist government controlling how we think and act using color-coded alerts and false alarms designed to terrorize the citizenry into giving up even more freedoms. They see a century of psychological war upon the American people by our own leaders, using their power to concoct wars based on lies, using their control over us to murder hundreds of thousands of human beings, all the while imprisoning us further in the cages of authoritarian rule.

They see America’s rural and urban poor, young in mind and body, conscripted into perpetuity, their destiny becoming cannon fodder for their corporatist masters, dying not for freedom’s ring or democracy’s protection but for protecting pipelines, spigots and the ballooning profits of the military industrial energy complex. The Truth Movement sees thousands of lives once promising and full of talent wasted killing innocent people, sent to die unprotected into a burning inferno, believing lies of protecting freedoms and bringing democracy, returning home maimed in body and mind, deep psychological fissures ripping through their minds and lives, left to rot in the halls of apathy and corruption.

What truth seekers see, and which so many so-called left gatekeepers, writers, reporters and intellectuals fail to comprehend, is that the inside job of 9/11, for that is what this truth is called, allowed predetermined and planned wars of aggression to become reality. It allowed a decades-long plan of perpetual war and fear and empire building and mass murder to begin, and continue relentlessly, leaving the American people as the sacrificial lambs to blowback, karmic terror and untold sacrifice. The new Pearl Harbor, for that is what 9/11 was, was but the first bomb to explode in a psychological war aimed at the American people. Indeed, 9/11 was designed, like the Reichstag fire in 1930’s Nazi Germany, and as other false flag operations throughout history, as the first salvo in a war of propaganda and fear upon the American people. Without exposing the criminality, 9/11 will not be the last attack by the enemy within against the American people. If left unchecked, America as we know it will not survive. Indeed, if not stopped, we will not see peace and security in our lifetimes. This post 9/11 world vision will never cease, taking us all down with it, including our children, who will one day wonder what freedoms and rights were.

It was 9/11, after all, that shifted our world into what we have today. Without 9/11, the American people would have never become the crazed and hypnotized warmongers that they inevitably became, allowing criminals and murderers in government to invade, attack and occupy lands that had no reason for attack. Hypnotized inside the clouds of 9/11 and easily manipulated by terror and insecurity, the American people gave the criminals and murderers in power free reign to murder and pillage and rape and torture and destroy in our name. 9/11 allowed Bush and his cabal of criminality carte blanche to do as they pleased, unrestricted and unquestioned, given power never before granted a group of individuals. This impact on the American populace 9/11 was specifically designed to achieve.

With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq having been green-lighted many months before 9/11 even came into existence, the criminals and murderers in the military-industrial-energy complex and the pro Likud/AIPAC neoconservative needed a catalyzing event that would mobilize the American citizenry, turning hundreds of millions of ordinary, peace loving people into the united voice demanding vengeance and death to the Arab world. Quite conveniently, those lands the cabal of criminality sought to conquer were the exact ones the concocted enemy was from.

Through 9/11, the American population would enter a submissive, acquiescent and warlike state, becoming the army of good Americans our rulers have always dreamed of possessing. 9/11 allowed America and her people to be hypnotized by a catalyzing event that was played and replayed hundreds of times, thereby ingraining itself into the American psyche. Propaganda in the corporatist controlled mass media made sure to hammer down its horrors, its wickedness, its masterminds and its reasons. A new enemy had been created; new excuses were discovered as to why they had attacked us: they hate us for our freedoms, for our democracy, for our way of life the talking heads exhaled. Fear on steroids was allowed to permeate the airwaves, as always making sure to emphasize who the enemy was, as always hiding uncomfortable truths from ever coming to light. It was our government, not the so- called evildoers, that since 2001 has blitzkrieged terror into our daily lives. It is it, more than anything else, that is the real terrorist organization. Much of the world already acknowledges this reality.

The massive propaganda machine of the corporatist world was unleashed, night and day, on a bewildered and frightened populace. The war on terror had been born, an enemy had been found to replace the dreaded Communist, and scapegoats were chosen to have the fires of hell unleashed onto their lands. In a matter of days after 9/11, the dreaded Patriot Act was introduced and soon passed, at once decimating many civil liberties and rights of Americans. Yet nobody bothered to ask how a document so extensive and complicated, so massive in its regulations and laws, was written in such a short amount of time after 9/11. For if it had been written before 9/11, as many suspect, would this not invite suggestions of premeditation and foreknowledge, of a desire to destroy liberties and freedoms, waiting patiently for a new Pearl Harbor to do just that?

With the oil fields of Iraq and quite possibly Iran having been carved up and selected for exploitation by American and British oil conglomerates months before 9/11, in the Cheney Energy Task Force, with the Taliban given an ultimatum to open up Afghanistan to American oil and gas pipelines, with a choice of either riches or war in the months prior to 9/11, and with the Bush Administration negligently unconcerned with terrorism prior to 9/11, yet fully committed to war with Iraq, as per PNAC and the neocons, only the arrival of a new Pearl Harbor was needed to implement what has since occurred.

With the arrival of 9/11 the world changed for the worse, with the United States expanding its power, reaching with imperial ambitions abroad while extending its corporatist tentacles at home. The PNAC blueprint was implemented and to this day continues to guide many of the policies the Bush administration has in place. With so many PNAC members, known as neocons, at one time or another given powerful positions in the Bush administration, with so many of these criminals and murderers roaming the halls of governance, it is easy to see how 9/11 became a new Pearl Harbor, a new catalyzing event that transformed the American psyche. It is easy to see how a new Pearl Harbor became the invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Only the laughable incompetence and ignorance of the neocons, along with the massive, well organized and brutal resistance of Iraq’s freedom fighters, have prevented the timely continuation of the neocon agenda.


An Unearthing


The events and reality of 9/11 can no longer be questioned. The only conspiracy theory is the “official” one, for it makes no sense. To believe the official story, the official “truth”, one would have to suspend reality, entering into Fantasyland, drinking the corporate world’s kool-aid, believing a government that has not told one truth in almost seven years of office. To believe the corporatist version, one would have to overlook the myriad number of truths, or coincidences, any of which standing alone disprove the official story. To believe a government, and by complicity the mass media, that has not once told a truth about any of its activities, choosing instead to ignore, omit and hide facts that do not validate the official story, choosing to smear and taint the lives of truth seekers instead of confronting and trying to challenge their truth, cherry picking facts much like they cherry picked facts on Iraq before it was invaded, is to purposefully decide to live in delusion, as if the official conspiracy theory is sacrosanct. The laws of common sense, physics, logic, reason, and of evidence, both physical and of countless witnesses, not to mention the knowledge of experts, would have to be abandoned and rewritten for the official conspiracy theory to survive scrutiny.

The destruction and implosion of the Twin Towers, falling into their own footprints, along with the destruction of WTC 7 by controlled demolition on 9/11 is now a self evident truth. This truth is no conspiracy theory, as the corporatist media would have us believe. It is quite obvious and apparent, to those whose eyes have been opened and whose minds have found freedom of thought. Sure, it is not easy to fathom that the government of your nation, the one you grew up thinking was altruistic and noble, good and virtuous, free of evil and wickedness, could ever be capable of destroying the lives of 3000 of your fellow citizens in order to have an excuse for perpetual war, perpetual fear and perpetual profit that will benefit only a small elite.

Unfortunately, the government of your childhood and of your delusions is one that has been inculcated into your head from birth through brainwashing and propaganda. In reality, it is a government that cares not one ounce for you or your fellow citizens, preferring to golf and fundraise while your city drowns in massive Katrina created floods, leaving you to rot in the squalor of sewage and human chaos. The government of your youth and dreams is one that has firebombed entire cities to rubble, killing hundreds of thousands in Germany and Japan. It is the only government to use nuclear weapons on foreign cities. It is the government that murdered 3 million Vietnamese and planted the seeds for Pol Pot to kill millions of Cambodians. It is the government that has decimated democracy in the Philippines and Indonesia, helping to suppress freedoms, assisting in destroying hundreds of thousands of lives.

This government of your fantasy has never cared about democracy or freedom, over the last fifty years overthrowing more than fifty democratically elected leaders of nations, either by coup, assassination or economic measures. As always, of course, these democratically elected leaders are replaced by military juntas, dictators, strongmen and puppets of our choice, picked because of their fidelity foremost to American interests, not those of their people. This government of yours, the one incapable of murdering 3,000 of its own citizens for economic, strategic and financial motives, has participated in or contributed in the death of one to two million souls in Central and South America, either through its dictators or its sponsored death squads or paramilitary thugs, never allowing Latin America the opportunity to prosper.

The altruistic government you cherish cares so much about human rights and freedoms that its multitude number of dictators and puppets are renowned for their human rights violations and their suppression of civil liberties and freedoms. The Middle East, that land of the Arab you hate so much, is a cesspool of torture, abuses, human rights violations and lack of freedoms, all supported by the puppets, kings and dictators your government is in bed with. Your government is the government most despised around the world after the one in Israel, thanks to its newfound affection with torture, mass murder, the preemptive invasion and occupation of Iraq, the death of one million of its citizens, the displacement of two million more and the importation of hell on Earth into its streets. Through a war of choice, based on lies and criminality, a civil war ready to burst and engulf an entire region in flames is afoot, yet your altruistic government is on the verge of attacking Iran, a nation that poses no military threat to America.

Indeed, the government of our childhood and of our delusions cares nothing for its people. Simply look at the way it treats its heroes, its bravest, those maimed and injured and psychologically destroyed by war and its human wickedness. Simply admire the conditions at Walter Reid and at many other such places. Notice too how many Vietnam and now Iraq veterans roam the streets of our cities homeless, with no place to go, no job, no life, forced to confront the evils of war through firewater or narcotics. Look at a veteran’s anguished face after he has been subjected to Agent Orange, or Depleted Uranium, or used as a lab rat or guinea pig in radiation experiments or anthrax vaccines and see how his body and mind deteriorate until he dies of what your government has subjected him to.

This government of the people, by the people and for the people, instead of using its vast wealth on education and healthcare and infrastructure and on providing decent jobs for its citizens, instead pillages the nation’s treasury, sending billions upon billions to the war machine destroying one nation after another. These billions, of course, end up in the accounts of war profiteers and elites and the cronies of the cabal of criminality, quickly made to disappear into foreign bank accounts. You, on the other hand, are but an automaton to your government, castrated of free thought, saturated with brainwash education, made conformist, complacent and acquiescent, transformed into the ignorant sheeple trained to be the obedient mass consumer and producer that guides the entire system forward. Meanwhile, year after year education rots, healthcare is made worse, infrastructure depreciates and the overall well-being of the nation plummets. This, indeed, is your government.


The Pursuit of Truth


The unearthing of truth can be an unsettling proposition, causing bouts of anger and animosity towards the truth seeker. Denial and the closing of the mind to new truths usually follows, as does ridicule of truth, suppression of it and fighting of it until one day, in the not too distant future, beyond the morning horizon, a sunrise suddenly appears, full of radiant light, warm in its glow, powerful in its brightness, ready to guide you forward. This is the moment of truth, when one finally reaches toward the sky, his or her mind suddenly made clear, now unafraid of what the truth may mean for a once beautiful mind.

The truth you have been fighting suddenly becomes self evident, bringing you the freedom of thought, of mind, of thinking for yourself for the first time in your life. You have fought against and declared victory against the pathology of years of brainwashing, of constant bombardments of propaganda, of being told to always have unyielding faith and loyalty in governance. With the warm rays of truth, you are no longer a slave to the system, a mere robot regurgitating the thoughts implanted in your head by the monitor in your home. You can now see what years of conditioning have prevented you from knowing, of a government far different than the one you were made to believe in. It is a government of the elite, for the elite and by the elite, pursuing the interests of the elite and the corporate world that now controls the hallways of power.

In your own research and investigation, using the full powers of the Internet at your disposal, using the free thinking mind you were born with, you discover the self-evident reality of 9/11. You watch videos of towers imploding and collapsing, of WTC 7 being demolished masterfully, as if experts in controlled demolitions were at hand. You wonder why air defenses failed so miserably even when hundreds of times before everything worked to perfection. You wonder how one of the most protected buildings in the world was struck so easily and without defense; yet in one of the most secure buildings in the country not one clear video exists of footage supporting the official conspiracy theory. You read about and become aware of the plethora of inconsistencies in the official conspiracy theory, and you realized how taken together, nothing adds up. You ask yourself who benefited most from the 9/11 attacks, and suddenly enemies within our own shores rise from the World Trade Center’s rubble.

In scanning the Internet for answers to government fictions you suspect of being lies, you see that the 9/11 Truth Movement is gaining momentum, gaining strength in numbers, for you see that more and more people are actually reading, observing, doing their own research and finding out that what they thought they knew simply does not and cannot possibly add up. You realize that more than one hundred million Americans doubt the official conspiracy theory, and that millions more are beginning to question whether or not it was an inside job. You see too that very few Americans, indeed, very few human beings, are aware that there even existed a WTC 7, and that it fell in perfect symmetry, into its own footprint, in classic controlled demolition style, even with minimal damage to its integrity, with insignificant fire damage. And you notice too that video for this demolition is readily available, from multiple angles, yet continues to be suppressed by the corporatist media, for reasons having to do with ignoring truth and disseminating the official fiction. Indeed, when WTC 7 is brought to the corporatist media’s attention, it is quickly returned to the black hole of silence, as if its reality never existed.

You wonder why the corporatist media is so quick to go after the personal lives and personalities of those who question the official story while choosing to remain silent on the questions presented by the truth seekers. You see the corporatist media smear and try to destroy the credibility of those that challenge the official story, and you wonder what is it exactly that these stenographers have to hide. You wonder why no corporatist journalist or news organization has taken it upon themselves to conduct a thorough and intensive examination of the events of that day, and why only the official conspiracy theory is given relevance, as if it is sacrosanct, untouchable. Meanwhile, any other theories or realities, most of which have more basis in truth than the official story, are bashed as the stuff of conspiracy theorists, become pariahs and are never given the light of day. What does the corporatist media have to hide, you ask, and who are they protecting?

Your research leads you to the gatekeepers of the left, those that feel the need to chastise and ridicule the Truth Movement, as if they want to make names for themselves, as if only they are allowed to know the truth, as if their arrogance has led them to believe the Almighty speaks through them. You realize instead that these bozos know very little about anything, and many, while competent enough, got their voices only through nepotism and connections, not because of their egocentric ability. You notice how these individuals smear the movement and resort to name calling, yet fail to comprehensibly put together a valid refutation of the Truth Movement’s claims. You understand their vested interests, you see through them, you decide to ignore them even though they provide a valuable tool in the discussion and debate of 9/11. After all, this is America, and everybody is entitled to freedoms of speech and thought and dissent and debate. You just hope these freedoms are not the next ones to disappear into oblivion.

Truth, invariably, is ridiculed, silenced, fought and eventually, accepted. The 9/11 Truth Movement is no different, for its foundation is constructed of solid granite, based on sound research and investigation. The Movement grows and grows and, no matter how hard the corporatist media and its agents try to slow down its momentum or halt it altogether, more and more Americans are becoming aware of its existence. The Movement cannot be silenced, for truth cannot be destroyed. What was done on 9/11 was a declaration of war against the American people, by internal enemies that have hijacked government, our freedoms and rights, and the Constitution. The Movement exists because it sees the dangers of leaving those in power unpunished, of doing nothing, of letting human wickedness continue. It flourishes because millions seek justice, truth and humanity, a better America, a better world.

Every act of criminality done in the past six years has as its genesis the horrific mass murder of 9/11. Every illegal war, every act of torture, illegal imprisonment, destruction of rights and freedoms, all mass murder done in America’s name is attributed to the destruction of the Twin Towers. If the enemy within is capable of such barbarity, if they had the audacity to perpetuate the greatest crime in American history, all to implement their delusional vision, all to enrich and empower their fellow criminals, what is to say that they will not do it again, in greater capacity, killing in greater numbers? One more so-called attack on American soil will destroy the America that we have lived in and enjoy, the one we love and cherish, the one of internal freedoms and rights, of the pursuit of happiness, the one enjoyed by present day citizens.

Already American democracy and freedom are in their last throes, hemorrhaging from years of corporatist mutilation. Elections have become a sham, a farce. Freedoms are disappearing, becoming extinct. The enemy within wishes for nothing more than an authoritarian, fascist nation, the easier to make decisions, the easier to implement their vision, the easier to control the population. The enemy within detests democracy, and this we must understand. Democracy and freedom are enemies. Ask yourself who has been the organization destroying our democracy and freedoms, our civil rights and liberties? Who has enacted Patriot Acts One and Two, who has destroyed due process, right to an attorney, habeas corpus? Who has tried to silence truth, dissent, protest and free speech? Who has made torture legal, false imprisonment necessary, confessions by torture legal and evidence concocted through hearsay or torture legal? Who has made it legal to spy on American citizens, opening our email accounts, overhearing our phone conversations, looking into our lives? It has not been the dreaded Arab evildoers. It has been the Bush administration. It has been your own government.

The truth is apparent, it can no longer be denied. The 9/11 Truth Movement thrives because it has truth and a quest for justice on its side. It has the power of the naked eye, for WTC 7 video footage cannot lie. It has physics, science, witnesses and research into government action and inaction. It has technology, experts and whistleblowers. It has honor, integrity and momentum. Of course there will always be 30 percent of the population that will never be made to believe in the criminality of its right wing heroes, even if the button for the controlled demolitions is put in front of their face. These 30 percent are sheeple, individuals comprising the army of good Americans, the most ignorant and closed minded people around. The Movement will never convince them. The challenge is reaching the millions who do have free-thinking minds, those who can put common sense and science and reason together.

The challenge ahead will not be easy, but the powerful never make it easy. They never grant the masses anything of value. We have to fight for it ourselves. Every civil liberty and right and freedom gained in the last century was achieved through the Power of the People. This Movement will be no different. Those that are our masters concede nothing, they take everything. They will throw obstacles at us, they will threaten and ridicule us, try to destroy our reputations and integrity. They will use the full power of the corporatist media to try and divide us, to divert us, to deceive us, to manipulate us. United we stand strong, divided we will fall. Strength in numbers, strength in conviction, it is time to bring these criminals and murderers to justice.

For what is braver, questioning authority or following it? What is more convenient, thinking for oneself or believing only what television wants you to believe? Who is more a patriot, the person who challenges the blatant lies of leaders in times of trouble or the person who obediently believes everything he is told him by a government that has not once told the truth? What is a true patriot, those that read the Constitution and seek to bring a bad government into account or someone who stands next to the flag and blindly follows the known criminality of the Commander in Chief? It is those that dissent and protest and debate, because they love their freedoms and rights, while being called traitor and treasonous and terrorist that are the true patriots of America. There are millions of them across the land, fighting to expose the greatest crime ever committed upon the American people, fighting to restore what has been and continues to be lost.

It is they who show the bravery and courage and strength and willingness to tolerate the smears and ridicule that are slowly, but surely, helping to return America to its rightful owners, namely, the People. It is these Truth Seekers whom history will remember as the ones responsible for ridding America of its greatest enemies, those that lie embedded within our shores, inside the cabal of criminality. When the day comes, and it soon will, when 9/11 is exposed for the inside job that it was, America and her people, and by consequence the world entire will smell the clear, pure mountain air of a truth too long hidden, of a sunrise giving birth to a new nation, a restored nation, returned to her People, where truth and justice prevails, where the Power of the People is omnipotent, where the interests of the People prevail, where criminals and murderers sit waiting in the gallows, waiting for the justice of 6,000 dead Americans and 1,000,000 dead Iraqis to be reclaimed.

The restoration of America thus begins with truth. Its unearthing is underway. America’s awakening will inevitably follow.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

America’s Tomorrow

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Burden on Those Yet to Come


Throughout human history certain patterns continue repeating themselves over and over again, becoming, if careful attention is paid to study them, a direct harbinger to what tomorrow’s cultures and societies will be like. The inevitability of what a future generation’s destiny will become is oftentimes discernable from the accumulated sins of the fathers that came before as well as those of the grandfathers that no longer exist, over years accruing and building upon each other until the future becomes the unstoppable rollercoaster birthed from the damage that was done in the past.

Tomorrow’s fate follows the path of the slow to evolve human condition and of our raw animalistic emotions and psychologies that have for millennia remained unchanged, following the same direction and trends, the same inability to change, though multiplied by advanced technologies, societal complexity, environmental stresses and increases in populations. It can be read buried inside the forgotten writings of historians and in the investigations of anthropologists, for the patterns endemic to our existence are bountiful, traversing oceans and continents, sparing no corner of human habitation, prevalent to all peoples and all times.

What we will become can be analyzed by studying the research of evolutionary psychologists and that of modern day zoologists. The patterns of our descendants can be deciphered examining the perpetual hierarchy of castes and the habitual social engineering of entire groups demonizing humankind for tens of thousands of years. It can be foretold by the never ending rule of peasants by the Establishment, the exploitation of the masses by the elite and by the willing, seemingly masochistic subservience of the many to the will of the few, as if authoritarian systems of governance are inbred into the human condition, making us mammals thriving on the suffering and heartache ingrained with being governed by tyrants and despots.

Human history, both biological and of civilization, – with its massive amounts of evidence left behind, accumulated and now known – does not lie, telling us the human condition has been a constant throughout time, following the psychologies, behaviors, emotions, culture, needs, wants and instincts that have walked with us since the genesis of humankind. Through the study of the past and of ourselves, therefore, our future can be deciphered and better understood. For what is the future but days yet to come built atop the accumulated ruins of the past, its lessons and errors and triumphs forgotten? What is the future but the heavy burden left behind by past generations whose complicity or failure to act passes on to those young or not yet born? What is the future but the accumulated knowledge of past civilizations imprisoned and silenced by our inability to know who and what we truly are, our denial and ego becoming the demons condemning us to perpetual years of unnecessary turmoil?

The future has yet to arrive, of course, its destiny having not yet been sealed in stone, but what is certain is that there exists a perpetual belief among humankind, in this modern age of greed, selfishness and comfort, that the problems or errors or sins of the present can be ignored and inherited to those yet to take the reigns of society. Every generation, it seems, places upon the next the heavy weight of a society’s ills, those hidden secrets we all know about but would rather not confront, in the misplaced assumption that the future will invariably be better equipped to confront the maladies of the past visiting the innocence of the future.

In this way, the present can relinquish the guilt of what they have endowed to the future, enabling selfish minds to return to their comfortable existence, continuing on the errors of their ways, thereby condemning tomorrow for the short-term satisfaction of today. Built upon the foundations of those now ash and dust, themselves leaving behind heaps of unresolved troubles, and continuing with those now made producers, consumers, serfs and sheeple, the sins, errors, gluttonous stupor and indifference of yesterday and today gather momentum, building a colossal wall, brick of indifference built atop brick of indifference, making blind the present, hindering views of the horizon, even as their behavior degenerates further and even as their actions further indebt America’s tomorrow.

Ultimately, the weight of burdens and ills left behind by the past and present becomes an unbearable responsibility for those yet innocent and unborn who are placed in the indelible position of having to somehow make right what has for years been made wrong. The accumulation of past errors, indifference and acquiescence becomes so heavy, containing so much volume and momentum, that inevitably the dam containing and hiding the indifferences of times past breaks, flooding tomorrow with an unfixed and untreatable destiny. As such, one day in the not too distant future the remnants of times past will arrive to overtake our achievements and triumphs and virtues, swallowing our children with the inherited affliction not of their own making. The vicious cycle will continue, inevitably leading humankind to the precipice of its own destruction.


Facilitator of America’s Tomorrow


If America’s today is any indication of how America’s tomorrow will develop, the past and present must be scrutinized, and understood, for in exploring the sins and errors and tribulations and events of days preceding our own time we can peer directly into, as far as we can go, into America’s tomorrow, trying to understand the course our nation is headed towards. The patterns of history are omnipotent, never invisible or clandestine, waiting eagerly on the periphery for us to wake up and hear the trumpets signaling and warning us to the troubles waiting America’s tomorrow.

America’s tomorrow will arrive like a thunderbolt created during an ominous storm of fear and psychological fragility, striking without warning, its concussion reverberating throughout the land. An attack by the enemy will be declared, its images aired repetitiously by the corporatist media, unleashing wave after wave of human emotion and tragedy for all of us to absorb. The attack will be horrific, a new Pearl Harbor reincarnated, devastating lives and infrastructure, its severity magnified a million-fold by the instruments of propaganda, the tools of power releasing a hypnotizing cocktail of fear, hatred and xenophobia amongst the citizenry.

Tens of millions of people will instantly become, once again, the marching army of drones and automatons for those in power, engendering legions of “good Americans,” their minds under the spell of human wickedness, ready to sacrifice their blood, children, treasure and freedom in the name of security, acting on animal instinct, looking at government for protection, willingly enslaving themselves to the dictates of criminals and murderers. Calls for vengeance abroad and greater security in the fatherland will emanate from our monitors, becoming the calls to prayer listened to by the faithful.

Under the pretext of securing the homeland from the terrorists wanting to destroy us for our cherished freedoms and democracy, the police state will be ushered in during the quiet hours of citizen fear and shock, blindly approved by the people themselves, preferring the modes of totalitarianism to being woken from their gluttony-filled, comfort-laden, fiction-living bubble. In the darkness of America’s chaotic nights the spot lights of draconian measures will be introduced, and the America of yesteryear’s dreams will abruptly vanish into the reality of America’s tomorrow.

It will all be a smoking mirror, of course, stirring the masses through the chimera of terrorism, placing in our own hands the guillotine used to self-decapitate our rights and freedoms, sacrificing liberty for so-called security, the futures of our children for so-called protection. Used to justify total corporatist domination over our lives, and our society, an attack upon an American city will be but the latest stage in our acrimonious and gradual descent into fascism. For the road we have decided to take, so tempting in its comfort and lavishness, yet so corrosive in its birth of ignorance and docility, has inevitably led to the rise of the corporate world, a Leviathan managed by the Establishment, over the years having grown all-powerful, its fangs deeply entrenched in the mechanisms used to create, alter and dominate society and culture.

Our eyes and ears will be unable to understand or see the ramifications of a society allowed to enter the black hole of today’s mutated capitalism. Years in the making, capitalism’s lifespan has reached the point of regression and perversion, where its apex, that greatest bell curve of exploitation, inequality and addiction to power, coincides with the compromising nature upon the human condition, creating that period of decline where its advantages are severely outweighed by its demons. After decades becoming indifferent and unattached to the gradual mutation of capitalism from beacon of hope to unregulated manipulator of human nature, allowing it to reach its most corrosive stage in its cycle, today we find that we are reaping what we have sowed.

The methodical rise of the corporate Leviathan, controlled by the vices of greed and addiction to power, its wealth and power unmatched and unchallenged, concerned only for revenue and sales, stock price and dividend yield, putting profit over people, seeing 300 million Americans only as producers and consumers, not human beings, and thinking of democracy more as a hindrance rather than a blessing, has invariably resulted in the total dominance of governance by an Establishment intent on expanding its control and power over American society.

The last few decades have seen the accumulated wealth of the few at the top grow exponentially, reaching astronomical proportions. At the root of this manifestation has been the exploitation of the middle and working classes along with the pillage of their wages, creating an unbalanced redistribution of resources in favor of the rich. These castes have, over the years, been made to subsist on the crumbs, bones and scraps thrown them by the ruling elite, forced to survive by purchasing the same products they make or sell at work, using up their slave wages for food and survival, forced to pay tribute to their rulers through high taxes.

Behind today’s degenerative and unfettered capitalism – an economic system simply embarking on the next step in its lifecycle – stands the inability of man, no matter what position he stands in, to sever highly animalistic emotions, passions, wants and needs away from the mechanisms of modern economic forms of governance. The rewards spawned by capitalism to the few at the top, as satisfying as any euphoria, yet as addicting as the most compulsive drug, compromise and indeed multiply the primitive, mammalian urges existing inside us, granting sustenance to the demons of human nature and making of man a most dangerous entity.

Inside the minds of the luckiest and wealthiest among us, those we would call the elite, the Establishment, the capitalists and the rich, these demons grow unabatedly with the continued accumulation of capital, creating a circle of degeneration, making addicts to power, wealth and control the same people already possessing them, those with the ability and means to keep pursuing and expanding their wealth at the expense of the easily exploitable masses. For absolute power corrupts absolutely and the human condition has yet to evolve the mechanisms to control itself both in the presence of gluttony or once trapped inside the addictions created by the spoils of capitalism.

In a vicious cycle of capitalistic greed, those having much devote their lives to amassing more, never satisfied with the treasure they already possess, like a wolf gorging on the spoils of the kill, becoming blind to the addiction their lust to the Almighty dollar has created. In their quest for wealth and power, therefore, they will stop at nothing in order to achieve their goals, exploiting and subjugating the masses, manipulating and enslaving us, commandeering the instruments by which to control society, decimating the environment, steering us directly towards the gates of corporatism.

The few at the top, mostly products of inheritance, nepotism and born wealth, over the years inbred and diluted, lost of ability and talent, living off the laurels of ancestors, forever spoon-fed and pampered, far removed from their talented patriarchs and the realm of reality, long since weaned from the ways or lives of the rest of us and insulated by the bubble that wealth inflates, have never experienced the struggle of the masses, nor the reality of life to billions. Instead, isolated and protected do they live, their vast empires designed to enrich them through the slave labor that social engineering manufactures. Paying slave wages, exploiting the lives, energy, blood, sweat and tears of billions, their revenues and profits skyrocket, their lives becoming ever more luxurious, gluttony permeating every moment of their existence. The addiction to what they have cannot be controlled, or extinguished, and so, the exploitation of their workers continues, enabling the ever-widening gap between the rich and the rest of us.

Yet even their wealth and power cannot halt the possession over the human mind that the addiction to greed, love of the Almighty Dollar and the ingrained demons of human nature that are unleashed by capitalism create. Because weather rich or poor, from suburban haven or urban reservation, the fact remains that our brains remain the same, our behaviors perhaps more refined in the former, less educated in the latter, yet still human, all too human, both primate and mammalian, subject to the same forces of evolution, the same animal behaviors, human psychologies and vulnerabilities of consciousness and thus susceptible to the same evils that capitalism helps spawn.

The ruling elite have long since lost any attachment to the masses, or any empathy to the plight of the less fortunate. They live cocooned in their aristocracy, unable to comprehend the life of normalcy, possessing only the drive to further the interests of their own kind. They have become slave drivers, degenerate capitalists, thriving at the expense of others, depending on lower caste systems for their workers, pushing forward the buttons of social engineering to create the next generation of their slaves, slashing education, making more automatons, exacerbating poverty, cutting social services, implementing insurmountable barriers to entry and multiple incentives for failure. They have achieved their successes through the corporation, over the years having become their lifeblood, allowing them greater control over America.

The corporation has become the demon of the modern age, becoming, to 21st century humanity, what totalitarian regimes were to the 20th, a threat allowed to grow and prosper, slowly gaining power and influence, becoming wealthier than entire nations, allowed to control and manipulate the population, swallowing whole the branches of government, becoming overlord of Earth, master of the masses. It is the corporation, allowed to develop through debauched capitalism and the power of the Establishment, through our indifference and failure to act, which has accelerated the dastardly stage of degenerate capitalism we are immersed in today. It is the corporation, and the people that control it, that has become the greatest threat to the continued survival of humankind.

Yet the Leviathan is allowed to continue expanding its wealth, power and control. Out of the top 100 economies in the world, 51 are corporations, their GDP surpassing that of many underdeveloped nations. It is destroying entire societies and cultures, usurping governments into its den of servitude, collapsing the environment and using as its exploitable producers and consumers 6.3 billion human beings. The Leviathan now controls every mechanism of globalization, giving rise to the era of the corporation and the death of the nation state, resurrecting the systems of feudalism and serfdom, carving up the lands of the planet and furthering the utter decay of billions of human lives through the reality of perpetual indentured servitude. The influence they possess is, therefore, immense, able to dictate the direction of the world, and the lives of over six billion humans, through control of the government’s of the world.

The power of the corporation is such that American government, that bastion of ‘We the People,’ has been hijacked, the army of corporatism now infested deep within all levels of governance, conditioned to further the interests of the corporate world. Through the allure of wealth, money and the always addicting Almighty Dollar, which the human brain cannot yet defeat, the Establishment can purchase the services and favors of government employees as well as injecting its own vermin into the halls of power. The revolving door of cronyism, where government officials are hired by corporations and corporate executives get appointed to the highest levels of government, as well as through the legal form of bribery called lobbying of government officials, have resulted in the complete control of America by the corporate world. The military-energy-industrial complex has infiltrated the Oval Office, West Wing and the Congress, spreading its tentacles to all Departments and offices of substance. American government has, for all intents and purposes, become a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations, a prostitute inseminated by her pimp to give birth to and nurture the mechanisms of complete corporatist control of American civilization.

Every day we see further signs that a government designed to represent the interests of the People has long since stopped doing just that. Yet the citizenry continues to yield more and more power to the corporate world, its indifference and passivity helping seal America’s tomorrow. As the years progress, this reality continues, with government having become a charade, democracy but an instrument of fantasy, our elected representatives having become the whores of corporations, the twice unelected President a corporate puppet, a buffoon whose last name was needed to secure entrance of corporatists to the most powerful position in the world. The debauchery has resulted in laws and regulations and appropriations and rules and tax breaks and incessant welfare furthering the power of the corporation, not those of the people, our interests steamrolled by money, power and greed.

Capitalism has created a system whereby the Almighty Dollar has become the new religion of man, with the demons of greed and exploitation working hand in hand to emasculate the human mind, the pursuit of wealth and the addiction to power condemning billions around the world who have no choice but to live the life of slave to the capitalists. Never before in the history of man has our brain, and our psychology, been confronted with the gluttony or the lavishness or the temptations or the incredible wealth now available to a small minority of humans. It has yet to build defense mechanisms to the evils that capitalism spawns inside the mind; society, and capitalism, has proceeded much faster than our ability to evolve our psychologies. The pursuit of wealth, the addiction to power and the ease with which the elite can build personal empires has become a new phenomenon in our species, relatively speaking. For millennia we were nothing but primitive hunters and gatherers, living off of game and plants, surviving day to day, week to week, considered lucky if we ate once a day, our numbers sparse, the planet virgin.

Never had we seen the gluttony or unsustainable exploitations of today, the overabundance of material goods, the excessiveness of foods, the great accumulation of wealth and the evisceration of the planet to achieve it. The human species has never seen the obesity we see today or the large cardboard cookie cutter homes of today’s suburbs or the stresses of modern living or such technologies as television. Humans had never lived the life of luxury, pursuing material possessions much more than humanity, becoming the greed mongers we are today. The elite had never had the corporation as an option, its tentacles building human wickedness around the globe.

We have evolved technology, but technology has not evolved us. Our society has grown beyond the reach of our slow evolving brains, witnessed by our inability to manage and control the over excessiveness prevalent in the America of today. Our ingrained behaviors and instincts cannot keep up with the rapid pace of society and the alluring temptations of the Almighty Dollar, for evolution works in long epochs, not in decades or years or days.

Our psychology remains susceptible to the demons of capitalism, transforming us not into animals, but into animals now divided by wealth, power and social engineering, with some possessing immense power, control and treasure while others own not one possession. We remain the mammalian primate we have always been, yet capitalism has allowed entrance to the evils inherent in human nature, exploiting and manipulating the easily created pathology of greed, the addiction to power, the urge to exploit, the loss of empathy and the drive toward selfishness, creating behaviors and actions we have yet to fully comprehend. Our fragile, as yet unevolved psychology relative to the mechanisms of the modern world, with its many liabilities, constraints, errors and needs for improvement, has proved that we sped like a runaway freight train directly into forms of economic governance our minds were perhaps not ready to dominate.

We have become, perhaps, a society where the blind lead the blind, into a place nobody knows, for no one has ever entered the parameters of where we presently find ourselves. The temptations, addictions, euphoria, comforts and materialism spawned by capitalism have blinded us to what we have become, to the frailty of our psychologies, to the demons we are releasing. Instead of humankind dominating and controlling capitalism we have allowed capitalism to dominate and control us, much to the detriment of billions.

Today we see the effects of capitalism run amok, beyond the control of humankind, becoming, through its sojourn through its various stages, a runaway freight train whose only stop will be the crash that sends concussions reverberating throughout America’s tomorrow. With few possessing much, many owning little, the great gap between the haves and the have nots nonetheless continues to increase, creating friction and animosity. Left to its own devices, free to evolve as it has since its inception, capitalism, in its modern incarnation, is inevitably leading to increased levels of corporatism, for in authoritarianism, and in control of governance, the elite see the next step in their pursuit of power, wealth and control. In corporatism they see control of a population that will in the next few years increasingly become more and more bitter with the continued decimation of their way of life.

Corporatist addictions to the evils of capitalism, to which their minds are impotent to try and dominate, dictate that the fusion of their corporations with government is the next logical step in the complete control over producers and consumers, 300 million strong. With the increased gap between rich and the rest, with poverty on the rise, with slave labor and slave wages growing, with tens of millions struggling paycheck to paycheck, needing two jobs to sustain themselves, with healthcare lacking for over 40 million people, with laws and regulations no longer enacted to help citizens, with inequality and injustice on the rise, with wealth vastly disproportional, the nation’s resources owned almost exclusively by the elite, and with millions waking to the realization of what is being done to America and its citizens by corporatist interests, the only way to prevent a repeat of the French Revolution will be complete and utter control of the population.

The exploitation by the corporatists of both the people and the nation will continue, for the most deranged step in capitalism’s cycle is upon us. At some point in time, whether in a month or five years, the masses will wake to what is being done to them. Corporatists, already in control of government, dominating society, our culture, thoughts and lives, will try to preempt this inevitability with the introduction of a perpetual police state using as pretext the war on terror and further attacks upon one of our cities.

For corporatism, more commonly termed fascism, has arrived, just in time to hail the arrival of America’s tomorrow.


The Arrival of Tomorrow


Already in control of government, possessing the technologies of private enterprise and the resources of governance, holding all the mechanisms by which to brainwash and manipulate the populace, their wallets thick with the Almighty Dollar, the tentacles of power and control omnipotent and omnipresent, corporatists have all the ingredients deeply entrenched to enact the next step in America’s history.

It is they, the power hungry and corrupted, those addicted to greed and wealth that cannot stand democracy and must, therefore, try to destroy it. For real democracy, and not the illusion meant to convey in the masses a sense of participation, is a threat to those seeking to rule by authority and through absolute control of the nation. To them the will of the citizenry is an obstacle; a government of, by and for the people is a hindrance, because in real democracy the population chooses, decides and controls the path a country will take. In a real democracy the rights of minorities are protected, the freedom of everyone is guaranteed.

Democracy is, therefore, incompatible with authoritarianism, with a system ruled by the few, not the many. Democracy becomes an obstacle to those at the top, because they are few, the masses many, and, in deciding the fate of a nation the elite can never outvote the masses. Given that the interests of the elite are incompatible with those of the people, and that the people will, without manipulation, vote for those espousing their own interests, the elite must use all tools at their disposal to manipulate the vote or the mind of the voters. In order to steer the nation in the direction of their interests, then, the wealthy few must control government and society, using all weapons at their disposal to control the thoughts and opinions of the population. Hence, the importance of the elite to control all aspects of the corporate media is understood, for in the television the thoughts and decisions of the American people are born.

To the corporatists and the elite, the will of the people becomes meaningless, their interests emaciated by the instruments of corporatism. Instead, the illusion is maintained in the minds of the people that their interests are being protected and defended, yet to the careful eye, the interests being pursued are only those of the elite. Slowly but surely, the ambitions of power become a parasite feeding off the interests of the weak, hemorrhaging centuries old rights birthed through revolution. A nation of liberties, freedoms and rights interferes with the wants and visions of those seeking to become overlords of the most powerful and wealthiest nation the world has ever seen. It is, therefore, imperative that the Bill of Rights be torn to shreds, that the Constitution be ripped apart. It is only a “god damn piece of paper,” after all, a document meant for the masses, a barrier to complete control by the elite. To the corporatists now in power, cherished American documents, wonderments in the evolution of human society and thought, are nothing but the toilet paper used to clean themselves of the refuse they call the masses.

A nation of liberty, freedoms and rights is a nation of people able to become threats to governance, their lives protected by law and by the will of the people. Freedom and rights gives birth to a society free to question the actions of government, to seek accountability, a citizenry that owns a government created to serve the interests of the people. A nation of liberties possesses millions of people unwilling to become the sheeple of the powerful, always searching for the truth, seeking it through protest, dissent, debate and intelligence.

A nation free is a nation educated and intelligent, wise to the chicanery of the elite and criminality of its leaders, a people emancipated through the powers of knowledge. An educated people are a liberated people, given the tools to question authority, myth, fables and the auras of false leadership. Indeed, a citizenry that thinks for itself is the greatest threat to corporatists and the elite because free minds question, analyze and are able to see beyond the haze of aerolized bull manure, seeing through the lies and crimes and propaganda, the thoughts of controlled television not given entrance to a mind free to think and reason.

A people free is a threat to the Establishment, for it places barriers to government and corporate chicanery, acting as a firewall to the actions of thieves and murderers, helping, in some way, to try to make right what has been made wrong. Knowing the vital protections endowed to them by the Constitution, the population has the confidence to rise up and be heard, speaking truth to power, marching for justice and liberty.

In this document, a living, breathing, always evolving masterpiece of human understanding, meant to adapt to the present, not cement itself to archaic notions of the past, exists the impediment to corporatism desired by the elite. It is the Constitution that has halted their rise to total prominence, for in their ideology, humanity has always and must always be governed by authority, by a Machiavelli type despot thinking for those that cannot, for only then can civilization thrive and only then can the total domination of the corporatists become reality. In their warped mind, then, America must come under the grip of corporatism, for today, in this stage of civilization’s evolution, the corporate Leviathan is overlord of the planet and those that control it are, therefore, our masters.

Using as pretext an attack on one of our cities by terrorists, America’s new stated enemy, corporatists now entrenched in power will declare martial law, pronouncing that the security of the nation and the protection of our way of life are at stake. Through the exploitation of patriotism, xenophobia and the ignorance of large segments of the American public, the corporatists will introduce new laws designed to further control our lives and eviscerate our rights. The tools of propaganda will bombard us with psychological warfare, molding us to threats existing only in our fears and in our altered state of mind, making of us the soldiers embedded deep inside the trenches of American society, doing the dirty work for the corporatist government.

Exploiting the blindness and silent acquiescence of the masses that fear, anger and hatred engenders, corporatists in government will give rise to the police state, first by deploying the military throughout key cities and regions, creating the environment necessary to begin the conditioning process of the population. Under the rubric of securing the homeland, the military will be placed at the helm of a new security apparatus that will maintain an ever vigilant eye on the population. The citizenry will be told to be vigilant and to report suspicious activity. It will be told to become the eyes and ears of the corporatists, transforming itself into agents of tyranny. In time the populace will become paranoid sheeple robbed of freedom, shadows of their former selves, created by the ceaseless suspicions bred by years of Americans spying on Americans.

The Bill of Rights will be truncated and the Constitution, which is already seen as a piece of toilet paper to the corporatists, will be altered or amended to suit those holding the reigns of absolute power. The government will be further degraded into serving the interests of the corporations, its vast resources, with its tentacles of governance, used to expand the reach and wealth of corporatists. Gone will be our rights to free speech and of assembly and of the press, replaced instead with draconian laws designed to quash dissident voices pronouncing the sounds of wisdom.

A police presence throughout large cities will permeate, designed to intimidate and control. Everywhere one goes will be seen the tools of subservience and obedience, from army fatigues to machine guns to surveillance cameras located in every street corner to police patrols to curfews to heavily armed men stationed at all points of public interest. Warrants will cease to exist, as homes will be invaded without the authority of the law. Courts will become tribunals judging those guilty of breaking the laws of draconian intent.

Dissent will be made quiet, and all forms of protest and debate will not be tolerated for in the America of tomorrow only the voices and visions of the rulers will be allowed to stand. The idea of due process, along with habeas corpus, will become an abstract concept reserved for future historians, for those designated enemies of the state will simply be made to disappear without reason into the national system of gulags, its numbers swelling into the tens of millions, the fates of its prisoners decided by the level of truth they once tried to tell.

Subservience to the state will become a principle to be embedded into the minds of all, particularly the young, whose education will further be implemented to dumb them down, brainwashing them, making them, over years of conditioning, soldiers and automatons loyal to corporatists and the powers of the state. Free thought will become a thing of the past, as books of knowledge will be banned or burned, the opinions of reason made extinct. Television and music will be controlled much more so than today, becoming the loudspeakers of propaganda and the education of enslavement. The pages of past history will be erased or altered; those of the present will be manipulated as reality becomes what the corporatists decide it to be. News, opinion and current events at odds with the goals of power will disappear from society, for the citizenry will only be allowed to hear the propaganda and see only what is beneficial to the state.

Arrests without cause or suspicion will be legalized, wiretaps and eavesdropping will be said to benefit the quest for the homeland’s security. The wonders of the Internet, already a grave and gathering threat to the Establishment, will be destroyed; censorship of websites and their content will become policy and throughout the country, the free opinions of the population will become less than a whisper of a dying society, for in the last breaths of freedom the last palpitations of America’s heart will be heard. Fear and intimidation will permeate throughout the nation, thereby controlling the population, for in the threatening posture of a police state the people are forced into shells of their former selves.

A culture of surveillance will be endemic as the instruments of the security state are used to spy on its own citizens, especially those deemed threats and dissidents. Those fighting for the freedoms and rights now lost will be picked up in the middle of the night, lost like a morning fog, joining a growing group of the disappeared, likely tortured, imprisoned or dropped from a plane at 10,000 feet. Mass graves will be hidden from reality, unmarked and untended, forgotten like the cadavers contained in their bowels. Dissent and protest and debate will be outlawed, and all around, a society made to conform and acquiesce to totalitarianism will be born, its children never experiencing the freedom and the rights once afforded their parents.

In America’s tomorrow, neighbors will be made to spy on neighbors, strangers will inform on strangers, children will be told to report the suspicious activities of parents and all around the nation paranoia will hover over towns and cities and the homes of the population, trust having become one more victim of corporatism, the loyalty amongst friends and relatives compromised with the arrival of self-preservation. False accusations will be made against thousands whose only crime will be thinking for themselves, not being liked by an informer, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and guilty they will stand in a court not of law, but of guilt, where justice is not blind, though it will be unknown and unwanted.

Secrecy and unaccountability will be hallmarks of America’s government; constant surveillance of its citizens will become routine. With the advent of newer technologies the complete whereabouts of citizens will be known at all times. The national ID card will contain all the biometric information about a person, its carrier able to be tracked through GPS surveillance. The introduction of permanent police stops throughout various city streets, state highways and borders will assure authorities of one’s intentions, our vehicles, already equipped with GPS, ransacked without need for reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

The intrusion by the corporatist state will define our existence in our daily lives. Propaganda posters will line the streets and public spaces; surveillance cameras will watch our every move. Project Echelon and its offspring will monitor our phone calls, emails, faxes and conversations; through our fingerprints, DNA and iris scanning the state will be aware of our movements at all times. National psychology examinations for children will be made mandatory, with those deemed ‘troubled’ forced to take certain prescription drugs, made to attend special schools, creating a caste system of undesirables through genetic and social engineering. Through the use of television we will be told what to think and what reality is. Our children will be forced into conscription, trained to become soldiers of fortune in wars against East Asia, Middle Asia and South America. The end of privacy as we know it will arrive with the insertion of cameras into our homes, used to monitor our daily lives and record our most intimate moments.

Birthed from a slippery slope of America’s past and present, fusing the sins of the fathers and ignorance of the sons, our tomorrow will be a mutation of the natural regression that American capitalism has taken over the last two hundred years. We are entering an epoch of cataclysmic momentum, for the evils of 21st century capitalism, having gathered unstoppable momentum during the last 100 years, have generated forces uncompromising and degenerate, gathering power through our inability to visualize the damage inflicted by our economic system’s cycles. The America of yesterday cannot survive in the America of tomorrow; to the corporatists they are mutually exclusive.

We have reached a moment in history where the opening of different doors can be made by our decisions in the next few years. Yet time is precious, for it passes fast and without contemplation, passing us without so much of a realization on our part. Today, corporatism grows and festers in our midst, using the fictional and over-exaggerated war on terror to entrench itself into our culture, methodically conditioning us, preparing us to its eventual and permanent rise. The instruments of its governance are systematically being put into place, clandestinely inserted into our consciousness, one piece of the puzzle at a time, the easier to assimilate us to America’s tomorrow.

Soon we will wake not to find a new dawn but a dreaded twilight, marking not the end of yet another day gone by but the end of America as we knew her, a once brave people succumbing to fear, and once intelligent citizenry cowering to manipulation and a once free society shackled to the dungeons of America’s tomorrow. With each day that passes that we remain passive, silent and indifferent, becoming submissive to further corporatist control over our lives, we are helping to cement the unforgiving future of our progeny and of a once great nation.

Through our inability to act to reality and understand where we are headed we have burdened yet one more generation with the sins and errors of those that came before, in the process imploding the foundations of a nation that once acted as the beacon of freedom, rights and liberty to people throughout the globe. In the end, we have begun assisting in burying the grave of American liberty and freedom, helping to give birth to American corporatism and invariably acting to give rise to the dawn of America’s tomorrow.

Originally published December 28, 2005

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Of Crazies, Neocons and the Enemy Within

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Beginnings


An all too familiar and ominous echo is reverberating through the American landscape, once more blasted into the airwaves, and our minds, through the Ministry of Propaganda and its merry bunch of sycophants and stenographers. For yet another consecutive year since three monolithic towers were demolished, imploded and systemically brought down onto their own footprints in a catalyzing event unleashing a new American century, Americans are hearing the fiery rhetoric of imminent danger, a cocktail of fear, terror and warmongering fed our enemy-addicted culture, aimed both at stirring conflict with Iran and conditioning our minds into accepting the coming attack on yet another Muslim nation that poses no threat to the mighty Empire.

For the Enemy Within is hard at work concocting the trigger-happy bogeyman Americans are always too eager to declare war upon, and they are working overtime, using their control of the print, radio and television media, to condition us into accepting their version of reality. Yes, the dreaded neocons are once more circling this nation like vultures, flying high above the dying carcass of freedom and democracy, ready to plunge down to Earth for a mighty feast. The reviled neocons, that plague that refuses to die, that pestilence that seemingly only increases in number, that nest of rats that lingers in our midst, is once more contorting truth and creating reality, once more beating the drums of war in continuation of their war song. The Enemy Within is softening us up, readying our minds, preparing us into accepting yet one more blitzkrieg of evil, criminality and mass murder.

If you are not disgusted at how this species of human being has hijacked America, how it has condemned a million people to their premature death, how it has turned the beacon of freedom into the gulag of criminality, how it has made mass murder, torture, rape and pillage acceptable, how it has made an entire nation hateful, xenophobic and jingoistic, how it has molded and conditioned an army of American authoritarians, then you have not been paying attention. If you are not reviled at the existence of this nest of cockroaches, and how, even after all the damage it has done to America and the Middle East it nonetheless remains alive and thriving, seemingly – and bewilderingly – given prominence, authority and visibility in the media, in spite of its perpetual stream of lies, incompetence and subversion of freedom, in spite of getting everything about Iraq wrong, then you have not understood the real and severe threat of the neocon element to America, and the world.

Deeply entrenched within the corridors of power, infesting the Department of War, the Department of State, the Department of Justice, the Congress and the White House, and firmly, and clandestinely, embedded throughout the corporatist media, the Enemy Within, it can safely be said, has hijacked America, taking her hostage, occupying her capital, unleashing an incessant barrage of psychological warfare against the American people. Neocon nests, those putrid think tanks and lobbying offices where delusion and deception thrive, are clustered throughout Washington, having acronyms all too familiar to those still living in truth and reality.

The neocon infrastructure is powerful and massive, financed by moneyed and influential people, supported by modern day little Sparta, that American financed welfare state, that encircled Bantustan of imported European Zionists hunkered down among an ocean of native Arabs, possessing all necessary machinations to concoct enemies, the deceptions to create and unleash wars, the scruples to divide and conquer, and the media tools to brainwash and condition millions of human beings. The neocon machine prevents truth from ever seeing light, reality from ever surfacing, debate from ever existing and dissidents from ever having a voice. Instead, the neocon big lie is allowed to be repeated countless times, their deceptions and distortions are granted the aura of reality, and their propaganda is allowed to thrive, and spread.

The card carrying member of the neocon community has instant access to the airwaves, to op-ed articles and editorial opinion. The neocon talking points grace front page headlines and the opinions of news anchors and reporters. These same talking points are given preeminence and are never questioned or challenged. Neocon talking heads, representatives, hacks and lackeys have an always open invitation, in spite of the disaster they have created for America in Iraq, to appear on television news shows to spew their venomous rhetoric and talking points. Neocons are sent in droves, upon commands from on high, to appear in the always friendly corporatist media, as always spewing lies and deceptions when propaganda needs to be delivered, when fear needs to grow or when hatred needs to find new hosts.

Staying on message, the big lie is repeated over and over by this army of manipulators, attacking the airwaves, and thus our brains, in a constant stream of appearances, offering a multitude of faces, and voice tones. Treated as experts and opinion makers, when in fact they are but ignorant, ideological and delusional Machiavelli’s, this legion of propagandists is given free rein to saturate both televised and written media with their talking points. They appear as “guests” on news shows, making the rounds, regurgitating the message their group wants disseminated, never being challenged, always having a loudspeaker from which to reach the citizenry.

Without merit, these operatives are placed as opinion writers, reporters and editors in America’s most influential magazines and newspapers, free to manipulate and condition the minds of readers, free to shift the nation’s discourse in a particular direction. Hired and promoted, even after being wrong or delusional about nearly everything they have ever said or written about, these enemies of the people are nonetheless still given a voice and a bully pulpit from where to manipulate millions of readers.

Even when one thinks the neocons have been discredited thanks to the myriad number of pathetic mistakes they have made, even when one thinks their opinions have made them clowns, even when they are the laughingstock to those aware of their incompetence and delusion, they are still prominently displayed on our monitors, magazines and newspapers. Somehow, after so many errors, after so many disasters, they still remain to unleash more damage, shaping the nation’s opinion, setting its direction, pushing policy and as always, steering the nation towards war. This reality has not changed since 9/11, which should be a clear indication that the corporatist media is a full collaborator and partner in the neocon agenda. The Enemy Within is deeply entrenched in the corporatist media, and this should never be forgotten.


Playbook


Using the same recipe that launched the false Iraq WMD fear and terror marketing campaign, the same audacity that gave birth to the official and highly fictional 9/11 conspiracy theory, recycling the same cast of neocon characters for years warning us of the imminent and perpetual Arab danger, the warmongers in power are slowly, yet surely, prepping the American people into accepting a new act of preemptive, and illegal, aggression. For the Enemy Within knows that the American people will voluntarily remain ignorant of whatever enemy is chosen for them, never wanting to use reason and logic and critical thinking or common sense, always believing the lies and deceptions of the state and its vast propaganda machine, always eager to believe the myths and fictions spouted by criminals and murderers. Indeed, manipulating the American mind is like taking candy from a baby. At no time has the American mind been more fragile, ignorant and ripe for the picking.

Under ceaseless assault since the false flag operation of 9/11, the collective American mind is in deep psychosis, unable to escape the cloud of fear and terror thrust upon us by the neocon cabal in power. The catalyzing event of 9/11, methodically executed by warmongers and crazed zealots, was orchestrated with the intent of birthing a new American century, one in which the Pax Americana would thrive, unparalleled in power, reigning as the new Rome, unrivaled among the brotherhood of nations. It would merge the interests of little apartheid Sparta with those of America, forever cementing ties born through deception, for now the American people would also be confronted with the “evildoer” Arab horde, conveniently having as new enemy the same peoples whose oil we coveted and were addicted to, the same peoples whom little apartheid Sparta hated and detested.

The inside job of 9/11 would unleash a Long War, the so-called War on Terror, as much a fictional fantasy as any war concocted by Hollywood. Without the dreaded Soviet to scapegoat, to distract from internal strife, to use as excuse to enrich the military-industrial complex, a new enemy had to be manufactured, one that, unlike the Soviet Communist, was ambiguous, hidden, alien, an enigma, free of borders, national constraints and political handcuffs. Free to create any enemy out of thin air, the marketers of fear, for that is what the creators of enemies are, decided that the American populace needed a bogeyman unlike any ever devised, one free to roam beyond borders, lurking in dark alleys, independent of a nation that could, just like the Soviet Union, dissolve due to internal incompetence or political strife.

While the Soviet enemy remained known, even familiar to average Americans through European-like skin color and facial features, an appearance that seemed close to home, its culture and ethnicity unable to be dehumanized and made sub-human by the state’s propagandists, both essential elements in conditioning the populace into accepting destruction and murder of the enemy, the newly minted enemy, the Arab bogeyman, faced no such obstacles. Indeed, years of conditioning by Hollywood vilifying Arabs had jumpstarted the American hatred of the Islamic culture, even before 9/11, planting the seeds of hatred and xenophobia that would fully sprout on the day catalyzing events unleashed a new American century and Americans were introduced to the dreaded Arab terrorist.

The dreaded Arab bogeyman, concocted as terrorist through years of state sponsored propaganda and manipulation, only fed into the historical hatred of people of color by xenophobic majorities. The decimation of tens of millions of Native Americans, their condemnation into hellholes called reservations, the prolonged enslavement of Africans, the decimation of Filipinos, Koreans and Vietnamese in Asia, the wars of aggression and senseless mass murder against Latin Americans spanning decades, the still prevalent racism against African Americans and Latinos, condemning most to lifelong imprisonment and abandonment in urban ghettos, and the recent jingoism and bigotry exhibited against Hispanic immigrants – nothing more than America’s new slave class – by a new generation of No Nothings are but a few examples of a time honored tradition of indifference, racism and hatred of peoples not possessing the characteristics of European lineage, of white Anglo-Saxon tradition. The Arab culture, then, would be treated no different.

A new scapegoat had been chosen, one alien and fear-inducing, for fear of the unknown is the greatest fear in the human condition. All that was needed to foment the fusion of alien dark skinned Arab with terrorism in the minds of the people would be a catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor, that would cement a hatred and anger never before seen on American shores, one that would blind and make fearful entire segments of the population. Of course the chosen patsies would perform the tasks assigned to them, oblivious to the eternal fame they would garner. Molded and nurtured, observed and guided, these patsies would become the face of evil incarnate, with the modern day Emmanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden, striking fear and terror in the minds of Americans.

It would be the events of 9/11 that would firmly, and permanently, transfix Al-Qaeda into the imaginations of 300 million Americans, striking fear and a Pavlovian induced schizophrenia into the populace with every pronouncement of its title. Blinded by fear, made devoid of reason and logic through the manipulations of terror, the American people would follow lies and deceptions without question; they would obey and become subservient to the dictates of the neocon ideology; they would take as truth and reality the fictions and charades offered by the state and the corporatist media.

It would be 9/11 that would forever alter the course of American history, along with the psyches of her people, becoming an untouchable, almost religious myth whose original story was sacrosanct, an untouchable story no matter how unrealistic it was. Of course, 9/11 became a most fortuitous event to several entities, benefiting, first and foremost, the military-industrial-energy complex, desperately in search of an enemy and a region to exploit, as well as those seeking American hegemony around the globe, and fitting perfectly with the master plans of the Likudnik neocons and their Project for a New American Century. Thanks to 9/11, America had her new enemy, one evolved to suit the best interests of America’s warmongering class, one designed as a failsafe entity that could be counted on, in relative confidence, for a perpetual stream of conflict, war, destruction, hegemony, profit and power.

Al-Qaeda, born and reared by America’s clandestine services, having evolved from Afghan freedom fighters battling the Soviet Union to evil incarnate after 9/11, a product of ceaseless marketing and constant manipulation of fragile and vulnerable psyches, would be the face of America’s new enemy, one without borders, politicians, standing armies and capitals, a bogeyman hidden and secretive, free to appear anywhere on the planet, alien and ambiguous, a mole popping up exactly where it was, and is, needed most. In short, al-Qaeda is the perfect enemy for America, capable of sprouting like a weed wherever and whenever America needed a place to attack, invade, conquer and pillage. Used as the perfect excuse by which to attack sovereign nations, labeling fighters or insurgents Al-Qaeda acts both as cover for the advancement of Empire and as the marketing ploy used to smear and label legitimate peoples’ movements fighting the criminality of the Empire itself.

When marketed to the American people by the propaganda of the state and the corporatist media, resistance fighters such as those in Iraq struggling to rid their lands and homes of the imperial overreach of the Empire become sub-human enemies whose death is accepted and indeed sought by the citizenry. When the Pavlovian term “Al-Qaeda” is ushered, all semblance of common sense and reason is lost upon the populace of the Empire, who has been trained to fear and hate when the utterance of the evildoers is mentioned. Designed to dehumanize valid resistance and freedom movements, the people of the Empire will thus only see terrorists and criminality when reality offers a different portrait. Such is the power of the label Al-Qaeda that it immediately makes terrorists of those fighting the evil and terrorism of the Empire itself. It validates and indeed obscures the high levels of state sponsored terrorism of the Empire. Such is the genius of those who concoct enemies for a living.

Make no mistake, 9/11 was a declaration of war upon the American people by the Enemy Within, acting as the first strike in a psychological war aimed at our emotions. A new Pearl Harbor was needed to unleash invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and eventually Iran, opening up new imperial hegemony. Freedoms and rights had to be eviscerated, the better to control the citizenry, the better to take advantage of technological innovations that would facilitate an omnipresent police state. Solidarity with little Sparta had to be increased, both to take worldwide pressure off its Nazi like treatment of Palestinians and to join at the hip two nations that were now seen to fight the same fight. Only two powers could dominate the Middle East, and with America establishing a permanent presence, with its military fomenting civil war between the region’s Sunni and Shia, following the old adage of divide and conquer, little Sparta could become the preeminent power in the region, its rivals destroyed and weakened, its threats curtailed and its hegemony growing.

Carefully planned and orchestrated, 9/11 and its myth, most of which was disseminated in the hours after the tragic events, with pieces of the still smoldering puzzle miraculously being put together at the speed of light, was designed as the new Pearl Harbor needed to militarize the citizenry into supporting the invasions and occupations of Middle East nations. In that sense, 9/11 was an event staged specifically to manipulate the emotions and psychology of the American people in the expectation that we would march lock step with the warmongering aspirations of the state. Its tragedy was calculated more as a shock to the psyche than as an act of war; its horrors were needed to act as conduit between calls for revenge, hatred of the Muslim world, and acquiescence to pre-9/11 invasion plans.

We the People were the targets on that day, not the state and certainly not our elected leaders. It was We the People that were the intended victims, not our freedoms or our way of life, not our happiness nor our comfortable lifestyles. Our minds were the ultimate prize, which is why the towers had to be demolished in such violent fashion, why the controlled demolitions were covered from every conceivable angle, to be played and replayed countless times, until they were seared into our memory, into our psyche, so that we would forever be victims of fear and terror manipulations, so that we would forever acknowledge and assist the military-industrial-energy complex in its quest for global hegemony.

For the neocons, two enormous towers and 3,000 human beings were an easy sacrifice compared to the dividends the Project for the New American Century would get in return. Two towers in a metropolis full of skyscrapers, along with 3,000 Americans out of 300 million, were simply the collateral damage needed to fulfill Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Thus, a New Pearl Harbor took place on 9/11, ushering in a new American Century, just as the neocons had predicted, just as they had fortuitously envisioned. Using the power of the corporatist media and its battalions of propagandists, the psychological war against the American people, with 9/11 as catalyst, was only beginning.

In the years that followed the manipulation of emotions to extract long-sought rewards and objectives would intensify, as would the subversion of freedoms, rights and liberties in the name of promising security to fragile and maimed American psyches. America’s real enemy, that which resides within, was about to unleash a barrage of fear and terror mongering the likes of which no people have ever encountered, in furtherance of the war against the American people, a war unlike any other, a war for our minds and psychology, against the very freedoms, rights and democracy we so cherish. For what manufactured terrorists could never take away, homegrown terrorists were slowly, yet surely, making extinct.


Cabal of Criminality


Democracy and freedom has never been of much importance to the neocon vultures, even as they spew these virtues as sacred dogma. Of course, what neocons say, and what they do, are almost always at odds with each other. They are experts at extolling the virtues of the grand lie, of lying pathologically to the people for the people’s supposed own good. Government secrecy is a hallmark of the neocons, a reality the world has seen since 2001. Keeping secrets and telling a constant stream of lies has defined the neocon administration of George W. Bush.

It is interesting that while they talk of democracy and freedom, they try to destroy both, abroad and at home. These vermin stand for Machiavelli-style rule, being comforted more by authoritarian governance than pure democracy. Indeed, democracy is anathema to their ideology, for they do not believe the masses can correctly govern themselves. Therefore, leaders possessing dictatorial powers must be created, the better to serve the interests of the neocon belief system. In fact, the stolen election of 2000, in the state of Florida, was a direct consequence of neocon planning and implementation, the first domino to fall in pursuit of their new American century. The ascension of Bush to the throne, a man who had promised them Iraq on a silver platter if elected, was of paramount importance. He was also a willing participant and firm believer in Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Once immediately safely selected to the throne, in fact, he began implementing its highly militarized and unilateral policies.

Knowing the final outcome, and triumph, of the 2000 election would inevitably come down to Florida, all machinations needed to steal the election were implemented, showcasing a disregard for the will of the people and democracy in pursuit of absolute power. Florida 2000 was the catalyst the neocons needed to begin altering the face of American governance and her role in the world. Everything that was to come hinged on the election in Florida, hence the audacity and the purposefulness seen in completely subverting American democracy. One day, it will be Florida 2000, along with 9/11, that will be studied, analyzed and seen for the history altering event that it was, becoming recognized as the first salvo in a war against the American people, the key that unlocked the gates of Hades upon the world. Without Florida 2000, history, and 21st century reality, would have perhaps never become familiar with the neocons and their demented and delusional ideology.

Thrust into power in 2001, an administration saturated with neocons in the Departments of War, Justice, State and the White House set about to alter the system of checks and balances and to begin implementing, step by militarized step, the blueprint called Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Once deeply ensconced inside the halls of power, once comfortable with the methods and systems of governance, once confident in their control and mastery over the state’s apparatus, once they had fully hijacked the government of the United States of America, they could finally implement the catalyzing event they so desperately wanted, and needed.

With their dirty and criminal hands at the helm of every strategic department and office, especially within the Department of War and the Office of the Vice President, a new Pearl Harbor was ready to be born, conceived through distracting war games and drills, allowed to breathe life through systematic planning and confusion. Possessing absolute power, becoming the hand guiding the American puppet, with the corporatist media as collaborators, the cabal of criminality declared war upon every American. On September 11, 2001, America’s worst and most heinous crime was perpetrated, along with her greatest criminal cover up. The 9/11 Commission Report would only cement the cover up, with yet one more neocon assigned to make sure a whitewash occurred.

After 9/11 the nest of vultures embedded in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President began manufacturing war, first in Afghanistan and later, much more famously, in Iraq. Today it is widely known the severity by which the Office of Special Plans manufactured and devised the lies that led to war, piping only information that would push the neocon agenda directly to the top, thereby bypassing career analysts and experts. Today it is widely known the lies told repeatedly to guide us into war, with warnings of mushroom clouds and WMD. That the neocon establishment led us into a war of choice, based on lies, deceptions and delusions, is not in question. Indeed, these architects of the Iraq War should never be allowed to forget that they involved America in the greatest strategic disaster in her history.

That the neocon establishment lied us into an immoral and illegal preemptive war, based on lies and fictions they knew to be false, in order to secure Empire’s petroleum and beachhead, not to mention Israel’s security, demands that these individuals be seen for what they really are: war criminals, surely guilty of crimes against humanity, fully responsible for the death of one million Iraqis, thousands of Afghanis, and 6,500 Americans. War criminals tried since World War II have been sentenced to death on far less heinous and egregious crimes.

To say the neocons should be sitting at The Hague, rotting away their existence, contemplating their crimes in perpetuity, locked away for centuries so they can no longer inflict carnage and evil on our world, is an understatement. These individuals, this cabal of criminality, those visible and clandestine in government, business and the media, those responsible for 9/11 and the Iraq War, from the architects to the propagandists, should be facing war crime charges in both New York City and Baghdad, forced to face trial for the human wickedness they have engendered.

In a more perfect world, they would be. In this world, unfortunately, they are promoted, rewarded, saluted and allowed to ride into the sunset, free to corrupt young minds, continue living in freedom, profiteering from their opinions and wreaking havoc upon the peoples of Earth. In a more perfect world, one different than the one we presently inhabit, there would be justice for all those murdered and maimed in pursuit of blatant ignorance, psychotic delusion and deranged ideology.


Project Iran


Instead, the terrorists living among us, the elements we call neocons, with their vast control of American government and media, and by consequence control over our lives, continue expanding their power and their pursuit of further decadence. Not content to dwell as history’s greatest fools, they maintain a course of further escalation in Iraq, still thinking possible a victory that will never arrive and a delusion that will never become reality. Delusion and denial being a neocon characteristic, they think further military action, this time against Iran, will salvage victory from the throes of defeat, giving America the birth pangs of triumph from the calamity of debacle and quagmire.

Enraptured by their longtime hatred of Iran and its supposed threat to Israeli hegemony, the neocon element has once more gone on a fairy tale adventure, this time by trying to get America to do Israel’s bidding. The same playbook once used to cajole us into the Iraq debacle has been taken out of the closet, wiped free of dust, and implemented throughout the neocon world. This time, however, the neocon infestation is less prevalent in government, so they must resort to their nests in think tanks and lobbying offices, along with their vast power in the corporatist media, to sell, convince, connive and foment a war between Iran and America. With so many people in government aware of their constant malfeasance, however, the road to warmonger heaven has been a bit more difficult.

This explains why the corporatist media, doing the bidding of Israeli interests, has become a major player in the Iran propaganda campaign. Without the Office of Special Plans, with many military personnel aware of the techniques of the “crazies”, with deeper scrutiny by the public and America’s intelligence agencies, and with many officials aware of the consequences of a war with Iran, the neocons have had to bombard the airwaves with the lies, deceptions and manipulations needed to once again bamboozle the Empire into a war of choice.

It is from inside the corporatist media, with help from neocon think tanks and Israeli interests, where the propaganda is in full swing, where neocons are given an open microphone, a camera to look at, and where the interests of the state of Israel are given credence. It is from the inner doings of the corporatist media where war with Iran is being conditioned into our minds, for the Enemy Within knows it has less than two years left to destroy its hegemonic rival.

Sensing desperation that Iran has yet to be attacked, thanks in large measure to the disaster unfolding in Iraq, the neocons may yet resort to desperate measures, perhaps even another false flag operation blamed on Al-Qaeda, working for Iran, which would again become a catalyzing event unfolding yet another new Pearl Harbor. When dealing with psychotics of this nature, nothing should be discounted, and nothing should be left to chance.

As always emanating from the mouths of America’s most vile criminal element and terrorists extraordinaire, better known as the neoconservatives, the false alarms and war trumpets now being heard are part of a careful and methodical campaign of psychological warfare against the American people. A continuance of the psychological operation launched against America on 9/11, that catalyzing event granting New Pearl Harbors life and a New American Century sustenance, the latest act of manipulation is designed to make evildoers of the Iranian people, turning Iran into a scapegoat for the disaster unfolding in Iraq.

Such is the debacle in Iraq, created by the delusions, complete ignorance and gross incompetence of the neocons that, since American exceptionalism prevents America from ever making mistakes, being outwitted or admitting defeat, an easy scapegoat must be fomented to take the blame for the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy. Enter the puppet Iraq government and Iran, two easy targets offered up as the sacrificial lamb to a perpetually ignorant, delusional and completely devolving populace that would much sooner believe outside forces were to blame for the inevitable defeat than realize that the myths of American grandeur are nothing but the fairy tale propaganda of a corporatist state.

Almost on a daily basis, this group of terrorists, for no other word can best describe the neocons, is systematically cementing into the American conscious the idea of attacking and bombing Iran, a nation that poses no military threat to America, under the rubric of terrorism, mushroom clouds and Hitler-like evil, thereby extending forward a fictional war on terror along with an already disastrous debacle in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Once more a Muslim nation is about to be attacked, as always following the blueprint of the neocon Mein Kampf, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. More and more Iran is being blamed for arming the Iraqi – and now Afghan – resistance, training its fighters and financing its activities. That no proof has yet to appear, even among a barrage of accusations, should give one pause as to the validity of such asinine propaganda and should leave no doubt in whose hands the corporatist media lies.

For the neocons, a group of Christian and Jewish Zionists, most with strong ties to the Israeli right-wing Likud Party, embedded throughout the halls of governance, business and the corporatist media, hate Persians, Arabs and Muslims with a passion only seen in xenophobic psychopaths. Their contempt for the peoples of the Middle East has become apparent in their actions and writings, their beliefs and hypocrisy, and in their defense of the Nazi-like treatment of Arabs by apartheid Israel, . It is this hatred that they hope to embed into America’s citizenry, enough that we think of Arabs as subhuman animals, and is therefore the reason for the saturation of the airwaves with anti-Arab, Persian and Muslim propaganda, designed to engender hatred and feelings of xenophobia against the non-European people of the Middle East. This manipulation, of course, has not relented since the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

These architects of New Pearl Harbors, fictional wars on terror and the Iraq War, names all too familiar within the reality of those who chose to pay attention and stay informed, have set their targets on another Islamic nation, now that Iraq is in disarray, as always pursuing the interests both of the so-called New American Century as well as those of Mother Israel. On both sides of the imaginary and nonexistent aisle, inside the bowels of political duopoly and the two headed hydra, where political prostitutes are allowed to roam free, as always paying homage to the hand that rocks the cradle, the shrieks of war are therefore getting louder, for the sugar daddy to Washington’s politicians has arrived to collect on dues and debt once paid.

From these charlatans and miscreants we somehow always chose to elect the war cries and the drums of war are growing in strength, for the time of preemptive criminality is almost upon us. For they have been given their marching orders from on high, where the high priests of war convene, where criminals and murderers congregate, and slowly their cohorts in the media are conditioning America to the inevitability of continuing war crimes and crimes upon humanity on Muslim lands.

Iran has been selected for destruction, becoming the prize of prizes, the ultimate reward in pursuit of a Project for a New American Century. The cries desperate for an attack on Iran are palpable, coming from all neocon nests and perching trees. The call to use nuclear weapons against the Persian state is also resounding loudly, becoming both an ominous declaration of neocon intentions and a warning to the world entire of ignoring and not halting the delusional cries of the crazies.

As expected, and predicted, the delusional Machiavelli’s we know as the neocons have increased their level of vitriol against Iran, in conjunction both with the coordinated propaganda campaign begun by their masters in Tel Aviv as well as through the perpetual dissemination of such manipulations by their stenographers and lackeys in the corporatist media. For the days are fast approaching, and all preparations must be made, before those living in delusion unleash their latest, and greatest, military blunder.


Ending the Occupation of America


We in America must be vigilant, for a poisonous snake cornered is at its most dangerous. Time is running out on the neocon element, which, sensing desperation, and the ticking sound of time, might resort to reenacting its greatest triumph, the manufacturing of new Pearl Harbors on American soil, sacrificing American lives in pursuit of Israeli interests, making thousands of citizens the collateral damage needed to attack Iran.

The Enemy Within lives among us, occupying our capital, owning our elected officials, saturating our airwaves, manipulating our minds, polluting our society. The Enemy Within is the only entity we must fear, for it is psychotic and delusional, criminal and devoid of scruples, ready at a moment’s notice to kill in the name of a new American Century, in the name of A Clean Break. The Enemy Within is our greatest threat, both to life and freedom, to limb and democracy, lingering in our midst, two faced and corrupt, pursuing the interests of militarization and those of little Sparta, trying to ensure hegemony for the Zionist ghetto, trying to establish proxy wars fought by the Empire in the interests of the dog’s tail.

The Enemy Within is the terrorist organization we must fear most, and fight against, declaring our own war on terror, our own fight against extremism and criminality. Our nation has been hijacked, dispossessed of its reputation and its treasure, her sons and daughters dying in the interests of corporatism and Empire, maimed due to delusion and ego. America lives under occupation, our freedoms and rights and liberties being made extinct by Machiavelli pretenders. A welfare state in the Middle East controls our elected officials, dictating policy that directly contradicts our own interests.

We are being transformed by the tools of the neocon element into a nation of xenophobic bigots, slowly being bred to hate scapegoats and concocted enemies. Our corporatist media has become the Department of Propaganda, a Ministry of Truth where reality is manufactured and truth sequestered, hidden in the deep dark recesses of censured stories and stifled dissent. Only the propaganda beneficial to the Enemy Within is allowed to grace our monitors and our newspapers; only the stories and individuals pushing for war are ever seen or heard. America is occupied, her capital hijacked by a malevolent cabal of criminality, caring only to perpetuate a war against the Arab world through action and reaction, eye for an eye, and inevitable blowback.

It is up to Americans, in valid resistance to authoritarian tendencies, to stop the crazies from unleashing hell on Iran and the Middle East. It is up to us to stop them before another Pearl Harbor strikes one of our cities, killing hundreds or thousands of our brothers and sisters. It is up to us, true patriots of the republic, to finally expel the occupiers from our land, thereby restoring a nation that has much to offer the world, perhaps finally becoming a beacon of light upon a city on a hill, surpassing even the myths of American state-sponsored propaganda. The real war on terror must begin, for the neocon terrorists must be thrown in the gulag they have created for the world.

If you are repulsed with the neocon plague afflicting our country, if you are tired of the warmongering and the manipulations, of the lies and profiteering, of elected representatives listening to foreign agents and not native citizens, if you are ready to put Americans’ interest first, second and third, and those of little welfare state Sparta in the dustbin of history, then get ready to confront the occupiers and hijackers, never letting them rest, never letting them speak or be seen publicly without being confronted with a litany of their crimes.

If the courts will not try them, then we must. If the media will not expose them, then we will. If the state will not prosecute them, then we should. If their peers will not shame them, then we most definitely will. Karma and justice should follow these crazies and criminals wherever they go, wherever they appear. If America no longer suits them thanks to our actions, then they are welcome to move elsewhere. We do not want them in our nation anymore. They are not welcome, for they have brought nothing but war, death, destruction, fear, terror, decadence and manipulations.

Peaceful resistance must commence, the occupation of America must end, the neocon reign must be extinguished and the crazies roaming our streets must never be allowed to hijack our country again.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Unmasking of the Authoritarians

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Phoenix Rising

Can you smell the putrid fumes of authoritarianism rising like smoke from burning trash, filling our senses with the toxins of despotism? Do you see these clouds of tyranny surpassing the morning horizon, their darkened haze making blind our eyes, deaf our ears and ignorant our minds? Can you hear the America of yesterday screaming in agonizing pain as the cancer of the authoritarian personality slowly devours her from within? If so, you are not alone, for evolving within our shores since 9/11 lies a most ominous and frightening reality, namely, the rise and acceptance of American-style authoritarianism.

Conceived through the neoconservative Mein Kampf, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” birthed through the controlled demolition of skyscrapers that gave rise to the New Pearl Harbor and nurtured through the psychological war of fear and terror upon the American populace, conveniently labeled the War on Terror, authoritarianism, and an absolute belief in it, has planted itself firmly upon American shores. The emergence of this pathogen, – for that is what it is – usually contained and restrained within the minds of millions of individuals, has dramatically shifted the personality and beliefs of American society, perhaps forever altering the makeup and psyche of the nation.

Thanks in large measure to an overwhelming propaganda campaign by the neocon controlled corporatist media, an onslaught of manipulation upon the American populace has resulted in the acceptance of authoritarian tendencies in a large segment of the citizenry. In present day American media, neocon anchors, reporters, talking heads and stenographers are allowed to parade uninterrupted and unobstructed, day after day, parroting neocon talking points and propaganda, stirring fear and insecurity and hatred and anger, hiding truth and disseminating fictions, all systemically done to condition the people into accepting Machiavellian-style governance.

For in the neocon ideology, democracy is but a hindrance, an obstacle to be eliminated, for the will of the people interferes with the decisions of those in power. Democracy, therefore, must become a charade, an illusion designed to convey in the masses the feeling that their votes count, that their voice is heard. In fact, the opposite is true, for only those that count the votes have their voice heard. The neocon belief structure believes that in order for leaders to govern effectively, freedom and rights must be curtailed, and the people must be subjected to surveillance and greater police powers. Hence, America’s quite obvious flirtation with authoritarianism. Truth is anathema in the neocon lexicon, for the people must be kept in the dark at all times, for we are too stupid to know better. This is why truth was the first casualty of 9/11. The lie, too, is a fundamental principle of neocon dogma and, as such, is used repeatedly and consistently to catapult the propaganda. The noble lie is thus created by the delusional to keep the people from knowing uncomfortable and harsh truths. This is done in our interest and for our protection, of course.

Using the corporatist media to hide truth, engender perpetual lies and create new realities, the neocon movement is methodically molding together an army of virulent warmongers, submissive and acquiescent to the dictates of the state, choosing the sacrifice of rights and freedoms in order to have security and so-called protection. The neocons are using the media, in print, radio and television, to reach out to and condition the weak minded among us, those who lack the courage and conviction to make extinct fear, those who prefer to live in the comfort of fiction rather than confront the difficulty of reality. The neocon movement, desiring imperial hegemony and perpetual war, seeking destruction of Israel’s enemies, wishing for an authoritarian state lead by a benign dictator, is thus using a vast arsenal of propaganda to create millions of subservient and loyal followers. They are molding a standing army of authoritarian personalities.

Throughout history the authoritarian personality has risen like a phoenix from the short silences of peace we offer ourselves between outbreaks of human wickedness. It rises to the zenith of our skies when fear and insecurity thrive, when scapegoats are chosen, when hatred and anger abound. It congregates within the elements of xenophobia, jingoism and patriotism, demanding the arrival of a police state or the permanency of dictatorship. It falls easily to the propaganda of the state and the manipulations of the media, for fear and cowardice blind reason and logic. Embedded in the psyche of millions of human beings, the authoritarian personality awakes and hibernates according to the patterns of human interaction and the manipulations of our leaders, rising regardless of time or place, ethnicity or religion.

Its sinister intent does not reside inside every human being, however, but lingers like a personality trait, born through the intertwined connections of genetics or molded by the fated circumstances of environment. Yet it exists in the human condition nonetheless, to the great detriment of our species, for its power grants sustenance to criminality and immorality, to those leaders of man who inevitably lead the human race spiraling to the nadir of wickedness. It escapes the shackles which peace places on it and quickly assembles its army of like-minded personalities, conjoining in confluence towards the adoration of leadership and submissiveness to the state. Its large numbers guarantee that the Goebbels’ of the world succeed in bridging commonalities and connecting energies. Its large numbers guarantee that the Hitler’s of the world never go extinct, always finding a warm and gentle welcome among the army of authoritarian personalities.

The authoritarian personality is reincarnated with New Pearl Harbors and all commensurate acts of state terror upon the populace. It awakens with the neocon manipulation of emotion, psychology and behavior, with the corporatist media acting as the hypnotizing glow giving instruction to the millions whose only comfort from fear is the supposed authority of the state. With the awakening of the authoritarian personality through external threats, catalyzing events and selection of alien enemies, a lust for violence and a hunger for blood soon emerges. With fear imprisoning the reason and logic of millions, warmonger leaders can easily proceed with long-standing plans for imperial hegemony abroad and authoritarian principles at home. As long as humans exist, the authoritarian personality will linger, those taking advantage of its weak minded psychology will thrive and the threat of authoritarianism will, as always, remain to wreak havoc upon humankind.


Tectonic Shifts


In a sense, the architects of 9/11 and the fictional war on terror have been triumphant in the implementation of their Machiavellian plans. In the six years since 9/11, the People have been impotent and unwilling to act as the nation has plunged, rather purposefully, into the throes of authoritarianism. Laws marketed as offering protection and security from terrorism have instead been used to dismantle the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Civil liberties continue to be eviscerated, while freedoms once thought sacrosanct continue to be made extinct. The power of the executive continues to grow in strength, in essence creating a leader with dictatorial powers. Against the will of the People wars continue to be waged, occupations continue to exist. An emerging police state continues to evolve, seemingly without hindrances. Hundreds of billions of dollars continue to be allocated to the military-industrial-energy complex, just as they are taken away from education, healthcare and social services, all while the treasury continues to be pillaged.

The nation has systematically been made to shift away from its centrist traditions and has, thanks to the machinations of the cabal of criminality, instead taken a sharp, authoritarian and extreme right, headed into the realm of despotic undercurrents. Today, the neocon agenda and ideology now commands the centers of power, as well as the platform of two-headed hydra, that political duopoly feeding from the same hand, enslaved to the same master. The Republican Party has become a party of fascists, while the Democratic Party is now where true conservatives seek refuge. Sadly, this political duopoly serves not the People, but corporatist elements and the elite, becoming parties of money, power and corporations. Progressives, dissenters and truth seekers, meanwhile, are now seen as enemies of the state, while the army of authoritarian personality is the new Republican base.

For whatever the outcome of the Iraq debacle, America is now firmly entrenched in the desert of Mesopotamia, to remain there for decades to come. This naturally amplifies all future confrontations with China and Russia, for Iraq is now one giant forward operating base, an aircraft carrier destined to serve as a staging ground to protect, conquer or acquire resources or lands deemed to be in the national security interest. Meanwhile, the pretenders to the throne of the Empire, those from the political duopoly, enslaved to the corporatist world and the interests of Israel, along with the lifelong cheerleader still in power, continue to threaten Iran with military force, using, once again, the illusory threat of WMD – this time nuclear weapons – even though Iran poses no threat whatsoever to America.

While transforming America into an authoritarian enclave even Machiavelli would be proud of, the architects of 9/11 and the fictional war on terror also assured themselves, and the military-industrial-energy complex (MIEC), of a nation that is fundamentally now, more than ever, a militarized Empire. The tragedy of 9/11 has militarized the nation, along with millions of its citizens, and has enabled the MIEC to pillage and plunder the national treasury, converting American ingenuity into a conduit of death and destruction. America now spends more in one year on military equipment than the entire world put together, and this will only increase in the years ahead as expenditures for the military only continue to grow. The neocons would not have it any other way, for perpetual war naturally leads to perpetual profit.

The last six years have forced leaders of both parties to become much more militant in their ideology and platform. The genius of 9/11, besides shifting the nation in the direction of authoritarianism, besides allowing the Empire to attack, invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, is that it forced and exerted a tremendous amount of pressure on both parties to never relent and never put a stop to the fictional war on terror. To do so would be political suicide, for the electorate, fearing for their lives and security, demand a stronger military and security apparatus. For both parties, there thus exists a competition to outdo one another in terms of offering the best policy for protecting the so-called Homeland, for fighting the “war on terror,” and for defeating all enemies of the nation, be they real or imagined.

Defense spending, in the wake of two parties force fed with bravado, filled with testosterone, obligated into ever-greater promises of militarization, will ultimately, and conveniently, only continue to increase. Under such auspices, then, 9/11 assured the MIEC of a perpetual stream of money and profit, the Pentagon of ever-increasing power, the elite of greater wealth, and the corporatist world of incessant growth and greater control over the lives of the masses.

America has become more militarized, for a new enemy has been created, marketed and launched. Of course fighting this new enemy conveniently allows the state to launch preemptive attacks and invasions wherever and whenever the dreaded bogeyman appears, granting warmongers a pretext to conquer the resources and lands it seeks. With an ambiguous enemy, unseen and hidden, belonging to no nation or land, intent on destroying our way of life, hating our freedoms and democracy, lurking behind every street corner and underneath every bed, the illusion of needed security, as always provided by the state, will methodically eradicate our rights and freedoms, altering the landscape of America from one of liberty to one of a burgeoning police state. The more we are made to fear, the more insecure we are made to feel, the greater the assault on our civil liberties and rights will become. With every threat, with every act of terror, real or concocted, our freedoms as Americans will dissipate, transforming our lives, corralling our destinies, controlled via the mechanisms of authoritarianism. This, sadly, is the future that awaits us.


Altered Duopoly


What was once known as the Republican Party has mutated into an authoritarian and corporatist political entity, since 9/11 shifting to the extreme right of the political spectrum. That is to say, it has morphed itself into a political arm of the Pentagon and of the authoritarian elements presently ensconced throughout government and the corporate world. The Republican Party of yesteryear has ceased to exist. In its wake now lies an entity that has shred the Bill of Rights, burned the Constitution, made legal torture, once-illegal wiretapping, domestic spying and false imprisonment and made illegal various aspects of free speech, freedom of assembly and due process. It is this party which has declared habeas corpus null and void, has spat upon the Geneva Convention and international law, and has embarked on the ideology of the neoconservative movement. It is this party that now applauds lies and deceit, fictions and myths, and castigates truth and reality. It is this new party that mocks true and honest conservatives, vilifying them when they speak inconvenient truths.

As a result, millions of loyal Republicans, most honorable and good people, (most liberal and progressive on most issues, yet through years of fear, conditioning and manipulation turned to support the Republican platform) do not recognize what was once their party. To millions of lifelong Republicans who do not subscribe to the neocon delusions of imperial hegemony, offensive, preemptive warfare, military buildup and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Republican Party has long since been made extinct. To them, their party is unrecognizable, becoming a mutated monster of Machiavellian ideology.

The party has transformed itself into a purveyor of human wickedness, with its cast of pretenders to the 2008 throne trying to outdo themselves in a competition of who could become more immoral, debased and criminal. From doubling Guantanamo – where it has been proven that most prisoner are innocent – to allowing torture in interrogations – when torture to extract confessions does not work – to unleashing more wars of conquest to making extinct more civil rights and freedoms, today’s cast of pretenders sound more like Nazis than Republicans. Fear, fear and more fear has become the Republican selling point, its one and only platform, the only way it can maintain tens of millions of authoritarian personality-types from returning to hibernation. In macabre symphony it has tried to monopolize and abuse the horrors of 9/11, constantly regurgitating its memories in hopes the American people can continue to be manipulated.

Catering to the base has never been so much fun, being that millions of authoritarian personalities have become blood-thirsty warmongers whose once hidden racism, xenophobia and lust for violence have suddenly sprouted from the clouds of 9/11. Hating has never been so much fun, either, nor openly accepted and praised. The hatred and unjustifiable anger millions of authoritarians have for Iraqis, or all Arabs for that matter, not to mention Persians and Afghanis, – people who had nothing to do with 9/11 and thus remain innocent – is a traditional trait of authoritarians everywhere.

Once the state and its corporatist press select a convenient enemy to scapegoat and unleash a barrage of propaganda to condition the authoritarian personality masses, the army of authoritarians easily lines up behind the charades of the state. Because authority dislikes Arabs, because it blames them for 9/11, the army of authoritarians will exhibit hostility against Arabs. Because racists and xenophobes in power use Latino undocumented workers as scapegoats for society’s ills, the army of authoritarians will likewise exhibit hostility to these minorities, especially if it is believed that this group might threaten or change traditional values. Combined with ignorance and manufactured consent, an authoritarian personality will ignite the flames of hatred and anger against the enemy of leaders or of the state.

The same principle applied today was also used back in World War Two, when the Nazis used undesirable minorities and dissenters as scapegoats for Germany’s problems, creating enemies so as to push forward the interests of the state. In short order, Germany’s authoritarian personalities unleashed human wickedness on these chosen scapegoats. For regardless of nation or region, time or place, authoritarian personalities are everywhere, their debased morals sequestered in hibernation until that moment when the right buttons are pushed and levers pulled, when New Pearl Harbors are created and malfeasant leaders rise to power.

The Democratic Party too has been struck by the virus of authoritarianism, becoming since 9/11 a conservative party far removed from its liberal and progressive values. Sure, it still clings to some of the progressive ideals that are wedge issues, nothing but illusions that have always been used by both parties to divide and conquer the people. Yet, fundamentally, as the party outside the confines of power when 9/11 occurred, it has had to rebrand and refashion itself in the image of the old Republican Party, in order to remain politically viable, with its moderates shifting further right, with its leadership embracing corporatism and even neoconservativism.

Left in the wake of this Democratic movement towards the right is the progressive left, which has been hemorrhaging thanks to its complete abandonment by the party. Sensing, rather correctly, that the mood and political spectrum of the republic has shifted further right, or more conservative, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Democratic Party has itself adjusted and evolved in this same direction, cognizant of the fact that to fail to do so risked impotence and extinction.

Today, it competes with the new Republican Party over who can thump its chest the strongest and loudest, who can yell and scream the loudest, and who has the biggest scrotum and penis. As a result, and in order to stay within the margins of the militant, criminal Republicans, the Democratic party has made the decision to become more pro-military, thereby embracing warmongering as ideology and the MIEC as a bedfellow. Combined with the warmongering demands by its master, the Israel Lobby, the Democrats have become vociferous cheerleaders for bravado, threats and the possible attack of Iran.

The Democratic Party, sensing the shifting winds of power, smelling presidential and even Congressional victory in 2008, has decided to do nothing with the many laws and regulations that inhibit Americans’ freedoms, rights and liberties. It has decided to do nothing to overturn or destroy Patriot Acts One and Two, the Military Commissions Act, Guantanamo and its many gulag brethren, signing statements powers, and the rising growth of the unitary executive the Bush administration has methodically created. It sees the growing power of the executive branch, senses it will indeed take possession of this branch in 2008, and salivates at the thought of controlling the unitary executive.

Once it has control of the presidency, it can begin to implement all the promises of protecting and defending the “Homeland,” the better to market itself to the people as doing a better job at national security. It can begin to exhibit its machismo and testosterone abroad, perhaps flexing its muscles by attacking impotent third world nations, finally destroying the myth that it is weak on foreign policy and national security. In the meantime, it will appease the MIEC with greater defense spending, the Israel Lobby with continued one-sided support for Israeli apartheid and Iranian intervention, and the corporatist elite through the continued erosion of power of the people. With the neocon movement slowly and clandestinely shifting away from Republican circles and towards those of the Democratic Party, in essence aware of which party will hold power soon, and with so many Democratic pretenders fully embracing the guiding light of the neocon movement, imperial hegemony will continue abroad, facing down all potential rivals, and the path towards authoritarianism will only widen on the home front.

Invariably, the shift rightward will continue in the years ahead, spearheaded by fear, terror and propaganda, taking the duopoly with it, tipping a now unbalanced fulcrum away from centrality and in the direction of authoritarianism, and corporatism. The descent of America into unchartered and unwelcome waters is only now beginning.


House of Little Goebbels


What the neocons have long envisioned is slowly, but surely, coming to fruition, for the foundations that once held America in balance has been damaged. Today, again as a result of 9/11, the fictional war on terror, the marketing of Arabs as enemy extraordinaire and the complete manipulation by fear and insecurity of the citizenry, a shift in the magnetism of opinion has created an America that has become more conservative, right-wing and thus, much more tolerant of authoritarian precepts and policies. As explained above, much of the nation has shifted hard towards the extreme right, that is to say towards an embrace of fascism, a result of incessant fear, insecurity, terror, jingoism, patriotism and war bombarded into our everyday lives.

In fact, the conditioning and manipulation of the American mind that began with 9/11 and has yet to cease, and which was designed to condition us into accepting the fast approaching authoritarianism, has hit us like a blitzkrieg, a constant and perpetual barrage of opinion, sound bites, images and carefully orchestrated propaganda disseminated through the greatest tool of brainwashing ever invented, namely, the television.

Today the corporatist media is saturated with the talking heads and stenographers of the neocons, corporatists and authoritarians, all paid to embed into our minds the propaganda and manipulations of the cabal of criminality. Using our sophisticated and fancy flat screens and HD televisions against us, the corporatist/neocon media is thus using every tool at its disposal to dumb down opinion, alter the meaning of words and precepts, and condition us into accepting growing limitations to our freedoms and rights we enjoy as Americans.

Most egregious of all is FOX News, a fascist propaganda machination masquerading as a news and media channel. Owing its success to the incessant jingoism, patriotism, war cheerleading and fear mongering in the days and years after 9/11, FOX News has only served to brainwash, condition and make ignorant millions of authoritarian personalities. This network has accumulated a collection of the most vile, despicable and nefarious authoritarian personalities in the country, a group of little Goebbels’ who are proud to serve as propaganda loudspeakers and stenographers of the emerging American corporatist state. This collection of immoral midgets and schizophrenic sycophants has made the Nazi propaganda machine look like the Brady Bunch.

These charlatans have regressed debate so much in America, they have devolved political opinion so enormously, they have dumbed down the population to such a high degree, yet have become successful because they satiate the very craving and appetite of the authoritarian personality that longs to hear the talking points of tyranny rising and fascism spreading. Indeed, the authoritarian personality seeks comfort and security in the demented and delusional opinions of FOX News personalities, needing the validation of beliefs to assuage his insecure and feeble mind.

The success of FOX News, with its group think mentality, its obvious distortions, manipulations and lies, its smearing of opposition, its virulent hate mongering and dissemination of extreme right-wing corporatist venom, has had the effect of spreading its corrosive propaganda to other networks as these seek to replicate Rupert Murdoch’s formula for success and profit. Consequently, these networks, in imitating the formula for success used by FOX, became conduits of propaganda and stenographers of the state, thereby exacerbating ignorance, compounding hatred and destroying free thought.

Acting as the Ministry of Truth, at a time of perceived and manufactured fear and terror, FOX News offered stability in an unstable world, drawing in millions of authoritarian personalities that needed to hear and see that the world, although inherently evil, was being protected by the state. Thus, FOX News became the main stenographer and defender of the party in power.

With millions of viewers tuning in, needing a fix of bravado and schoolyard bully newspeak and behavior, corporations wanting to cash in joined the FOX News orgy of hatred, fear mongering and xenophobia, spending millions of dollars so the army of authoritarian personality would watch their advertisements and invariably, purchase their products.

By appealing to the authoritarian personality at a time when to do so is appealing and expected, especially with the fortuitous luck of 9/11 having molded, created and awakened so many authoritarians in hibernation, FOX has helped push the nation down the precipice of authoritarianism, steering the nation’s mood to the hard, authoritarian right, and in the process shifting ideology towards the parameters of accepted despotism. For while the good Germans of yesteryear allowed the Nazi regime to flourish and commit monstrous atrocities, they did not have the power or scope or reach of a FOX News, corporatist media type propaganda machine from which to gather and be brainwashed. Indeed, their army of authoritarian personality, much smaller than ours, was conditioned on much less, without the use of television and its many powers of persuasion, yet it is America’s army of authoritarian personality that has been molded via the airwaves to become a dangerous and growing entity. The television has thus proven a most useful tool to the neocons, just as it is to any fascist regime.

But for the army of authoritarianism tuning in religiously on a daily basis, however, FOX would have never survived, thrived and grown to become the greatest tool of propaganda the nation, and the world, has ever seen. Like two organisms in a symbiotic relation, therefore, one entity fed the other, growing together in power and scope, sustaining each other through one entity’s addiction to insecurity and the other’s immediate and hypnotic fix.

So successful has the conditioning of FOX and its imitators been, so dangerous has the end result turned into, that today over 100 million individuals have been transformed into an army of authoritarians, their personality being such that easy followers of criminality do they become. At the drop of a hat, these individuals would chose slavery over freedom, security over rights, ignorance over knowledge, war over peace and tyranny over liberty. In a world of unintended consequences, the army of authoritarian personality can help turn freedom’s bells into fascism’s sirens.


Army of Authoritarian Personalities


To the authoritarian personality, those millions living among us as neighbors, friends, co-workers and family, the arrival of authoritarianism into our lives will be welcomed without even a hint of dissent. For these individuals believe everything emanating from their television monitors, treating those words spoken by stenographers and propagandists as sacrosanct and truth. To these millions, blind faith in government and in criminal leaders is a way of life, for the myths of the American state caring for its people, being an altruistic entity, is a certainty rooted in life-long brainwashing. To these millions, the myths of and faith in American exceptionalism are just as strong as those myths, faiths and beliefs in a primitive and unseen deity. To the authoritarian personality, the fables of American history, and of the American government, are deeply embedded in the mind, never able to be exorcised from within.

To this individual, the state is the ultimate arbiter of human interaction, and its leaders, the personification of religious deities themselves. Indeed, traumatic events such as 9/11 systematically alter the behavior and psychology of an authoritarian personality. This individual could mutate from moral and honorable man to warmongering and xenophobic psychotic. He could go from once being a thinking and knowledgeable person to easily brainwashed and manipulated, made to believe a vast array of lies and deceptions, creating a barricade within that prevents all truth and reason from entering. It is calamities such as 9/11 that like a snap of a finger transform normalcy and decency into hate and fear, causing the carrier of the authoritarian personality to alter his or her psyche. As if hypnotized by unrecognizable powers, this individual does not even become aware of his sinister and oftentimes self-destructive metamorphosis.

To the authoritarian personality, fear of Arab bogeymen, that dreaded evildoer known as al-Qaeda, marketed as seeking the complete destruction of America, controls all aspects of emotion and psychology, resulting in the complete submission of his mind to authority. Thus, if the state requests that a microchip be implanted into his head, he will immediately comply. If the state decides to suspend the Constitution, he will provide a flame. If Muslims, Arabs, dissidents and other undesirables are forced into ghettos or are rounded up, he will gladly volunteer. If curfews or checkpoints or martial law is declared, he will finally feel protection from fear. If his rights and freedoms are taken away, he will live life content. If the state desires to attack a foreign land, he will ask for the use of nuclear weapons. If the dear leader asks for volunteers to defend the homeland, he will immediately purchase a brown shirt. If he is told to be vigilant in his neighborhood, he will take that as instruction to spy on neighbors. If he is told his wife or mother are enemies of the state, he asks where to turn them in.

Such is the corrosive interaction between the authoritarian personality and the manipulative powers of the state. Such is the danger of authoritarian personalities intertwining their numbers with engineered, catalyzing events. Such is the potential damage of authoritarian personalities to tomorrow’s freedom that the sacrifice of their progeny’s long-term rights and liberties is a small price to pay for the short-term comfort of their own manufactured fears.

Authoritarian personalities are the submissive peons of power, the cowards of corporatism, and the blood-thirsty barbarians of warmongers. They are, quite simply, one of the greatest threats to the republic, a collection of intellectually hollow, willfully ignorant followers of criminality. Born natural followers, selfish and greedy, uncurious and apathetic, devoid of reason and logic, lacking courage and free-thought, unwilling to ever question authority, eager to place blind faith in both the unseen and the unproven, in adulthood becoming the ignorant sheeple easily obeying the dictates of leaders, with authoritarian tendencies running through their veins, these individuals have come out into the open, like cockroaches rising from the sewers, the propaganda and conditioning by the corporatist media becoming the hypnotic flute beckoning them forward.

This authoritarian personality, deeply embedded in the psyche of millions of individuals, for years buried, sequestered and controlled by the fictions and fantasies of the American Dream, was resurrected from the catacombs of the mind with the psychological war against the American people begun on 9/11. Like, zombies, the army of authoritarianism rose from the dead, thereby transforming America’s character for the worse. Crossing party lines, both Democrats and Republicans, liberal and conservative, from all socioeconomic, ethnic and religious groups, these individuals suddenly saw the world with different eyes. Millions became blinded to reality, building bubbles of infallibility from where truth was banished. The lies of the corporatist state became accepted through blind faith. Anyone who disagreed with the state or its leader became a traitor, a terrorist sympathizer, a treasonous enemy in the eyes of these people.

Spoon fed a potion of FOX News propaganda and corporatist manipulations, authoritarian personalities have fallen under the spell of neocon thinking. Unable to think for themselves, these people incorporate as their own any and all talking points spewed by the neocon, authoritarian media. Thus the lies and propaganda of corporatists and neocons becomes the belief and world view of these ignorant personalities. The views emanating from the talking heads and stenographers of authoritarianism are quickly embedded into the mindset of the authoritarian personality, who because of his great timidity is made to fear the dreaded, evil and dark skinned Arab enemy concocted by the creators of reality.

Possessing little logic or ability to reason, with fear controlling emotions and thoughts, this personality is quickly made to believe the lies, deceit, and deceptions of the neocon media, and thus eagerly accepts the destruction of his civil rights, freedoms and liberties in the name of security and state sponsored protection. This personality would rather live in a police state, serving under tyranny, rather than confront his own, and oftentimes manufactured fears and insecurities. He would rather remain ignorant than accept truth, preferring to dwell in fiction than in reality. Confronting the truth of his so-called leaders, along with the reality outside his bubble is unfathomable, lest his beautiful mind be molested of its fantasy and comfort.

Lacking conviction, strength, courage and bravery, all alien afterthoughts to him, this person would much rather live inside the comfortable charade created by the state than confront a reality of the world around him that might disrupt his delusions. He would much rather attach a meaningless car magnet “supporting the troops” than enlist to fight a war he approves of and wages from his comfortable couch, even as he supports leaders who care nothing for soldiers. This personality is made to cower in fear of an enemy created exclusively to control and oppress him, an enemy he purposefully refuses to know and understand, study, listen to and research, preferring to remain in darkness, preferring to believe the drivel emanating from his monitor than know the truth of the evildoer he hates so much yet comprehends so little.

The rise and spread of authoritarianism has been rapid and as yet unstoppable, growing from its 9/11 birth, reared through years of fear and terror conditioning, and maturing through perpetual wars, concocted enemies and eviscerated rights. Like a contagion passing from host to host, American authoritarianism is spreading, afflicting perhaps 100 to 150 million citizens, anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the population, many of whom seem oblivious to the threats to their ways of life they themselves are engendering.

The New Pearl Harbor, besides acting as the catalyzing event needed by the cabal of criminality to unleash imperial hegemony, also acted as the hypnotizing awakening of authoritarianism, becoming the deafening siren triggering the emergence of a once hibernating authoritarian personality. With the rise of this army of authoritarianism also came a monumental shift in the direction of fascist tendencies and policies, so much so that at no other time in America’s history has the threat of fascism been more apparent, and prevalent.

This phenomenon also gives us pause, for in its existence can we see how the totalitarian monsters of the past were allowed to flourish, how they were allowed to unleash carnage upon the world. They also offer us a window into the future, into how tomorrow’s tyrants can be contained and stopped before they once more open the gates of human wickedness. And, of course, in the unmasking of the authoritarians we can also see the present, and how America has allowed herself to descend into the frontier of authoritarianism, the badlands of despotism.

The unmasking of the authoritarians commences with introspection and a look into the mirror, understanding how 9/11 affected each of us, studying how its subsequent barrage of propaganda and manipulations by the corporatist state altered our psychology and emotions, researching what its emotional effects and consequences were. By seeing 9/11 for what it is, an inside job whose purpose was a psychological war against us by a cabal of criminality intent on controlling our minds, we can better comprehend the individuals that comprise the authoritarian personality that have had such a pivotal role in our descent into authoritarianism. Perhaps we can learn how to prevent this army from rising again once it returns into prolonged hibernation.

In the end, introspections as a nation are a good thing, especially in times of universal deceit and criminality, for they teach us about ourselves and our neighbors. Perhaps next time, and there will be a next time, we will prevent criminality and the rising tentacles of authoritarianism from submerging us into the ocean of impotence. Perhaps, if we learn our lessons and our history, instead of ignoring both, we will be able to prevent another attempt to plunge us deeper into the abyss of fascism.

Only by knowing ourselves and our American personality better will we succeed. Only by understanding the manipulations and the propaganda of our masters, and how they affect us, will we be triumphant. Never in our history has a mirror been more needed. Never has its use been more sought.

What we might see reflected back might be uncomfortable, it might frighten and enrage us, it might send chills down our spine. Yet in this reflection we might also see hope, possibility and promise; we may see our true selves. By looking directly into the mirror, the unmasking of America can thus commence.

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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Operation Iraq Forever

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Catastrophic Success


The occupation of Iraq, still illegal and immoral by any sense of human understanding, has now run into its fourth bloody and horrific year, becoming a quagmire for America and a vast killing field for Iraqis. Indeed, for Iraqis, America’s invasion and subsequent occupation has been and will continue to be one massive war crime, an onslaught of criminality against humanity not seen since World War Two. It is they, the Iraqi people, who have undergone tremendous hardship, and it is they who will continue to suffer in horrific ways, due to the lunacy and delusions of America’s miscreant leaders. Indeed, hell on Earth has been imported into Iraq without so much as a care, concern or bother from the American people, without so much as a protest or two by the world entire.

For America and her people, on the other hand, to say that the Iraq debacle is the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy history is an understatement, for the implications of America’s defeat at the hands of Iraqis have only now begun to be seen, with its reverberations to be felt for years to come. What was once considered a cakewalk by an arrogant nation, basking in the glory of exceptionalism and ignorance, blinded to reality by addictions to materialism and televised charades, instead turned into an inextricable sand trap that threatens to turn a New American Century into the Last American Decade.

For unlike Vietnam, a backwater nation at the outer periphery of world affairs, where America’s defeat did not disturb the grand chess match of Cold War geostrategy or cause worldwide geopolitical earthquakes, Iraq is at the epicenter of the world, sitting atop vast oil fields, possessing two fresh water rivers in a region where water is scarce, situated in the middle of vitally strategic lands sought by rising powers and dwindling empires. A defeat in Iraq, as is already apparent, and had long since been predicted by many, would thus severely damage the interests of America, thereby altering a global balance of power where one superpower dominates the rest of the world. Inside her shores, a defeat would, similar to what happened after Vietnam, alienate her people away from further wars of conquest, thus making it harder to implement the plans for a New American Century, thus destroying the once great controlling power engendered by the New Pearl Harbor.

The occupation of Iraq has and will continue to severely cripple America, both in treasure and blood, bogging it down in a grueling guerilla war of attrition for years to come. Already the war and occupation has lasted longer than America’s involvement in World War II. Already it has cost, in only four years, over one trillion dollars. Already, America’s military is overstretched, overstressed, overburdened and overworked. So far, close to 3,500 troops have died, with up to 30,000 maimed and injured; tens of thousands of personnel have been forced to serve more than two tours of duty. The psychological costs to thousands of soldiers will never be quantified, as will the societal damage done by people returning home with different minds, different lives and altered circumstances.

Yet in spite of the apparent defeat, the apparent debacle taking place in Iraq, the American leviathan, that corporatist element within the parameters of the state, that elitist cabal embedded in predatory capitalist markets, will not allow itself or the nation to be extricated from Iraq, for the price of such a calamity would be disastrous. For the Iraq War was first and foremost a war for control of oil, that most important of natural resources, that devil’s excrement needed to run the engine called modern human civilization.

The subsequent occupation of Iraq, beyond the obvious lies of WMD, bringing democracy and freedom, ridding Iraqis of tyranny and Saddam, and fighting al-Qaeda in the “war on terror,” was built on the necessity of pacifying and controlling the Iraqi populace so that the rape and pillage of Iraq’s oil could commence. For this war has always been and will always be about black blood, that dark substance that condemns and curses all who live above it, and empowers and enriches those who extract it. He who controls the oil controls the world, after all, and he who controls the world controls humankind’s destiny.

It is the devil’s excrement that sustains modern civilization; its births Empire and makes overlords of those that control it. It is also a truism that those who seek the power of modern empire must make a deal with the devil to drink blood from its veins. It is this deal with the devil that invariably resurrects violence, destruction, suffering and the worst in human wickedness.


Empire’s Gas Station


As such, to purposefully give up such a prize as the oil fields of Iraq, along with its perfect strategic location, would be tantamount to giving up on a burgeoning empire, something the elite and the corporatists of the nation are not yet ready to do. Controlling the oil markets of the world, along with the spigots, pipelines and oil fields of Iraq, dictating supply and demand to the globe, possessing the power to control the amount of oil a rival or rising superpower is allowed to have, and establishing a beachhead for further attempts at acquiring yet more oil and gas, this time in Iran and Central Asia, is too tempting a proposition for America’s elite to extricate their armies from Mesopotamia. In truth, to leave Iraq would be to leave behind all delusions of a New American Century. It would be akin to declaring defeat to Russia and China, in essence granting these rising powers Iraq’s oil fields on a silver platter and cementing the precipitous fall of the American Empire itself.

Iraq is too valuable, in the minds of America’s elite and her corporatists, to simply walk away from. For all intents and purposes, therefore, Iraq has become America’s 51st state, a colony that will act as America’s gas station for decades to come. Iraq is destined to become the grease that provides the lubrication needed to run the great American engine. It will act as America’s aircraft carrier, the easier to patrol the world’s most strategic region. In time, Iraq will be used to invade, threaten, hold hostage and/or conquer the oil fields of Iran and those of the central Asian basin. From Iraq America’s new national security infrastructure, such as pipelines and refineries, can best be defended from any barbarian horde. Iraq is today the gateway towards attaining the Empire the elite and the delusional have always envisioned. It is the gateway towards power, control and untold wealth.

Of course the sacrifice of American treasure and blood is and will continue to be of no significance to those possessing the delusional blueprints of a New American Century. After all, it is not their children sent off to war, becoming cannon fodder, returning in a body bag, with missing appendages, burned bodies or psychologically maimed minds. It is not their wages being taxed in order to pay for the ever-expanding corporatist army. It is not their hard earned money being expropriated so that energy giants can further enrich themselves to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in profits every year.

To the elite way of thinking, the sacrifice of 3,500 dead soldiers, most poor and working class, from rural cesspools or urban jungles, is a minor and inconsequential inconvenience, along with the injury of 30,000 more, in the pursuit of Empire. These brave and oftentimes naïve and brainwashed soldiers are simply the expendable tools of wealth accumulation and empire building, the robots needed to pull the levers and push the buttons of the vast arsenal of killing machines developed by the military industrial complex. They are cannon fodder used not for defending freedom and democracy, but for defending the corporate bottom line and its shareholder wealth. In a nation of 300 million people, the death in Iraq of 3,500 soldiers, or 30,000 for that matter, is of little importance to the elite who see poor men and women as a means to an end. They are the collateral damage sacrificed in the name of predatory and debauched capitalism. They are the catalysts for corporatism to thrive.

Sadly, America will remain in Iraq for decades to come, occupying sand and dune, living behind massive concrete walls, inside enormous embassies and bases, all built to protect the ultimate prize of the 21st century: oil. Iraq is now a giant American forward operating base, a geostrategic prize from where the delusional elite can amplify their presence both in the Middle East and the Caspian basin. From Iraq the oil and natural gas fields of Iran are but a stone’s throw away. From Iraq and Afghanistan Central Asia becomes easier to threaten and control, easier for its energy resources to be exploited and defended against potential adversaries. From Iraq it is easier for the rising empire to contain, control and check the advancements of Russia, China and India.

The future death of thousands of American soldiers, and the maiming of tens of thousands more, is a reality that will inevitably come in the years ahead, will be but the price of doing business, of maximizing profit and power, of controlling the black blood necessary for empire to rise and breathe. Thousands dead and tens of thousands maimed is of little consequence or importance to those whose vision of delusion includes an empire greeted by the world as liberator, with flowers and candy thrown at its feet. Sacrifices need to be made for the sake of consumerism and materialism, for gluttony and greed, after all. Just not for the elite that steer the American ship. The trillions of dollars that have already been spent, and those trillions that will invariably be needed in the future will of course be taken from the American people, their treasure pillaged, their wages raped in the pursuit of empire. It will be us, the common peasant, that will be forced to absorb the present and future costs of delusions of grandeur and self-aggrandizing hubris. It will be our children who will have to sacrifice freedom, rights and blood.

The added benefit to the elite of this robbery of the American taxpayer is that for every dollar that goes to the Iraq War, to the military-industrial complex, to the bank accounts of the war profiteers and the energy corporatists, one less dollar is allocated for social services, education, healthcare, infrastructure and the general welfare of the American people. One more dollar taken out through taxes equals one less dollar in the pocket of the people, thereby eviscerating the middle class and shifting the burden of war from the wealthy to the middle and working classes. By gutting the middle class, by putting severe pressure on its ability to subsist on already diminishing wages, the elite further separate themselves from the rest of us, increasing the wealth gap, and by consequence, increasing their power and control over us as well. When the rich get richer and the poor poorer, only a nation of fools fails to see who wins and who loses.

As such, the Iraq War is also a war against the American people, for it is designed to make us anemic creatures dependent on the decisions of the elite. It is engineered in part to increase injustice, inequality, exploitation and dominion over us, robbing us of our power to mobilize and seek change. By redistributing America’s treasure away from the people and to the few elite and the corporations, using war as pretext and fear as a conditioning element, government is being rewired to stop acting in the interest of the masses. Meanwhile, it is being made to serve the interests of the corporate world, which have been getting enormously powerful through the looting of our treasure, under the rubric of fighting the fictional war on terror and under the illusion of destroying a nation only to later rebuild it. The shifting of resources away from what helps the people to what empowers the corporate world is but one more sign that the age of American corporatism is upon us.

The belief that the Iraq War will end once the Bush administration leaves office, and that American soldiers will return home, is an illusion and a mirage, a concoction of wishful thinking that has no basis in reality. America has cemented its presence, firmly planting the foundations for a long and prolonged occupation. Permanent military bases have been erected, as has the largest embassy the world has ever seen. It has manipulated elections so that its puppets are elevated to the highest echelons of Iraqi power. It has written oil laws favorable to its interests that it then demands be passed by so called sovereign Iraqi lawmakers, in essence writing the same laws it needs to make legal the exploitation and robbery of Iraq’s oil fields.

The Middle East is the most vital region in the world in terms of energy allocation and its subsequent strategic control, and is therefore of tremendous national importance to a nation desiring to elevate itself to full-fledged empire status. It has controlled the region for decades now, either by military force, destruction of democracy and through its large cadre of puppets, and by occupying Iraq with a large military force, it now possesses a stranglehold on the world’s second largest energy reserves. And, by making colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq, by supporting the tyrants of Central Asia, it now surrounds the third largest oil reserves in the world, namely those of Iran. Its rich oil and gas fields, now targeted for conquest, are located just across the Iraq border, within invading distance for American forces, far away from Tehran, close enough to smell the fumes.

Iraq, therefore, is a prize that will never be relinquished, and is the reason America will never extricate herself from the debacle it has created. No amount of pre-invasion ignorance, occupying incompetence and blinding arrogance will force America to abandon her cherished possession. No continued bleeding through a thousand cuts will force it to return home in defeat. To the architects of empire, there is more than enough cannon fodder, more than enough treasure from which to maintain control of Iraq’s oil fields. There is too much invested already, too much left to gain, too many fragile egos to appease, too many insecure men to protect, to simply abandon a prize that has been cherished by the elite for decades.

We are in Iraq, and though broken by our hands, though destroyed by our military, she is now ours, for our greed and our love of comfort and consumerism demands that she be pillaged of her oil and raped of her sovereignty. Our addiction to her black blood demands that we care nothing for the plight of her people or for the decimation of her society. It demands that we cast a blind eye to the holocaust now taking place there and the ethnic cleansing destroying families and neighborhoods.

It demands that we see Iraqis as subhuman brown skinned aliens, their plight and suffering ignored, their decimation at the hands of our military and our government lost in hollow memory banks. It is because of oil, after all, that we can share in the privileges of living in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known. And so to continue living in comfort and consumerism, the beast must be fed, it must gorge upon the dark liquid of the third world, and the deal with the devil must, invariably, continue well into the future.

As such, no matter which member of the political duopoly is in the White House, no matter how loudly the citizenry demands a pullout, the United States will not leave Iraq in the foreseeable future. The two headed hydra is, after all, attached to the same body, obeying the same master. No amount of lies or spin or promises will alter this reality. We live in the New American Century, after all, where reality is the domain of those in power. As the will of the people no longer matters or counts, our voices will be silenced, our growing anger suppressed. Sure the illusion of troops returning home will be created, with scenes of families reuniting and hero’s coming home gracing the airwaves, yet in the real world, back in the land of permanent bases and rich oil fields, back where enormous and modern embassies rise on the banks of ancient rivers, tens of thousands of troops will remain, guarding America’s ultimate prize, the blood that sustains Empire, comfort and the military-industrial-energy complex.

The mirage of American troops returning from Iraq with their heads held high, as always marching triumphantly, as always having defeated evil, will captivate millions of ignorant but otherwise well-intentioned Americans. To millions more, however, this charade will be seen for the fiction that it is, for Iraq will remain a very dangerous place, especially for energy exploiters and oil conglomerates eager to further enrich themselves by pillaging a nation blind. Tens of thousands of American soldiers will remain, we will be told, to secure democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people, to ensure security in the cities, to make sure the “democratically” elected puppet is protected from al-Qaeda. We will be made to think our soldiers need to remain to protect Iraqis from themselves.

In truth, tens of thousands of soldiers will establish a permanent presence in Iraq because the Anglo-American energy consortium will need protection while it pillages and rapes Iraq of her natural resources. America’s military will be needed to defend from the targeted sabotage and rebellion of freedom fighters, from the expected assassinations and kidnappings of energy workers. It will ask to protect pipelines, oil fields and their infrastructure; it will be told to suppress strikes and the rage of Iraqi oil workers. The safety and freedom of Iraqis will mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of greed and gluttony and American empire. To the empire, oil trumps blood just as much as profit trumps people.


Brand Marketing


Of course to hear the Iraq War apologists tell it, and there are many of these individuals in government and the corporatist media, America is in Iraq because we are fighting al-Qaeda, and nobody else. To the dwindling delusionists and supporters of this illegal war who are somehow inexplicably still given a voice in the media and in print, the illusion must be made that America is at war, given this war on terror, with the dreaded bogeymen from al-Qaeda, those same evildoers who attacked us on 9/11. This is the only way to keep the charade going in the minds of millions that America must remain in Iraq, staying the course, as always knowing that the deeply embedded myth of America being the epitome of good and always triumphing over evil, epitomized by whatever convenient scapegoat is needed, will again capture the minds of the naïve and gullible.

This fantasy, of course, is the last refuge of scoundrels, for it has been proven over and over again that only two to five percent of fighters in Iraq are foreign. But this does not preclude scoundrels from preaching lies to the congregation nonetheless. A convenient enemy is needed to validate the Iraq occupation, however, one that has already been conditioned into the American mind as being nefarious and monstrous.

Indeed, what America confronts is guerilla warfare in an urban setting. Her soldiers, sent to protect the interests of the elite and those of the military-industrial-energy complex, are engaged in a battle against freedom fighters, the vast majority from Iraq, most common peasants once living ordinary lives who want nothing more than to rid their land of the occupying forces. From the beginning of time resistance fighters have waged war against the more powerful invading and occupying force, as always using their skills and talents to bleed their rivals to death.

Like American Revolutionaries, Iraq’s freedom fighters fight for independence and freedom, for nationality and to expel foreign forces from their country. If America or any other nation were invaded and occupied, resistance fighters would immediately spring up as well, forming an army of brave patriots using the tactics of the poor to try and contain the weapons of the much more powerful and wealthier military. Unfortunately, it is the poor of both countries waging war against each other, killing and maiming one another, for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Such is war that the poor are always made to fight each other when it is the elite that is their common enemy.

Yet the truth of who and what America’s army is fighting can never be mentioned, for a myth has been embedded into the average American mind that America is in Iraq to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq, not to fight their freedom fighters or rape their women. Since an occupying power cannot fully dehumanize a legitimate resistance movement, given that its cause is nobler than that of the occupying force itself, it must resort to the realm of fiction and propaganda, concocting lies and distortions to smear the resistance. Only by making freedom fighters seem subhuman or evil in the eyes of its people can the occupying force thereby make it acceptable to mass murder, dehumanize, torture and illegally detain Iraqis.

Indeed, resistance movements such as those fighting the American military in Iraq are allowed under international law. When such an invasion and subsequent occupation has been proven to be based on lies and deceit, becoming immoral and illegal, a crime against humanity, any resistance movement would find broad support among the peoples of the world. Indeed, these movements are romanticized and applauded, for they become brave patriots and freedom fighters against criminality, illegality and immorality. Such was the case with the French resistance against the Nazis, the Jewish resistance in the ghettos, the plight of blacks in apartheid South Africa and the struggle of Palestinians against the oppressive and apartheid methods of the Israelis.

As such, in order to marginalize and vilify the resistance, in order for the American populace to accept wanton destruction and killing, in order to transform individuals fighting for independence and for an end to occupation, the impression must be made by the creators of reality that the Iraqi mujahedeen are really al-Qaeda in Iraq, thereby becoming the central myth of why America is in Iraq and why it must continue to remain there. This way, the dreaded evildoer extraordinaire, that entity that continuously haunts the American mind, that bogeyman that in the original conspiracy theory was said to have brought down World Trade Center towers 1,2 and 7 through controlled demolitions and at freefall speed, killing 3,000 innocent Americans in the process, can continue to spread fear and insecurity in the belief structure of millions of Americans who, like Pavlovian dogs, cower in fear at the sound of the word al-Qaeda. It is al-Qaeda, after all, and not Iraq freedom fighters, who attacked us on 9/11. It is al-Qaeda, after all, that planned war games on the day of 9/11 and ordered fighter planes to stand down, not Iraqi resistance fighters.

Thus, by using the concocted scapegoat of al-Qaeda, having escaped the caves and mud huts of Afghanistan, this time festering and planning to take over Iraq if we let them, and hiding the reality of whom exactly the American military is fighting in Iraq, millions of Americans readily accept the continued occupation as being beneficial to their own safety and security. For, as the scoundrels and the liars love to tell us, we are fighting them there so we do not have to fight them here. If we leave, we are told, they, being al-Qaeda, will follow us back, undoubtedly to wage holy jihad in the little towns of Indiana and Nebraska. This way, the creators of the new reality hide the true rival in Iraq while at the same time manipulating the American public into allowing the continued debacle taking place.

As long as the term al-Qaeda is used in symphony with Iraq, as long as Iraq and the so-called war on terror are similarly correlated, millions of Americans will continue to support an occupation that is illegal and immoral. As such, the Iraqi resistance movement will continue to gain strength, it will continue to engage the American military, and a war of attrition will continue to kill and maim both Americans and Iraqis. This way, a vicious cycle of violence will not cease, for Americans will continue to associate the need to wage war in Iraq, believing, albeit mistakenly, that America fights al-Qaeda in the fictional war on terror, not knowing or understanding the true nature of the rival.

With violence begetting violence, more resistance fighters will join the movement, as naturally occurs in a guerilla war against an occupation. With manipulations and lies, the American people will be made to believe that al-Qaeda in Iraq is growing more dangerous, that it is expanding, that it will indeed follow us home if we leave, that it presents a clear and present danger that must be defeated. Thus, the ingredients for the endless war the elite have dreamt about for decades, and the key to staying permanently in Iraq, have managed to rise out of one nation’s desire to be free of occupation and another’s systematically damaged and manipulated psyche, born on 9/11, that freezes in horror and loses all ability to reason and think logically at the mention of the words al-Qaeda and war on terror. As long as the term al-Qaeda is used over the airwaves, as long as it retains its corroding effect, the American people will allow the fictional war on terror to continue. Such is the damage done by the masters of reality.

Quite conveniently, then, Iraq’s freedom fighters are morphed by the state and the corporatist media into al-Qaeda, thereby validating America’s presence and continued occupation of a nation, and a people, fighting for her freedom. The liberty and ease by which the apologists of the war grant al-Qaeda franchises throughout Iraq, indeed, wherever America seems to pick fights, without even a hint at investigation by the corporatist media, underlies the fallacy of this myth. Along with the purported death of probably 100 al-Qaeda’s number two’s, it also demonstrates the level of propaganda and manipulation the Pentagon and its lackeys fill the media, and thus our minds with. Truth is the first casualty of war, after all. Therefore, under the auspices of fighting terrorism, America can stay and focus on the real and most important task at hand, namely the complete control, rape and pillage of Iraq’s oil fields and pipelines.


The Curse of Black Gold


And so America will continue fighting in Iraq because the state says we are fighting al-Qaeda, because it blames Iraq’s puppet government for its own incompetence and ignorance, because it says through its stenographers and talking heads that the war on terror must be fought, even if it takes decades to win, and because America is good and exceptional and she must defeat evil, just as she has always done. Along with our permanent occupation, we will continue mass murdering, torturing, dehumanizing and falsely imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose only crime, whose only curse, is living atop the devil’s excrement, that dark liquid waiting to be gorged on by a most greedy, ignorant and arrogant drug addict.

For when it comes to dominating that black gold called oil, easily available for conquest in various third world nations, either through puppets, market colonialism or military might, no dark skinned, non-European looking human is safe from the tentacles of modern empire, for soon subhuman you will be called, seen as primitive, as an animal, needing the “enlightened” hand of Western intervention for salvation. When the aim of categorizing you as alien, evil and below the parameters of being human is achieved your family will be murdered, your people displaced, your life forever altered, your plight ignored. Your death will never equal that of an American or a British citizen, for you are a third worlder, a person of the southern globe, bred to be exploited and oppressed, your lands becoming the feudal estates of corporatism, your blood, sweat and tears falling only after you have slaved yourself for the north’s comfort and wealth.

The death of your son will not be counted, the rape of your daughter will be dismissed as lies, the dehumanization of your father and the torture of your brother will never see light of day, for your country has been targeted as the next petrol station that will invariably be forced to pay tribute to the purple robe of empire. Whether you live in Nigeria, Venezuela, the Caspian Sea basin or Iran, it does not matter, for you live where black gold abounds, where the drug of oil can be found. As such your lands will become toxic, your air and water filled with poison. All the while, even as your natural resources are pillaged, your nation raped, your nation collapsing, you will never see a dime from the corporations of the empire. For poverty is your destiny, even as vast wealth lies below your feet. Subsisting on garbage, living in shacks, your national wealth stolen and embezzled, you thus realize that the black gold you were told would transform your nation has been nothing but a terrible curse you wish never existed.

Of course if you live where the devil’s excrement is bountiful you cannot help but notice the addiction of the empire, and how maddened it becomes if its fix is not satiated. You realize that death, destruction and suffering are the only realities and expectations for nations not willing to pay tribute to the empire. Thus, if you are not careful, if you are not ready, the next knock on your door might very well be that of a most immoral and criminal addict, ready to kill you and destroy your nation for its next much needed fix. And then you will automatically become the Empire’s next enemy, its next terrorist scapegoat, becoming the evildoer chosen to strike fear in the American populace. Inevitably, your face, your people and your culture will become the poster children in the next marketing campaign and psychological war against the American citizenry, designed, as always, by fascism’s public relations experts, its army of little Goebbels.


Deal With the Devil


America cannot exorcise itself from its addiction to oil that, like a demon inside our body, possesses us day and night, demanding that we satisfy our insatiable thirst for black blood. In this deal with the devil that we long ago made, we became dependent on a natural resource that, while not plentiful inside our own shores, is readily abundant in the Middle East, Central Asia, West Africa and Venezuela. For this reason the Middle East has become a militarized region, a vast feudal estate owned by the masters and lords of energy, protected by the Empire itself. For this reason it has become the world’s most volatile and sought after region. Inside its borders puppets and despots and proctors overlook America’s oil fields, proclaiming themselves princes, kings and presidents, as always oppressing and exploiting their people, as always overseeing the