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.

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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. He welcomes comments at euromeximan@yahoo.com

Monday, November 08, 2004

American Resistance: Valid Outrage

Valid Outrage


If you are still upset at the resounding defeat of humanity that occurred on November 2, 2004 you have every right to be. On that day billions of us lost a most important battle through both the vote of the ignorant, unenlightened among us and the systemic fraudulent manipulation of electronic-voting machines which, it is becoming more and more apparent, helped steal victory, for the second time in four years, for George W. Bush and the Republican/corporatist party. The consequences on America and the world of such tragedy may inevitably set us back to the dark ages and to a meeting with a most ominous destiny.

You should be outraged that so many fellow Americans were methodically conditioned to vote against their own interests and for the benefit of the corporate world, sending the world a message of backwardness, of warmongering, of ignorance and thirst for violence. Americans of all varieties should be incensed that so many gave George Bush a thumbs-up mandate for the feeble leadership, incompetence, violence and killing of the past and the ineptitude, violence, war, division, terror, criminality that is sure to come. By voting Bush back into office we have lost all respect in the world, we have become the terrorists we fear, the war criminals we loathe and have allowed for the continued slaughter of untold thousands through the weapons of mass destruction we are so proud to manufacture.

We have given the corporatists in government the confidence that what they have done is endorsed by so many millions. We have given the neoconartists new life, their ideology fresh legs, and their delusional preemptive ideas to reshape the world continued existence. You should be ashamed at your fellow citizens, 59 million strong, for voting while living in bubbles and disconnect, for voting kidnapped by fear, bigotry and homophobia, for voting not with their brains but with their manipulated emotions.

You should be outraged that millions have made you less safe, not more, making our world a much more dangerous place, and America a most inviting target of vengeance and hatred spawned by a foreign policy we have through our vote accepted. Now, thanks to all those millions, the actions of our government will be imputed onto us, and guilty we will all be in the wrongs done in our name. To the eyes of the world, there are now no innocent Americans, for the actions of the criminals in power have now become our own. To the world, our government’s wrongs have fused with the people’s beliefs, and distinctions between the two will no longer be made. We should all be screaming that the collective future of our children has been made more perilous, and that blowback will surely continue the vicious circle of violence we presently inhabit.

You should be outraged that democracy has been made extinct, once again plundered of its inherent power arrived at by the will of the people. Democracy has been hijacked, becoming a farce, turning American elections into the dreams of despots and the realities of dictators. Third-world elections have been imported to the bastion of democracy, using new technology and systemic manipulation of voters to grant mandates and power, robbing the People of having any say in the future direction of the nation. The recipe for success has been perfected by the corporatist few, learned through careful study and American sponsored implementation in Latin America, Africa and Asia that for years has had the desired result of selecting American puppets, dictators and proctors.

The will of the people has been made extinct since 2000; democracy is now a rigged system of charades and mirages, now but a tool to make citizens believe they participate, belong to and help steer the direction of the nation. It is a fiction to retain control, to pacify the populace, to give the illusion that democracy works, that in 2000 George W. Bush was elected and that in 2004 George W. Bush received widespread approval for his failure and a mandate to continue his reign of ruination. Elections are now relegated to the realm of fantasyland; democracy has become a mere conduit for corporatist domination of our dreams, another charade in the system of control.

The appearance of clean elections pacifies the people and prevents us from seeing that the United States as we once knew it no longer exists. It prevents us from realizing that the unfathomable has come true, that in dictatorship do we now live. When votes and elections are stolen, when the voice of the People is trumped by the shouts of the corporate world, when a government fails to guard the interests of its citizens, when it sacrifices the good of the many for the exuberance of the few and when it makes worse the lives of millions for the benefit of corporate profit the realization arises that corporatism, the marriage of corporate interests and government power, has finally come out of the shadows to invade the nation and our lives.

Through rigged, hacked, glitched, manipulated, distorted, disappeared, disenfranchised, intimidated, lost, stolen and suppressed votes democracy has mutated into despotism, elections have become meaningless illusions to birth conformism and control the easily manipulated, the will of the people has been forever silenced and the nation once known as America has taken the next step in its degenerative road towards tyranny.

We should be outraged as hell.


The Beast Emerges, the Enemy is Now Known


Inside the belly of the beast do the last remaining vestiges of normalcy lie, fear and ignorance once again claiming triumph, ripping America apart at the seams, infecting tens of millions with the hypnotizing virus of lunacy from where all disease grows and prospers. Inside the belly of the beast can the ruins of democracy be seen, strewn across vast landscapes, its once glorious temples and columns scattered on once holy ground, now smeared with the stains of festering corruption and fraud.

A new paradigm shift has taken place, you see, giving rise to a surreal manifestation of democratic fraud, technological corruption, blind ignorance, omnipresent fear, schizophrenic conditioning, controlled emotions and Alzheimer’s-like amnesia that has further eroded all that was once wonderful and rotted all that was once possible. In its wake can be seen an America whose dream continues to be eaten away by its terrible and never-ending nightmare.

Inside the belly of the beast can the tremors of cataclysm be felt, threatening the return of dark ages and the arrival of despotism, blackening once bright lights of American greatness and making blind the eyes of the people. For the beast thrives in the darkness that is ignorance, fearing both the radiant light emanating from the power of the people and the inevitable march forward that is human knowledge. Through its penetrating claws and suffocating grip it is famishing our freedoms, rights, human progress and all potential for renaissance.

The war it has waged against us continues to succeed catastrophically, methodical in its implementation, potent in its veracity and absolute in its ability to squash our will to fight. We the People are being routed in a war most of us fail to see or understand, our lives each day becoming that of yesteryear’s serfs and tomorrow’s automatons.

We the People are being robbed of every truth we once knew to exist, raped of the knowledge that serves to liberate and ransacked of the lives we once led. Yet in these dark days where light has vanished can reality now be seen, where the charade of what America is has given way to what it has always been. An eclipse of sun, moon and eyes now hovers over us, finally allowing us to see the silhouette of reality, of the beast that controls us, of the Evil Empire.

The America of old, that America that never existed, the fantasy we so long believed in, has given rise to the America that always was, now present for all to see, no longer ruling and controlling behind the scenes, finally coming out of dark rooms to claim unfettered power over the People.

What the world has forever seen, known and experienced can those residing inside the belly of the beast now recognize. The America of wars for profit, of economic genocides, of market colonialisms, of feudal ownership of nations, of devastating poisoning of the planet, of enslavement of peoples, of destruction of talent and opportunity, of murderous rampages, of evisceration of democracy, of insatiable appetite for resources and of addiction to consumption has risen like a blazing phoenix, becoming a reality finally made apparent through the darkness we are enveloped in.

The United Corporations of America is now visible, an Evil Empire that has plunged billions into perpetual suffering, indigence, enslavement and premature death, an empire whose true calling is to make of its citizens ignorant, unthinking sheep easily herded, efficient machines bred for perpetual production and a gluttonous plague of locusts addicted to ceaseless materialistic consumption. The time has arrived to resurrect minds made numb, lingering since birth in the abyss brought by lifelong conditioning. The time has come to escape the fictions that control our minds, breaking free from the shackles of bondage that have been placed at our appendages.

The time has come to see the beast for what it is, an empire whose cherished principles of profit, greed and love of the Almighty Dollar are hidden behind the mirages of democracy, liberty and freedom; an empire that espouses a government of, by and for the People but serves only its corporate masters; an empire that declares wars in the name of democracy and freedom yet supports dictators and despots; an empire that sends our loved ones to die for human rights yet is the single greatest exterminator of human life on the planet; an empire that enslaves nations of the south, those so-called ‘third-world’ countries, exploiting their lands, resources and people; an empire that lies to and manipulates its own people into war for the enrichment of its corporations; an empire that breeds fear and terror into its populace, manipulating fragile emotions, so that acquiescent beings we become to the dictates of the corporate world; an empire destroying the foundations of its citizens for the benefit of its greed-addicted masters.

The America that has always been can we now see, no longer hiding in shadows, no longer living in deceptions or controlling through puppets. We must open our eyes, clear our clouded minds and deprogram all that has ever been brainwashed into our heads. Through cold November chills did the fabled myth of America disappear, instead showing its ugly head in morning dew and sunset’s haze, appearing in its true colors, ready to usurp democracy and once more dictate what was, what is and what will become.

In the beauty of Election Day has the hideous monstrosity of what America has become been made manifest. It is in those times showing our perceived greatest assets that our most sinister demons arise. It is when these demons rise that we see the truth and reality of what is happening to America. If the will of the people no longer matters, do we have democracy or dictatorship, freedom or despotism? If our elections can no longer be trusted, what can? Democracy? Freedom? Reality? America?

On Election Day the enemy reared its ugly head for all to see, and now we know what has been waging ceaseless war against the People for all these years. Never has the enemy become so apparent, arrogantly unmasking itself, challenging us to fight it, challenging us to dare resist what it is doing. It no longer hides in darkness or shadows, it no longer cares that we see how it steals elections or manipulates minds, how it has destroyed democracy and silenced dissent, how it controls destinies and ruins opportunity. It believes its power is omnipotent, that we are but senseless sheep easily corralled, unthinking droids conditioned to serve.

The enemy is now known, and George W. Bush is but its poster child, a symbol of its evils, a weak-minded entity easily controlled, a sock puppet whose appendages are stringed to the rhythm of its masters and the policy of the corporatist world. It is he we loathe, yet it is the beast we must fight.


59 Million Hypnotized Sheep


The United Corporations of America was once more at work, manipulating the emotions of those blinded by the cross and shielded by the flag, playing on their conservative values and beliefs, using their close-mindedness, intolerance and ignorance, their lack of education and knowledge, abusing their homophobia and xenophobia, making them pawns in the game of power and control, for years terrorizing their conditioned fears, brainwashing their minds and deciding their futures. Through a blitzkrieg of deceptions, lies, propaganda and charades 59 million of these easily-manipulated entities – the same kind of people as those who fell into Hitler’s trance-like spell – voted against their own interests, proving once again how easily sheep are led to slaughter.

Hypnotized to the images of 9/11 and to the falsity of George Bush’s image as savior in chief, on November second they voted for war, division, corporations, perpetual violence, ceaseless fear and fictional terror. On that fateful day, tens of millions voted for ignorance and hatred, for vengeance and violence, for segregation, inequality, injustice and for the further decay of the nation they love and the principles they cherish. Fifty-nine million voters, blind to history, ignorant to anything beyond American borders, compressed in fundamentalist religion and deaf to the cries and wisdom of billions of their fellow human beings decided that they preferred lives languishing as slaves and serfs, unwilling to escape the dungeons of ignorance and fear placed at their door by a corporatist government, than to breathe the sweet, crisp air of a world free of corporate domination, sending the world a message that the American Empire was at the mercy of the People, not the People at the mercy of the Empire.

At the end of the day, the sheeple had done what they had been trained to do since the horror of 9/11 and the incessant bombardment of television images that followed. Attaching themselves to the American psyche like deer ticks, sucking all semblance of analytical thinking and cognitive reason, replacing these with irrational paranoia and the Hitler-like hypnosis of eroded free-thinking minds, fear and insecurity thus captured tens of millions of brains and votes for George Bush and the corporatists who own him.

Almost overnight, this weak-minded, inept, ignorant, unwise son of privilege and monument to everything wrong with America became, in the minds of tens of millions and thanks to great marketing, the second coming of Christ, a savior to the American people, a leader for all times, the only man capable of securing the homeland and protecting the people. It seems the human brain will believe even the grandest fairy tales, no matter how absurd, far-fetched and how contrary to reality, in times of psychological damage. Tens of millions of votes were thus assured, no matter the level of sheer incompetence, failure and utter stupidity shown by the worst President in living memory.

This is the power of fear, of terror, of ignorance and of insecurity, and the reason the hypnotized vote for people like Hitler and Bush. For leaders like Bush feed of off and indeed grow in power thanks to ignorance and fear. This is the sustenance that keeps them in power, their manna from heaven, and the reason Bush needs ceaseless terror and insecurity to maintain the people hypnotized. Bush needs Osama bin Laden alive, lurking in canyons, caves and the American mind, he needs the war on terror, he needs old and new 9/11’s and perpetual war to sustain the mirage. Lies and deceptions about evildoers and terrorists and those that hate our freedoms and those that want to end our way of life are thus needed to squash questioning and free-thinking minds, to brainwash the easily led among us. Psychologically decimating their populace in order to achieve individual glory, Hitler and Bush simply followed long established rules of engagement, created by tyrants past, that have historically worked to pacify, control and suppress the citizens they led.

In the years since 9/11, incessant conditioning of conservative moral imperatives, brainwashing minds to the fictional gay, immigrant and Arab bogeymen and evildoers, and fear-mongering manipulations of emotions and psychology has led to the omnipotent control of vast segments of the American people. The pickings have never been easier, and the corporatist exploitation of the traumatized American mind has succeeded with devastating consequences, oftentimes resulting in the acquiescence of mass murder and acceptance to perpetual war and terror that the world witnessed on November 2nd. The psychological war that has been implemented against the People since 9/11 had worked magically, like a concocted fog penetrating directly into the heads of millions, exceeding all expectations, tunneling deep into the far reaches of the American psyche that allowed citizens to vote against their own best interests and for the benefit of the corporatist/capitalist/ownership classes.


The Progressive Persecution


Into dictatorship have we stumbled, back to dark ages are we heading towards. The United States has ceased to exist as we once knew it, and in danger of tyranny do we find ourselves in. This is the story of three America’s, one conservative, one progressive and one elite class basking in the splendor of seeing the masses at war with one other, perceiving themselves as each other’s enemy instead of allies in a war being waged on both by the elite, corporatist few. Occupied with the other, progressive and conservative America is ignoring the beast at the top, the corporate dominated government and its legions of minions who are eviscerating our rights, freedoms and protections. Progressives do not have the numbers in an increasingly religious society and conservatives have become unknowing pawns in the beast’s quest for enveloping control, nothing but millions of harvested votes granting mandates to corporate controlled government.

A civil war of ideas and ideology fills the air, divided in belief and split by differing views of the world. States stand balkanized, blue in the northeast, upper Midwest, California and Pacific Northwest, red in the Dirty South, the middle plain states, the Southwest and the upper West. The United States is an oxymoron, one more charade designed to maintain illusions of times past and fantasies of grandeur. In reality, the nation is in a war of attrition with itself, yet both sides of this self-defeating battle will in the end lose to the corporatist elite.

America’s ownership class has descended like a powerful tornado, greed guiding its path. Corporatist rule continues its devastating attack, the Almighty Dollar leading it forward. Decadent capitalism runs amok, making the search for profit paramount, democracy extinct and ignorance all-encompassing, continuing to exacerbate our lives while it controls the direction our society takes. To this reality must we awaken before we never again see a semblance of all that once was.

Thanks to the beast, America has been taken hostage by religious fundamentalism, ensnarling the world’s most powerful, diverse and talented nation inside the claws of religious backwardness and its conditioned ignorance. This has been done methodically and purposefully, for the beast understands that religion controls human beings, it suppresses and it manipulates, transforming human minds into conduits of obedience and exploitation. For millennia the Christian religion sequestered knowledge and innovation, free-thought and analytical thinking, keeping humanity in the abyss of primitive belief. People were prevented from seeing the world in its reality, instead depending on myths and fairy tales to explain existence.

Science was persecuted, as were those courageous enough to seek truth. Anything that proved the fallacy of religious belief or exhibited the controlling mechanisms by which the leadership ruled over the masses was destroyed, burned at the stake and banished. The People could never know the truth, for truth and reality are enemies of Christianity, as are education and knowledge. Christianity has systematically eroded and robbed humanity of education, knowledge and potential, and is why, still in the 21st century, the establishment and those who pull the levers of control seek the implementation of religious conditioning upon the less enlightened among us.

Religion is control; it is ignorance and subservience, oppressing shining stars and spawning black holes. It is acquiescence, unthinking minds and devastating exploitation; it is hereditary conditioning from which few human minds are ever able to escape. Those at the helm of religious belief hold the keys of power, of altering society and controlling minds, of regressing backwards in time and holding static the progress of humanity. This is the reason America is now the most fundamentalist nation on Earth, for to have the ability to manipulate and control those living inside the belly of the beast is to have immense power. It is to make ignorant and unenlightened tens of millions, transforming them into easily managed and exploitable entities striving for the dogma of their convictions and the sinister motives of their leaders.

Thus, corporatist America seeks the harvesting of souls for the manifestation of profits. It seeks the introduction of the Cross for the continued hegemony of the Almighty Dollar. It seeks to inhibit human thinking and progress so that it may more readily control those residing inside its bowels, transforming America into a nation of conditioned parasites, consumerist drones, exploited slaves and warmongering crusaders.

In progressive thought the beast sees a threat; it sees free-thought, science, analytical thinking, education, knowledge and realism as catalysts for rebellion and resistance. It sees progressive citizens, secular and not attached to the realm of fantasy, as harder to brainwash and manipulate to its fears, dictates and commands. More knowledgeable minds are harder to break, harder to condition and harder to make conformist, indifferent puppets. It is for this reason that progressive thought and belief, open to new ideas and peoples, opposed to despotism and willing to question both authority and the bounds of human reality are being persecuted. In knowledge the answers to humanity are released, our fears made to vanish and our ignorance, that hornet’s nest of human evil, is forever condemned to the dungeons of human waste. It is knowledge that is the greatest enemy of those now in power.

Everywhere one looks can be found the mechanisms to make our society more religious and by its natural consequence more ignorant. The preaching of creationism in public schools, the fight to minimize the truth of evolution, the search to ban a women’s right to choose, the bigotry in preventing two-people in love from joining in union, the battle to unite church and state, the desire to keep the word “God” in government, maintaining the death penalty, even as so many questions now exist as to its validity, the stupidity of preaching abstinence to hormonal teenagers while making contraceptives harder to attain, the xenophobia of denying social services to new immigrants and their children, most of them dark-skinned and of divergent cultures, the decimation and oppression of science in government and schools, the fight to prevent stem-cell research that may save the lives of millions, the under-funding and indifference to our children’s education, the skyrocketing costs of higher education that prevent millions from advancing in enlightenment while maintaining them in the lower castes of society and the subsidies to faith-based institutions over those of secular existence.

We are witnessing a battle of religious fundamentalism versus progressive realism, of secular modernism against Old Testament ideology. It is a battle of dark ages reintroduced or of renaissance resurrected. As has always been the case with Christianity, progress is sought to be thwarted, and with it the many professing to see humanity for what it is and the world as it appears, without instructions, without fables and without the chains of bondage that those in power try to shackle the masses with.

Progressive thought in America is being persecuted; our way of life is threatened. Pragmatism and reality are in danger, and, unless we act, soon the most powerful nation on Earth, will hundreds of millions of citizens, will be in the hands of religious fundamentalists, not much different than those in Muslim lands, fighting progress and freedoms, rights and liberties, humanity and the inevitable move forward. Those in power are trying to purge modernism, progressiveness and liberalism from our lives, making the wealthiest nation on Earth, where one would expect education and progressiveness to be all-encompassing, into a stronghold for fundamentalism and ignorance, a land of regression and of backwardness, taking ten steps back from the inevitable manifestation forward that is human progress.


The Birth of American Resistance


The fight of our lives is upon us, for war has been declared against us. For years we have been oblivious to the lost battles and eroded rights, the vanished freedoms and kidnapped protections. For decades the beast has grown, its veins filled with greed and its eyes saturated with the green of the Almighty Dollar. Its power swells with each new day and year that passes, and still we refuse to accept that we are in a most important battle. Our nation is under siege, its people hijacked by a corporate world and a corporatist elite addicted to the smell of money and the taste of greed. If we refuse to act, this siege will continue, growing exponentially until the day arrives that we are impotent to do anything. What totalitarian regimes were to the 20th century, corporate control will be to the 21st. The question is whether we respond now or wait until we are too far behind.

The birth of American resistance is upon us. Through the re-selection of George Bush can we now see the destruction of the America we once thought existed. It is time to join ranks, marching side by side along the trumpets of solidarity and fraternity, putting aside our differences and egos for the common good. It is time for resistance, peaceful and non-violent, yet devastating and triumphant nonetheless. If 55 million of us can vote in one day, mobilizing in earnest to help eliminate a most malignant tumor, then certainly we can mobilize again and again, uniting millions, marching in our cities, demanding justice and equality, demanding the return of our nation and the banishment of tyranny.

Do not let your outrage dissipate, do not let it subside. Rather, keep it inside your body and mind, letting it gather steam and anger, for what the corporatists in power are doing to our nation is treasonous and without shame. Keep your outrage alive, for it will be a most useful tool. Mobilize, unite and act, joining in hands and minds, sending 10 million people to Washington if we have to, causing civil disobedience if we must, instituting boycotts, sit-ins, strikes, in the end trying to release the hostage called democracy and the prisoner called America.

Do not conform, do not forget and do not let time make you indifferent. Let the peace movement be reborn, let peace and love once more supercede war and violence. Let brotherhood of humanity replace division of peoples. Let love of people triumph over love of profit. Let us retire greed and love for the Almighty Dollar, embracing instead the principles of humanity, equality and justice.

We are the many and the enemy the few, and only together can we defeat this most formidable enemy. In time our ranks will swell, as more and more of those liberated and free join our side, as more and more begin to see the truth. As Iraq descends further into the abyss, as more thousands are murdered and their towns razed the peace movement will grow, our numbers will increase. It worked once, it will work again, but this time it must continue to a new understanding of governance and humanity.

If Bush and his cronies do wrong, then let us do right. If they murder, then let us give life. If they maim, then let us heal. If they increase poverty, then let us increase well-being. If they choose wealth and materialism, then let us choose communalism and humanity. Whatever they may do, we must do the opposite. If they make war, let us make peace. If they divide, then let us unite. If they destroy, let us rebuild. If they use bullets, then let us use flowers. If they hit us, then let us forgive them. Only united, in peace, through nonviolence can we achieve victory. Only by doing good can we defeat them. It is through our humanity that wretched scoundrels wither away and die. It is through love and peace that warmongers are made to lie in ruins.

American resistance must begin now. It must incorporate all the tools at our disposal. We must do all we can, from small town meetings to large city marches. Do what you can, but please do something. From musicians to poets to writers to teachers to doctors to lawyers to radio personalities to celebrities to editors to activists to professors to factory workers to high school students to government employees to secretaries to college students to managers to burger-flippers to retail store salespeople and everything in between, the movement must be massive, it must be united, and it must be strong, knowing that what we are fighting for is just, it is right and it is necessary.

Let the American resistance commence, let it alter this most horrific parallel world, let it transform and empower, and, most importantly, let it free us of the corrosive grip of corporate power and the addiction to greed and materialism it spawns. The enemy is now known, unmasked for all to see. It can be defeated, and it will, for in the end, the united hearts and minds of millions always trample over the hollow cavity of the few.

Together we will win, and together will we reclaim the nation we want and rebuild the foundations we most cherish. Together we will banish tyranny to the gates from where all demons arise. Together will we make our planet safer, healthier and more peaceful, according to the wishes of billions, not the commands of the few. Together must we march through haze and fog, through smoke and fire, for we must first taste the bitter to better enjoy the sweet.

Let the American resistance be born, let it breathe the air of life; let it grow to dimensions high and mighty, guided by our collective fight.