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, February 25, 2008

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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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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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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