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

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

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

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Hear No Evil, See No Evil


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Reincarnation of the Habitual


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

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

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

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

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


Entrapment


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Monday, February 18, 2008

Crusade of Surge and Siege: Part One of Three

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Homeland Born and Bred


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rise of a New Crusade


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


First they came for the Muslims…


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Tuesday, February 05, 2008

The Year of Living Dangerously: Part Two of Two

Read Part One


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An Absence of Will


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The New Normal


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Read Part One

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Monday, February 04, 2008

The Year of Living Dangerously: Part One of Two

Read Part Two


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Manifestations of Intent


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Transformation


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Read Part Two

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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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