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

Operation Iraq Forever

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Catastrophic Success


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Empire’s Gas Station


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Brand Marketing


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Curse of Black Gold


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

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

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

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


Deal With the Devil


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

In our deal with the devil, the more we taste the more we want; the more we continue to grow the bigger we want to get. The more powerful we are the greedier and more gluttonous we become, expanding the size of everything we own, including our stomachs. Millions of us believe oil is abundant, as if it grows yearly in some global breadbasket. Millions of us fail to understand that hundreds of thousands of human beings are killed and maimed, and tens of millions live in perpetual indigence and oftentimes are forced to confront armed conflict because of our insatiable addiction to oil. Millions of us fail to see that it is our standards of living, our greed and gluttony, that contributes to so much misery and destruction worldwide.

Yet year after year our greed compels us toward ever larger vehicles and homes, bigger toys and an exponentially growing consumption habit. Through our actions it seems that we care nothing for the planet or its inhabitants, instead filling our minds with the arrogance and apathy of a spoiled child, transforming ourselves into a most insecure schoolyard bully. We behave as if we are entitled to what does not belong to us, in essence forcing the school’s other kids to give us their lunch money, threatening with violence those that decline or stand up for themselves.

Our greed and gluttony, our indifference and arrogance, our insistence on maintaining and even expanding our standards of living, all at the expense of the planet and its people, is the reason we invade, occupy and exploit weaker nations. It is the reason Iraq is in chaos, why Nigeria is on the verge of full rebellion, why Central Asia is full of despotic leaders and why Venezuela is vilified. It will be the reason why Russia and China will in the years ahead become rivals and enemies, why more and more people around the globe hate America and why we spend more on military equipment and weapons than the entire world put together. It is when we look in the mirror that the devil’s excrement can be seen, acting like an aura around our head, smearing our face with the darkness of wickedness and the madness of addiction.

We can continue believing the exceptionalism of America, the grandeur of her virtues, that of her leaders and her people, yet reality and truth are altogether different, presenting circumstances too uncomfortable for us to contemplate yet important enough to try and understand. We can continue living the delusion of myth and the charade of the American Dream. We can continue being brainwashed and conditioned that our way of life is the only way of life, that the world entire must conform to this way of life, and that bogeymen hate us for said way of life. Yet to confront the evil’s done in our name by the government we elect or fail to stop, we must realize that in many ways, we are to be blamed, we are guilty in failing to act, in putting a stop to an unsustainable standard of living.

Until we realize the damage we do around the planet so that we may live in comfort, so that we may enjoy the highest standards of living humans have ever had, so that we may drive giant SUVs and live in expansive, heated and air-conditioned homes, America will remain in Iraq indefinitely, her military garrisoned inside bases clustered around oil fields, facilities and pipelines. Until we confront the predatory capitalism that is turning America into a corporatist state and the world into a giant sweatshop Iraq and others like it will continue. Until we look ourselves in the mirror and realize that it is our failure to act and alter a doomed course, that it is our indifference to the damage our lifestyles cause Earth, we will finally grasp that it is ourselves, more than anything else, that are the reason we will remain in Iraq long into the future, for our way of life must be maintained and fed through the world’s last remaining petroleum reserves.

Until we realize our gluttony and greed, until we decide to put a stop to our addiction and arrogance, a new version of Iraq will metastasize every decade or so, popping up somewhere around the globe where black gold exists, every time new oil fields are needed to expand our economy or our comfort level, causing untold suffering and destruction in the process, resulting in resistance, conflict and a ever-growing hatred of America. To feed itself the empire thus needs to increase its military, it thus needs to maintain over 750 bases worldwide. To feed its peoples’ ever-growing greed and gluttony, its ever expanding waistline, Iraq must remain within the empire’s violent and voracious claws, becoming a colony of imperialism, to be exploited and raped.

No amount of propaganda or brainwashing or delusion or denial can make extinct this truth. We are thus stuck in Iraq for the long term, for her resources and land is needed to sustain and maintain the America we live in. To believe the empire will ever leave voluntarily is to live in delusion and fall prey to the myths of our conditioning. We have made a deal with the devil, and now we must pay its consequences.

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Holocaust Redux

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"The only thing for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"
----- Edmund Burke


The State of That Which Is


Such is the state of human affairs, whether in the present age or in those that came before, that not a decade passes without humanity resurrecting, in some corner of the globe, in some forsaken nation, the devastation unleashed by human wickedness. Whether mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, endemic rape, pillage, scorched earth and yes, even Holocaust, human wickedness prevails upon the human condition, leaving us impotent beasts in its wake, unable to control or suppress its malevolent tentacles, seemingly powerless to alter or halt its predictable and disastrous momentum.

The barbarity to which we are predisposed, to which we are unable to exorcise from our nature, is as common to so-called primitive peoples, those humanity likes to call "third worlders," as it is to those societies considering themselves modern and developed. There is no difference between suicide bombers and guided missiles raining down from the sky. Technology does not behold humanity to label the terrorism falling from the sky as nobler, or as more moral, than that of terrorism bred through poverty. Possessing vast wealth and resources does not diminish murder and criminality, nor the birth of, and continuation in, a new Holocaust.

The crimes against humanity that are thrust upon the world with a consistency that betrays our anemic ability to control our mammalian nature do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity or religion. We are free to unleash wickedness, whether our powers derive from the machete or the smart-bomb, the suicide bomber or the guided missile, the knife or the machine gun, from tribal conflagrations or nation to nation war. The consistency by which human wickedness is thrust upon our conscious cannot be denied, nor can it be ignored.

Such is the state of human affairs, and so little progress have we made in dominating our primitive mammalian behaviors, that even in the supposed modern world of today, even in the supposed enlightened nations of the West, the harbingers of mass destruction and suffering are spawned, planned and executed. For those bastions of morality and exceptionalism we call the First World have realized that war is as old as humankind itself, and as profitable as well, for the violence that creates war is ingrained into our instincts, embedded into the most violent species the planet has ever evolved.

War and its multitude of deviations, along with its many devastating aftereffects, has never been controlled or sequestered; its extinction has never been a possibility granted the predisposition to our impotency of willpower. This reality the lords of war understand well. As long as internal strife exists inside a nation, as long as racial, ethnic and religious hatreds are fomented and maintained, and as long as tribes or peoples or sects or beliefs are allowed to mature into full blown animosity and anger there will be war.

As long as there exists individuals addicted to power and wealth, as long as governments and special interests vie for control of territory and land, as long as natural resources have immense value and as long as money is valued higher than people there will be war. As long as there is uneducation, intolerance, oppression, poverty, injustice, inequality and exploitation there will be war. As long as there is profit to be derived, money and power to be made, division to be birthed, resources to be stolen, there will be war.

As long as there is war, that is to say death, destruction, suffering and misery, there will also always be crimes against humanity, for war is the virus that unearths human wickedness and unleashes crimes against humanity upon each other. Indeed, if our history books and our anthropological and archeological studies teach us anything, if they convey any warnings that we must heed, it is that humankind has possessed a propensity to destroy one another from the time our first ancestors hung on trees.

This propensity, this inclination towards violence against members different than our own group or tribe, is apparent by observing our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, with whom we happen to share 98 percent of our genetic code with, as they wage violent war-like battles between groups. It is apparent with every war modern man gives birth to and nurtures through our indifference and silent acquiescence. It is apparent with every act of genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, mass murder, rape and extermination, in all corners of the globe, regardless of time and space. From primate cousins to modern man, violence is a reality, and a curse.

For if this malevolence that possesses us were not ingrained in our core, in our behaviors and psychologies, if it were not part of our human condition, would it keep surfacing over and over again, irrespective of time, distance, space and peoples? If our propensity to unleash carnage and violence upon each other were not part of who and what we really are, would such a thing as human wickedness and destruction and violence even exist? Would war and violence and devastation upon our fellow human beings? In fact, they exist because they possess us like a miscreant demon, living within our nature, controlling our destiny and our lives, unwilling to escape or be exorcised from our condition, creating the most violent species to ever roam Earth. War and genocide and Holocaust exist for the simple fact that we exist, because war without humans is no war at all, because violence of man against man cannot exist if there is no man, because humans are impotent to rid ourselves of that demon called human wickedness.

Indeed, our species has been defined through war and its inevitable crimes against humanity. Lingering in our midst for hundreds of thousands of years, endemic to all civilizations, tribes and peoples, the human wickedness we seemingly resuscitate with every new generation is a symptom of our disease, the very sickness maintaining us from advancing forward as a species. Just when we believe ourselves enlightened or reborn, just as we think we have exorcised the demons within, just as we think a new generation of humans has defeated that which enslaves us to our passions, released again and reborn forever is the violence and the destruction and the suffering and the mass murder and the catastrophe that is war.

Repeating the pattern that has held us hostage from time immemorial, we believe ourselves enlightened enough to think that violence and war and crimes against humanity will settle our differences, instead of increasing our animosity and hatreds. We have evolved war, yet war has not evolved us. There is but one common denominator in the perpetual stream of violence, war and crimes against humanity we have seen repeated over and over throughout history – whether it be written or long forgotten – and that is us, human beings, Homo sapiens. For we remain prisoners of our own delusions, slaves of our self-proclaimed exceptionalism, blinded to the true nature of our existence by the comfortable glow of our most primitive myths.

As long as we maintain our delusions, our purposeful ignorance, our disastrous belief in fictions and fables, the reality of man killing man will endure, long into perpetuity, possessing our nature and our condition, concocting war after war, molding violence and destruction through the deadly mixture of our instincts, behaviors and mammalian predispositions. Until we finally decide to purge the grip of our self-deception, of thinking ourselves beyond the realm of our reality and truth, of who and what we really are, and not what we pretend to be, humankind will linger on in the limbo of self-destruction, living a fantasy that does not comport with our reality, granting ourselves small windows of temporary sanity, inevitably blown to bits by the destructive qualities we chose to ignore and not confront.

The predictable unleashing of our worst inner demons invariably destroys all that is achieved during the small frames of sanity we exhibit. For every step we take forward in our evolution, the demons called human wickedness takes us ten steps back. This demon has prevented us from progressing to the full capabilities of human thought and understanding. In the near future, given our level of technology and modernity, it might very well be the catalyst that sends us back to the Stone Age or indeed, buries us permanently under the rubble of our once-great civilization. If the pattern continues, so will the trend, and in time, so will our self destruction, for as John F. Kennedy once said, "If we do not put an end to war, war will put an end to us."

Only time and our willingness to alter inevitability stand in the way of where we are headed. Only humankind can put a stop to human wickedness. Only we can destroy that which is slowly, but surely, destroying us all.


Abandonment of Brotherhood


How does one even begin to examine the devastation that Iraq has become? How does one begin to contemplate what is now, thanks to America’s illegal and immoral invasion and occupation, an utter collapse of incomprehensible proportions?

What was once the nation, and the people, of Iraq has been transformed into an amalgam of carnage, blood, misery and decimation the likes of which the world has not seen since World War II, or Vietnam. Iraq has become a human catastrophe, a defeat for humanity itself, birthed not through tempests or tsunamis or earthquakes, but through the criminality, corruption and human wickedness of one nation. It has been humankind that has routed itself in self-debasement, our failure to act one more silver chalice in our trophy case of human wickedness.

It boggles the mind to even begin to fathom the suffering and misery of the Iraqi people, a collection of what was once 25 million human beings, the vast majority living in peace and apparent happiness, maintaining sectarian harmony, content with stability and security, living normal lives and cherished memories. The collapse of their society into chaos and anarchy has been one of the most spectacular crimes against humanity ever witnessed. Indeed, hell on Earth has been imported into Mesopotamia, creating, since the early 1990’s, a Holocaust that defies logic, reason and common sense, an evil so malevolent, so egregious, that its devastation will not cease until decades after Empire’s last throes have returned normalcy to the people of the planet. What is now seen as a debacle, as a failure, is nothing more than a malevolent crime of mass murder, rape and pillage, a crime against humanity itself.

The seeds of Holocaust were planted in the fertile soils of Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates flow, where humankind was nurtured, feeding off the bosom of rich land and life-giving water, at the beginning and after the end of the first Gulf War. It was at this time that the Iraqi people, and not the government, were chosen to feel the collective punishment of the rising Empire, a nation so consumed by hubris and arrogance that, using its vast powers of persuasion and control, instituted a regime of devastating sanctions, most targeting the infrastructure, food and medicine necessary for the general welfare of the populace.

The decision was made in the upper echelons of governance during the Clinton administration to enact and enforce sanctions that were always known to harm only average, ordinary citizens, those that depended on the state for health, food, shelter and education. This conscious decision was made even knowing that the Saddam Hussein regime would not suffer as a result of the sanctions. Indeed, the regime of sanctions was aimed specifically at the Iraqi people, 25 million innocent human beings whose only crime was being Iraqi, their homes located above the enormous fields of the devil’s excrement. The Iraqi people were about to feel the wrath of the American Empire, enabler and disseminator of a new Holocaust.

Compounded with the complete destruction by aerial bombing of Iraq’s electricity, sanitation, sewage, food production, medical industry and civil infrastructure during the war, all using radiation-saturated depleted uranium filled missiles, artillery and shells, a nation once among the healthiest on the planet began to feel the aftereffects of disease, cancers, stillbirths and deformities. With little food supplies trickling into the nation, hundreds of thousands of children and adults began to suffer malnutrition, hunger and starvation. Soon disease and malnutrition, easily remedied by adequate supplies of food and medicine, began to take their terrible and debilitating toll.

This medieval and barbaric blockade, sponsored, enacted, enforced, defended and maintained by the Empire, began to rob 25 million Iraqis of nutrition, healthcare, education and of the standard of living that was the envy of the Middle East. Iraq soon went from having some of the most nourished children and adults in the world to having one of the most malnourished populations on the planet. One of the best standards of living in the Middle East was transformed into a cesspool of backwardness, a rotting and eroding society robbed of strength and vitality. Without adequate medicines, supplies and machines, their importation into Iraq being prevented by America, children began to die by the thousands every month.

Children became weak and anemic, their bodies and bellies turning to symbols of malnutrition. Immune systems were weakened, collapsing the body’s ability to fight disease, toxins and viruses. Those once healthy and strong now succumbed to easily preventable diseases and viruses, losing once vibrant energy, losing the will to live. Those once bright and intelligent had their development halted, for food and the energy needed to sustain growth dwindled. Children began to die in an epidemic of economic genocide, enacted and enforced by the American Empire, as always tightening the noose on the sanctions regime, as always caring nothing for the plight of millions of Iraqis. An entire generation of Iraqi children had perished, vanished from the Earth, never more able to play and dream and grow up, never able to experience the life we all strive to have.

After a decade of sanctions, up to one million Iraqi children had died, with 500,000 adults buried in graves as well, the products of easily preventable disease, the products of a nation not being allowed to have medicine, supplies and the necessary machines that can save lives. Close to 5,000 children were dying every month, to say nothing of those whose brain and body development became stagnant due to malnutrition. By the beginning of the 21st century, the American Empire had caused the death of 1.5 million Iraqis, spirits like you and I, never to take a breath of air or a gulp of water, never having the opportunity to grow old and enjoy the wonders of life, perishing in a war upon the Iraqi people they were impotent to wage war against.

The seeds of Empire had been planted, cast upon soils of genocide, watered with the blood of dead Iraqi children, winds of devastating silence spreading disease and viruses and cancer and mutations to all corners of Mesopotamia, affecting rich and poor, Shiite and Sunni, its invisible wickedness scattering itself into young and old, indiscriminately securing new victims through the inhalation of oxygen.

By the time new Pearl Harbors had been concocted by the Empire, by the time towers were demolished and the American people became the obedient warmongers of those cheerleaders pretending to be leaders, by the time Iraq had been chosen for destruction, invasion and occupation, up to two million Iraqis had died at the hand of the Evil Empire, victims of sanctions, a genocide in itself, a Holocaust by any definition, though only a precursor to what was yet to come.

The devastation of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has brought unfathomable levels of misery and suffering to the Iraqi people. The utter debacle that is Iraq, many would say the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy, has become a monument to human wickedness, yet at the same time it represents one of the most egregious criminal enterprises in the history of humankind.

For what transpires today, and what has transpired for the last four years, cannot be labeled as a mistake, or a lie, or a quagmire. What it is, indeed, what it has always been, is a crime against humanity, war crimes of the highest order, a conspiracy that has led to the collapse of Iraq as a state and to a creation of a Holocaust that will in the end, years from today – when combined with the economic genocide of the 1990’s, endemic disease and the radiation poisoning that will kill for decades to come – have cost the lives of anywhere from four to six million human beings, to say nothing of the refugee crisis, the mass displacement of people, ethnic cleansing, the loss of property, collapse of society, of lives altered, nation shattered and child development damaged.

The Iraq War represents humanity at its worst, with the elite of the Empire destroying a nation as an excuse to rebuild it, caring nothing for dark skinned Arabs, yet claiming contracts in the billions of dollars, as always designed to pillage the American treasury and rob the people. Meanwhile, the American masses have and continue to sit silently in lazy obedience and acquiescence while war crimes and crimes against humanity are committed in our name. Like the Good Germans of World War II, millions of Americans will one day claim they had no idea what was being done in Iraq, all the while knowing that comfort and gluttony helped maintain silence and willful ignorance to one of the worst cases of human wickedness ever to rise from the violent nature of humankind. To millions of Americans, the latest gossip from tele-trash and infotainment has more value than a Holocaust presently being waged by our government.

Where humanity once rose and was nurtured today only Holocaust, torture, mass detentions, mass rapes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, radiation poisoning, stunted development, miscarriages, hatred and dehumanization can be seen, as clear as sunlight, penetrating deep into the dark recesses of our conscious, wanting to stop blood from flowing and body parts from exploding, yet impotent and unwilling to put a halt to a nightmare Iraqis live on a daily basis and Americans only read about.

To be living in Iraq today is to live in constant and perpetual fear, unable to walk once tranquil streets, unable to shop in comfort, as always grazing bullets and bombs, unsure where explosions will go off next, afraid to be caught between warring factions. It is to experience an insecurity and a fear no American has ever felt inside our shores, of chaos, anarchy, of civil war where to be one religious sect and not another could cost you your life, and that of your family. To live in Iraq is to be subjected to daily car bombs and suicide bombers exploding in markets and streets, of having bullets whizzing by your head, of shrapnel attacking your every pore. It is to breathe the smell of death in every street corner, of feeling the concussions of bombs reverberating inside your home, and head.

To live in Iraq is to be unsure whether you will make it through the end of the day, if you will see another sunrise, another sunset. It is to see 70 percent of your children exhibiting symptoms of acute stress and traumatic disorders, not being able to sleep at night because the nightmare of what they have seen, smelled and heard cannot be exorcised from their minds. It is to see your child become a constant bed wetter due to the fear and insecurity that roams her mind. It is to see your son unable to comprehend the endemic death and bodies he sees trying to get to school. It is to witness as your child can no longer learn what she is taught, nor understand her schooling, as the fear and stress of living in civil war has become too much to bear. To live in Iraq is to realize that there are now 900,000 children who are orphans, their parents dead from a war that makes no sense, their tiny minds forced to confront the reality of being alone. It is to experience death firsthand, in large numbers, as no family left in Iraq has gone unharmed, without a murder of a relative.

To be Iraqi today is to see the most horrible deformities in young children, many mutated unlike anything seen before, a product of the invisible ghost of death afflicting expectant mothers, its radiation penetrating a body’s pores and bloodstream, traveling into placentas and embryos. To be Iraqi is to see cancer become an endemic reality, over the last fifteen years growing exponentially and methodically, inevitably claiming its victims with the tumors and infections caused by depleted uranium, becoming a silent killer that will last centuries, quite possibly altering the genetic code of your fellow citizens.

To be an Iraqi today is to realize that the professional class has left the country, becoming refugees in Syria or Jordan, a number two million strong, while one million more have become displaced within their own nation, ethnically cleansed by religious sects, forced to leave their homes, possessions and neighborhoods, forced to abandon both hope and lives once worth living. To remain living inside Iraq is to witness criminals control the streets and militias transforming entire neighborhoods and districts. To remain in Iraq is to live without doctors or medical providers, knowing that it has become too dangerous for them to stay. It is to see professors assassinated on a daily basis, many now having fled along with architects, teachers, engineers and state officials. To remain in Iraq is to see the shortage of professionals, to see that only the poor and those that do not have the money to flee remain, trapped in hell on Earth, in a land a devastation, of Holocaust.

The state of Iraq has now lost 1,000,000 citizens since the beginning of America’s war of arrogant ignorance began. In four years, one million human beings have died, an average of 250,000 every year, nearly 70 people every day. Combined with the two million people who have died as a result of sanctions, it can be stated that 3 million Iraqis have died since the early 1990’s. The carnage has only intensified, with bombings routinely killing 200 Iraqis one day and 150 more another day. Assassinations of military age men has become routine, found in the morning haze, bullet holes in the back of their heads, victims of America’s counter-insurgency, El Salvador-style tactics. Over 20,000 men, most of them innocent civilians, now saturate America’s vast gulag system in Iraq, held captive without due process, existing in limbo and uncertainty, in essence kidnapped from their homes or from the street, victims of American dehumanization and ignorance of culture. How many of these men have been or are tortured in places such as Abu Ghraib? How many have died while in custody, made to disappear, forever lost in some remote mass grave?

To be in Iraq is to be living in hell on Earth, a place so devastating, so horrific, that it has become the rule, not the exception, to see feral dogs eating from dead corpses. It is to see football fields become mass graveyards, mosques become mortuaries, and how missiles and artillery destroy homes and businesses, turning lives into rubble. It is to experience the rape of your daughter, the mental retardation of your son, the humiliation of your family, the invasion into your home by American forces, the dehumanization of American boots stomping your face, placing a dark hood over your head, taking your clothes off, calling you humiliating words, treating you like an animal.

Living in Iraq is to survive day to day, roaming city streets ducking bombs and bullets, possessing little money for food, lost in a sea of fear and uncertainty, unable to find employment, having two to four hours of electricity, an unworkable sewage and garbage collection system, having to spend up to three days waiting in line in order to fill your vehicle with gasoline. It is to have the smell of death permeate your every pore every single day, the smell of bombs and smoke and bullets becoming constant reminders of your closeness with death. It is to wonder if luck and fate will decide a car bomb will blow you to bits when you walk to the market, or whether a sniper will cause your head to explode like a watermelon. It is to fear an American contractor or soldier will decide your vehicle should be machine-gunned for fun and games, because it is cool to destroy the lives of enemies that are not considered human, and whether your son and father have had enough of the occupation and humiliation and will inevitably join the resistance.

To be Iraqi is to wonder if the world has forgotten your plight, if it even cares about the fate of millions of your fellow citizens. To live in Iraq is to see the worst in the human condition, to see human wickedness stamped with the seal of the United States. It is to believe life has abandoned you, wondering what you and your people have done to deserve America’s wrath and punishment. It is to wish for the nightmare to end, to wake up to normalcy, to security and peace, just how it was before, when Iraq was a model for the Middle East and the Arab world. You want to open your eyes and hope the last two decades have been but an illusion, a hallucination that does not really exist.

Perhaps you feel hope has been lost, that wickedness has triumphed, that Iraq will never be the same, that she is no more, that the land of fertile soils and running water has ceased to be a viable society. You think the occupation will never end, that America will be your master until the last drop of oil is exhausted, that the nightmare you have lived will only dissipate when the Empire is defeated by the resistance, or by its own over-extension and ignorance. You see a one-hundred acre fortress being built, larger even than the Vatican, the largest embassy the world has ever seen quickly rising from Iraqi ground, and you know the Empire will never leave. You see permanent military bases sprouting up alongside petroleum pipelines and you notice the pillage of your land’s oil through laws enacted by the Empire’s puppets and you weep for a nation destroyed from within, damned by the devil’s excrement, cursed by Western powers who for a century have only cared for the black gold lying below your feet.

Most importantly, perhaps, you wonder where the voice of the world has gone, in her uncomfortable silence, in her complete stillness, why she does not heed your calls for help, why she fails to stop the carnage and the destruction, why she has turned a blind eye to you and your people. You look to the heavens and ask why even in Iraq’s despair and suffering the world’s people have abandoned millions of her children to the greed and hubris of the rapacious Pax Americana. You ask fate why the American people have done nothing to stop this new Holocaust from continuing, why they casually ignore the plight of Iraqis, why they continue their blissful ignorance of reality. You ask why the death of millions of Iraqis is hardly mourned, why the maiming and psychological devastation of her children is ignored, why her implosion as a state and as a people is hidden from the beautiful minds of Americans.

In the end, you ask yourself how a nation that mourns the tragic loss of thirty-two college students, with wall to wall media coverage, with flags flying at half staff nationwide, with services held from coast to coast, rarely, if ever, cares to even blink at the death and horrible misery of millions of Iraqis, or offer the same mourning, memorials and media coverage to the death, and memory, of nearly 3,500 of its sons and daughters. You ask how it is not understood by the people of the world that Iraq loses in one month what America lost in one day, on September 11, 2001, when 3,000 innocent victims of state terrorism and psychological war were murdered.


Holocaust Redux


It is reality, not hyperbole, to describe what is presently happening in Iraq as a new Holocaust, a new paradigm of devastation and destruction, of mass murder and horrific suffering. An entire nation has been made to implode, an entire society has been disemboweled, its vital organs gutted and spilled into hell on Earth. The blood of one million Iraqis covers her streets, the severed body parts of the maimed pile up on her corners, and the severed psychology of her youth lies in tatters. Iraq’s entire society is in disarray, her upper and middle classes having fled her bosom, living the life of refugees, her poor and working classes trapped in an inferno from which escape is but a wishful dream.

Disease and radiation poisoning, those silent assassins that kill and murder in clandestine pleasure, those unleashed poisons imported by the Empire, have and will continue to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s poorest and weakest individuals. For like the gas chambers of yesteryear, radiation poisoning from depleted uranium, along with the Empire’s destruction of sanitation, sewer and civil infrastructure, will, in the end, kill countless and as yet untold numbers of Iraqis, most forced to suffer sickness and cancer, deformity and miscarriage, misery and death.

For a Holocaust does not need toxic chambers to count its dead, nor crematoriums to hide its victims. It does not depend on concentration camps to starve its prisoners, nor barbed wire to hide the truth. Deadly poison can be released into the air, penetrating soil, crops, water and food, slowly penetrating human bodies, killing from within. It can be created by the destruction of the infrastructure needed to contain and fight off infection, disease and outbreaks. Holocaust exists in sanctions that refuse to let in vital medicines and food, it exists in making the Iraqi nation itself into an enormous concentration camp. Holocaust can be flamed by the dropping of bombs, missiles or artillery into homes and neighborhoods. Holocaust can be created, molded and furthered by causing civil war among religious sects, using counter-insurgency machinations to divide and conquer, caring nothing for the plight of millions caught in the crosshairs of a societal collapse engineered by the Empire’s war architects. In the end, the result is the same, whether a Holocaust is molded by Nazis or nurtured by the Empire itself. The only reality that changes is the method to the madness and the cast of characters for whom the flame of humanity has long since ceased to exist.

What the world is seeing today, for those few who care to see and disturb their beautiful minds, is a carnage and a devastation that fits the pattern of Holocaust throughout humankind’s brief reign on the planet. The Iraq Holocaust, while still not apparent to all, while still hidden from the conscious of the world, while still taking place even today, is but another manifestation of a pattern that is all too familiar to the human condition.

For no ethnic minority or religious group can claim a monopoly on Holocaust, no matter how convenient it has become, no matter how beneficial its incantation and remembrance may be. Holocaust is an all-inclusive devastation, a human wickedness that preys upon all peoples, throughout all time and space, whether they be from 20th century Armenia, Korea, Manchuria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or World War II’s wickedness, which killed tens of millions in Russia and more than a dozen in Germany and Eastern Europe. The term Holocaust is not exclusive to any one particular group, nor can its use be defined by Empire's propagandists or by history’s victors.

Of course the Empire will never call what is happening in Iraq a Holocaust, for to do so would criminalize the very enterprise of destroying a nation and its people for the purpose of controlling its vast oil fields. To call the Iraq Holocaust by its rightful name would be to make war criminals of its architects, its boosters, its propagandists, its stenographers and its military leaders. It would be to place the Empire on par with some of the worst atrocities of the vanquished Nazi regime, creating comparisons between warmongers and leaders of different eras. To call what is happening in Iraq by its proper term would be to make tens of millions of American citizens the equivalent of yesterday’s good Germans. To allow the use of the term Holocaust to describe present day Iraq, America would risk the shame and scorn of the people of the world, becoming a pariah nation, a rogue state, and a failed people.

The Empire will never allow the term Holocaust to be used alongside the reality, and devastation, of Iraq. The truth of what has been done and continues to be unleashed upon Iraqis will, as always, be whitewashed and made to be hidden in a dark, dank recess of history’s uncomfortable dirty little secrets. In time, even though the magnitude of what transpired in Iraq will become known to some, its truth will be suppressed, its reality contorted, its victims soon forgotten. Just as three to four million dead Vietnamese were erased from uncomfortable memories, just as that Holocaust was a reality that never took place, so too will the Iraq Holocaust dissipate from our conscious, to be replaced by the dumbed-down heroin of tele-trash, the addiction of infotainment, usurped by the only Holocaust that ever took place, the only one that matters, the only mass murder that must remain ingrained in our memories, never allowed to be replaced, never allowed to be forgotten.

Yet to the Iraqi people, to those that will invariably survive the catastrophe that has been imported to their land, the Iraqi Holocaust will remain an all too real calamity, a truth that exists in rubble, in mass graves, in the memory of lost souls and never forgotten memories. To these human beings, the millions that have already died, along with the millions that have yet to perish, will never be forgotten, becoming a reality ignored by the world, yet remaining entrenched like a small flame inside the hearts of survivors. Every deformity or mutation of Iraqi babies will remind survivors of the poisons unleashed by the Empire. Every death caused by malignant cancer and disease will bring back memories of dropped bombs and devastating guided missiles. Every scar, burn and amputated limb will forever become a horrific and eternal memory and reminder that cannot be erased from one’s brain, their grotesque appearance becoming a time machine of suffering and misery. Seared in their minds for decades and centuries to come, the Iraq Holocaust and its creator will never be forgotten, to be passed down to each new child born, to each new generation.

In time the present collapse and corruption of humanity, the present entanglement of human wickedness, this thing called Holocaust, which we as a species always vow to never again repeat, will predictably be replaced by another such tragedy. In time that new horror will itself be replaced by yet another. The cycle of violence will continue, just as it has always been, just as it will always be, for its viciousness has never been stopped, its demons have never been controlled. We are slaves to its demands, mere weaklings to its call to arms. Impotent we have been from the very beginning, from the genesis of humankind, passing enlightenments, reformations, renaissance and modernity, and still today it cannot be defeated, still we have failed to free ourselves from its omnipotent grip. Every century that passes we fall prey to its temptations and its cruelty, its brief rewards and long-term curse.

Today, in every corner of the globe, in every continent where man exists the genesis of the next Holocaust is being birthed. Somewhere, someplace, the next Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or Bush is being nurtured by hate or anger, feeding off the breast of intolerance and ideology, living among corruption of morality, breeding in the self a taste for psychotic narcissism. For it is a given that wherever man settles in, death, destruction, extermination and devastation soon follows. It is written in our history books, in stone tablets, in our cultures and ruined cities. Its warnings and lessons are everywhere, if only we wished to look. It is wired into our human condition. It remains a virus afflicting our conscious, never exorcised, always resurrected.

Somewhere, someplace, a leader is being molded among men, as always infected in delusion, infested with selfishness, though possessing the qualities of attraction, of leadership, of hypnotizing thousands through stare and voice. It is this human being, like so many that have come before, that will recruit a group of like minded individuals, each, like him, with an insatiable thirst for power, immoral in character, criminal in personality, in time concocting power grabs and debasement of the human condition.

It is from these so-called leaders of men, these alpha males, from where human wickedness derives, flowing from its oasis of hate, through rivers of unending blood and carnage. For mostly, throughout time, it is the warmongers, the war-like leaders that create the devastation and destruction called Holocaust. It is from war-like leaders that war-like people are created. It is from them where human wickedness derives, passing from person to person like a virus, making monsters of us all.

Such is the state of human affairs that one Holocaust will give rise to another, and another after that, filling a century of civilization with systematic death and murder. Its consistency is overwhelming, clear as day to see, for those willing to confront uncomfortable realities. For every step forward we take, our self-destructive ways push us back ten, committing us to the primitiveness that has yet to be surpassed and the mammalian behaviors we have yet to understand. The human wickedness will continue until we reach an enlightenment of who and what we truly are, escaping the machinations and institutions that spawn hatred, injustice, inequality, anger, division, bigotry, animosity, oppression, ignorance and poverty.

From where will the next Holocaust be born, ruining land and people, corrupting humankind ever more? When will humanity say enough is enough, never again, and actually mean it? Will it be when we put an end to war and human wickedness, or when war and human wickedness put an end to us? In the meantime, the seeds of the next act of human devastation are today being planted. Where, we wonder, will this wicked weed grow next? For where can be anywhere, and anywhere can be gone tomorrow.

In Iraq we find the answer, for its shows where we have been, where we at present are and where we will again, and inevitably, soon be.