by JON PHALEN
An organic reconsideration of US history and major "conspiracy theories" of the past 40 years, including those pertaining to the 9-11 attack, and how they shed light on America's present drift into fascism.
Hijackers?
What makes you think you actually KNOW what happened on those planes? All four were obliterated, along with everyone on board, remember? No crime scene, no direct evidence, no recognizable remains, no witnesses whatsoever -- it's a blank canvas. How convenient for any party intent on launching a new era of global imperialism, and willing to spin this tragedy into a viable excuse. Indeed, all of the attack's consequences are far better explained by this agenda than by Bin Laden's purported death wish. Those presuming to examine this matter, i.e. ALL OF US, need to recognize that such trickery is a timeless specialty of governments.
And yet from that very day we have allowed the government-media complex to focus all attention on one rather thin explanation: Crazy Arabs did it! George W. Bush and his cabinet have made it known to us, in the most arrogant terms, that they will brook no discussion of other possibilities -- an edict most Americans, in their desperation to believe in this man, seem to have embraced. The Bush Administration even withholds its "proof" of Al Qa'eda's guilt; clearly, it considers mere citizens too unimportant to require full explanations, and once again, we're just rolling over and taking it.
The phrases 'spiritually broken' and 'morally adrift' come to mind...
Until the full case against Al Qa'eda is made available for public review, we have absolutely no assurance that this "proof" isn't exactly like the "proof" of Iraq's weapons programs -- i.e., a big fat lie from top to bottom. On these terms, wholesale acceptance of the hijacker scenario will continue to be what it has always been: a pathetic display of blind faith in this administration's utterances, and in those of its media accomplices. At present, it is astonishing that anyone places faith of any kind in either party: by means of the "WMD" debacle, both have proven themselves amoral, duplicitous, and utterly devoid of humanity. Indeed, why do we give them so much as a moment of our attention? No one with a lick of sense would do this.
A rigorous civilian investigation of 9-11 would help resolve such doubts. If Bush and the rest were standing on firm ground, they would fully support such a thing. Instead, they have worked to thwart both its formation and its progress, using every resource within their reach. Some time last year, they seem to have realized they were only fueling suspicions this way, so Bush grudgingly approved an "independent" investigation. The arrogance of this bunch is so disabling, however, that they actually damaged their credibility even further by naming Henry Kissinger to lead it. This is a man whose dedication to "US interests" verges on homicidal psychosis (see his treatment of Cambodians 1970, Chileans 1973, East Timorese and Kurds 1975, MUCH more). He could only be expected to skew this investigation accordingly, i. e., to omit and cover up any issue not conducive to empire building. Ironically, even Henry had the sense to admit he was an inappropriate choice, thus resigning from this duty, whereupon Bush immediately returned to his original tactic of stonewalling (1). Could the man possibly have something to hide?
To appreciate the ugliest possibilities of the 9-11 attack, one must first become aware of the continuous practice of such manipulations by the entire progression of American politicians. The need to cultivate this awareness is itself an enigma: if you have the honesty to see this pattern at all, its full enormity, emerging over time, will at some point cause your previous ignorance to amaze you. Imagine living your entire life with an 800-pound gorilla, then realizing one day it's not a sofa, after all. At the same time, finding this enlightenment is challenging, because the relevant facts are usually withheld from the public for decades, seldom appearing in mainstream discourse even after they become common knowledge -- not because of some grand conspiracy, but because legions of 'America Firsters,' including most of the famous and powerful, simply don't want to hear it. The telling of these facts is an affront to their most cherished political assumptions. Invariably, they respond with hostile apologetics, ranging from simple denial and ridicule to the claim that such incidents are random and unrelated "mistakes." That they can sincerely believe this 'unrelated' claim is remarkable, given the way it crushes into dust under any burden of historical proof: America's state crimes have been ethically monstrous, vast in both scale and number, unilateral in their aggression, virtually uninterrupted in their chronology, and very coherent in both motive and method. Certain themes just keep popping up:
1) Greed, particularly for territory;
2) Supremacism, driven only partly by race, perhaps more so by delusions of national grandeur allowed to ramify without limit;
3) An enthusiasm for "total war" -- i. e., the indiscriminate butchery of entire populations. This seems most likely to happen when "strategic" territories, resources, or victories are at stake. That is, when those in authority feel they "must win," and so discard principle to whatever extent is necessary;
4) The systemic corruption and antidemocratic functioning of every level of American government, made abundantly clear by its relations with sworn enemies of the public interest, namely corporations;
5) The bid for global empire that has all but defined the American agenda since W.W.II, in flagrant violation of democratic principle.
This last "US interest," discussed openly by flacks and shills only since 9-11 suspended all moral judgment on such matters, actually represents the driving passion of our ruling elite, going all the way back to the Revolution. Indeed, grasping the means of power, beginning with sovereign domain, was their main motive for pursuing revolution at all. Starting then and continuing ever since, they have whipped the people up to support their warped appetites, even as they have misrepresented them spectacularly. EVERY SINGLE TIME we as a people have committed to a war of expansion, we have been duped into doing so by their twin handservants, American politics and American media:
1776 to 1890 - innumerable 'Indian wars'
In which the western frontier was pushed through the territories of one Indian confederation after another, all the way to the Pacific. An early and definitive example is George Washington's post-revolutionary conquest of the Ohio Valley, where the Washington Family held deeds to immense tracts of prime real estate never actually ceded by the Indians. The lore that George was a "surveyor" is a populist distortion; he was no blue collar grunt, laying out property lines to earn a living. He was in fact the most ambitious of an elite family of 'land speculators' -- the colonial equivalent of venture capitalists -- and his toils were in the service of his own family fortune. Already one of the richest people in post-revolutionary America, he was determined to get even richer through the sale of his Ohio holdings, and wasn't about to be stopped by 'two-legged vermin' like the Shawnees and Miamis. To this end, he abused his dominance of the early federal government, arranging for Revolutionary War veterans (a battle-hardened militia) to be compensated with "land warrants" deep in Ohio's wilderness, far beyond his own holdings. He also encouraged the issuance of large bounties, equivalent to several months' income, for Indian scalps along the upper Ohio River. These were essentially open murder contracts that targeted ALL Indians, regardless of age, gender, or tribal affiliation. By this means, genocide was openly subsidized for decades wherever intact Indian cultures presented an obstacle to "progress." Primitive as media was, its role in all this was crude but sufficient: posting the bounties while inflaming the settlers' hatred with tales of Indian atrocities, real and imagined. In the Ohio Territory, these tactics rapidly progressed to open war, orchestrated by Washington against Tecumseh's Shawnee Confederation, and then to the total extermination and westward displacement of the Ohio tribes (2).
1846 to '48 - The Mexican War:
Beginning in 1818, when the Oregon Territory was acquired, American imperialists developed an intense interest in California. Simply adding it piecemeal to their territorial inventory wouldn't have worked, however: it was too isolated, too defensible by the Mexicans. To take California, all of northern Mexico -- what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado -- would have to be taken, requiring the invention of some PRETEXT for doing so. In 1836, American "adventurers" (freelance political operatives) instigated a regional coup in the Mexican province of Texas, splitting it off to form an independent country, the Republic of Texas. Nine years later, this nation was annexed as the 28th state. Immediately afterward, President Polk made the predictable move of sending belligerent military incursions into disputed lands along the new border with Mexico. The Mexicans replied with patrols of their own, and then clashes developed, leading to the "spilling of American blood on American soil." Or so the press told it (their bias could be summed up in a phrase they coined around this time: "Manifest Destiny"). In fact, the soil in question was situated between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers, an area both governments held equal claim to. But no matter -- the people eagerly accepted this distortion, Polk got his dirty little war, and then proceeded to steal something like 650,000 square miles of territory from our next-door neighbor. Add to this the previous criminal acquisition of territory from Mexico, i.e. the "Lone Star State," and the area usurped approaches one-third of the contiguous 48 states, or HALF of what was originally Mexico (3).
Some years later, a fantastic mineral strike in this stolen territory -- the Comstock Lode -- would provide the Hearst Family with an immense fortune, soon parlayed by William Randolph into an infamous media empire.
1898 to '99 - The Spanish-American War/Philippine Campaign:
Though still a colonial client of Spain during the 1880s and '90s, Cuba was also a hotbed of insurrection, thanks to the efforts of Jose Marti and others. By 1898, the Cuban independence movement had Spain's colonial government on the ropes. The prominence of blacks among the rebels made this situation alarming for fin de siecle American royalists, among whom "Darwinist" (i.e. proto-Nazi) political thought was at the height of its popularity. Also, having just recently subdued the last free-roaming Indian tribes back home, their passion for grabbing other people's land could now be expanded into the Caribbean, Central America, and Pacific, via expanded activities of that handy agency, the US military. So in the fall and winter of 1897-98, the Hearst syndicate and other news organizations were blasting Americans with "yellow journalism" on the subject of Cuba -- sensational and often ludicrous accounts, custom made to induce support of US military intervention. The public thus primed, the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor gave McKinley all the excuse needed to commence grabbing up not only Cuba, but also Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It was in the Philippines that the US military took "total war" beyond North America for the first time. Encouraged by the Filipino's uncanny resemblance to Native Americans, US troops mass-murdered something like 25% of the civilian population. As imperial outrages go, this was the equal of anything that's happened since (4).
A 1975 investigation led by Admiral Rickover determined that the Maine's hull was breached by an explosion originating INSIDE the ship. This could have been a spontaneous "coal-bin explosion," or it could have been a bomb placed by an imperialist traitor. As with 9-11, this catastrophe neatly erased any inconvenient witnesses to its real mechanics.
1917 to '18 - World War I:
Three years into the "Great War," it looked as though Germany would defeat Britain and France, our primary capitalist hosts in Europe. Big financiers like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, who between them had billions invested "over there," weren't about to just sit back and watch this happen. They barked orders to their underling, Woodrow Wilson, who then declared war, using German interference with US shipping activities as a feeble pretext. Leading up to this, the media minions whipped the public into a war frenzy, basing their wildly manipulative propaganda on incidents such as the sinking of the Lusitania, two years earlier. Funny thing about the Lusitania: it's hold contained a secret, illegal, and massive cargo of ammunition and other materiel bound for Liverpool, and its passengers were used as unwitting human shields for this cargo by the US government, which is why they died. Neither Wilson nor the media of the day ever admitted any of this (5).
The dynamics behind America's entry into World War II were virtually identical. Over 500,000 Americans died in these two wars, with 875,000 more wounded, and an additional and unknown number emotionally shattered, all of which brought untold misery to their families and communities. Given the choice between destroying all those lives or allowing the likes of Morgan and Rockefeller to suffer the tragedy of somewhat less obscene wealth, our "representatives" chose the former as the lesser sacrifice.
1941 to '45 - World War II:
France already lying crushed beneath Hitler's war machine, and Britain under a devastating siege, the White House was once again compelled to intervene on behalf of its capitalist masters, whose European investments had grown two magnitudes since the close of W.W.I. Unlike Wilson, however, FDR did a truly brilliant job of constructing a pretext. in September of 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, a treaty committing all three countries to counterattack against new foes faced by any one of them. This gave Roosevelt a back door into Europe via the Pacific. Beginning one month later, and fourteen months prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, he launched secret military and economic operations against the Japanese Empire, obstructing its only access to oil, rubber, and other strategic resources. The Japanese response to this blockade -- open hostilities against the United States, beginning with a crippling preemptive attack on the Pacific Fleet -- was entirely predictable. In fact, it was Roosevelt's whole purpose in setting up the blockade: Nearly unanimous "isolationist" sentiment at home was his first military target, and precipitating a "vicious sneak attack on US soil" was his deliberate design for destroying that sentiment. For this reason, he concentrated the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii as never before, where it would be seen as an imminent threat by Japanese generals. He then withheld intelligence of Japan's attack preparations from Pearl's top officers, continuing to exclude them even when radio intercepts revealed the movement of a Japanese carrier group toward Hawaii (6).
From 1941 to '46, and again in 1995, Congress investigated "the intelligence lapses that made this sneak attack possible" no less than NINE TIMES. On all of these occasions, officials of the Roosevelt Administration and the Office of Naval Intelligence perjured themselves and concealed vast amounts of evidence to preserve the historical fictions surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack. To this day, the NSA claims "national security" as its basis for withholding relevant material from the public. "National security" stands revealed, then, as a euphemism for this government's ruthless grip on power -- a thing that certainly would be threatened, were we to become fully aware of the treacheries it spawns. This context radically transforms "national security" rhetoric into an ideal excuse for all sorts of betrayals and deceits, and this seems to be it's actual interpretation among those who "safeguard" it.
The agonies of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc. under Hitler, not to mention those of the Chinese and Koreans under the Japanese Empire, were incidental at best to US motives for pursuing W.W.II, both before and during. It was only afterward that the camps were seized upon as a full-blown "pretext in retrospect" to maximize America's apparent heroism. With each year that has passed since, this myth has been more shamelessly advanced, so that now some stunning percentage of Americans believe that "halting genocide" was their government's main motive for waging war at all.
1945 to '89 - The Cold War (a.k.a. W.W.III):
was launched by the closing episode of W.W.II, i. e. the atomic bombing of Japan. President Truman's official rationalization for the bombing, trumpeted ad nauseum by the media of the day, was that it was the only way to end the war quickly, thus avoiding a horrific house-by-house assault of the entire Japanese Archipelago. In fact, the Japanese were already making conditional surrender overtures. Accepting their terms, however, would have made Truman's victory conditional as well, and he was determined to humiliate them. Even the total surrender he insisted on was only a few months away, by all signs. Meanwhile, the war in Europe having ended in May, the Russians were now free to join the allied fight against this old enemy of theirs, and were preparing to do exactly that. Given enough time to enter the Pacific War, they would have claimed a portion of Japan upon its surrender, just as they had recently claimed the eastern half of Europe. To keep the Soviets from horning in on this pending crown jewel of America's Pacific Empire, Truman needed his total victory immediately, and The Bomb gave him an irresistible means by which to secure it. As an early devotee of anti-Communist paranoia, he was also confronting the Russians with a demonstration of America's 'invincible technological prowess.' Finally, his decision to vaporize 200,000 Japanese civilians was made easier by his avowed hatred of the entire race (7).
The cover provided by the Cold War enabled the United States to pursue its largest campaign of expansion by far, extending its economic and strategic tentacles into every corner of the planet and even into space by means of literally hundreds of "anti-Communist" initiatives, interventions, and proxy wars. Our present "global hegemony," a source of endless glee for Bush and other miscreants, didn't "just happen" -- it was the overarching and unspoken goal of US Cold War politics.
Another important thing to understand about the Cold War: the "War on Terrorism" is directly adapted from it, just as the Cold War itself developed directly from W.W.II, which was in turn a direct consequence of W.W.I, which was Germany and Britain vying with one another for world domination -- a contest America ended up winning. What an epic of greed-crazed murderous lunacy! One that the present regime seeks only to perpetuate, and for the same reasons as always: expansion and consolidation of empire.
1950 to '53 - The Korean War:
To coerce public support for this war, the press and the Truman Administration whipped up public hysteria about the "Red Menace!" that was then "swallowing up" obscure Far Eastern precincts. No mention, of course, that the mounting anti-US sentiment in those precincts resulted entirely from collaboration between US occupation forces and the Japanese fascists they were supposedly there to remove. This collaboration ranks as one of the most arrogant foreign policy blunders in US history. For people throughout the Far East, it was an unbearable betrayal, as it effectively prolonged what had already been one of the most gruesome and protracted military occupations EVER. Similar dynamics had already developed in mainland China, a hornet's nest so immense that withdrawal quickly resolved as our only sane option. And also in the Philippines, where US troops and Huk rebels started out fighting side by side to expel the Japanese. Indigenous sovereignty being the Huk's ultimate goal, the Americans began killing them, too, as the Japanese were subdued. Two thousand miles from all these places, in French Indochina, the exact tensions seen in Korea arose AGAIN in response to brutal French/Japanese collaboration -- abetted by American field agents, naturally (8).
In all four places, revolutionary leaders greatly admired America's political tradition of anti-colonialism and self-determination, and sought to claim these values for their own countries. They even made earnest attempts to form friendships with the US; they thought colonialism was a 'european thing,' so that we must therefore be 'the good guys.' For strategic planners back in Washington, all this was at odds with their grand design for the Far East: now being vacated by its previous colonial tenants, it was seen as a "power vacuum," fairly begging for RE-colonization according to America's obfuscated formula of puppet politics and corporate infiltration.
American society has yet to recover from the "Red Menace!" propaganda barrage, which soon became a constant theme of international news coverage, and remained so for the next 40 years. As a means of inducing mass paranoia and public consent to limitless militarization, the "Red Menace" lost its punch following the collapse of the Soviet Union, necessitating its replacement with a more robust methodology -- the "Terrorist Menace!" Nazi Germany and Israel being the great innovators of this second method, America owes a great debt to both of them.
1965 to '73 - The Vietnam War:
By way of manipulating Congress into granting him war powers, LBJ reprised the "vicious sneak attack" gambit with his brazen lies regarding such action by the North Vietnamese against US Navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. Beginning in 1969, Nixon and Kissinger expanded on this crime enormously, adding Laos and Cambodia to North Vietnam as targets of a redoubled 'total war' initiative. Several million tons of cluster bombs were then used to totally destroy vast civilian districts in all three countries (districts simply crawling, mind you, with subsistence farmers bent on global domination). All of which exactly repeated the pattern of the Korean War -- right down to America not winning (9).
As huge as the American effort against Vietnam was, it was just one element of a yet more enormous strategy of military encirclement (a.k.a. "containment") directed against mainland China. Other elements were: the permanent and massive US military presence in Japan; a similar presence in Thailand; unlimited military and economic support to Chiang Kai-Shek's exile government on Formosa (Taiwan); the Korean War and subsequent permanent US military presence in Korea; a strong strategic interest in India, including covert support of an otherwise preposterous nuclear weapons program; also, a US-equipped and -trained covert army of Chinese "nationalists" in eastern Burma, within what became known as the "Golden Triangle." It was here that the CIA first learned of the marvels of the international heroin trade.
To advance its "interests," the US government has manipulated the affairs of every region of the planet on this same incredible scale, and continues to do so. Other hotspots include Europe, the Middle East, Central Africa, and all of Latin America and the Pacific.
1991 to 2003 - The Gulf War / "No-fly Zones" / Sanctions:
To con Americans into backing this outrage, Daddy Bush and his media bed-buddies told a couple real whoppers. First there was the one about the satellite photographs of a massive Iraqi invasion force assembling on the northern border of Saudi Arabia (10). Then there was the Kuwait Incubator Hoax, an inventive revival of the childish "babies on bayonets" propaganda of World War I -- as told by a child, no less (11). As it turned out, Operation "Desert Storm" was merely the opening episode of a ruthless destabilization program, aimed primarily at hapless civilians, that would continue for over a decade, killing no less than 500,000 Iraqis in a fairly obvious attempt to turn them against their head of state. This fulfills any sane definition of terrorism, and is probably the most grandiose recent example of the state-sponsored variety. It was maintained with enthusiasm by the Clinton Administration.
2001 to present - The "War on Terror" (a.k.a. W.W.IV):
Pretexts include: 1) the 9-11 attack; 2) this Administration's single-minded incrimination of Al Qa'eda (a CIA proxy), backed up with such things as; 3) an obviously fraudulent videotape of Osama "confessing;" 4) the conceit that Al Qa'eda's guilt justified a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan (the combined strike force for which began building up at least six months prior to 9-11, disguised as a "war game"); 5) an implied equation between Al Qa'eda and Iraq's Ba'athite regime, and; 6) the absurd fantasy that Iraq, a country left all but helpless by the previous campaign, might pose a real threat to the world's deadliest strategic power.
By rights, I should have included the Civil War in this run-down: all the ingredients are there, with antidemocratic preservation of domain being equivalent to expansion. Also, the fable that 'freeing the slaves' was its entire purpose has to rank among the wildest disinformation campaigns ever perpetrated upon Americans by our "free press."
Though they never precipitated the full-scale wars their authors had in mind, a few other nasty episodes are especially relevant to 9-11:
Operation "Northwoods"
A Pentagon plan for a massive "false flag" terror campaign against American citizens, the purpose being to provide pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. If approved, it would have entailed such things as sniper attacks on random US citizens (a la the DC sniper), terrorist bombings, and a bogus missile attack on an unmanned, remote-controlled US airliner in the Caribbean, the plane's fictitious passengers to be reported as "entirely lost." All of this was to be carried out by US intelligence agents posing as Cuban operatives, whose dirty work would translate directly into the sort of massive public manipulation campaign this government always launches when it sees profit in war. The Northwoods plan was called off by Robert McNamara only when it was submitted for executive approval, having already been approved by every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (12).
Northwoods would never amount to anything more than a glimmer in some agency psychopath's eye. In Europe, however, the CIA's most deranged anti-leftist terror tactics were actually implemented ...
Operation "Stay Behind"; Operation "Gladio"
As part of a larger US withdrawal strategy following W.W.II, the CIA created underground right-wing militias throughout Western Europe, to be activated as guerilla armies in the event of invasion by the Soviets. These were known as "Stay Behind" forces; they were a rogue's gallery of mercenary scum, dominated by devout ex-Nazis recruited by SS-cum-CIA agent Reinhard Gehlen. As the years passed and the Soviets failed to provide the anticipated invasion, the Stay Behinds resorted to other means of justifying their CIA paychecks. All across Europe, beginning in the 1950s, they morphed into right-wing hit squads and terrorist groups. They participated in massive CIA-NATO destabilization efforts against the Soviet Bloc countries, assassinating Soviet officials, sabotaging industrial plants and public infrastructure, and generally terrorizing civilian populations. The pattern should be familiar from similar terror campaigns against Cuba and Nicaragua. In East Berlin, the activities of Stay Behind units were the primary reason for the construction of the Berlin Wall. The Stay Behinds did not limit their mayhem to the Soviet Bloc, however; as time passed, their attention turned more and more to equivalent activities within their NATO home countries. Throughout Western Europe, particularly in Italy, leftist politics had a stronger following than it has seen in the US since the 1930s, and the Stay Behinds were the CIA's primary footsoldiers in its "dirty tricks" campaign against this percieved enemy. In a psy-war effort to alienate the public from the political left, they launched bogus left-wing terror outfits (the "Baader-Meinhof Gang") or framed real leftist undergrounds (the "Red Brigades") for atrocities they committed themselves. In Italy, where the Stay Behind operation was code-named "Gladio," agents posing as left-wing extremists perpetrated many public bombings during the '70s, killing at least 300 people. These culminated in the August 1980 Bologna Train Station Bombing, which killed 86. The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro was another Gladio exploit. These activities had one purpose: to portray the political left as public enemy number one, thus isolating it domestically while building consent for military escalation and NATO aggression against the Soviets (13).
So what's it all about, anyway, all this intrigue and stomping of jackboots on distant shores? Thanks to its unrivaled military strength and exceptional geographic isolation (oceans make bitchin' moats), this country is all but perfectly invulnerable to invasion, and repelling invaders would seem to be the only defensible function of armies. No one's invaded this country since the War of 1812, when British expeditions came out of Canada, Florida, and the Gulf of Mexico. Don't expect a repeat anytime soon. Although a massive one, the Pearl Harbor Attack was still just a raid, on what at the time was this country's farthest-flung primary military base.
To keep the entire planet under its thumb, our government burdens us with the gargantuan cost of the world's largest military, which it mostly uses to crush pitiful rebellions in the remotest and poorest corners of the world, places we truly have no business being in. This is exactly like a bully swaggering around a schoolyard, shaking down all the little kids. Is that really how you want your government representing you to the rest of the world? Shouldn't DOMESTIC policy take priority instead? Things like adequate health care and effective primary education -- programs that would serve the wants and needs of YOU, their citizen, whom they claim to be their master. But this is not their priority, and never has been. The geometric growth of this economy, by various forms of conquest, is their abiding passion, with domestic policy being attended to almost as an afterthought. To force our consent, they hypnotize us with lurid visions of one boogeyman after another, maintaining childish fear as our primary political sensibility, keeping us dependent, trusting, stupid, distracting us from our own self-interests...
Why is that?
WHO BENEFITS??
The average American, who spends his or her life chained to the machinery of wealth production, watching their share of its output dwindle steadily, sure as hell doesn't. The stratum of society that truly gains from all this just happens to be the same one that finds employment in high-level intelligence positions: big-time spooks like Kermit Roosevelt, the Dulles brothers, Nelson Rockefeller, George H. W. Bush -- i. e. America's ruling families. In their parlance, "US Interests" is just doublespeak for global empire and corporate colonialism, and these have always been the real purposes behind their warmongering.
All told, these wars killed over a million US soldiers, along with many times this number of civilians and combatants in the lands invaded, and this isn't even touching on the dozens of proxy wars that have been the American Empire's main battle front for going on sixty years. All of these millions of people, American and foreign alike, were MURDERED by a government intent on advancing the interests of a tiny minority while betraying the rest of humanity; a government willing to wield its power in their service in any manner, including technological and economic terror campaigns waged against entire national populations. And yet this government has the audacity to call itself a "beacon of hope to the world!" And the majority BELIEVE THEM!! It simply amazes.
America's shadowy patricians were already too powerful before the Cold War. And then decades of public hysteria borne of imminent nuclear annihilation delivered them into the fabled realm of "absolute power." This has been pretty obvious. Americans have avoided realizing it only by actively pursuing a mental state of utter denial on this subject, sort of like the three monkey icons of Shinto. Thanks to this determined ignorance, keeping the rest of us in the dark has been childishly easy for people like the Bushes. They can even be incredibly brazen and sloppy and get caught red-handed, as with Watergate. No biggy: just tell all the boobs it was Nixon acting alone, assisted by his best buddies, who just happened to be, um, CIA agents. Yah. They'll never notice this story's unbelievable stench; they'll be too relieved at having any sort of excuse to NOT think about it. You know, just like when the Warren Commission's whitewash came out.
One hypothesis is particularly good for sending 'America Firsters' into an apoplexy of denial: that the political culture now emerging in Washington is actually a product of 40 years of covert penetration into the Executive Branch. To substantiate this, one need look no further than the lineage of our present "leader." His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a military spy during W.W.I, a key financial collaborator with the Nazis, and a US Senator. His father, George H. W. Bush, was heir to the CIA realm under our most infamous presidential regime, a fixture in presidential politics for 20 years, and all in all one of the creepiest figures ever to darken the American political stage. The 'quiet coup' that brought this man to power traces back to the Eisenhower Administration, when the utterly creepy "National Security" underworld first became a secret and malevolent force in national politics -- a force whose power is still nearly impossible to measure. There are ominous glimpses, though: in 1960, Eisenhower's VP and political heir, Richard M. Nixon, was shouldered aside by John F. Kennedy, who over the next three years developed grave misgivings about this underworld and its power. Then he ended up dead, and yes, his assassination DID stink of black ops, as did the similar jobs on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and his kid brother "Bobby," who would have been the SECOND Kennedy to sour Nixon's presidential hopes, had he lived to see the 1968 election...
Though the CIA denies it, several independent sources identify George H. W. Bush as a high-ranking agent during the Kennedy Administration, commanding covert operations against Cuba. The ships used in Operation "Zapata" (the "Bay of Pigs" invasion) were named by him, it is said, after members of his family. Those names indeed correspond with those of his wife and children. Among the most conclusive sources is an official memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963, which refers to a "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" (14). The memo refers to Bush's evaluation of emotional reactions to Kennedy's assassination among Cuban exiles under his watch.
From here, Bush the Elder went on to become a protege of Richard Nixon's, was a mid-echelon member of his cabinet beginning in 1971, had very interesting connections to CREEP, and somehow eluded Congress's Watergate dragnet.
Watergate and a few other incidents proved that Nixon had a most unwholesome relationship with the CIA. Once this scandal had hemorrhaged to the point that Congress could no longer avoid taking action, containing the damage could be seen as the main theme of its response -- a hallmark of Congressional investigations. There was far too much eagerness to examine this matter only in terms narrowly relating to impeachment, thus leaving larger questions wholly unexplored: did the Watergate break-in really happen on Nixon's orders, or was the intelligence underworld acting on its own, using 'dirty tricks' to prop up their man in the White House, exactly as it has on countless occasions for entire puppet governments all over the world? In the latter case, letting Nixon take the fall would have been an extreme measure, but possibly the only sure way to divert attention from an abhorrent and illegal power structure, thus preserving it. Nixon himself would have been a likely author of this tactic, as it was he who trumped Congress' investigation by resigning, whence the entire matter was eagerly dropped.
Bone-tired of Watergate in any case, the public was predisposed to accept Nixon's implied guilt as the final answer: "responsibility can't go any higher than the President, right? Harry 'the buck stops here' Truman said so." In reaching this conclusion, we were assisted by major media organs, which immediately began spinning this as Watergate's "final resolution." In fact, this conclusion resolved nothing -- it left the most crucial questions hanging in mid-air, soon to be shrouded in rhetoric by professional apologists from all quarters. Its only definite outcome was the softening of a renewed public spirit of scrutiny and resistance, which in turn allowed a deadly authoritarian cancer to resume its march throughout our body politic. After going underground for seven years, this cancer emerged in full force as the Reagan Administration.
Dubya's announcement last April of another bogus 'conclusion' -- that of his Hitlerian conquest of Iraq -- had a strikingly similar effect. Once again, mounting vigilance was undone by a well-timed lie, universally disseminated.
Following Nixon's resignation, Poppy finally hit the big-time when Gerald Ford named him Director of the CIA. After toppling Carter, he became VP himself, and for the next twelve years was at the center of the Reagan era's continuous parade of treasonous covert operations. A few highlights: 1) the campaign to prevent an "October Surprise," in which Bush & Co. induced the Iranians to delay release of the American embassy hostages, thus undermining Carter's re-election bid; 2) an inhuman terror campaign against the people and government of Nicaragua, even after Congress declared it illegal, at which point the CIA was forced to devise covert funding arrangements such as 3) "Iran-Contra" and 4) operation "Watchtower." This last episode, which was going on around the time of Bush Senior's succession, is easily the most incredible: the CIA was a major domestic smuggler and distributor of "Crack" cocaine during the late '80s, when this drug became an inner-city plague (15).
At this point, the CIA was contemptuously wiping its ass with the Constitution, and got completely away with it. If this were truly the America the Boy Scouts taught you to believe in, the exposure of operation "Watchtower" would have destroyed the CIA.
Late in Reagan's second term, 60 minutes was granted a horrifying personal interview with Ronnie and Nancy in the Oval Office. Horrifying because, even though Reagan's Alzheimer's wasn't disclosed for several more years, it was perfectly obvious the man was totally gone. Faced with a steady stream of unscripted questions from Mike Wallace, Reagan's usual patter rapidly degenerated into stark senile mumblings. Desperate to conceal her husband's incoherence, Nancy kept practically thrusting her face into the cameras. This is consistent with puzzled accounts of writers and artists of the time, who, as dinner guests of the Reagans, were mystified as to how such an oaf could present himself so effectively on television.
All of which implies a striking parallel between the Reagan Presidency and that of Bush II: in both cases, Bush Senior can be discerned as the man behind the curtain, while the "president" is a mere speech reader, whose real job is to keep the public distracted with his amiable, vacuous, universally televised performances. Dubya's main puppeteers -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell -- are all Poppy's cronies, going all the way back to the Nixon Administration. The five Supreme Court Justices who put Junior in power are also Nixon/Reagan/Bush cronies, and their cancellation of democratic process was a classic "installation," reminiscent of the CIA's long-running antidemocratic escapades throughout the world.
It has Poppy's pawprints all over it.
If not for daddy's influence, Silver Coke-spoon Boy would be lucky to find work fishing golf balls out of water hazards at the local country club. This is obvious, and widely acknowledged. Most Americans, however, aren't willing to examine the enormously sinister ramifications, given Poppy's background, of the Bush Family's dynastic grip on American politics. Most Americans, after all, are a weak-minded lot -- though harassed by apparitions of unprecedented corruption, they lack the courage needed to fix their gaze upon them.
Which brings us to 9-11...
The most venerable means of transmitting control inputs from a plane's cockpit to its various aerodynamic control surfaces (rudder, ailerons, etc.) is via a system of cables, i.e. "aircraft cables." With the introduction of huge planes during and after W.W.II, unassisted human arms could no longer provide the force needed to actuate proportionately huge control surfaces, and so hydraulic assist devices and fully hydraulic control systems were developed. The introduction of autopilots and landing guidance systems over the next three decades layered yet another 'control system' over this one, an electronic layer capable of manipulating the hydraulics directly and thus flying the plane on its own. In the 757- and 767-series planes boarded by "the hijackers," Boeing expanded this layer enormously, making it much more sophisticated and integral to the continuous operation of these planes. For one thing, it continuously monitors such things as attitude, acceleration, turn rates, etc., and if necessary can assert exclusive control of the hydraulics at any time, modifying or even overriding pilot decisions that would otherwise result in drastic maneuvers, inappropriate for passenger service. Though meant to provide an added margin of safety in the event of gross pilot error, this arrangement introduces an ominous new dimension: in a very real sense, the humans on the flight deck have only tenuous control of flaps, rudder, etc.; the computer, the arbiter between the two, allows them direct control only on it's own immutable terms. If the computer can override the pilot some of the time, a potential exists for it to override the pilot ALL of the time. This is a vulnerable arrangement, as anyone who has dealt with a virus should know. In other words, the advancing dependency on avionic interfaces has brought with it an advancing potential for the total electronic co-optation of those interfaces. As they have grown exponentially in complexity, so too has the number of entry points by which such co-optation might be effected. All that was needed was for technologists to devise a "back door"...
Enter the US government and its defense contractors, who began joint development of remote flight control and flight circumvention technology at least two decades ago, using the full force of their virtually infinite R&D resources. The existence of these programs, and of the resulting technology, was verified soon after 9-11 by a panel of commercial and military pilots participating in an independent inquiry (16).
The existence of such technology IN ANY FORM raises intriguing questions/possibilities about 9-11: 1) could the planes have been hijacked via this technology alone? 2) Were they? 3) Remote hijacking and on-board hijacking are not mutually exclusive scenarios; if there were actual human hijackers on those planes, their plot may have been remotely co-opted by another party they knew nothing about, leaving them as horrified as anyone when the planes took control of themselves and banked straight into buildings.
Photographic evidence and eye-witness accounts support the idea that the override functionality of the planes' computers was somehow defeated, allowing "the hijackers" to make prohibited maneuvers. For example, there are multiple photographs and video clips showing AA Flight 175 making an outrageously hard turn into the second tower. According to official information, the plane that hit the Pentagon also made aerobatic descent maneuvers worthy of a fighter pilot. To have flown the planes in this manner, Atta and the rest would have needed 1) advanced large plane skills, and 2) a way to defeat the planes' avionic systems. Since that flight school they attended in Venice, Fla. probably didn't offer a course titled "Hot-dog Maneuvers with Airliners 101," they must have possessed these abilities already, so why would they have bothered with flight lessons at all? Any benefit they realized in terms of understanding new control layouts would have been at the cost of increased exposure, thus endangering their mission. On the other hand, if they were as inexperienced as the presstitutes tell us ("I just want to learn how to steer"), they couldn't possibly have flown the planes this way at all, which means someone else must have.
However distasteful, there is a real possibility that remote circumvention occurred on those planes, a possibility that any credible investigation would hardly ignore. All the more so because the necessary hardware isn't just a cockamamie theory: a fully developed, totally programmable remote flight control platform actually exists. Suggestively named the "Flight Termination System," it is manufactured by Systems Planning Corporation of Rosslyn, Virginia, which maintains web pages devoted to the FTS and various subsystems:
A system overview:
http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/FTS
The transmitter hardware:
http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/CTS
Related software:
http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/MkVSW
The CEO of Systems Planning's international division, Dov Zakheim, is a long-time DoD and Republican Party insider, and a founding member of the Neoconservative cult. While Bush was still Governor of Texas, Zakheim became one of his closest advisers, counseling him on defense technology and strategic aspects of Middle Eastern affairs. After the 2000 "election," Rummy rewarded Zakheim with a low-profile but strategically important position -- Comptroller, i.e. head money man, of the Defense Department.
Zakheim also co-authored the Heritage Foundation's infamous tract, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," in which the Bush Administration's entire design for renewed global conquest was laid down a full year prior to 9-11. On page 63, the authors note that timely implementation of their ideas would require "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."
See for yourself:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
To identify the expansionist motive behind the "9-11 Wars," one need look no further than this document. Echoing Ziggy Brzezinski's thoughts in "The Grand Chessboard," the authors identify the Persian Gulf / Central Asian region as the world's greatest geopolitical prize, and recommend that decisive control of this region be made a top strategic priority.
The remote control scenario also neatly punctures the 'yada-yada objection' always employed by conspiracy theory critics: "It couldn't have happened that way, because too many people would have known, and someone would blab..." In fact, the most sensitive part of this plot would be that of anticipating or enabling nineteen flesh-and-blood "hijackers," and yet this part of the scenario is all but universally accepted. Nineteen men backed by a larger organization schemed to get on those planes and take control of them, and then they did; everyone knows they did because CNN has stated this "fact" about ten thousand times and counting. As for exactly WHICH organization did the backing, well, there's a saying about 'dead men' ...
Once the patsies were in position, the rest of this scenario -- the "really unbelievable part" -- could have been carried off in its entirety by a tiny team wielding extravagant technical skills and multimillion-dollar equipment. No larger conspiracy is necessary. As for the apparent complicity of the entire government and media, this is mostly just cynical opportunism and jello-brained obedience rising to the occasion -- a response easily anticipated by the real conspirators, for whom history provides a never-ending parade of examples on which to base such expectations.
Mind you, this is not to say that remote circumvention is definitely what happened. On its face, this scenario is wildly improbable. Speaking of improbable, what about four airliners being taken over simultaneously and used as missiles? Since this actually happened, we have no choice but to consider fantastic scenarios, and since the official scenario is itself an unsubstantiated "conspiracy theory," competing scenarios should also receive serious attention. Our reluctance to question official doctrine on this matter is a symptom of the societal role most of us have been bred and trained for: to be ever-faithful hounds, tails thumping the floor as we contentedly slorp the hand of class authority. Such credulity also becomes inevitable when the alternative is so unbearable: if someone in Bush's position is capable of lying to us about something as huge, as gut-wrenchingly horrible as 9-11, then everything we believe about this country -- about the nature of civilization itself -- might just be childish nonsense...
Most people simply don't have the guts to go there.
Given a desperate enough need to sustain the childish belief in government-as-benevolent-father, a person will adapt that belief to any circumstance. The behavioral end result can resemble courage; indeed, we are taught to regard it as the DEFINITION of courage. Actually, it's one of cowardice's darkest moments. Even a casual examination of Nazi Germany, where this phenomenon was rampant, will drive this point home.
It's almost funny, the way people readily see the threat of technological circumvention presented by Diebold's electronic voting machines, yet when the subject switches to the "Flight Termination System," which is every bit as real, and to the exactly parallel possibilities it represents vis-a-vis 9-11, they suddenly retreat into profound and combative denial. It's as if a threshold has been crossed into a realm of possibilities too vile to entertain, so they simply don't. Never mind that this country's operatives have been traveling the world, perpetrating similar horrors, for all of the past century. Rather than acknowledge the possibility of a unifying pattern, Joe Average would much rather 'shoot the messenger.'
Every so often, such people establish a new high-water mark for cowardice and facultative stupidity, and the present is definitely one of those times. After all, the official 9-11 scenario they cling to with such desperate faith comes from only one source: the Western "intelligence community" -- the most brazen, systematic, resourceful, and interlocked association of habitual liars this world has ever seen. As should have been made clear by the 'British dossier' scandal of last winter, the credibility of this bunch goes past zero into the negative: pending airtight proof, anything they say should be reflexively deemed a lie. You may remember that MI5 also provided the identities of "the 19 hijackers" -- information that soon also became quite suspect. At least six of the hijackers, possibly as many as nine, are still alive in the Middle East -- a pretty good alibi, considering. Several of these ex-suspects had their passports or other IDs stolen from them over the years, and it's entirely possible that all 19 hijackers had stolen identities, meaning they could have come from anywhere, or been absent altogether. The US media was pretty slack about acknowledging this at the time, and since then has dropped this ball entirely (17).
Rather than allow the "intelligence community" to render every detail of our comprehension on this matter, we would be much wiser to carefully identify and discard every assumption they hand us.
Far from being a source of independent corroboration, our "free press" is more like a public relations contractor for the spooks. This is because the entire fourth estate AND the governments of the West, including their intelligence services, are essentially employees of a single entity: the US-dominated coalition of international corporations -- by several magnitudes the largest concentration of wealth in human history.
The subjugation of governments by such an entity is hardly unprecedented. The Twentieth Century saw several extremely unsavory examples. It's called Fascism. You don't need to take my word for this -- just peruse the opinions of acknowledged experts:
Benito Mussolini:
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt:
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.
For many Americans, the word 'fascist' instantly evokes jackbooted Germans wearing Swastikas and stuffing Jews into ovens. In fact, that representation is a cardboard diorama, empty of nuance and historically specific almost to the point of meaninglessness, which is why the closet fascists who own the media keep force-feeding it to you.
Fascism is certainly a violation of every noble and enlightened political impulse. To advance their agenda, fascists must bring about a mass rejection of egalitarian and democratic ideals, and seem to get the best results by inflaming and feeding upon common fears and popular bigotries -- racist, nationalist, classist, religious, political, etc. ANY set of bigotries, suitably stimulated, will provide fertile soil for fascism, and the incurably ignorant, always a majority, are easily swayed by such methods -- fascism is a dictator's fantasy formula for subverting democracy. Bigotry, however, isn't fascism's whole essence; it's simply an expedient means by which fascism's agents, classic political pragmatists, consolidate the monolithic pattern of government corruption that is their true calling -- a syndrome America has been sliding into deeper and deeper throughout its history. Just look at the consistent warnings from all the presidents who noticed this trajectory and tried to alert a nation of groveling candy-asses:
Thomas Jefferson:
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Abraham Lincoln:
The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy and more selfish than a bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at the rear is my greatest foe.
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned .... An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed.
Theodore Roosevelt:
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.
Franklin D. Roosevelt:
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his farewell address, 1961:
In the councils of government, we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
John Kennedy took Eisenhower's warning to heart, apparently. During the last year of his life, as he contemplated a second term and his own final contribution to history, he resolved to reverse America's moral and civic death-spiral, a.k.a. "the Cold War." His ideas included: ending the CIA's freedom from oversight; abandoning the country's rabid anticommunist stance, beginning with de-escalation in Vietnam; normalizing relations with Cuba and Moscow; by doing these things, redirecting Washington's immense weapons budget into sweeping domestic reforms (18). What's more, Kennedy's popular mandate was strong enough by this time that he probably would have succeeded.
From the viewpoint of the corporate capos that truly rule this country, one aspect of the Cold War was all-important: it was a pork barrel straight out of their wildest dreams of avarice. Watching Kennedy plant his feet and reach for its plug, these 'absolute power' addicts would have been sorely tempted to seek his removal by any means. As it just so happens, several of them were also supreme civilian commanders of the 'National Security' apparatus, meaning they had direct control of the most suspect means of effecting that removal (19).
Since Kennedy's death, dire warnings about corporate power have been conspicuously absent from the pronouncements of American presidents. Funny, huh? By daring to stand on his conviction that it was he, not them, who held the reins of American society, Kennedy quite possibly forced the financial elite to make an example of him. Since that time, their supremacy has been unchallenged by politicians.
It's as if democracy itself 'got whacked' by the Corleones and Gambinos! Fortunately for them, Americans are kept too delusional to notice.
On the strength of the fear-driven and essentially mindless popular mandate that followed the 9-11 attack, the Bushes and their kind are now concluding a plan they began formulating long before 1963: transforming this country into an abomination, a clinically exact violation of everything their core public THINKS it believes in. The situation is a three-ring circus of ironies: People like the Bushes, Ashcroft, etc., don't operate in a vacuum; they don't suddenly and magically "seize power," any more than Hitler did.
The history of the Nazis holds many lessons of great value to present-day Americans. Among the more important: political lunatics become dangerous only when whole populations lose their marbles enough to deliver them into real power. Truly, it's absurd to blame amoral monsters who insinuate themselves into high places. OF COURSE they're going to do that; it's why they were born. The sensible object of that disgust is 'The People' who allow them to stay there; who idly watch as other groups suffer, too stupid to realize that tomorrow the guns will turn on them; The People, who hand these scumbags ALL of their power by becoming eager footsoldiers in the global mafias they create. Helen Keller knew this:
"Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction!"
So did Emma Goldman:
"How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen."
No matter what label a government assigns itself -- democratic, communist, etc. -- The People who live under that government, who are its real repository of power, have an uncanny way of getting exactly what they deserve. If a government has descended into utter moral dissolution, and its people actually deserve better, they will summon the courage to do what's right for themselves, as did the French, the Russians, the Cubans. If a government is basically sound, but its people are grotesque petulant infants gobbling at giant tits of material excess, then it won't be long before that government sees its opportunity to build jail cells around them. Why not? Frantic tit-suckers aren't likely to notice, and if they do, a jail cell isn't so unlike a womb. If by some bizarre chance they should actually protest, they can simply be told it's for their own safety. Infants are easily duped with such talk, which they will regard as irrefutable when backed up with lurid cartoons showing "The Enemy In Action!!"
This was the context in which Jefferson used terms like 'inalienable' and 'self-evident.' People determined to discover their own power will find a way. So will those determined to live as slaves. The role of government is secondary. If the American people didn't deserve this buffoon president and his panel of corporate handlers... if this were other than a land of selfish tit-feeders, spoiled insane... if "The Home of the Brave" didn't ring quite so false... then the outrage of the 2000 "election" would have unleashed a nationwide tsunami of riots, martial law would have been declared, and the ruling class would have hastily dumped him before things REALLY heated up.
As it stands, Dubya's sickening success is owed primarily to a curious "political awareness," shared by a decisive majority of Americans: intuitively, they know they're on the sugar-dumpling end of the global economy. If staying there means everyone else gets hurled at birth into a fuming acid bath, well that's okay, too -- just don't ask them to notice.
Just as rampant corruption is symptomatic of fascist governments, this 'let them eat cake' mindset is also typical of the national populations that sustain those governments through their complicity and inaction. Corruption isn't just a disease of governments, elites, etc. -- it's a creeping contagion that infects whole societies, eventually reducing them to colonies of moral bacteria. If the wealth of a society is large enough that this degeneracy can progress long enough, its members become so drained of the essentials of character that whatever 'Great Things' they've accomplished become like marble temples built on a lake of pus.
America, for example, once had a heroic reputation among freedom-seekers around the world. Starting many years ago, the keepers of that legacy grew so arrogant, so artless, that their attempts to disguise their selfish motives became transparent to the average ten-year-old, so now America finds itself becoming an object of generalized hatred. And deservedly: when an elite cult of villains and cowards waylays all the governments of the world by holding a nuclear gun to their heads, they SHOULD be hated, and that's exactly what this government did while its subjects snoozed at the Big Boob these past five decades. The aggrieved parties will of course be deemed "just jealous" by the press, whose pronouncements are both source and product of the tit-feeder mentality.
With Buffoon & Co., the pretenses are now so tissue-thin that even Americans should have no trouble seeing through them. The one thing stopping them is all-determining: they don't want to. This sort of delusion even extends to self-described "liberals," who love to vomit the platitude that "America's PEOPLE can't be held responsible for the excesses of their GOVERNMENT."
I wish one of these nutless wonders would explain to me exactly how this works; from where I sit, ultimate responsibility for the criminal conduct of this government belongs to THEM. After all, thirty years ago most of them were intensely aware of this government's capacity for evil. Since then, they've been seduced by accumulations of property, privilege, and mental lethargy, thereby settling into America's most selfish middle class generation EVER. Watching them recite fatuous denials to themselves, I'm reminded of the French Court under Louis XVI. Their stock concept of 'political involvement' -- filling in a ballot once a year -- hardly seems likely to fix a goddamn thing, since the forces of wealth clearly have both major parties in their pocket. By all indications, they don't even care; the interests of wealth have become their own. If Bush's 2000 installation left any doubt about collusion between the two parties, Schwarzenegger's triumph in California just removed it. The California Democratic Party simply HAD TO KNOW that Gray Davis was history, so why did they fail to put all their marbles behind ONE potent alternative candidate? They can't strategize on their own behalf worth a damn, but they sure do a bang-up job for the repugs. Is it insane to wonder if they both get their marching orders from the same place?
Voting should certainly be part of a larger strategy -- it may not mean as much as we're told, but at least it's something. Real change, however, would seem to require much more from us: open dissent and resistance, civil disobedience, total rejection of bourgeois sensibilities, including careerism, as this is the path taken by most on their journey into apathy and selfishness. It's no wonder, then, that causing each of us to nurture dreams of professional glory has long been this country's most lavish "philanthropic" project. Our unprecedented university system -- is it really about giving us all a leg up, or is it a clever and utterly cynical social engineering program? As they hand out huge endowments, what do the bloodless billionaires really mean with all their malarkey about "investing in the future." The working class is the true home of the political left. Demographically and politically, it once dominated this country, and thoughtful people didn't always have reason to flee from it. Now it's a defeated mass of Bush-boosting, TV-mesmerized morons. When class assignment at birth is an immutable life sentence, intelligent members of an exploited class tend to become revolutionaries. By its very nature, the "classless" careerist ethic solves this problem by identifying the gifted among them as young as possible and reassigning them to a separate social order, where they're supplied with selfish reasons for staying quiet. Added together, their class defections and betrayals make up the aforementioned billionaires' "return on investment." Divide and conquer, divide and conquer...
In so many ways, the true genius of American politics has been in making sure the average slob has far too much to lose by rejecting bourgeois temptations. The tragedy of this design is that it makes us all full partners in the prevailing order of plunder and corruption. During the Great Depression, poverty was so rampant here that this formula began to unravel, prompting our keepers to feign benevolence with an improvised Head Amputation Prevention System, otherwise known as "the New Deal." Given the power of the information technology now at their disposal, they seem to be preparing to let it unravel again, this time to be replaced with an all-seeing electronic security state. This is probably the real reason behind the USAPATRIOT Act, rampant domestic spying, mounting repressive tactics and nationalist propaganda, vast enlargements of prison infrastructure, and so on. Kudos to all the technological utopians out there; far be it from them to realize that those in power always pervert emerging technology into a means of grabbing even more power.
The American political scene is now becoming so ominous that many Americans are finally waking up, achieving real political awareness for the first time in their lives. As they discover reality, they are finding themselves in a horrifying predicament: this country is but a few steps away from becoming an overt dictatorship, and the Neo-cons seem determined to go the distance. All they need to do at this point is arrange another "Pearl Harbor." Anything short of massive, uncompromising civil disobedience seems unlikely to stop them, and the vast majority of Americans are unlikely to engage in any such thing. Incapable of even noticing how bountiful their lives are, what could possibly induce them to reflect on the malevolent work by which that bounty has been concentrated, or to acknowledge the rights of people and other beings, living and dead, from whom it has been stolen? The hopelessness of the situation is deepened by the relentless and all but inescapable onslaught of commercial media, whose role of promoting this exact selfishness and civic apathy is now performed with incredible audacity. Most of these "Good Americans" just trudge along mindlessly in the rut indicated by their message, willfully oblivious to its subtexts.
America's malaise isn't entirely a product of conscious effort, but on the other hand, none of it is accidental. How is this possible? The main thing people use "logic" for is to conceal even from themselves the mediocre nature of their true motives. America's corruption, like that of all nations, is an organic phenomenon, i. e. it is neither orchestrated nor needs to be. It has been advanced not by the lurking efforts of secret circles so much as by the main thrust of American culture. Those frontiersmen in Ohio, for example, scarcely needed the inducements Washington offered them; they were eager to exterminate the Indians and steal their land. And so it goes. By such means, the corruption of our entire civic culture has been advanced by all of us, through habits of thought that lie beneath the level of consciousness -- for example, in the sane and humane alternatives we consistently choose to NOT consider. Again, media's leadership in this area has been inestimable.
My gratitude to those who have protested and been civilly disobedient over the years is beyond measure -- they are the true bearers of Liberty's flame -- but I am doubly contemptuous of those among them, seduced by privilege, who have ended up swinging to the other side. They are the very soul of corruption, and traitors even to their own dreams.
Here's the richest irony of all: Bush's most avid supporters are a puritanical bunch. They attend church. They pray on streetcorners. They bludgeon the unwitting with their sanctimonious talk of God, Family, and the American Way. So convinced are they of their moral superiority, they have no qualms about marching toward even greater material gluttony over a pavement of charred corpses. In fact, they seem to see this as a divine quest. You don't need a doctorate in Theology to know that if Hell is real, its inmost pit has got to be reserved for hypocrites such as these.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notes:
1) Even now, the "independent commission" is shot through with incredible conflicts of interest, exemplified by the present chairman's financial ties to members of the Bin Laden Family. Such a panel can hardly be expected to deviate from the gutless pattern of past "investigative commissions": the Warren Commission, the Rockefeller Commission, the Iran-Contra hearings, etc.
Chossudovsky, Michel. Who's Who on the 9/11 "Independent" Commission. see http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO307B.html
2) Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997) pp. 209 - 214
3) Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States, 1492 - Present. (New York: Harper Collins, 1999) pp. 149-169
4) ibid, pp. 297-320
5) ibid, pp. 359-376
6) Stinnett, Robert. Day of Deceit: the Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) See ALL
7) many historical documents support this analysis, including:
United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War) (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946) p.26:
"Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion... Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
8) Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. (Monroe, Maine, USA: Common Courage Press, 1995) pp. 21-23, 39-43, 50, 51, 122-127
9) ibid, pp. 129-145
10) Heller, Jean. Public Doesn't Get Picture With Gulf Satellite Photos. St. Petersburg Times, 1/6/1991
11) MacArthur, John R. Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) pp. 37-77.
12) Bamford, James. Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century. (New York: Doubleday, 2001) pp. 82-91
13) Blum. Killing Hope. pp. 106-108
14) A scanned copy of this memo can be seen in http://www.internetpirate.com/bush.htm -- scroll down
15) Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance. San Jose mercury News, 9/18/1996 available online at: http://home.attbi.com/~gary.webb/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html
16) de Grand Pre, Donn; Col. US Army (Ret.). The Enemy is inside the Gates available online at http://scribblguy.50megs.com/evidence.htm#THE%20ENEMY%20IS%20INSIDE%20THE%20GATES
17) multiple sources:
Kennedy, Dominic. Suicide Hijackers Hid Behind Stolen Arab Identities. London Times, 9/20/01
MacFarquhar, Neil. A Nation Challenged: The Hijackers; Confusion Over Names Clouds Identities of Attackers on Jets. New York Times, 9/21/01 available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/21/international/middleeast/21IDEN.html
Jeffery, Simon. Special Report: Terrorism in the US. The Guardian, 9/21/01 available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,601550,00.html
Harrison, David. Revealed: the men with stolen identities. The Daily Telegraph, 9/23/01 available online at http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml
Author unknown. Hijack 'Suspects' Alive and Well. British Broadcasting Corporation, 9/23/01 available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1559000/1559151.stm
18) Hepburn, James. Farewell America. (Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Frontiers Publishing, 1968) see ALL. Available online at http://www.voxfux.com/Kennedy/farewell/farewell00.html
19) The most suspect parties here are Nelson Rockefeller and his demonic lackeys, the Dulles brothers. The threads implicating Rockefeller in Kennedy's death are explored rigorously in:
Colby, Gerard and Charlotte Dennett. Thy Will Be Done -- The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. (New York, USA: HarperCollins, 1995)
Approaching this matter from different directions and supporting their arguments with extraordinary historical documentation, the authors of 'Farewell America' and 'Thy Will Be Done' arrive independently at strikingly similar conclusions
