"The great danger of the lynch-mob terror-bubble we find ourselves trapped in, as the Germans under the Nazi regime were, is losing touch with the rest of the world..This is no longer our government, but has been stolen from us by country-sized corporations and their henchmen." from Slingshot 2003
Triumph of Kleptocracy & Death of Reason
By Cassandra Camus
[Published in: Slingshot #78, Summer 2003, 3124 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, Calif., http://www.thelonghaul.org.]
If the first casualty of war is the truth, then reason must be its first prisoner. Leave it to Americans to escalate the battlefield of the mind to an Orwellian level of shock therapy. Glued to our mind screens for the majority of our waking hours, we have become the audience at a global coliseum, cheering for enemy blood and applauding billion-dollar bombs bursting in air. Reason? Logic? Truth? Those were sold to the highest bidder long ago, to pay for the most monstrous killing machines ever created and our raging addiction to chemical energy.
War has never made a great deal of sense, and that’s in large part the point. Since one tribe went out to dominate another at the point of a spear, leaders have attempted to override the logical part of the human brain by aggravating our reptilian and ruthless revenge mechanisms. In the age of industrial warfare, we have witnessed the business of killing vast numbers of opponents become a “necessary evil,” and an honored form of employment. Americans will even argue that dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply “got the job done” in a more efficient manner, and therefore was acceptable “collateral damage.” As I said, no reason or logic here, and don’t look for truth in the wastelands of war.
Americans entered a terminal realm of doublethink and psychosis when the revolutionary band of corporate cryptocrats seized the White House, our shining center of authority. The Bushista regime has turned every commonly-held value established by previous generations on its head, in a topsy-turvy heap of nonsense and cowboy lingo. Yes, we now argue, war IS peace, slavery and paranoia is freedom, you see, and the truth will never be known because it must remain a state secret.
Our sanity slips away daily as the cluster bombs and fireballs light up our video screens, as any hope of salvaging the American Dream is trampled under the boots of ever more militarized police, under the glare of ever more sinister terror alerts, and behind the firewalls of ever more secretive and corrupted “security” agencies. It’s a sophisticated destabilization of our entire society, plotted out decades ago. The way the Bush family, CIA headquarters bearing their name, always seem to leave a trail of burned-out cities, piles of dead bodies, drug scandals, and secret bank accounts behind them, and somehow never get caught-has worn our suspicions down to a dull stupor.
Influential over our ability to reason and assess the truth are the mighty media corporations, owned by giant conglomerates who also make the weapons and the drugs which the politicians in power are so invested in. Americans are kept in a Twilight Zone limbo of steroid-stoked entertainment and shocking pseudo-reality events, barely able to keep up with the latest terror alert, let alone understand what is happening outside our country. The “fog of war” has become our sociopathic modus operandi, and the latest approval ratings let us know everything is “going great” because our lemming herd agrees the edge is where we must push.
Without even understanding the cause or the odds, we are prompted to blindly “support our troops,” which actually means allowing the military contractors in power to bomb the hell out of another Third World country. We are prodded to display our allegiance to the flag, and declare our patriotic fervor – again, without reason or logic, simply based on conditioned slogans about freedom and democracy, while those in power are busy ripping the guts out of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Signs that our society has gone over the edge of sanity into the murderous realm of raging monkeys: obsessions with obscure symbols, such as French fries (which we named in the first place), outrageous harassment of artists such as the Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore, who are simply stating their opinion, belying the alleged “freedom of speech” our troops are supposedly fighting for, and crowds of “pro-war” demonstrators wrapped in American flags lashing out at anyone or anything that may stand in the way of “victory.”
The great danger of the lynch-mob terror-bubble we find ourselves trapped in, as the Germans under the Nazi regime were, is losing touch with the rest of the world. At the same time, we are unable to assess that this is no longer our government, but has been stolen from us by country-sized corporations and their henchmen. To the rest of the world, we seem to be reveling in our corruption, celebrating the theft of our constitutional protections, our economic resources, our5 dignity and reputation, and our security, by a group of second-rate elitists and dictator-wannabees. Meanwhile, innocent people are being slaughtered by high-tech weaponry designed for annihilation, along with mostly defenseless “enemy combatants,” in a land far away, in a culture that most of us don’t even comprehend.
Is there any hope for America’s sanity? Right now, we are lost in a cowering dead-end of lies built on lies and secrecy, dating back to the end of WWII when Nazis were enlisted by Kissinger to start the CIA, financed by George Bush’s granddad. Do you believe our irrationality and ignorance is a result of poor planning and excess? No – the reality is that we’re held hostage in a “fog of war” and terror by design, and the rest of the world has now become the war zone. Is it all like a spectacular video game? Yes, we’ve been conditioned to accept blasting away other humans like insects, from a distance. Now we must question – who designed this game and who is promoting the even more costly future version?
“Americanism” may in the future be described as a pathological syndrome, much as we now attempt to unravel the ideology and cruelty of Nazism. The two are not unconnected. A few hard truths for Americans to work their teeth on: We are a relatively recent colonial expansion of European empire, molded on a Roman model of expansion. We are only 5% of the world’s population, 75% white, controlling over 50% of the resources of the rest of the world. There are 1.2 billion Islamic people in the world, 5 times the number of Americans. The vast majority of those people live in sub-poverty conditions, ruled over by wealthy dictators armed by the United States (as Saddam and the Taliban were).
One final little fact which festers at the root of all of this Strangelovian insanity and psychosis: If only 1% of the nuclear arsenals on our planet are deployed in a “limited” nuclear exchange, we will be living in a mutant nuclear winter and most of the species on Earth will go extinct, including ourselves quite possibly. The Bush regime has made nuclear weapons a very real first-strike option, tossing aside all treaties signed over our lifetimes. But you won’t hear about that on the 6 o’clock news, unless you happen to have a TV system in your fallout shelter. By then ratings won’t matter so much…
Cassandra Camus
Occupied Hawaiian Nation
Planetary Rescue Corps
http://metamagic.org
planetary@wildmail.com
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Original: Triumph of Kleptocracy & Death of Reason