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The Year of Living Dangerously
Part One of Two
By Manuel Valenzuela
Manifestations of Intent
04/02/08 "ICH" -- - - Can you smell the smoked fumes of a
discombobulated economic engine that has ceased to function, its
synergy spitting and sputtering, its many parts thrashed by the
claws, and vices, of neoliberal capitalism? Can you feel the
dismantling of the economic spark plug, the American consumer,
as our livelihoods are sacrificed to the greed, and
incompetence, of the establishment and as the value of our lives
is further enslaved to the Almighty Dollar and its puppet
masters?
Can you hear the roar of authoritarian Machiavelli-types, of
which many exist, cheering as the Constitution is discarded like
yesterday’s trash, its principles and foundations burned inside
the incinerator of fascism? Can you hear the searing of one of
the greatest documents of governance ever created by man as it
goes up in flames thanks to the kerosene thrown at it by
American corporatists in power, its ashes slowly scattering into
the realm of nothingness?
Can you see, if not blinded by tele-trash and infotainment, by
the propaganda we call news, by the lies and deceit and
censorship of the corporate media, by the comforting glow of
television, by the charade that is American democracy and by the
myriad distractions of bread and circus, the approaching
finality of American liberty and freedom, soon to be replaced by
Big Brother, a surveillance society, a police state and
full-fledged corporatism?
Can you sense the growing momentum of militarism and imperialism
rampaging across the nation, and the globe, leaving nothing but
hatred and animosity in its wake? Can you sense that imperialism
and empire abroad and freedom and democracy at home are mutually
exclusive, that to attain the former the latter must be
sacrificed, and that inevitably the people must, for imperialism
to function, be immersed in tyranny? Do you realize that we are
one major shock, one major event away from catapulting our lives
into the headwaters of an altogether different America?
If you are not angered, indeed enraged, by the current state of
the United States, then you have not been paying attention, or
you just do not care enough about the future your children will
inherit, and have to live in. If you are not alarmed at where,
at present, this course is invariably taking us, then you have
abandoned the responsibilities of an informed citizen,
preferring the comfortable warmth of ignorance to the absolute
frigidity of a most ominous reality.
Indeed, it has been our passivity and acquiescence, bred of
comfort, distraction and the erosion of critical thinking, that
has facilitated our decent into authoritarian and corporatist
waters. It has been our indifference and our “can’t happen here”
mentality that is inevitably guaranteeing that it does, in fact,
“happen here.” It is our inexperience with tyranny at home and
our lack of exposure to authoritarian tendencies such as
surveillance, secret police, torture, spying and disappearances,
prevalent in many American supported states, encouraged by our
government, though until recently non-existent here, that
subjects us to a methodical assault by Machiavellian ideologies.
What billions of humans have first-hand experience in,
oftentimes thanks to our government’s sponsorship, funding,
training, backing, protection and encouragement, we have not yet
fully been subjected to. The dirty little secret that the people
outside our borders understand fully, and which has been kept
from us, is the principle that if America wishes to maintain its
empire, it must then continue acting like an empire. This, of
course, means maintaining a firm grip over its vassal states, by
proxy through its puppets, using the methods any aspiring empire
must use, namely tyranny, oppression, and repression along with
the tools at the disposal of any credentialed authoritarian.
As the empire expands and seeks more control over lands,
resources and people, its methods become more and more brutal,
as native peoples become more resistant, with growing
imperialism and addiction to hegemony needing greater amounts of
military weaponry, violence and tyranny to squash and threaten
resistance movements. In order to maintain its overstretched
empire, America must therefore become openly fascist, a reality
that cannot be fused with the freedoms, rights, liberties and
democracy of its own people. The two principles, empire and
liberty, are diametrically opposed, incompatible elements in a
struggle to determine the future course of the nation.
Given that historically the nation’s elite and its establishment
have consistently chosen imperialism, expansion and empire
building, there is no reason to believe that this hegemonic
drive will decelerate. On the contrary, in a world of finite
resources, eager and growing competitors, a globe that only
seems to get smaller, with an ever-increasing population and
with Washington enraptured in arrogance, self- aggrandizement,
self-exceptionalism and greed, it is certain that the elite will
invariably chose to sacrifice the Constitution, and the
foundations of American society, and hence the freedoms, rights
and liberties of the masses, in order to maintain and expand the
realm of American hegemony. This paradigm is occurring today, in
real time. The transformation is under way, right before our
eyes.
For between the coup that was the 2000 general election,
allowing entry into the executive branch of corporatists and
authoritarians, and the first hours of the American Reichstag,
or 9/11, that most catalyzing and transformative of events, the
neocon Pearl Harbor, America, already a most vicious and evil
empire in the decades before then, seemingly elevated its level
of arrogance, unilateralism, defiance, wickedness, inhumanity
and violence against the people of the world.
Whereas the 2000 stolen election introduced an era of open
hostility, unilateralism and a “we will do what we want”
mentality regarding the United States’ view toward world
relations, including the planning and green lighting of the
attacks, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq and
other Middle East nations, 9/11 was the shock introducing the
world to an America intent on global hegemony, now open and
transparent, the new normal, the maker of humanity’s new
reality. The inside job of 9/11, aimed as a psychological attack
on the American people, designed so the masses would become
subservient and acquiescent to otherwise unpopular methods of
empire building, also allowed the Pax Americana to begin its
quest for hegemony on a more transparent, and thus easier,
basis.
Before 9/11, as has been described above, America’s elite were
forced to rely on mostly clandestine methods of hegemonic
expansion, as well as to at least give the impression of
following and adhering to international law, its activities kept
secret from its population only to maintain control on the home
front, given the unpopularity of tyranny and all its tools. This
made it much harder for the empire to achieve its goals. With
the end of the Cold War, with its threat of an external bogeyman
gone, which was used as an excuse to justify America’s imperial
aspirations, supposedly to defend freedom and democracy, new
excuses had to be concocted, new enemies had to be created that
would engender in the population acceptance towards a
continuation of Manifest Destiny.
Hence, new methods of manipulation, such as 9/11, were
implemented. The opportunity that was 9/11, a catalyzing and
transformative event, allowed American fascists to continue
their previous drive forward, only this time in a more open,
methodical way, with the full engines of American societal and
military might fully behind the endeavor to conquer the
strategic lands, resources and peoples of the world in favor of
American corporations, particularly the
military-industrial-energy complex, and its elite. Today, much
more than in the past, the criminality and control is done in
full and open arrogance, not caring that the world becomes
witness to an imperialism that is as systemic as it tyrannical.
9/11, for all its terror and fear inducing stupor, guaranteed
compliance, passivity and even ignorant encouragement on the
part of the American people. After all, an external,
dark-skinned, unknown bogeyman had dared to attack the empire.
It was only natural, then, that the empire fight back, even if
those lands of the bogeyman were conveniently also those that
had been preemptively chosen months and years before for
invasion and attack due to the strategic locations and natural
resources claimed by the empire itself. Under this rubric, along
with the frivolous claim of bringing “freedom and democracy” to
the Middle East and Central Asia, the American people were easy
patsies to the maniacal ideology of American fascists in power.
What we call American-style imperialism has thus evolved, with
9/11 acting as its birth pangs, in open arrogance and
unilateralism, in open state sponsored terrorism and hostility,
in open defiance of and in direct confrontation with the peoples
of the globe. Where once clandestine mass murder, violence, war,
coups, repression, tyranny, executions, assassinations,
disappearances, collective punishment, dehumanization and
torture dictated the empire’s maneuvers to control the people
and places of the world, with its assortment of dictators,
tyrants, juntas, kings, proconsuls, ministers and elite
fraudsters helping maintain and expand the fields of empire, the
next stage of the empire’s temerity has brought imperialism into
plain sight.
Today the world entire can see, with the exception of those
living inside the empire itself, -- for most citizens choose a
cocktail of delusion, denial, beliefs in exceptionalism and the
inherent goodness of America, an absence of reason and
self-imposed ignorance in order to secure an “out of sight, out
of mind” mentality – what millions of human beings have
experienced for decades. American imperialism and empire
building has become an accepted reality, a “new normal,” with
its attempts at building and securing hegemonic power throughout
the world, through threats, violence, war, economic
strangulation and market colonialism, as evident as cold in
winter and as real as sunrises in the east.
Transformation
What is new, and what is not fully understood by the vast
majority of the 310 million people it affects, however, is that
the empire has brought clandestine corporatism and authoritarian
rule inside the very shores of America. It has begun importing
the very essence of the imperial methods it has and continues to
use abroad, most of which have been very successful in
controlling its domain, and thus expanding its global hegemony.
This has been achieved by the criminal manipulation of
psychology; by the induction of fear into the populace; by the
mass propaganda of sacrificing liberty for security – which
achieves neither – ; by conditioning the masses to think only in
foggy black and white, good versus evil reasoning; by gutting of
the economy, thus creating hardship, financial insecurity and a
need to scapegoat (classic divide and conquer strategy); by
destroying jobs and wages, slowly destroying the middle class,
in essence making this group slaves to debt and predatory
capitalism; by waging perpetual imperial wars designed to
control resources and strategic locations and transfer trillions
of dollars from average Americans toward the pockets of the
establishment; by the exponential rise in militarism, the
military-industrial-energy complex and the subsequent allocation
of ever-expanding budgets towards the Department of War and away
from other government services; by the decline of critical
thinking and reasoning skills by the purposeful decimation of
education; by the systemic pattern of lies, deceit, propaganda
and brainwashing endemic in corporate media; by the wholesale
auctioning off of all branches, departments and agencies of
government to the corporate world; and by the embedding of
corporatists and fascism’s enablers into all sectors of the
United States government and its propaganda apparatus.
With a more than malleable citizenry conditioned for obedience
and passivity, it is easy to see why corporatism rises like a
phoenix in the nation of the Founding Fathers. It is inside the
belly of the beast itself where the empire has declared open war
against the American people, in the span of a few years
unleashing a devastating assault on the rights, freedoms and
liberties of every American. It has been in the last seven years
where the policy of eroding the power, strength and wealth of
most working and middle class Americans has had its greatest
success, thereby creating an almost impotent subservient class
of serfs and slaves. It is inside the bowels of the empire
itself where the people are under constant attack, with the
livelihood of hundreds of millions of people being gutted and
eviscerated on a daily basis.
The objective, of course, is simple. Using fear mongering and
scapegoating of an external enemy, a dreaded dark skinned
bogeyman of unquestionable “evil”, preferably one that is
unknown and different, therefore, the very object of fear, one
that coincidentally inhabits the lands whose resources and
locations you covet, thereby validating war and destruction and
conquest and occupation, the populace is bombarded with the
recipe of engendered hatred and, of course, perpetual fear.
Straight out of the Orwellian playbook, then, the concocted fear
of the Arab and Muslim is used both to conquer resources and
land needed to expand hegemony, with the acquiescence and
passivity of the people, as well as to eviscerate the freedoms
of and better control the lives of the population.
A populace in constant fear of “its way of life,” of its
cherished “freedoms and liberties,” which the catapulted
propaganda spews mercilessly on a daily basis, making the
repeated lie a certifiable truth in the eyes of tens of
millions, will inevitably place unbridled faith, even if blind,
on the elements of government which, by definition, are
entrusted to protect and defend the people. If hundreds of
millions have no problem placing blind faith in a god that has
never before been seen, heard, smelled or felt, relying on the
stories and language of our primitive past, refusing to use
reason and critical thinking to combat myth and fables, how can
we expect them to not place blind faith in a tangible unitary
executive acting as father figure – or alpha male for that
matter – that offers promises of security and protection in a
terribly uncertain and frightening world – albeit a fictional
charade at that – while preaching from the bully pulpit?
Along with an approaching economic meltdown – which inevitably
causes anger, hatred, scapegoating, false patriotism,
xenophobia, racism, crime, hardship, hunger, suffering, poverty,
fear, division and insecurity in a large segment of the
population, thereby making tens of millions easy targets willing
to accept authoritarian and tyrannical rule over their lives –
the use of an external enemy as convenient scapegoat the riled
masses can concentrate their wrath on virtually guarantees
national compliance and acceptance of the erosion of
Constitutional guarantees in favor of a police and surveillance
state under corporatist rule. This formula has worked wonders
for many of modern history’s most ruthless authoritarians.
This combination of economic shock fused with fear of terror and
of a very dangerous external enemy that wants to destroy the
peoples way of life is a recipe for a successful implementation
of corporatist and authoritarian doctrine throughout the nation.
The anger, resentment and negative energy of the masses, most
afflicted by the hardships of a severe recession or near
depression, is easily corralled into an amalgam of anger that
can be manipulated and channeled in whatever direction the
corporatist elite chose. Under these conditions, and having a
scapegoat by which hatred and anger and emotions can be directed
at, the corporatist element in leadership can dictate empire’s
follies and aggressiveness with reckless abandon.
Together with a spineless and colluding legislature, – nothing
but a collection of fraudsters, snake oil salesmen, charlatans,
professional liars, opportunists and corrupt politicians, each
bending over to the thrusts of the corporatist world, their
powers decimated, their significance diminished, having now
become but an insignificant opinion-generating entity, firmly
under the control and power of the unitary executive, unable to
enforce or keep the president-emperor in check – the government
in Washington has become the very entity destroying freedoms,
liberties and rights and helping to build and secure the
infrastructure needed for a permanent corporatist, surveillance
society, a police state, an authoritarian reality.
What no terrorist organization could ever accomplish has over
the last seven years been done by the same government most
Americans believe incapable of wrongdoing, the same government
we place blind faith and trust in, the same government we
actually believe has an opposition within its ranks. Ironically,
what the external bogeyman could never take away is being
methodically plundered by our internal “protectors,” and with
our unbridled, yet ignorant support and enthusiasm. Taking candy
from a baby is a much more difficult endeavor. With the state
and corporations colluding together, the masses are left to fend
for themselves.
In fact, it has been the government, with the help of the
corporate media, that has terrorized the citizenry in an open
and continuous act of psychological warfare. It has been the
government, along with the Ministry of Truth, that has instilled
fear and insecurity into the population. It is they who, under
any definition of terrorism, have become our terrorists, our
real enemy, our internal bogeyman. Fear mongering has never been
so easy and, when the collective trauma of 9/11 wears off, all
that is needed to reinvigorate the senses of the masses are lies
of further attack, more dehumanization of the enemy, propaganda
of imminent threat and insecurity and, if all else fails, one
more false flag event.
Part 2 of this article will be posted on Tuesday 05/02/08
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, international/national
affairs analyst and Internet columnist. His articles as well as
his archive can be found at his blog,
http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com. Mr.
Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at
manuel@valenzuelas.net
.
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