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Crusade of Surge and Siege
Part Two Of Three -
Part One Here
Cages of Conquest
Hear No Evil, See No Evil
By Manuel Valenzuela
20/02/08 "ICH" -- -- - Americans’ ever-enduring, catatonic
sleepwalk through the Empire’s vast array of bread and circus,
as always produced by the Ministry of Truth and the Department
of Propaganda, better known as the corporatist media, has
succeeded in the creation of an ignorant, incurious and dumbed
down populace completely bereft of knowledge of what is done in
its name. With no concern for or understanding of geography,
cultures, history, alien societies, the outside world and of the
imperial aspirations of the Empire, Americans have proved easy
targets to the manipulations and deceptions of the corporatist
world. Seemingly unwilling to gain knowledge of anything outside
American Idol or the weekly NASCAR rat race, the soldier ants
and worker bees of the Empire are content to circumvent the
horrors of war and the myriad crimes against humanity committed
in their name in order to maintain their beautiful minds at
peace.
Indeed, the corporatist media has triumphed in completely
erasing America’s two disastrous occupations of Muslim lands
from the peoples’ conscious and concern, in effect shifting the
ongoing debacles away from the daily reality of Americans and
towards the abyss of a most cavernous memory hole. Methodically
and systematically, the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, with
all their inconvenient truths, with all their disturbing
realities, with all their corresponding death, suffering and
destruction, have virtually vanished into a vacuum of
nothingness, transported by the corporatist state into a
clandestine and secretive reality, making of these disasters
non-existent nightmares that vanish upon the waking of a new
day.
This propaganda by omission, this “out of sight, out of mind”
machination has virtually erased from American reality the
disasters unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan, thus guaranteeing
in the public mind a complete ignorance in or understanding of a
barbaric continuation to occupations stuck in the quicksand of
fierce resistance and never-ending guerilla warfare. Thus,
America’s aggressive wars, its imperial occupations, its crusade
of surge and siege that has done so much harm to millions of
people, not to mention to the moral standing of the nation, have
become non-existent memories under cover of fog and haze.
To the American people, the hegemonic occupations now descending
further into quagmire have become invisible creations that only
surface in the rare instance that a branch of the corporate
media goes off script and produces footage of death, destruction
or suffering. Otherwise, the war against West Asia remains a
figment of our imagination, a reality when our beautiful minds
want it to be, an inconvenient truth that becomes fiction the
moment we decide it is so.
As such, having been conditioned through the corporatist media’s
ceaseless dehumanization propaganda to believe Arabs and Muslims
sub-human enemies, having been manipulated into hating America’s
new enemy and having the corporatist media erase Iraq and
Afghanistan from the memory hole, the American people have
developed a disturbing, almost criminal indifference for the
millions of human beings dying, suffering or otherwise being
affected by the Empire’s wars and occupations. To a vast
majority of Americans, the malignant tumors that are Guantanamo,
Bagram and Abu Ghraib, together with what they represent, are as
hazy and as far removed from reality as last week’s episode of a
favorite sitcom. These cesspools of immorality rarely, if ever,
register in the beautiful minds of most Americans, only
bothering the conscious when photos, video or whistleblowers
surface to incriminate torturers, leaders and patsies. Only then
are we forced to confront one of the myriad number of
inconvenient truths the red, white and blue does across the
globe.
When truth does not surface, however, we revert back to willful
ignorance, aided by the fictions of television and the comfort
of consumerism, for deep down, inside the dark recesses of our
mind, we know exactly what is done in our name, though we chose,
willfully, to erase it from memory, to suppress the reality of
American criminality. Using denial and delusion in conjunction
with conditioned brainwashing and manipulation, we have decided
that crimes against humanity do not exist if those crimes are
done to sub-human enemies. Thus the barbarian horde at our gates
becomes undeserving of human rights and international laws
protecting human beings because they do not fit our definition
of human.
Thus, never do we seek to know the ugly realities of places like
Guantanamo, nor how America’s gulags, with their brutal methods
and tactics, will inevitably affect our way of life, or question
why they exist in the first place. For us, America’s black sites
are reserved for the evildoers wanting to destroy our way of
life. Little do we realize, though, that our way of life is
being eroded at these very same sites, one right at a time, done
not by terrorists, but by those managing our descent into the
breadbasket of despotism. Remaining passive, obedient, silently
acquiescent and possessing the attention span of a gnat,
hundreds of millions of Americans thus concern themselves only
with what new toy they can add to the family collection, or what
new product they can obediently purchase next, or what new
reality show will entertain them the most. After all, we must
preserve our “way of life”.
If Guantanamo and what it stands for does not directly affect
us, if torture and perpetual suffering and dehumanizing
conditions and sadistic treatment and the destruction of habeas
corpus and the Bill of Rights only affects the dreaded dark
skinned Arab or Muslim, then America’s beautiful minds need not
concern themselves or have empathy, they need not contemplate
the inflictions of wickedness on their fellow human beings, they
need not realize the crimes done in their name, nor the
evisceration of American morality, nor the new normal being
established, nor the precedence beings set, nor the trial and
error being conducted, nor the techniques being experimented and
refined, nor the machinations of tyranny being perfected.
Thus, through our transcendental customs, our American “way of
life,” of methodically following the exploits of celebrities
dead or dying, of aimlessly producing and consuming, as always
becoming hypnotized by modern day court jesters, jousters,
gladiators and chariot races, as well as exhibiting
idol-worshipping, messianic-like followings and tendencies over
the Corporatist Party’s current crop of presidential contenders,
we have chosen to ignore the plight of the innocent – for most
prisoners are – in Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and
other places of ill-repute. We have thus chosen to be good
Americans, seeing no evil, hearing no evil, mistaking ashes for
snow, and pretending the evil done in our name does not exist.
Reincarnation of the Habitual
To look inside one of America’s gulags is to look back at dark
history, to times of brutality and primitiveness, using the
tunnel of hindsight to peer at the dungeons of the Roman Empire
and of the Middle Ages, with their chained and caged collections
of dissidents, enemies and scapegoats, their persecuted and
tortured, and their sadism and thirst for blood; it is to step
back in time to days of Inquisitions and torture chambers, to
eras of witch persecutions and heretic trials, of silencing
threats to power and spawning a black cloud of fear and
intimidation throughout society.
It is a return to days when humans had no right, to nights of
barbarism, to the depravity and indecency of our mammalian past,
to the possession of the human mind by the wicked demons
inherent in man. Looking inside America’s gulags helps us
remember that over and over, for as long as humankind has walked
the plains of Earth, when authoritarians rise, as always carried
high on the shoulders of fear and insecurity, morality,
integrity and human rights become lost in a sea of tyranny.
These institutions of immorality help us see beyond the veneer
and the hypocrisy that those espousing freedom and liberty
propagate, helping erase the fog of deception those claiming to
be defenders of human rights engender.
America’s archipelago of gulags proves, once again, that the
“western” mantra of values, modernity and morality is nothing
but an empty shell built on self-adulation, delusion and echoes
of ethnocentrism and exceptionalism. This hollow and cynical
vociferation falls flat upon the challenge of evolving human
rights, for in its claim of moral superiority, hiding behind the
theoretical wonders of Judeo-Christian tradition, supposedly
progressing away from the primitiveness of our past, the
“western” tradition has been one of continuous mass murder,
repression, tyranny, oppression, exploitation, suffering and
destruction, most aimed directly at the peoples of the “south,”
most directed at people not possessing the genetic mutation that
turned skin color pale.
American gulags and its system of extraordinary renditions,
green lighted at the very top of the food chain, proves to
anyone not blinded by delusions and propaganda that America is
not now and has never been morally superior to the rest of the
world. From the very beginning of the republic, morality has
given way to imperialism. Whether done through proxy, by puppets
or by America’s own hands, control over the peoples of the world
has usually involved some form of tyranny, as always dependent
on the vast funding, financing, political support and training
of the Empire. However, where once hidden under the veneer of
democracy and freedom, under the ruthlessness of puppet
dictators, America’s sordid, though clandestine, past has come
to the surface thanks to the exposure of its methods and
techniques, becoming an open acknowledgement of past
indiscretions and present malfeasance.
From the School of the Americas, to research into psychological
and physical torture at McGill University, to perfecting the art
of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to support of every tin
pot dictator and junta in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East
and Africa, to the training of their thugs, enforcers and
torturers, America has always possessed the wickedness of human
malevolence. Its claims of being the defender of human rights is
and has always been hypocritical at best and farcical at worst.
Today we can see the real America at Guantanamo and its
extension of gulags and torture chambers, the America the world
entire has known for the last century but that Americans are
just now waking up to. For today’s gulags are evolved creations
of yesterday’s criminality, just as they will be the
inspirations for tomorrow’s tyranny.
Entrapment
Guantanamo, with its cages and sensory deprivation and barking
dogs and dehumanization and its stress positions and forced
feeding and extremes of cold and hot and its isolation and its
medical/psychological experimentation and its waterboarding and
its darker, more sinister methods of torture yet to be exposed
magnifies American tyranny and her hypocrisy, her injustice and
depravity, her criminality and arrogance. It exposes, more and
more, the charade that the war on terror is, how the purpose of
Guantanamo is not the imprisoning of terrorists, for most there
are guilty only of bad luck, persecution, retribution and being
at the wrong place at the wrong time, but the methodical
evisceration of the Constitution.
For Guantanamo, and its siblings, are a culmination of
desperation, an attempt to rationalize the supposed existence of
Arab and Muslim evil, an attempt to validate a fictional war on
terror by incarcerating people falsely labeled “terrorists.” It
is as much a torture center as it is a public relations and
propaganda institution, a way to manipulate the American public
both that Arab and Muslim terrorists exist, and that the
American government is succeeding in bringing the terrorist
threat to justice. It is a Hollywood-style set with its
corresponding fictions and illusions of reality, a scam to
convince Americans that a war that is concocted is indeed real,
that it is being won.
The reality of the gulags exposes how an initial hunger for
vengeance immediately after 9/11 has led to the imprisonment,
suffering and torture of thousands, and how, knowing the falsity
of charges and the innocence of men, America steadfastly
continues shackling injustice, deciding to stage-manage the
illusion of guilt as well as sacrifice the innocent to the
continued myth of the so-called war on terror.
Kidnapped, traded in for money, picked up by a giant net of
vengeance and imprisoned thanks to false accusations by rivals,
the men at Guantanamo have become patsies in a world unconcerned
for their rights. They are caged in a land of limbo, lost to the
outside world, made to disappear, their lives practically an
empty shell of their former selves . They are the scapegoats of
American mendacity, labeled “terrorists” so that we can feel
secure and protected, so that we can believe that evildoers hate
us for our freedom, for our way of life. They are the poster
children that grant the military-industrial complex a perpetual
stream of blood money, a ceaseless parade of war, an endless
flow of propaganda. They are, quite simply, the bread that gives
authoritarianism sustenance, the wine that makes drunk with joy
the enablers of fascism. They are, for all intents and purposes,
dead men walking, ghosts without closure, phantoms forgotten by
humanity.
Innocent of criminality, these individuals have been subjected
to brutal and sadistic torture, as always leading to false
confessions, their barbaric imprisonment and systemic
dehumanization more a manifestation of American culture than of
their resistance and human spirit. Many have been physically
tortured, yet it is the more corrosive damage of psychological
torture that has destroyed their minds, and their lives. Many
will never return to normalcy, for what their minds have surely
been subjected to no human brain should have to endure. Many
have become the guinea pigs of psychologists and doctors
experimenting with various methods of torture, trying to make
torture more effective, more efficient.
Many have quietly, and conveniently, under cover of darkness or
media blackout, been returned to their native countries, their
innocence confirmed by their release, and by the silence of
America. Forced to sign papers preventing them from speaking of
their horrors, or from suing their torturers, they return a
shell of their former selves, damaged beyond repair, scarred for
life, forever to relive the horror they experienced in their
nightmares and flashbacks. Yet many remain, shackled to American
propaganda, held hostage to the illusions of the war on terror.
As long as the fiction lives their guilt is assured, their
imprisonment guaranteed. As long as tyrants fear persecution and
imprisonment for criminality, they will live in cages. As long
as they are used as the meat feeding the dogs of tyranny, they
will remain encaged. As long as the authoritarian leadership
seeks the continued erosion of the Constitution, and of our
rights and freedoms, they will linger in perpetual purgatory,
becoming the rotting carcass fed to the vultures of fascism.
Guantanamo’s cages cannot yet be opened and made empty, for to
do so would be to expose the fictions, the charades, the method
to the madness, the sheer immorality of the Empire. It would be
to acknowledge injustice of innocence, the depravity of
liberators, the criminality of leadership. Guantanamo’s gates
cannot yet be closed, for the Crusade of Surge and Siege must
continue, the enemy must exist, profits must remain, our rights
and freedoms and liberties must be destroyed. New precedents of
American legality must be established, kangaroo courts must
convict, enemies must be punished, propaganda must manipulate
and the innocent must be executed in order to increase
leadership popularity, to refresh propaganda, to feed fear and
to politicize elections.
America’s leadership is fully aware of the innocence of the vast
majority of prisoners, yet cannot force itself to act against
its own inhumanity. For to do so would be to admit mistakes,
acknowledge criminality, condemn policies and destroy the
authoritarian dream. Closing Guantanamo would expose the façade,
the hall of smoke and mirrors, ending the subtleties of fear and
intimidation being built around the American public. Perhaps
more than anything, freeing the innocent and closing America’s
torture centers would confirm the monstrosity of what America
has become, destroying the foundations of a new normal being
developed, maybe even shattering the bubble of manipulation cast
over the population.
As long as Guantanamo remains the motives of fascists will
survive, and the indifference of the American people will be
assured. As long as its cages are occupied, as long as its
torture rooms resonate with the screams of agony and suffering,
Guantanamo will be the symbol of a new Amerika, one at war with
the Arab and Muslim world, an Amerika at war with its people,
and itself. As long as it remains a stain on humanity, America’s
clandestine past and her immediate present will be exposed to
more and more people, thereby freeing truth and knowledge,
liberating the brainwashed and emancipating the manipulated.
Inside America’s gulags the future of the nation is being
determined, one malevolent policy at a time, one sadistic
interrogator at a time, one tortured soul at a time. It is here
where our way of life is being altered, perhaps forever, not by
terrorist evildoers hating us for our freedoms, but by fascism’s
enablers doing the work of those domestic evildoers that hate us
for our freedoms, for our way of life. In this Crusade of Surge
and Siege, the Arab and Muslim victims have become a bridge of
precedence set and normalcy born reaching out towards America,
becoming the scapegoats and patsies granting access, and an
omnipresent reach, to tyranny rising over that city on a hill
once known as the United States of America.
Part
Three: Inside the Fires of Imperialism, to be posted 25
February, 2008
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, commentator, Internet
essayist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published
by Authorhouse.com . His essays appear regularly at various
alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela
welcomes comments and can be reached at
manuel@valenzuelas.net
.
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