Jerks for Jesus

I have heard it said that “God wants spiritual fruits and not religious nuts.” I was reminded of this last week when someone e-mailed asking my opinion of Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka.

Phelps and his followers are thoroughly sick and hateful people. These people are well-known for showing up at rallies and funerals with banners saying things like “God hates fags”, “AIDS cures fags”, “Thank God for dead soldiers” and for thanking God for the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. These people positively exude hatred. They just drip with it.

Their upside, if there is one, is that they only number about 150. And people have the good sense to hate on them correspondingly. Their size and influence are about equal to that of America’s most hated haters, the Ku Klux Klan. Their danger is in direct proportion to their microscopic numbers. This is a good thing, as social ostracism is far more powerful than laws and litigation in curtailing bad behavior.

However, Phelps and his crew are hardly the most obnoxious Christians in America. This dubious honor belongs to a group numbering in the millions, 99.44% of whom are far more polite and civil.

I speak of the big government groupies in the Religious Right. They are absolutely everywhere. And while their personal behavior may be far more desirable, the real-world implications of their beliefs are positively gruesome.

They positively FREAK OUT over things like The DaVinci Code, but are either in total denial or in total support of America’s bobsled ride into totalitarianism. They recklessly pervert Scripture in order to justify the total state.

They want you to think that Jesus’ instruction to “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” – Luke 20:25 – means that we should give unto Caesar everything Caesar demands and then siddown and shuddup.

They want you to think that Romans 13 commands unquestioning obedience to secular government. Never mind that the Bible contains numerous examples of civil disobedience. Never mind that Paul, the author of Romans, was a chronic jailbird who wrote four of his Epistles while behind bars.

They zealously support a police state at home and unprovoked war abroad. Indeed, several thousand pastors have been recruited to participate on “” whose job will be to quell dissent in the event of martial law. Never mind that Jesus only initiated force one time – when He kicked the money changers out of the Temple – and that He had no political purpose for doing so.

I used to be fond of telling left-wing secular liberals, who wanted the government to solve all their problems, that there was a place 90 miles south of Key West where they did things their way. Now, I think I should start telling right-wing Christian conservatives who have no problem with unlimited government that there is a place 90 miles south of Key West where they do things their way. Such is their state of denial about reality of life under the unrestrained state.

I have a bit of philosophy that goes as follows: When you let people do anything they want, you get Woodstock. But when you let government do anything it wants, you get Auschwitz. Rhetoric and intentions matter not. The results are the same.

While GW Bush – the hero of these millions of Christians – is a lot of bad things, he is not Hitler. We still have a measure of freedom in this country. However, he has put in place numerous laws and executive orders that send what was left of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in 2001 through the shredder and allow him to assume dictatorial power should he decide, if you will, it necessary. Some of Hitler’s strongest support was from Christians. And it wasn’t just Catholics either. Of the 14,000 churches in Germany, 13,000 pledged allegiance to Hitler.

There is a phenomenal book by Erwin Lutzer entitled Hitler’s Cross: . It goes into great detail describing how the great majority of German Christians cavalierly gave away their freedom. The parallels between Germany in the 1930s and post-9/11 America ought to make your skin crawl.

I am not going to do a Fred Phelps and rejoice in the death of William F. Buckley. I was a big Buckley fan until 1992, when I could no longer support his big government conservatism as it was identical to big government liberalism. Even after that, I still enjoyed his wit and his command of the English language. Big government is big government and total government is total government, regardless of rhetoric.

In 1952, the young Buckley wrote, “we have got to accept Big Government for the duration — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged…except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”

Buckley endorsed “large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington…”

As Rush Limbaugh says, words mean things. It is easy to support unfettered government when your own interests are not at stake. Limbaugh was all for the Drug War until he himself developed a jones and found himself in the crosshairs of the authorities. Again and again, I hear Christians say they will gladly give up their freedom to the Bush administration. Will these same people so nonchalantly surrender their liberty to, say, a Klinton or an Obama administration?

John Lofton edits a page called The American View that deals with, among other things, the danger of this unholy alliance between the Religious Right and the Republican Party. Lofton is fond of saying that he was “raptured” out of the GOP. He writes:

“We are seriously concerned about, deeply grieved by and lament the fact that far too many of today’s so-called ‘Christian leaders’ are a sinful embarrassment and are responsible for the cause of Christ being mocked and ridiculed. By being, first, cheerleaders for the Republican Party, they have dishonored their Lord and sold their Christian birthright for a mess of partisan political pottage. These individuals and organizations are Christian in name only, ‘Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.’ From such, it is added, we must turn away.” (II Timothy 3:5)

“Secular, Christless conservatism — even when it is supposedly ‘compassionate’ — will not defeat secular, Christless liberalism because to God they are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and, thus, predestined to failure.”

Whether he knew it or not, the Apostle Paul prophesied the contemporary Religious Right in II Corinthians 11:13-15:

“For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.”

Not only do these jerks for Jesus cause Christianity to be mocked and ridiculed, they promote mass deception within the church and, even worse, alienate God knows how many people from coming into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This is a far greater tragedy.

Doug Newman is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
You can visit his website at: The Fountain of Truth
He can be reached at:

How The Rockefeller Republicans Raped America

Part One: William F. Buckley, Jr.

“When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? “I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President.” He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens”.

In 1951 the CIA recruited Yale graduate William F. Buckley, Jr., who wrote the paragraph above, into their ranks as a “deep cover agent.” Yale supplied most of the early agents for the CIA and many of these individuals went on to placement high up in government or in multinational corporations. It was an exclusive fraternity, serving the interests not of Americans but of the corporations. Through their lives they took with them loyalties and a world view that was very different than that of ordinary Americans, uninvested in those very special interests.

There is a case to believe that William Buckley remained in that service. It was not so much service to the CIA as it was to those who had come to control government, the collation of multinational corporations that today have given up trying to hide their intentions with the very public and obvious moves now underway.

Among these are the North American Union, or Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, The driver’s licenses, ready for use, show their logo of the whole of North America; the insistence by the Feds on a Real ID that asserts absolute Federal Control; the LESO program that is now converting control of local law enforcement into Federal property. These prove what they denied for years. You can try to go to the LESO site but if you do a block comes up. You can read more about it on the Rockwell site; Lew is not usually an alarmist.

These are the end times, but not in the way Evangelicals have imagined; many who had bought into the Rapture are horrified at the bankruptcy now facing America, brought on by these same interests.

In the name of furthering the agenda or corporations America has justified torture, endless war, covert ops carried out routinely on all of us, and more. We are watching as the markets collapse and as people lose their homes in steadily increasing numbers, as the vital resources that belong to all of us, including the air ways themselves, are sold off along with the water we drink. The only cheering note is the report that ‘they’ are now preparing to destroy the evidence of this in Washington D. C., so perhaps Bush intends to leave after all, failing to finish what his grandfather Prescott Bush planned in 1943, the military take over of the US government.

Those working on this are relatively small in number. Buckley is one of them.

William Buckley was trained and paid by the CIA as a covert agent; he admits this as a matter of simple fact. If you look closely at his actions between 1951 and now there are many reasons to conclude he never left that job; all that changed was his assignment and perhaps how he was compensated.

To control the direction of America it was essential to limit the ideas in politics, especially movements that changed the framing regarding the power of government and the rights of the people. At that point in time there was only one movement that worried them.

Between the mid 50s and the 70s Buckley did all in his power to become Mr. Conservative. But there is no reason to believe he was, in fact, a conservative. He is identified with the Rockefeller wing of the GOP; his actions agree with the agenda of that political faction by his own contemporary quotes. His presence as a self-declared Conservative was founded on intense intellectual masturbation that ignored the unifying issues from which the Conservatism of that movement had derived.

Buckley did not win identification as a Conservative by enacting the ideas of Conservatism, he did so by simply repeating over and over that he was a Conservative, introducing microanalysis of issues that ignored the foundation for those ideas in the works of Locke and in the Declaration of Independence. Baffle with Thy Bullshit should be engraved on his forehead.

When that proved to be less than compelling to people looking for the truth Buckley changed tactics, destroying the people who lead and had created that movement. Their lives and actions tell us they were Conservatives; the records of their lives clearly prove that they understood the principles of limited government, individual rights, and adherence to the Constitution.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and lays duck eggs, it is a duck. Goldwater, Ayn Rand and Robert Welch were ducks. Buckley was a turkey trying to quack convincingly. William Buckley was no Ronald Reagan.

In the years following the Second World War American government, in collusion with corporations, was making war on the right of Americans to organize and restructure all they perceived as wrong with government. As that new movement began, dedicated to the ideas of limited government, individual rights, and the Constitution, corporations in collusion with the CIA, took up a covert war. To carry this out those who wanted to instead extend the power of corporations through government created the boogie man of Communism and recruited agents.

Children cowered under their desks to perpetuate that boogie man.

Many of those men involved in the planning stages of the Cold War had had dealings with the Soviet Union as they had had with Nazi Germany; those interests were purely financial. Living in a world of their creation, driven by money, they saw the world through the lens of corporations. They therefore owed allegiance to no nation; they were above such considerations, coming to view the issues of America as less weighty than of maintaining their own profits. Profits depended on an unending supply of oil.

All of the actions taken from then until now point to the goal of acquiring the oil reserves of which Everette Lee DeGolyer, the singular guru of oil they regarded as the preeminent world expert, had said, “No such galaxy of fields of the first magnitude over such a wide area has been developed previously in the history of the oil industry.” DeGolyer had returned from a survey of the Middle East.

The corporate interests, now merged with government in the US, were following through with a strategy intended to lower the costs of corporations in obtaining oil. Oil was the life’s blood that pumped through their veins. The fact that Communism was no threat was irrelevant; the corporations needed a threat so they could continue to justify control just as they do today with threats of extremist Muslims.

The individuals who then were organizing to oppose them were gulled by the threats of Communism; they believed the people who they thought of as fellow Americans. The real Conservatives were naive but honest. They included men like Taft and Barry Goldwater; Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. They came from diverse background but they shared a belief in the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the free market that America had never really had. They believed in individual freedom and the sovereignty of the individual before the existence of government. They dreams of freedom.

To men like Buckley, operating in the 50s and 60s, it must have been like stealing candy from a baby. Buckley’s motives went deep. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., had been an oil man in Venezuela whose interests were truncated by the move in that country to take control of that resource.

Buckley had very personal motives.

Now it is clear that all of those closely associated with the small group who worked to eviscerate the role of the United Nations, manicure the political environment in the United States, and weld the corporations to government had ties to Big Oil. The small group included George H. W. Bush, Sr., Maurice Strong, and Robert O. Anderson. Big Oil understood how much they had to lose if Americans had real choices. This period is also marked by the disappearance of various better carburetors and other innovations that improved gas and oil efficiency. These patents were typically bought up by oil companies and never used.

Communism was a distraction that kept the eyes of Americans off the ball and allowed for the continued plundering of oil reserves in the Middle East – and elsewhere as they were discovered.

Back home, Buckley made sure that the use of the military as an adjunct for corporate leveraging against other countries continued by destroying the potential objections from within the Conservative Movement.

Using government in this way gave rise to a very different attitude about their own mis gotten wealth and about people who lived simple, decent lives. You see the fully developed attitude in this Straussianism, which expressed this as, “if you are destined to rule then you may rightly ignore the rules made for lesser men.” This is self serving and ugly and it is possible that the hyper intellectual rationalizations used by Buckley and the others came from their unconscious knowledge that their actions were morally and ethically bankrupt.

Many of Buckley’s fellow CIA recruits shared his affiliation with Skull and Bones, where who you know and how, provides yet another layer of artificial elitism. Members of that fellowship guaranteed a lifetime of easy times paid for by those whose long term associations have made them rich at the expense of ordinary Americans. Few are inclined to bite the hand that holds the caviar.

Those who employed Bush, Buckley and their cronies are the descendants of the mercantilists either by genes or by practice.

No matter where they come from they share that they are the inheritors of the devious practices of those who see government as an extension of their power. Today we know them as Corporatists, Oil Barons, the 28,000 Elite. Their moral ancestors were the ship owners who ignored the disgust of other New Englanders, making their services available to slavers and dealing in slaves themselves.

Earlier generations knew them as the people who moved in on the profits to be made from the Civil War, a war fought to establish a more powerful Federal State and not to end slavery. A generation later John D. Rockefeller would establish his own line of avarice using the same techniques.

William F. Buckley was never a Conservative any more than Monica Lewinsky was an innocent virgin when she met Bill Clinton. And examination of his actions over a life time reveals no nuance of action that affirmed the principles of Conservatism. His stock in trade was deceptive rhetoric. Debunking the ideas of Conservatism by his failure to defend them over and over again, he continued to claim the mantle. He could never have accomplished that if he had not gone after the real leaders of that movement.

Buckley’s 1957 attack on Ayn Rand came in the form of a bizarre review of “Atlas Shrugged,” her most prominent novel, put out under the imprimatur of National Review. National Review would follow the strategy of later publications that are used in serial to excoriate individuals and reframe issues while continuing to carry enough unexceptional material so as to keep philosophical adherents oblivious to the real agenda, puzzled but not moved to attack.

Also essential was to control the youth. In 1960 Buckley used his estate in Sharon, Connecticut for the founding meeting of the Young Americans for Freedom. This did not work out as planned. The group immediately broke into two factions, reflecting two viewpoints that continue to drive politics today. The Rockefeller wing was a simple political extension of corporatism. The Conservative wing eventually dominating, representing the principles of small government, individual rights, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. These had been the principles of Robert Taft, who Buckley sought to displace in the minds of young Americans by promoting the candidacy of Barry Goldwater.

Credited with supporting the candidacy of Goldwater through National Review in 1964, Buckley gave public support to that candidacy because Goldwater’s platform, rather than taking the clean non-interventionist viewpoint of Alliances with None, instead promised only to end the draft as soon as possible, according to Rockwell in his essay, “Before the Storm.”

War was essential to the successful prosecution of the corporate agenda; the other issues would have been largely irrelevant at that point in time. Buckley’s later attitude towards Goldwater was dismissive. His support at the time had provided invaluable credentials and deflected resistance to the War in Vietnam. Providing very public support to a candidate who the loses badly is perfect positioning for the take over of the resulting political movement.

Those attacks included the devastating assaults on Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society for the shocking crime of saying, in 1965, that the Vietnam War was immoral and unconstitutional because Congress had not declared war. In those attacks Welch was characterized as, “just a candy maker from Connecticut.” A curious commentary from someone whose very accent lies.

The agenda was war for the profit of oil, pure and simple.

Most people believe because of that accent William F. Buckley, Jr., is the scion of old Eastern money, probably New England. In fact, he is the son of William Frank Buckley, Sr., a Texas oil baron whose fortune was made wildcatting in Venezuela and Mexico. Their descent is Swiss-German and they are Irish Catholics.

I have come to think of this as Buckley’s personal addition to the war of ideas, waged against opponents who had accepted him as a friend.

Even today most members of what we generally call The Freedom Movement, have not noticed the larger strategy used with the publication of bifurcated support on issues that leaves the reader uncertain of the real principles involved. Today we also must deal with the misdirecting websites used to deflect a clear understanding of issues also using this strategic approach.

For real Conservatives and the Libertarians who followed them, government should remain strictly limited and local; the rights of individuals are respected. The people do it for themselves; Government is best that governs least. That is Conservatism.

Buckley knew how to exude the rhetoric, leading the mind down into a sink of nuance and mincing fantasy, never the reality. For Buckley, who never encountered reality himself, and for his fellow privileged CIA James Bond wannabes, reality was what they wished to believe it to be.

He wrote this in 1952 in an article for Commonweal.

“We have got to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington—even with Truman at the reins of it all.”

In recent years Buckley has often gloated over his success. Growing older he lives in a world of privilege gained through betrayal and lies. It was probably a lot of fun; a career of profitable work that was great for the ego and pocketbook simultaneously. He was probably laid frequently. Evidently when you have no conscience the only truth that matters is written in dollar signs.

That is the first part of the series. More coming soon on those who subverted freedom.

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster hosts a radio program weekly at BBSradio.com. The program is titled, The Spiritual Politician and examines how government can be brought into alignment with the spiritual goal of decentralizing power and localizing control.

She is also the author of GREED: The NeoConning of America and A Tour of Old Yosemite. The former is a novel about the lives of the NeoCons with a strong autobiographical component. The latter is a non-fiction book about her father and grandfather.

Her blog is at: http://howtheneoconsstolefreedom.blogspot.com/
She is the founder of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation.
She is the mother of four living children and one deceased.

Video: Rapture Ready: The Christians United for Israel Tour

Max Blumenthal’s latest takes us on a shocking and at times bizarre tour of right-wing Pastor John Hagee’s annual Washington-Israel Summit, blowing the cover off the Christian Zionist movement in the process. Starring Joe Lieberman, Tom DeLay, Pastor John Hagee, Ambassador Dore Gold and a host of rapture-ready evangelicals praying for Armageddon.

Of Crazies, Neocons and the Enemy Within

Beginnings

An all too familiar and ominous echo is reverberating through the American landscape, once more blasted into the airwaves, and our minds, through the Ministry of Propaganda and its merry bunch of sycophants and stenographers. For yet another consecutive year since three monolithic towers were demolished, imploded and systemically brought down onto their own footprints in a catalyzing event unleashing a new American century, Americans are hearing the fiery rhetoric of imminent danger, a cocktail of fear, terror and warmongering fed our enemy-addicted culture, aimed both at stirring conflict with Iran and conditioning our minds into accepting the coming attack on yet another Muslim nation that poses no threat to the mighty Empire.

For the Enemy Within is hard at work concocting the trigger-happy bogeyman Americans are always too eager to declare war upon, and they are working overtime, using their control of the print, radio and television media, to condition us into accepting their version of reality. Yes, the dreaded neocons are once more circling this nation like vultures, flying high above the dying carcass of freedom and democracy, ready to plunge down to Earth for a mighty feast. The reviled neocons, that plague that refuses to die, that pestilence that seemingly only increases in number, that nest of rats that lingers in our midst, is once more contorting truth and creating reality, once more beating the drums of war in continuation of their war song. The Enemy Within is softening us up, readying our minds, preparing us into accepting yet one more blitzkrieg of evil, criminality and mass murder.

If you are not disgusted at how this species of human being has hijacked America, how it has condemned a million people to their premature death, how it has turned the beacon of freedom into the gulag of criminality, how it has made mass murder, torture, rape and pillage acceptable, how it has made an entire nation hateful, xenophobic and jingoistic, how it has molded and conditioned an army of American authoritarians, then you have not been paying attention. If you are not reviled at the existence of this nest of cockroaches, and how, even after all the damage it has done to America and the Middle East it nonetheless remains alive and thriving, seemingly – and bewilderingly – given prominence, authority and visibility in the media, in spite of its perpetual stream of lies, incompetence and subversion of freedom, in spite of getting everything about Iraq wrong, then you have not understood the real and severe threat of the neocon element to America, and the world.

Deeply entrenched within the corridors of power, infesting the Department of War, the Department of State, the Department of Justice, the Congress and the White House, and firmly, and clandestinely, embedded throughout the corporatist media, the Enemy Within, it can safely be said, has hijacked America, taking her hostage, occupying her capital, unleashing an incessant barrage of psychological warfare against the American people. Neocon nests, those putrid think tanks and lobbying offices where delusion and deception thrive, are clustered throughout Washington, having acronyms all too familiar to those still living in truth and reality.

The neocon infrastructure is powerful and massive, financed by moneyed and influential people, supported by modern day little Sparta, that American financed welfare state, that encircled Bantustan of imported European Zionists hunkered down among an ocean of native Arabs, possessing all necessary machinations to concoct enemies, the deceptions to create and unleash wars, the scruples to divide and conquer, and the media tools to brainwash and condition millions of human beings. The neocon machine prevents truth from ever seeing light, reality from ever surfacing, debate from ever existing and dissidents from ever having a voice. Instead, the neocon big lie is allowed to be repeated countless times, their deceptions and distortions are granted the aura of reality, and their propaganda is allowed to thrive, and spread.

The card carrying member of the neocon community has instant access to the airwaves, to op-ed articles and editorial opinion. The neocon talking points grace front page headlines and the opinions of news anchors and reporters. These same talking points are given preeminence and are never questioned or challenged. Neocon talking heads, representatives, hacks and lackeys have an always open invitation, in spite of the disaster they have created for America in Iraq, to appear on television news shows to spew their venomous rhetoric and talking points. Neocons are sent in droves, upon commands from on high, to appear in the always friendly corporatist media, as always spewing lies and deceptions when propaganda needs to be delivered, when fear needs to grow or when hatred needs to find new hosts.

Staying on message, the big lie is repeated over and over by this army of manipulators, attacking the airwaves, and thus our brains, in a constant stream of appearances, offering a multitude of faces, and voice tones. Treated as experts and opinion makers, when in fact they are but ignorant, ideological and delusional Machiavelli’s, this legion of propagandists is given free rein to saturate both televised and written media with their talking points. They appear as “guests” on news shows, making the rounds, regurgitating the message their group wants disseminated, never being challenged, always having a loudspeaker from which to reach the citizenry.

Without merit, these operatives are placed as opinion writers, reporters and editors in America’s most influential magazines and newspapers, free to manipulate and condition the minds of readers, free to shift the nation’s discourse in a particular direction. Hired and promoted, even after being wrong or delusional about nearly everything they have ever said or written about, these enemies of the people are nonetheless still given a voice and a bully pulpit from where to manipulate millions of readers.

Even when one thinks the neocons have been discredited thanks to the myriad number of pathetic mistakes they have made, even when one thinks their opinions have made them clowns, even when they are the laughingstock to those aware of their incompetence and delusion, they are still prominently displayed on our monitors, magazines and newspapers. Somehow, after so many errors, after so many disasters, they still remain to unleash more damage, shaping the nation’s opinion, setting its direction, pushing policy and as always, steering the nation towards war. This reality has not changed since 9/11, which should be a clear indication that the corporatist media is a full collaborator and partner in the neocon agenda. The Enemy Within is deeply entrenched in the corporatist media, and this should never be forgotten.

Playbook

Using the same recipe that launched the false Iraq WMD fear and terror marketing campaign, the same audacity that gave birth to the official and highly fictional 9/11 conspiracy theory, recycling the same cast of neocon characters for years warning us of the imminent and perpetual Arab danger, the warmongers in power are slowly, yet surely, prepping the American people into accepting a new act of preemptive, and illegal, aggression. For the Enemy Within knows that the American people will voluntarily remain ignorant of whatever enemy is chosen for them, never wanting to use reason and logic and critical thinking or common sense, always believing the lies and deceptions of the state and its vast propaganda machine, always eager to believe the myths and fictions spouted by criminals and murderers. Indeed, manipulating the American mind is like taking candy from a baby. At no time has the American mind been more fragile, ignorant and ripe for the picking.

Under ceaseless assault since the false flag operation of 9/11, the collective American mind is in deep psychosis, unable to escape the cloud of fear and terror thrust upon us by the neocon cabal in power. The catalyzing event of 9/11, methodically executed by warmongers and crazed zealots, was orchestrated with the intent of birthing a new American century, one in which the Pax Americana would thrive, unparalleled in power, reigning as the new Rome, unrivaled among the brotherhood of nations. It would merge the interests of little apartheid Sparta with those of America, forever cementing ties born through deception, for now the American people would also be confronted with the “evildoer” Arab horde, conveniently having as new enemy the same peoples whose oil we coveted and were addicted to, the same peoples whom little apartheid Sparta hated and detested.

The inside job of 9/11 would unleash a Long War, the so-called War on Terror, as much a fictional fantasy as any war concocted by Hollywood. Without the dreaded Soviet to scapegoat, to distract from internal strife, to use as excuse to enrich the military-industrial complex, a new enemy had to be manufactured, one that, unlike the Soviet Communist, was ambiguous, hidden, alien, an enigma, free of borders, national constraints and political handcuffs. Free to create any enemy out of thin air, the marketers of fear, for that is what the creators of enemies are, decided that the American populace needed a bogeyman unlike any ever devised, one free to roam beyond borders, lurking in dark alleys, independent of a nation that could, just like the Soviet Union, dissolve due to internal incompetence or political strife.

While the Soviet enemy remained known, even familiar to average Americans through European-like skin color and facial features, an appearance that seemed close to home, its culture and ethnicity unable to be dehumanized and made sub-human by the state’s propagandists, both essential elements in conditioning the populace into accepting destruction and murder of the enemy, the newly minted enemy, the Arab bogeyman, faced no such obstacles. Indeed, years of conditioning by Hollywood vilifying Arabs had jumpstarted the American hatred of the Islamic culture, even before 9/11, planting the seeds of hatred and xenophobia that would fully sprout on the day catalyzing events unleashed a new American century and Americans were introduced to the dreaded Arab terrorist.

The dreaded Arab bogeyman, concocted as terrorist through years of state sponsored propaganda and manipulation, only fed into the historical hatred of people of color by xenophobic majorities. The decimation of tens of millions of Native Americans, their condemnation into hellholes called reservations, the prolonged enslavement of Africans, the decimation of Filipinos, Koreans and Vietnamese in Asia, the wars of aggression and senseless mass murder against Latin Americans spanning decades, the still prevalent racism against African Americans and Latinos, condemning most to lifelong imprisonment and abandonment in urban ghettos, and the recent jingoism and bigotry exhibited against Hispanic immigrants – nothing more than America’s new slave class – by a new generation of No Nothings are but a few examples of a time honored tradition of indifference, racism and hatred of peoples not possessing the characteristics of European lineage, of white Anglo-Saxon tradition. The Arab culture, then, would be treated no different.

A new scapegoat had been chosen, one alien and fear-inducing, for fear of the unknown is the greatest fear in the human condition. All that was needed to foment the fusion of alien dark skinned Arab with terrorism in the minds of the people would be a catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor, that would cement a hatred and anger never before seen on American shores, one that would blind and make fearful entire segments of the population. Of course the chosen patsies would perform the tasks assigned to them, oblivious to the eternal fame they would garner. Molded and nurtured, observed and guided, these patsies would become the face of evil incarnate, with the modern day Emmanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden, striking fear and terror in the minds of Americans.

It would be the events of 9/11 that would firmly, and permanently, transfix Al-Qaeda into the imaginations of 300 million Americans, striking fear and a Pavlovian induced schizophrenia into the populace with every pronouncement of its title. Blinded by fear, made devoid of reason and logic through the manipulations of terror, the American people would follow lies and deceptions without question; they would obey and become subservient to the dictates of the neocon ideology; they would take as truth and reality the fictions and charades offered by the state and the corporatist media.

It would be 9/11 that would forever alter the course of American history, along with the psyches of her people, becoming an untouchable, almost religious myth whose original story was sacrosanct, an untouchable story no matter how unrealistic it was. Of course, 9/11 became a most fortuitous event to several entities, benefiting, first and foremost, the military-industrial-energy complex, desperately in search of an enemy and a region to exploit, as well as those seeking American hegemony around the globe, and fitting perfectly with the master plans of the Likudnik neocons and their Project for a New American Century. Thanks to 9/11, America had her new enemy, one evolved to suit the best interests of America’s warmongering class, one designed as a failsafe entity that could be counted on, in relative confidence, for a perpetual stream of conflict, war, destruction, hegemony, profit and power.

Al-Qaeda, born and reared by America’s clandestine services, having evolved from Afghan freedom fighters battling the Soviet Union to evil incarnate after 9/11, a product of ceaseless marketing and constant manipulation of fragile and vulnerable psyches, would be the face of America’s new enemy, one without borders, politicians, standing armies and capitals, a bogeyman hidden and secretive, free to appear anywhere on the planet, alien and ambiguous, a mole popping up exactly where it was, and is, needed most. In short, al-Qaeda is the perfect enemy for America, capable of sprouting like a weed wherever and whenever America needed a place to attack, invade, conquer and pillage. Used as the perfect excuse by which to attack sovereign nations, labeling fighters or insurgents Al-Qaeda acts both as cover for the advancement of Empire and as the marketing ploy used to smear and label legitimate peoples’ movements fighting the criminality of the Empire itself.

When marketed to the American people by the propaganda of the state and the corporatist media, resistance fighters such as those in Iraq struggling to rid their lands and homes of the imperial overreach of the Empire become sub-human enemies whose death is accepted and indeed sought by the citizenry. When the Pavlovian term “Al-Qaeda” is ushered, all semblance of common sense and reason is lost upon the populace of the Empire, who has been trained to fear and hate when the utterance of the evildoers is mentioned. Designed to dehumanize valid resistance and freedom movements, the people of the Empire will thus only see terrorists and criminality when reality offers a different portrait. Such is the power of the label Al-Qaeda that it immediately makes terrorists of those fighting the evil and terrorism of the Empire itself. It validates and indeed obscures the high levels of state sponsored terrorism of the Empire. Such is the genius of those who concoct enemies for a living.

Make no mistake, 9/11 was a declaration of war upon the American people by the Enemy Within, acting as the first strike in a psychological war aimed at our emotions. A new Pearl Harbor was needed to unleash invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and eventually Iran, opening up new imperial hegemony. Freedoms and rights had to be eviscerated, the better to control the citizenry, the better to take advantage of technological innovations that would facilitate an omnipresent police state. Solidarity with little Sparta had to be increased, both to take worldwide pressure off its Nazi like treatment of Palestinians and to join at the hip two nations that were now seen to fight the same fight. Only two powers could dominate the Middle East, and with America establishing a permanent presence, with its military fomenting civil war between the region’s Sunni and Shia, following the old adage of divide and conquer, little Sparta could become the preeminent power in the region, its rivals destroyed and weakened, its threats curtailed and its hegemony growing.

Carefully planned and orchestrated, 9/11 and its myth, most of which was disseminated in the hours after the tragic events, with pieces of the still smoldering puzzle miraculously being put together at the speed of light, was designed as the new Pearl Harbor needed to militarize the citizenry into supporting the invasions and occupations of Middle East nations. In that sense, 9/11 was an event staged specifically to manipulate the emotions and psychology of the American people in the expectation that we would march lock step with the warmongering aspirations of the state. Its tragedy was calculated more as a shock to the psyche than as an act of war; its horrors were needed to act as conduit between calls for revenge, hatred of the Muslim world, and acquiescence to pre-9/11 invasion plans.

We the People were the targets on that day, not the state and certainly not our elected leaders. It was We the People that were the intended victims, not our freedoms or our way of life, not our happiness nor our comfortable lifestyles. Our minds were the ultimate prize, which is why the towers had to be demolished in such violent fashion, why the controlled demolitions were covered from every conceivable angle, to be played and replayed countless times, until they were seared into our memory, into our psyche, so that we would forever be victims of fear and terror manipulations, so that we would forever acknowledge and assist the military-industrial-energy complex in its quest for global hegemony.

For the neocons, two enormous towers and 3,000 human beings were an easy sacrifice compared to the dividends the Project for the New American Century would get in return. Two towers in a metropolis full of skyscrapers, along with 3,000 Americans out of 300 million, were simply the collateral damage needed to fulfill Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Thus, a New Pearl Harbor took place on 9/11, ushering in a new American Century, just as the neocons had predicted, just as they had fortuitously envisioned. Using the power of the corporatist media and its battalions of propagandists, the psychological war against the American people, with 9/11 as catalyst, was only beginning.

In the years that followed the manipulation of emotions to extract long-sought rewards and objectives would intensify, as would the subversion of freedoms, rights and liberties in the name of promising security to fragile and maimed American psyches. America’s real enemy, that which resides within, was about to unleash a barrage of fear and terror mongering the likes of which no people have ever encountered, in furtherance of the war against the American people, a war unlike any other, a war for our minds and psychology, against the very freedoms, rights and democracy we so cherish. For what manufactured terrorists could never take away, homegrown terrorists were slowly, yet surely, making extinct.

Cabal of Criminality

Democracy and freedom has never been of much importance to the neocon vultures, even as they spew these virtues as sacred dogma. Of course, what neocons say, and what they do, are almost always at odds with each other. They are experts at extolling the virtues of the grand lie, of lying pathologically to the people for the people’s supposed own good. Government secrecy is a hallmark of the neocons, a reality the world has seen since 2001. Keeping secrets and telling a constant stream of lies has defined the neocon administration of George W. Bush.

It is interesting that while they talk of democracy and freedom, they try to destroy both, abroad and at home. These vermin stand for Machiavelli-style rule, being comforted more by authoritarian governance than pure democracy. Indeed, democracy is anathema to their ideology, for they do not believe the masses can correctly govern themselves. Therefore, leaders possessing dictatorial powers must be created, the better to serve the interests of the neocon belief system. In fact, the stolen election of 2000, in the state of Florida, was a direct consequence of neocon planning and implementation, the first domino to fall in pursuit of their new American century. The ascension of Bush to the throne, a man who had promised them Iraq on a silver platter if elected, was of paramount importance. He was also a willing participant and firm believer in Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Once immediately safely selected to the throne, in fact, he began implementing its highly militarized and unilateral policies.

Knowing the final outcome, and triumph, of the 2000 election would inevitably come down to Florida, all machinations needed to steal the election were implemented, showcasing a disregard for the will of the people and democracy in pursuit of absolute power. Florida 2000 was the catalyst the neocons needed to begin altering the face of American governance and her role in the world. Everything that was to come hinged on the election in Florida, hence the audacity and the purposefulness seen in completely subverting American democracy. One day, it will be Florida 2000, along with 9/11, that will be studied, analyzed and seen for the history altering event that it was, becoming recognized as the first salvo in a war against the American people, the key that unlocked the gates of Hades upon the world. Without Florida 2000, history, and 21st century reality, would have perhaps never become familiar with the neocons and their demented and delusional ideology.

Thrust into power in 2001, an administration saturated with neocons in the Departments of War, Justice, State and the White House set about to alter the system of checks and balances and to begin implementing, step by militarized step, the blueprint called Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Once deeply ensconced inside the halls of power, once comfortable with the methods and systems of governance, once confident in their control and mastery over the state’s apparatus, once they had fully hijacked the government of the United States of America, they could finally implement the catalyzing event they so desperately wanted, and needed.

With their dirty and criminal hands at the helm of every strategic department and office, especially within the Department of War and the Office of the Vice President, a new Pearl Harbor was ready to be born, conceived through distracting war games and drills, allowed to breathe life through systematic planning and confusion. Possessing absolute power, becoming the hand guiding the American puppet, with the corporatist media as collaborators, the cabal of criminality declared war upon every American. On September 11, 2001, America’s worst and most heinous crime was perpetrated, along with her greatest criminal cover up. The 9/11 Commission Report would only cement the cover up, with yet one more neocon assigned to make sure a whitewash occurred.

After 9/11 the nest of vultures embedded in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President began manufacturing war, first in Afghanistan and later, much more famously, in Iraq. Today it is widely known the severity by which the Office of Special Plans manufactured and devised the lies that led to war, piping only information that would push the neocon agenda directly to the top, thereby bypassing career analysts and experts. Today it is widely known the lies told repeatedly to guide us into war, with warnings of mushroom clouds and WMD. That the neocon establishment led us into a war of choice, based on lies, deceptions and delusions, is not in question. Indeed, these architects of the Iraq War should never be allowed to forget that they involved America in the greatest strategic disaster in her history.

That the neocon establishment lied us into an immoral and illegal preemptive war, based on lies and fictions they knew to be false, in order to secure Empire’s petroleum and beachhead, not to mention Israel’s security, demands that these individuals be seen for what they really are: war criminals, surely guilty of crimes against humanity, fully responsible for the death of one million Iraqis, thousands of Afghanis, and 6,500 Americans. War criminals tried since World War II have been sentenced to death on far less heinous and egregious crimes.

To say the neocons should be sitting at The Hague, rotting away their existence, contemplating their crimes in perpetuity, locked away for centuries so they can no longer inflict carnage and evil on our world, is an understatement. These individuals, this cabal of criminality, those visible and clandestine in government, business and the media, those responsible for 9/11 and the Iraq War, from the architects to the propagandists, should be facing war crime charges in both New York City and Baghdad, forced to face trial for the human wickedness they have engendered.

In a more perfect world, they would be. In this world, unfortunately, they are promoted, rewarded, saluted and allowed to ride into the sunset, free to corrupt young minds, continue living in freedom, profiteering from their opinions and wreaking havoc upon the peoples of Earth. In a more perfect world, one different than the one we presently inhabit, there would be justice for all those murdered and maimed in pursuit of blatant ignorance, psychotic delusion and deranged ideology.

Project Iran

Instead, the terrorists living among us, the elements we call neocons, with their vast control of American government and media, and by consequence control over our lives, continue expanding their power and their pursuit of further decadence. Not content to dwell as history’s greatest fools, they maintain a course of further escalation in Iraq, still thinking possible a victory that will never arrive and a delusion that will never become reality. Delusion and denial being a neocon characteristic, they think further military action, this time against Iran, will salvage victory from the throes of defeat, giving America the birth pangs of triumph from the calamity of debacle and quagmire.

Enraptured by their longtime hatred of Iran and its supposed threat to Israeli hegemony, the neocon element has once more gone on a fairy tale adventure, this time by trying to get America to do Israel’s bidding. The same playbook once used to cajole us into the Iraq debacle has been taken out of the closet, wiped free of dust, and implemented throughout the neocon world. This time, however, the neocon infestation is less prevalent in government, so they must resort to their nests in think tanks and lobbying offices, along with their vast power in the corporatist media, to sell, convince, connive and foment a war between Iran and America. With so many people in government aware of their constant malfeasance, however, the road to warmonger heaven has been a bit more difficult.

This explains why the corporatist media, doing the bidding of Israeli interests, has become a major player in the Iran propaganda campaign. Without the Office of Special Plans, with many military personnel aware of the techniques of the “crazies”, with deeper scrutiny by the public and America’s intelligence agencies, and with many officials aware of the consequences of a war with Iran, the neocons have had to bombard the airwaves with the lies, deceptions and manipulations needed to once again bamboozle the Empire into a war of choice.

It is from inside the corporatist media, with help from neocon think tanks and Israeli interests, where the propaganda is in full swing, where neocons are given an open microphone, a camera to look at, and where the interests of the state of Israel are given credence. It is from the inner doings of the corporatist media where war with Iran is being conditioned into our minds, for the Enemy Within knows it has less than two years left to destroy its hegemonic rival.

Sensing desperation that Iran has yet to be attacked, thanks in large measure to the disaster unfolding in Iraq, the neocons may yet resort to desperate measures, perhaps even another false flag operation blamed on Al-Qaeda, working for Iran, which would again become a catalyzing event unfolding yet another new Pearl Harbor. When dealing with psychotics of this nature, nothing should be discounted, and nothing should be left to chance.

As always emanating from the mouths of America’s most vile criminal element and terrorists extraordinaire, better known as the neoconservatives, the false alarms and war trumpets now being heard are part of a careful and methodical campaign of psychological warfare against the American people. A continuance of the psychological operation launched against America on 9/11, that catalyzing event granting New Pearl Harbors life and a New American Century sustenance, the latest act of manipulation is designed to make evildoers of the Iranian people, turning Iran into a scapegoat for the disaster unfolding in Iraq.

Such is the debacle in Iraq, created by the delusions, complete ignorance and gross incompetence of the neocons that, since American exceptionalism prevents America from ever making mistakes, being outwitted or admitting defeat, an easy scapegoat must be fomented to take the blame for the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy. Enter the puppet Iraq government and Iran, two easy targets offered up as the sacrificial lamb to a perpetually ignorant, delusional and completely devolving populace that would much sooner believe outside forces were to blame for the inevitable defeat than realize that the myths of American grandeur are nothing but the fairy tale propaganda of a corporatist state.

Almost on a daily basis, this group of terrorists, for no other word can best describe the neocons, is systematically cementing into the American conscious the idea of attacking and bombing Iran, a nation that poses no military threat to America, under the rubric of terrorism, mushroom clouds and Hitler-like evil, thereby extending forward a fictional war on terror along with an already disastrous debacle in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Once more a Muslim nation is about to be attacked, as always following the blueprint of the neocon Mein Kampf, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. More and more Iran is being blamed for arming the Iraqi – and now Afghan – resistance, training its fighters and financing its activities. That no proof has yet to appear, even among a barrage of accusations, should give one pause as to the validity of such asinine propaganda and should leave no doubt in whose hands the corporatist media lies.

For the neocons, a group of Christian and Jewish Zionists, most with strong ties to the Israeli right-wing Likud Party, embedded throughout the halls of governance, business and the corporatist media, hate Persians, Arabs and Muslims with a passion only seen in xenophobic psychopaths. Their contempt for the peoples of the Middle East has become apparent in their actions and writings, their beliefs and hypocrisy, and in their defense of the Nazi-like treatment of Arabs by apartheid Israel, . It is this hatred that they hope to embed into America’s citizenry, enough that we think of Arabs as subhuman animals, and is therefore the reason for the saturation of the airwaves with anti-Arab, Persian and Muslim propaganda, designed to engender hatred and feelings of xenophobia against the non-European people of the Middle East. This manipulation, of course, has not relented since the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

These architects of New Pearl Harbors, fictional wars on terror and the Iraq War, names all too familiar within the reality of those who chose to pay attention and stay informed, have set their targets on another Islamic nation, now that Iraq is in disarray, as always pursuing the interests both of the so-called New American Century as well as those of Mother Israel. On both sides of the imaginary and nonexistent aisle, inside the bowels of political duopoly and the two headed hydra, where political prostitutes are allowed to roam free, as always paying homage to the hand that rocks the cradle, the shrieks of war are therefore getting louder, for the sugar daddy to Washington’s politicians has arrived to collect on dues and debt once paid.

From these charlatans and miscreants we somehow always chose to elect the war cries and the drums of war are growing in strength, for the time of preemptive criminality is almost upon us. For they have been given their marching orders from on high, where the high priests of war convene, where criminals and murderers congregate, and slowly their cohorts in the media are conditioning America to the inevitability of continuing war crimes and crimes upon humanity on Muslim lands.

Iran has been selected for destruction, becoming the prize of prizes, the ultimate reward in pursuit of a Project for a New American Century. The cries desperate for an attack on Iran are palpable, coming from all neocon nests and perching trees. The call to use nuclear weapons against the Persian state is also resounding loudly, becoming both an ominous declaration of neocon intentions and a warning to the world entire of ignoring and not halting the delusional cries of the crazies.

As expected, and predicted, the delusional Machiavelli’s we know as the neocons have increased their level of vitriol against Iran, in conjunction both with the coordinated propaganda campaign begun by their masters in Tel Aviv as well as through the perpetual dissemination of such manipulations by their stenographers and lackeys in the corporatist media. For the days are fast approaching, and all preparations must be made, before those living in delusion unleash their latest, and greatest, military blunder.

Ending the Occupation of America

We in America must be vigilant, for a poisonous snake cornered is at its most dangerous. Time is running out on the neocon element, which, sensing desperation, and the ticking sound of time, might resort to reenacting its greatest triumph, the manufacturing of new Pearl Harbors on American soil, sacrificing American lives in pursuit of Israeli interests, making thousands of citizens the collateral damage needed to attack Iran.

The Enemy Within lives among us, occupying our capital, owning our elected officials, saturating our airwaves, manipulating our minds, polluting our society. The Enemy Within is the only entity we must fear, for it is psychotic and delusional, criminal and devoid of scruples, ready at a moment’s notice to kill in the name of a new American Century, in the name of A Clean Break. The Enemy Within is our greatest threat, both to life and freedom, to limb and democracy, lingering in our midst, two faced and corrupt, pursuing the interests of militarization and those of little Sparta, trying to ensure hegemony for the Zionist ghetto, trying to establish proxy wars fought by the Empire in the interests of the dog’s tail.

The Enemy Within is the terrorist organization we must fear most, and fight against, declaring our own war on terror, our own fight against extremism and criminality. Our nation has been hijacked, dispossessed of its reputation and its treasure, her sons and daughters dying in the interests of corporatism and Empire, maimed due to delusion and ego. America lives under occupation, our freedoms and rights and liberties being made extinct by Machiavelli pretenders. A welfare state in the Middle East controls our elected officials, dictating policy that directly contradicts our own interests.

We are being transformed by the tools of the neocon element into a nation of xenophobic bigots, slowly being bred to hate scapegoats and concocted enemies. Our corporatist media has become the Department of Propaganda, a Ministry of Truth where reality is manufactured and truth sequestered, hidden in the deep dark recesses of censured stories and stifled dissent. Only the propaganda beneficial to the Enemy Within is allowed to grace our monitors and our newspapers; only the stories and individuals pushing for war are ever seen or heard. America is occupied, her capital hijacked by a malevolent cabal of criminality, caring only to perpetuate a war against the Arab world through action and reaction, eye for an eye, and inevitable blowback.

It is up to Americans, in valid resistance to authoritarian tendencies, to stop the crazies from unleashing hell on Iran and the Middle East. It is up to us to stop them before another Pearl Harbor strikes one of our cities, killing hundreds or thousands of our brothers and sisters. It is up to us, true patriots of the republic, to finally expel the occupiers from our land, thereby restoring a nation that has much to offer the world, perhaps finally becoming a beacon of light upon a city on a hill, surpassing even the myths of American state-sponsored propaganda. The real war on terror must begin, for the neocon terrorists must be thrown in the gulag they have created for the world.

If you are repulsed with the neocon plague afflicting our country, if you are tired of the warmongering and the manipulations, of the lies and profiteering, of elected representatives listening to foreign agents and not native citizens, if you are ready to put Americans’ interest first, second and third, and those of little welfare state Sparta in the dustbin of history, then get ready to confront the occupiers and hijackers, never letting them rest, never letting them speak or be seen publicly without being confronted with a litany of their crimes.

If the courts will not try them, then we must. If the media will not expose them, then we will. If the state will not prosecute them, then we should. If their peers will not shame them, then we most definitely will. Karma and justice should follow these crazies and criminals wherever they go, wherever they appear. If America no longer suits them thanks to our actions, then they are welcome to move elsewhere. We do not want them in our nation anymore. They are not welcome, for they have brought nothing but war, death, destruction, fear, terror, decadence and manipulations.

Peaceful resistance must commence, the occupation of America must end, the neocon reign must be extinguished and the crazies roaming our streets must never be allowed to hijack our country again.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

Enter the Empire

Comfort and Masquerades

The wealthiest nation-state the world has ever seen has for the last sixty years been standing atop the upper crust of humankind, basking in the splendor of unfathomable richness, enjoying unprecedented standards of living, accumulating power and control at tremendous speed and becoming, at the expense of the planet and its inhabitants, the latest incarnation of Rome. America, that city on a hill, from where modern man’s guiding light emanates, that nation anointed by man’s imaginary deity, has, since the end of World War II, become the most powerful nation humankind has ever produced.

Today, 300 million people live inside its borders, enjoying levels of comfort and luxury never before seen. America has for the last two centuries become the nation whose attractiveness has become a magnet to millions upon millions of immigrants from all corners of the globe. No other nation on Earth has the wealth of the United States, and only a few countries come close to matching its immense power. It is this enormous wealth and comfort, leaps beyond that of most nations, along with myriad number of freedoms and rights for decades granted its people, that compel humans everywhere to try to migrate inside its borders.

Indeed, while most people of the world, billions strong, still struggle to subsist and survive on a daily basis, scrapping to eat, clothe and house themselves, living in shantytowns and slums and shacks and ghettos and cardboard huts, lacking the basic infrastructure and investments for adequate living, most citizens of the new Rome face no such hurdles or difficulties. To the millions residing inside the bowels of the Empire, the obstacles, anxieties and problems facing billions never become an issue or a reality that must be confronted on a personal and daily basis. Indeed, the gap between Americans’ standards of living and that of most of the world’s people is enormous to the point of absurdity.

Most Americans do not go hungry, they do not subsist on two or five dollars a day, or anywhere close to that, having to toil in sweatshops or relying for food on the scavenger techniques of family members combing through a landfill. They do not have to combat embedded corruption or the complete looting of their treasure. Americans have not had to live in tyranny, in dictatorship, in despotism, having to suffer the consequences of turmoil, of disease, mass drought and internal strife. They have not had to suffer through insecurity, war, and state sanctioned rape and murder.

Americans enjoy liberties, freedoms and rights that few peoples are allowed to possess in their native lands. In fact, it is those nation-states that are under the grip of America, those with puppet regimes loyal to the Empire and not their people, that paradoxically are prevented from enjoying the freedoms and rights and liberties that the Empire bestows upon its populace. It is those American sponsored dictators, royalty and puppet politicians that are often cited for fostering and nurturing the worst violations of human rights. It is in those foreign lands dominated by America where one is likely to find that democracy is non-existent and the rights of the people easily expendable.

Yet, it is those freedoms that Americans take for granted that are in many instances denied to billions, and it is those rights strongly desired by billions that are presently being eroded in America by the indifference of millions. For, in reality, the Empire has rarely, if ever, cared for the rights and freedoms of the peoples of the world, though to hear her words would be to believe the opposite. Actions, however, speak louder than words. And in her actions, the Empire has shown an indifference to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for billions of human beings. This truth can be seen in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where for years billions of people have been held captive – much to their detriment and suffering – to America and her puppets and proctors.

To the elite that control the Empire, the principles of the American Constitution and Bill of Rights are but a hollow illusion designed to wet the pants of human beings everywhere, especially to the citizens of the Empire itself. Like much of what America stands for, with its glazed and revisionist history, its self-created exceptionalism, its fictional values and beliefs, these documents are but a myth used as a tool to pacify and retain a compliant people. By offering the necessary amount of freedoms and rights, by allowing us to have liberties we demand, the elite placate the fire within us, containing a populace that is better controlled through calmness than by anger and animosity. Content with our conditioned illusions and myths, our belief that we live in the greatest nation the world has ever seen, we are less likely to stir trouble, even as the Empire decimates and subjugates the planet.

There is no doubt that those living inside the belly of the Empire have a much better life than most human beings, yet it is also true that because of this comfort level, because of our high standards of living, we are less likely to rise in anger or frustration. We are less likely to question the state or its elite, thereby helping to maintain a status quo where the powerful are free to grow in power not only over the rest of the world, but over us as well. Because we live in adequate comfort, with few worries of survival or fears of entering perpetual indigence, we are less likely to demand change or confront the criminality of leaders.

Indeed, the genius behind our silent passivity, our indifference to confront wrongdoing, our inability to detect what is being done to us, is in the elite giving us a bigger piece of the pie than has ever been given the masses. The elite of the Empire has found that by granting us slightly larger crumbs, bones and scraps than before, by willing to forego slight sums of change, the masses can be more easily directed and controlled. By giving us what amounts to a comfortable lifestyle, beyond the realm of squalor and subsistence, under the illusion that we own our own destiny, that we are not serfs or slaves to the system, the elite have discovered a formula that in essence is the gift that keeps on giving.

Not only do the masses remain passive and quiet, not only do they obey commands better and become more acquiescent to the dictates of the elite, they also become even bigger cogs in the system itself, becoming the spark plugs of Empire, the automatons of capitalism, consuming and producing, producing and consuming, returning all wages earned back to their masters, all for a little extra comfort, a little extra ego boosting. The elite formula for success is thus an attack on our human need to live in comfort, in attacking our inability to control our vices such as greed, gluttony and the desire to continue accumulating material wealth.

Thanks to the extra crumbs, bones and scraps given to us the elite are better able to unleash the machinations of the system upon our unsuspecting masses. Together with the continued and purposeful dumbing down of America’s youth and the incessant manipulation of our minds through television, the comfort level we have today – though never before attained by human beings – has created a populace slow to wake and slower still to question.

The genius of all three mechanisms mentioned above, intertwined and fused together like a new strand of mutated DNA, is that the modern day version of Rome is free to do as it pleases, both domestically and abroad, without suffering the repercussions and animosity of its citizens. With its most potent enemy – the people themselves – contained and in check, free of anger and the flames of dissent, the elite at the helm of the Empire can stay the course well into the future, heading straight to long-planned goals of continued exploitation, subjugation and control over billions of human beings.

Thus can be seen in this present incarnation of Empire building that, unlike most nations, domestic disturbance, protest and dissent in America remains a controllable nuisance bearing no threat to the system. Compliant and obedient, the American people have little to complain about, certainly no grievances to bear or demands to be made, unlike so many billions of human beings who take to the streets in united anger and resentment, their flames still lit passionately with the call of injustice or the shout of corruption. In many parts of the world, taking to the streets to demand change remains a power not yet extinguished. In America, this power of the people has for all intents and purposes been made obsolete, with the fire of protest and dissent now extinguished by a flame-retardant called greed, gluttony and the pursuit of materialistic comfort.

Empire Addicted, People Castrated

The materialist freedoms given over the last two centuries to the citizens of America have allowed the nation to prosper magnificently in the short run. However, these freedoms have been granted without seeing or envisioning the irreparable damage being done to it in the long term. It can be said that in order to secure short-term prosperity and unparalleled wealth accumulation, the long run success of the Empire has been sacrificed, for unsustainable accumulation of wealth cannot be maintained without destroying the very bosom that feeds it sustenance in the first place. Thus, in a battle between saving the environment and saving the Empire, the environment will sadly, and to our great detriment, always lose.

The destruction of the environment, from where natural resources are derived, later becoming the wealth and capital of the Empire, will thus continue unabatedly until it can be exploited no longer, for the environment is a finite resource, not an unending stream of dollar bills coming off the printing presses. With the depletion of the world’s environment and its resources already under tremendous strain and pressure, the Empire will not be able to sustain its wealth and power, forcing it to confront the reality that the same short-term thinking that engendered its power has now guaranteed its collapse. To combat this potential threat to its hegemony, a nation already saturated in arrogance will become even more predatory, more imperialist, forced through greed and gluttony to target regions of the planet whose resources, both human and natural, it desperately craves.

Like a heroin addict desperately in search of a fix, a rising Empire whose vision and greed only allowed it to see in the exploitation of the short term will find itself in need of an ever-greater hit, for like an addict, ever more quantities are needed to satisfy an ever-increasing craving for a high. Therefore, in its pursuit for the last vestiges of wealth accumulation through resource exploitation, the Empire will be forced to become ever more authoritarian, both at home and abroad. It will become ever more desperate, ever more willing to push the limits of human morality. To sustain itself, to attain the same level of gluttony that only increases with each passing decade, the world entire will become fair game to the war machine of the Empire. This will of course include its citizens as well, for most have been, are and will become expendable in the pursuit of global hegemony.

The very freedoms and rights of the citizenry will in the approaching future become hindrances in sustaining and expanding the Empire, for to maintain and enhance its power well into the future, the Empire must inevitably become even more imperialist, more predatory, more criminal in nature. In short, in order to sustain its ever-growing appetite, its addiction to comfort and wealth, it must dominate ever more egregiously the nations, peoples and resources of the world. The quest for Empire is akin to making a deal with the devil, though the demons you create along the way are not beholden to any deal. And, as invariably happens, imperialism and the quest for Empire abroad results in the loss of freedoms, rights and liberties at home, for Empire and freedom are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed concepts.

In order to dominate nations and peoples, in order to rape and pillage and exploit foreign resources and land, the Empire must make extinct democracy at home, for the will of the people must not be allowed to be heard. It must destroy freedoms and rights, the better to control a population, the better to rule an Empire. Inevitably, the Empire fears its own people most, for only the people can put a stop to it and its imperialist machinations. Therefore, the power granted the people must be methodically altered or abolished, whichever is easiest to accomplish, whichever is cheaper to implement.

Done gradually, over the course of years, quietly and without debate, the elite thus succeed in castrating the means by which the people can light the flame of change. Once the masses wake to a nation without rights and freedoms, once they open their eyes to a state without democracy and liberty, it is too late to rise in unity. The damage has been done, the laws have been erased, the rights have been eviscerated. Before the masses know it, under the rubric of fear and insecurity, under the guise of patriotism and defending the fatherland, democracy has been replaced by authoritarianism, rights and freedoms have given way to a police state, and liberty’s death knell has begun to sound the last cries of a nation that is no more.

In 21st century America, the so-called New American Century, the fireworks ushering in the rise and further pursuit of Empire began on September 11, 2001. On that day, as anybody with an IQ of over 80 can plainly see, as has become quite apparent to anyone still not blinded by faith or vested interests, the World Trade Center was demolished by elements of the American government and the military-industrial-energy complex. Corporatist America had risen from the ashes and pulverized concrete of lower Manhattan, unleashing the psychological war on the American people needed to embark on a course for naked imperialism. What had for decades been done clandestinely through market colonialism and economic genocide would suddenly be made visible through the unleashing of American military might.

While imperial building through clandestine domination had succeeded brilliantly over the years, it would only be through military might and conquest that Empire could continue its heavenly dictum of manifest destiny. Only through the acquiescence of the masses could Project Empire be allowed to flourish. Using the fear and insecurity of the people against themselves, using the chosen Arab scapegoat as America’s new evildoer extraordinaire, marketing the much needed protection of the nation against dark-skinned bogeymen, the usurpation of our freedoms and rights commenced, just as the elite had always wished, just as had been planned.

The subsequent Patriot Act and its progeny, the acceptance of torture and false imprisonment, the decimation of habeas corpus, due process and the Constitution, the shredding of the Bill of Rights, the burning of the Geneva Convention and the marginalization of the United Nations has utterly and devastatingly destroyed the last 200 years of human enlightenment. Yet not surprisingly, the American people have remained silent and passive to a one sided war against their freedoms and rights, choosing to believe their protection from fictional enemies is worth the complete destruction of their cherished freedoms.

Such is the genius of comfort, materialism, television, dumbed down education and the inside job of 9/11 that today most Americans remain oblivious to the present state of their country, and their lives. Through the horrific acts of 9/11, the people consented, under the spell of hatred, in an orgy of warmongering rapture, to the continued assault both of their last remaining rights and to an undeclared war to build and maintain Empire.

The consequences of this submissive act will haunt the world and us for years to come.

Extinction and Usurpation

With every war for resources, quest for land and battle for geostrategic and geopolitical territory the Empire will face growing opposition from many of its own citizens, most tired of and opposed to war, tired of sacrificing, both treasure and blood, and many outraged at the crimes of their government. With growing unpopularity at what is being done, with growing strains on the masses and with the resulting blowback from nations and peoples being threatened, attacked and decimated, the state will erode all those powers granted the people.

Over the course of time, the state will make extinct the freedoms and liberties and rights that no longer serve the interests of the Empire and its elite. For to the state and its Establishment, those powers given the People over 200 years ago have no more relevancy in the modern world, in the modern America, a nation simply fulfilling its heavenly mandate of manifest destiny. To those in power the corporatist element now running the nation, democracy, freedom, rights and liberties are an outmoded inconvenience, having become a hindrance in governing what is invariably turning into an authoritarian state. For we have become the Pax Americana, an empire to rival and surpass Rome, fulfilling a mandate sent from the imaginary god above.

In its pursuit of Empire, America is only laying claim to a path she has taken since its inception, that of taking the logical giant leap beyond her shores and borders, creating a reality far beyond the known, or expected, creating for herself a righteous seat beside the great empires of history, following manifest destiny to the upper reaches of human achievement, fulfilling the destiny her delusional elite undoubtedly have concocted for themselves. This path to Empire, to the detriment of billions, including millions within her borders, seems like the next step for a nation-state that since its inception has never stopped expanding, either economically or territorially, incorporating greed and gluttony into its mantra, in the process laying waste to man and land in unfathomable measures, caring nothing for environmental degradation, carbon dioxide emissions, economic strangulation, mass death, untold suffering and the inescapable poverty for billions of human beings.

The United States of the Founding Fathers, of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has long since vanished over the last century, victim to its own success, its own addictions and greed. It is no more, even if it ever was, even if we believe it to still be. Capitalism, in its most toxic stages, along with unrestrained power and control by the elite, has made sure of that. Like a greedy, pathological corporation, America has grown by leaps and bounds, becoming addicted to its own hubris, its own wealth, arrogantly wishing the destruction of competition and the monopolization of its culture. It has undertaken a hostile takeover of the world, exploiting, oppressing, invading and subjugating both people and land, caring only for power and profit, reaching out to new markets for cheap labor and resources. Like a predatory corporation, it has bought out regulating bodies, today controlling all aspects of the World Bank, the IMF, WTO and the United Nations, dictating to the world how reality will be run.

The America we believe in is no more and this reality must be understood by the people residing inside its bowels. The America of our youthful brainwashing, of our lifelong conditioning, of fictional television shows, of our dreams and ideals is a myth, a fantasy that, while ingrained deeply into our minds, must be understood for the reality that it at present is. It has become a Grim Reaper for millions, an economic torturer to millions more, using both economic and financial methods to ruin the lives of billions whose only faults lie in being born in lands the Empire covets, underneath resources her insides crave.

It destroys families and livelihoods through its control of banks, corporations, governments and neoliberal institutions, creating mass poverty and hunger, mass unemployment and oppression, mass migration north. For it is easy to blame brown skinned immigrants for crossing as undocumented workers, traversing scorching hot deserts to reach a better life, risking death and crime to seek the pursuit of happiness. For when food runs out man must go in search of it, lest he stay to die of hunger.

Of course to millions of the Empire’s citizens, themselves products of migration, it is much harder to accept that it is the Empire itself, and its consumer gluttony in particular, that demands the exploitation of third world labor and resources, of cheap foodstuffs, timber, oil and minerals. It is the Empire itself that creates the conditions by which the poor of the world are forced to migrate inside America. Unable to compete with unfair trade practices that make farming unprofitable, unable to secure employment because the Empire’s tentacles destroy a nation’s safety net, unable to afford the Empire’s products and prices, unable to make a living due to privatization of the state’s enterprises, forced to accept the slave wages offered by the Empire’s corporations, the poor of a nation, especially one bordering the Empire itself, must make a decision that to anybody with an ounce of empathy, is quite obvious.

Such is reality for billions of humans who stand not a chance at having a fruitful life as long as the Empire dominates and controls human reality, all throughout the world, as long as its citizens continue to believe it is American exceptionalism, not its market colonialism and economic genocide, that are the true reason for the migration of today’s undesirables and untouchables into America. It is this delusion, that America is the great city on a hill, the true beacon of light for the world, and not the reality that it is the great birth mother of human suffering and indigence, that must be made extinct.

Empire or no empire, whether from developed or undeveloped lands, we are all humans, bleeding the same color, suffering the same fears, experiencing the same emotions. We, all 6.7 billion of us, are stuck in this little planet. We are all in this human reality together.

Delusions of Manifest Destiny

What began as a great experiment in human enlightenment has turned into a genetically modified monster, going from late 18th century miracle to a phenomenon on steroids, catapulting beyond its own age, wisdom and control, becoming an overgrown Frankenstein now unleashing terror upon the world. Once a state among nations, America has become an Empire among client states, its massive tentacles reaching to all corners of the planet. America is indeed an Empire, transforming itself over the last sixty years into a giant monolith, becoming a schoolyard bully, an insecure tyrant, pretending to be humankind’s salvation, clandestinely assuring our collapse.

Its militancy continues to grow, with 750 military bases worldwide. It invests more on military spending than the entire world combined, obviously preferring the nurturing of soldiers than the education of its people. For years it has abandoned the needs of its people, showing the world that its priorities lie in expansion, exploitation and in dumbing down its citizenry than in providing healthcare and education, even as it is the wealthiest nation on the planet. It has made it known that it prefers to lead through aggression and military might than in the ability and intelligence of its people. It has shown that it cares nothing for its citizens, seeing them as expendable automatons, mere cogs in a system of unsustainable production and consumption. To the elite, we are collateral damage in pursuit of Empire, whether we die in new Pearl Harbors or in the inevitable blowback of an Empire gone awry.

The Empire, thinking itself exceptional and omnipotent, has begun overextending itself throughout the world. It has begun to rub shoulders with powerful and potential adversaries. It has unleashed forces in Central Asia that might invariably become the harbinger of armed conflict between itself and Russia and China. The world’s last remaining oil fields will soon become battlefields between the world’s heavyweights, for the age of resource wars is upon us. Soon the dwindling supplies of natural resources, with oil and water being the most important, will create violent competitions among nations and peoples, for embedded in our nature is the instinct of survival. In the next few decades we will witness war like we have never seen it, with the Empire at the helm, eager to conquer and destroy, eager to defend puppets and tyrants, ready to exploit and control the last vestiges of humankind’s resources.

The exploitation of Africa, central Asia and perhaps South America is setting the world on a collision course with an enormous iceberg whose giant size we cannot yet see, or fathom. Wars between the Empire and would-be superpowers, with the potential to end all life on Earth at the push of a few buttons, could be an inevitable result of the confrontation that is slowly, but surely, growing and heating up. This trend can be seen, and is readily apparent, through a pattern of behavior that the Empire is exhibiting, thinking itself the heir to Rome, an unbeatable entity whose reign will last a millennia. This hubris can be seen through threats, intimidation tactics, over-extension into lands controlled by others and through its reckless endeavor to upset the global balance of states. With such arrogance, greed and an addiction to its consumerist and capitalist system, with so little regard for history and its many lessons, can war with Russia or China be far behind? Will future wars of aggression against third-world nations rich in natural resources continue?

Will the American people ever wake up to the destruction of their cherished rights and freedoms, knowing that one more 9/11 false flag type incident will be enough for the elite to make extinct all remaining illusions of liberty and democracy? The lust for Empire in America has blinded the elite to reality, and its people to the approaching storm. The world entire has realized the danger to the world of the unrivaled superpower, hijacked by greed and addiction to vice.

Rising superpowers are aware they are being targeted and threatened, for what was the Iraq invasion turned debacle but a preemptive move against Russia, China, India and the European Union, designed to control Iraq’s vast oil fields? What is the approaching storm in Iran but the continuation of the Empire’s power grab of natural resources, of putting in place those nations who have not fallen in line with the Empire’s vision of the future? What is Afghanistan but a beachhead into central Asia, a pipeline route to vast oil fields, a grand prize in the great chess match between nations?

In the grand chessboard of geostrategic and geopolitical realpolitik, the invasion and occupation of Iraq served notice that the Empire was declaring the 21st century America’s century, fully willing to embark on a most ominous journey of resource acquisition and control, through war, if it had to, through peace, if rivals acquiesced and submitted, bending down to kiss the royal ring of Empire. Iraq was and is seen as a new American colony, its oil now belonging to the Anglo-American enterprise, its 100 acre embassy, larger than Vatican City, serving to remind the world that Iraq will never be abandoned, it will never be relinquished. Its prize, besides the oil fields, is the geostrategic location it provides, opening up a giant military presence in the Middle East and central Asia. The availability of its two rivers, providing enormous amounts of water to the Arab world, assures America of control over the Middle East in this respect as well.

The endgame, of course, is Empire, the inevitable continuation of manifest destiny, begun long ago, traversing through time and space, exterminating everything in its way. The opportunity to be recorded in history as a rival to Rome has also become a large incentive to those whose egos are larger than their intellect. The endgame, as always in the system called capitalism, is resource control, human exploitation, wealth maximization, competitor extermination and power unrivaled.

This is the new ideology of the new America, not your grandfather’s or mother’s nation, not the country of innocence, of yesteryear, of tradition, altruism and virtue. The new America is the Pax Americana, where to see its reality one must look at its actions, not its public relations, its trends, not its words. In this new America you and I are mere numbers, cogs in the system, the collateral damage in the pursuit of Empire. In this new America, profit is put ahead of people, the rights of corporations are placed in front of those of humans and the freedoms and liberties we once enjoyed are mere hindrances and obstacles to those wishing to destroy the very fabric of what once was a great beacon on a hill.

Enter the Empire, but be made aware, through its door lies a new paradigm, a new America, land of the meek, home of the slave. Through rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air nations are attacked, thousands of people are killed. In the dawn’s early light can we see the carcass of dying freedoms and rights, of a democracy that is but a mirage of control, a predetermined manipulation. In the new America We the People have become We the Sheeple. The government of, by and for the People is now a government of, by and for the Corporations. We are ruled by corporatists and criminals, and soon a police state we will have.

Enter the Empire at your own risk, for she cares not an ounce for you or me, her beauty destroyed by greed and gluttony, her virtue made extinct by fascists and elites. Her foundations have crumbled, her pillars have collapsed. Where once was a city on a hill today only ruins of a once great nation stand, buried in the indifference and laziness and passivity of her once great people. The beacon of light that once shone bright no longer lights the world, for its flame now stands extinguished, its warm and comfortable glow made extinct by our own delusions of exceptionalism.

America is the Empire called, inevitably destined to fall, just as all Empire’s fall, a result of her greed, gluttony and arrogance, of her ignorance and her abandonment of the People. For while in the short term the Empire may seem prodigious and powerful, unrivaled and unmatched, history and the human condition teach us that in the long term she will overreach, overextend, become ever-more corrupted and become, invariably, the latest victim to her imperial hubris, the last creature to suffer her unwelcome fate.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

The New World Order, the Theocrat in Washington

Part Seventeen

General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, appeared at the Good Shepard Community Church in Boring, Oregon in June 2003, not the first or last of such events. During his multimedia presentation he stated: “Now ask yourself: Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? … He’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this. God put him there to lead not only this nation but to lead the world in such a time as this.” [1]

He further stated, “We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God, have been raised for such a time as this.” This is reminiscent of the Old Testament phrase: “and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” [2] Some commentators, like Patrick Buchanan, saw nothing wrong with what Boykin said. Others viewed any hint of criticism as an attack on Christian values by the allegedly devious Democratic Party. [3]

The concept that “God installed Bush” was disseminated by naïve pastors to numerous congregations. Consequently, prior to the Iraqi invasion, James Merritt, a former Southern Baptist Convention president, confirmed Bush’s self-proclaimed status as “God’s man for this hour” particularly because of the events of 9/11. [4] So God installed Bush as a defender, someone to lead Americans into an immoral war? Yet this concept was disseminated throughout Christendom and Bush became the new leader of the religious right in America.

Another subtle selling of the Iraqi invasion is defined in the best-selling book series Left Behind by Reverend Timothy LaHaye, one of the original founders, along with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority. LaHaye is a past president of the Council for National Policy, “a secretive forum, created in 1981, for leading US conservative political leaders, financiers and religious right activist leaders.” Hatching plots behind the closed doors of secrecy proves useful to the elitists. How many earth-shaking, secret societies does the average person belong to? As mentioned in previous articles, Prescott, George H. W. and George W. Bush all belonged to Skull & Bones, also known as the Brotherhood of Death. Prescott, grandfather of George W, provided financial aid to Hitler through the Union Banking Company of which he was president. [5]

LaHaye’s novels, written with collaborator Jerry Jenkins, are allegedly based on biblical prophecies about the return of Jesus after a battle between God and Satan. It may have been what inspired the Southern Baptist Conference, the largest Protestant denomination, to support the war in Iraq, despite their official 2000 policy. [6] “Evangelicals have also supported the Bush administration’s campaign to democratize Iraq more consistently than most other domestic groups, according to polls conducted earlier this year (2006) by both Pew and Zogby International.” [7]

Many religious leaders have eschewed America’s current warfare. Of course they cannot preach an anti-war sermon without retribution. [8] However, religious leaders who endorse war, with its death and mutilation, rarely suffer any negative consequences. War-loving leaders, with their minions, are not unique as evidenced by former crusades, large and small. Bill Press suggests the following war criteria:

• There must be a just cause for a war.
• A just war can be waged only as a last resort.
• The ultimate objective of war must be to bring peace.
• There must be serious prospect of success; bloodshed without hope of victory cannot be justified.
• The war must be declared by a legitimate authority; no private individuals or groups can launch a war.
• The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered.
• Noncombatants must not be intentionally harmed.
• Prisoners and conquered peoples must be treated justly. [9]

Iraq did not perpetuate 9/11 and had no plans or military capacity to attack the United States. [10] Anti-war, demonized Democrats are not seen as compassionate, caring, or even Christian but simply unpatriotic or un-American. Yet, despite their “godlessness,” they regularly appear more Christian and compassionate than the religiously correct Republicans. No, I am not a Democrat nor a Republican.

Some theocons, assembled as the Apostolic Congress, work “hand in hand” with Bush to develop domestic and Middle East policies. Apparently, our elected Congress has again abdicated their responsibility to others who apparently dictate policy that is compatible with their “end-time rapture” objectives.

“The problem is not that George W. Bush is discussing policy with people who press right-wing solutions to achieve peace in the Middle East, or with devout Christians. It is that he is discussing policy with Christians who might not care about peace at all — at least until the rapture.” [11] On the other hand, Bush refused to meet with Jim Wallis and his organization, Call to Renewal, to discuss a peaceful, weaponless alternative to the Iraqi invasion. [12]

Nonetheless, Bush did accept a suggestion from Wallis before the inauguration:
“In December 2000, Bush sat in the classroom of a Baptist church in Austin, Texas, with 30 or so clergy members and asked, ‘How do I speak to the soul of the nation?’ … In one cluster, Bush and Wallis talked of their journeys.”

“I’ve never lived around poor people,” Wallis remembers Bush saying. “I don’t know what they think. I really don’t know what they think. I’m a white Republican guy who doesn’t get it. How do I get it?” Not a shocking statement from a member of the elite country club set – born in the lap of luxury with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth! His privileged status, rather than his qualifications, installed him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Wallis recalls replying, “You need to listen to the poor and those who live and work with poor people.”

“Bush called over his speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and said, ‘I want you to hear this.’ A month later, an almost identical line – ‘many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do’ — ended up in the inaugural address.” [13]

Self-righteousness, frequently a by-product of fundamentalism, is dangerous whether it is Christian, Islam, or any other religion. Dr. Calvin Morris, executive director of the Chicago-based Community Renewal Society, told World Magazine (Marvin Olasky is the magazine’s editor-in-chief), “It is ironic, and dangerously so, that the present Bush administration rails against the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while asserting a similar fundamentalism of its own. This administration needs to realize that God is not an adherent of American foreign policy, but a God above all nations and ideologies.” [14]

This “crusade” against terror is stripping citizens of their constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms. War on anything – drugs, poverty, crime, cancer, Aids, pornography or terrorism – is bogus. Most frequently it constitutes money going from the voter’s pockets into the pockets of big business without any recognizable benefit to the citizens. Our current “war on terrorism” constitutes a war against individual freedoms. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in speaking about military warfare, reminded us: “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.” [15]

“I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe… Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger.” Daniel Webster [16]

Any leader who wishes to accrue power or improve ratings can use war, without the troublesome ordeal of constitutional congressional approval. “Of course, as a self-described ‘messenger’ of God who was ‘praying for strength to do the Lord’s will,’ Bush was not troubled about shredding a little secular document called the U.S. Constitution.” [17]

Some fundamentalists are attempting to establish a “God-centered government” with total control over every aspect of our lives. This intolerant control would eliminate all religious freedom, except that proscribed by the ruling party. Our government is only obliged to punish illegal behavior, not satanically exercise control over individual beliefs and conscience. Many Christian fundamentalists endorse punitive punishment, harsh sentencing for all criminals, nuclear war, and starving sanctions for tens of thousands. They adamantly endorse death yet vehemently oppose, often with violence, abortion. Is it genuine opposition or “stone-throwing” judgments against assumed “evil” behavior or is it about unrighteous dominion (control)? What is it with some Christians who justify selective violence? Where is Christian mercy in this so-called godly-genocidal war?

Across the globe, our military is enforcing democracy on oil-rich Iraq while obliterating evil-doers – that is, anyone who resists occupation. Hitler focused on the Jews, Bush, not as definitive, focuses on obscure terrorists and open-ended warfare. Not surprisingly, Hitler joined a secret society, the Thule Society in 1919 whose membership later became the foundation of the Nazi Party. [18] He apparently did whatever was required to gain support and power including the manipulation of religion. He said: “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” [19] Hitler, despite claims to the contrary was an alleged Christian; he manipulated the religious populace and successfully, subtly merged religion and politics, with appropriate photo ops and speeches, all for political power with its inherent financial perks and big bucks for the military-industrial-complex. It is all about control, money and the resources of the earth!

German Soldiers wore belt buckles inscribed with the following: “Gott mit uns” (God is with us). Hitler’s troops were frequently sprinkled with holy water by the priests. Before fascism, before Hitler and his political power grab, facilitated by the Reichstag fire, Germany was a Christian country whose obedient citizens were programmed and propagandized to blindly follow all authority figures, political and ecclesiastical. No questions asked! “The Nazis demonized and then destroyed their enemies, after first intimidating and then liquidating their domestic opponents. The German propaganda machine cranked out misinformation and outright lies in the state-supported media, suppressing the truth and threatening anyone who dared to speak or print opposition to the war regime.” [20] “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law (as well as the church) on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.” Historian Alan Bullock

Repetitive war indoctrination and American imperialism have replaced the Sermon on the Mount. Twisting the scriptures for theocon political objectives is trusting in the “arm of flesh.” [21] We need to distinguish truth amongst the “many kinds of voices” abroad in the land. None of them are without significance. [22] Christians need to wake up, speak up and stand up for genuine Christian ideals!

One of the fourteen defining characteristics of fascism is: “Religion and Government are Intertwined – Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.” [23] Obviously, the common religion in America is Christianity.

“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.” [24]

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the Flag – and Carrying a Cross.” [25] Sinclair Lewis

Allegedly, scripturally-based churches are granting allegiance to the government and their mass mutilation and killing of strangers. Do we actually believe that the lives of foreigners have less value than our own? Silent Christian spectators acquiesce to and even participate in those atrocities, fueled by ardent nationalism and indoctrinated against an alleged enemy. We are not answerable to our government employees (the elected). We cannot justifiably say “I was just following orders.” The government is accountable to the electorate. We are all, however, accountable to God.

[1] With God on Their Side How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush’s White House by Esther Kaplan, p. 21 See also How the Republicans Stole Christmas by Bill Press, p. 11
[2] Old Testament, Esther 4:14
[3] William G. Boykin
[4] How the Republicans Stole Christmas by Bill Press, p. 11
[5] George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin
[6] How the Republicans Stole Christmas by Bill Press, p. 82
[7] Christian Evangelicals and U.S. Foreign Policy
[8] Religious Right Needs To Defend All Saints Episcopal by Chuck Baldwin
[9] How the Republicans Stole Christmas by Bill Press, p. 76
[10] Ibid p. 80
[11] In Line for the Rapture, See also Stop Spiritual Abuse
[12] How the Republicans Stole Christmas by Bill Press, p. 88
[13] Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush By Ron Suskind, Published: October 17, 2004 See also:
Inaugural Address of President George W. Bush, 2001
[14] Bush, religious right target churches
[15] Quotations Regarding War
[16] Daniel Webster Quotes
[17] With God on His Side… by Robert Scheer
[18] Tell me More About Adolf Hitler and WWII
[19] Mein Kampf, Volume 1, Chapter 2, Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna by Adolph Hitler
[20] Achtung! Are We the New Nazis? Soldiers, God and Empire by Douglas Herman
[21] Jeremiah 17:5
[22] 1 Corinthians 14:10
[23] Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism By Dr. Lawrence Britt
[24] Quote by Aristotle
[25] Sinclair Lewis, The quote comes from the novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” published in 1935.

The New World Order, by Conquest or Consent? Part One
The New World Order, the Secrets of Their Success Part Two
The New World Order, It’s Their Party! Part Three
The New World Order, Bush, the Best of the Worst Part Four
The New World Order, Programming the Masses Part Five
The New World Order, Deliberate Decline into Decadence Part Six
The New World Order, the Military Minions Part Seven
The New World Order, Weapons of Mass Inhumanity Part Eight
The New World Order, Weapons of Mass Inhumanity Part Nine
The New World Order, the Ministry of Truth Part Ten
The New World Order, the Conservative Charade Part Eleven
The New World Order, Stage-managed Morality Part Twelve
The New World Order, the Religious Right? Part Thirteen
The New World Order, Un-fair & Un-balanced Part Fourteen
The New World Order, Bush – God’s Choice? Part Fifteen
The New World Order, Piety, Packaging & Politics Part Sixteen

Deanna Spingola is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Deanna Spingola has been a quilt designer and is the author of two books. She has traveled extensively teaching and lecturing on her unique methods. She has always been an avid reader of non-fiction works designed to educate rather than entertain. She is active in family history research and lectures on that topic. Currently she is the director of the local Family History Center. She has a great interest in politics and the direction of current government policies, particularly as they relate to the Constitution. Her website is at: www.spingola.com
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America the Tyranny

The Road to Authoritarianism

Behold and bear witness to what has become of America, in this era of uncertainty and bewilderment, in this time of fear and intimidation, that since towers were brought down and demolished has methodically fallen into the viper pit of neocon decadence, becoming, as it stands today, an authoritarian’s heaven and a corporatist’s promised land, its people ignorant, as always, to the barrage of waves systemically eroding centuries of rights, freedoms and liberties. From sea to shining sea, despotism is what today those who pay attention see.

The road to fascism is being paved at a clandestine yet alarming velocity, across valleys, prairies and forests, surrounding cites, towns and states, from Atlantic to Pacific, immersing 300 million individuals into a fog of engendered tyranny, who without a care or whisper or concern remain trapped by comfortable surroundings born through perpetual indebtedness. Even as their rights and freedoms and liberties are made to disappear, even as their Constitution is burned, even as their nation hangs on the precipice of despotism, even as their collective destiny is being destroyed those residing inside the belly of the beast hear no evil, see no evil and feel no evil, preferring to gossip about pedophile politicians and celebrity failings than informing themselves to the last throes of the American republic.

The waves of autocracy are upon the shores of America, the demons of the past find themselves resurrected once again, free to unleash fear, intimidation and enslavement onto hundreds of millions of human beings. The high tide of tyranny has returned from the unlearned lessons of history, again engulfing humankind with human wickedness and Machiavellian rule, soon to subjugate the masses in the slavery endemic throughout man’s brief – yet thoroughly destructive – reign over Earth.

Authoritarianism has woken from its dormant slumber, ready to terrorize yet one more human generation, for while it meticulously rises and stretches out its arms, ready to spread its omnipotent disease, it has lived and thrived since the dawn of man, accompanying humankind wherever we might go, since man alone creates and grants it life. Indeed, it is those who have seen it rise before that today see it birthed again. Its symptoms are apparent, its dangers known; the stages of tyranny are remembered, for they are never forgotten. It is those who have been witness to and victims of its malevolence that see the approaching storm clearest; it is they whose experienced eyes and mature minds that are sounding alarms. Fascism, under the guise of protection, freedom and security, is upon us.

To those paying attention, the evolution of the coming tyranny has been apparent since 9/11, when the Twin Towers, America’s Reichstag Fire, were pulverized into nothingness by demolition explosives, in a declaration of psychological war upon the American people. On 9/11 the Earth stood still, as if the collective consciousness of the world awoke to a most ominous catastrophic and catalyzing event that would send the world entire down a vicious circle of death, destruction and despotism. On that day, the future course of human civilization was altered, spawning the birth pangs of authoritarianism rising, freedom dying, and of perpetual warfare breathing its devastating repercussions onto the realities of six billion human beings.

Almost immediately after those in power had imploded and brought down the World Trade Center towers upon their own footprints the initial stages of imposing authoritarianism upon the people were implemented, beginning first with a Patriot Act whose sheer volume and length betray its existence pre-dating 9/11. Brought out of the fascist closet and dusted, it was rushed through the Congress even as the Twin Towers still smoldered and, for good measure, in the terrifying wake of the still unsolved anthrax attacks that served both to threaten legislators into compliance and scaring the populace even further into obedience. The assault on the lives of Americans had begun and, out of the bowels of our collective fear, despotism once more breathed life.

In Enemies Tyrants Find Life

What was 9/11 but a direct declaration of war against the freedoms, rights and liberties of America’s most cherished documents and principles? What was it if not the death throes of the Bill of Rights? The New Pearl Harbor was as much an opportunity to wage war in the Middle East as it was to eradicate tyranny’s impediments in America. The complete assault on the U.S. Constitution and on 200 years of laws has been possible by the inside job of 9/11, for it became the catalyst needed to introduce fear into the populace and authoritarianism into government.

What was the passage of the original Patriot Act if not the first shots fired in the half-decade long war against our rights and liberties and freedoms? Make no mistake, for the last five years we have been shocked and awed into remaining passive and acquiescent automatons as the fascists in power eradicate – slowly but surely – what was once a plethora of enumerated and implied rights, freedoms and liberties. A government concerned with preserving freedoms and liberties would not try to eradicate them under the rubric of fighting terrorism. A government wanting to protect our way of life would not try its hardest to destroy it as well.

Conveniently, then, in typical fascist behavior, it is the Bush cabal that tells us terrorists hate us for our freedoms and rights, that they want us destroyed for our way of life, even as it is the cabal itself that hates us for our freedoms and rights, wanting to destroy our way of life. By imputing their desires and wishes onto the fictional barbarian horde, an unknown dark-skinned entity of alien religion, and knowing the ignorance and gullibility of the American masses, the fascist cabal can at once generate fear and hatred among the people while acting to devastate the nation’s freedoms and liberties under the guise of fighting the evildoers.

In reality, terrorism is but the excuse used to curtail our rights; the dismantling of the Constitution is justified by the fictional threat of dark-skinned bogeymen, and explains why the government, as well as its corporate media collaborators, has been relentless in the perpetual dissemination of propaganda trying to convince us of our imminent peril. The tyrants and their collaborators depend on the fear of the masses to grant sustenance to the momentum used to demolish the foundations of the republic. The emotional fortification created by fear thus ensures that the primitive human brain will cease to think logically and analytically, enabling the wisdom of reason to be usurped by the reptilian and mammalian desire for survival. Without some semblance of thinking by the masses, who by fear are relegated to the role of sheep, the authoritarians in power are free to pursue the evisceration of all burdensome rights and freedoms that interfere with their long-held goals.

Under the guise of fighting terrorism – a terrorism the government itself creates, perpetuates, expands, nurtures and helps grow – the Constitution as we know it is being dismantled, not by terrorist evildoers intent on destroying us, but by our own government intent on destroying our way of life. For a government need not eviscerate a nation’s laws, protections, guarantees, rights, freedoms and liberties to guarantee security. It need not introduce a police state that destroys the way of life for 300 million individuals. This government is pursuing the dismantling of the Constitution and our laws not for fighting terror but to fight the American people. It is doing this in a methodical, some would say obsessive, desire to erode rights and freedoms, grant unlimited powers to the executive and silence dissent because in doing so it is removing the barriers that have for decades impeded authoritarians and corporatists from implementing their vision of the world. As such, the last remaining vestiges of American freedoms and rights are all that stand between fascists and their despotic nirvana. With the relative ease by which they have eviscerated so many laws and rights since 9/11, it is these few liberties left that will be targeted next, becoming easy pickings on the road to full fledged American tyranny.

Already, the government has been granted the right to enter our homes without a warrant and without our knowledge. It can ask for and get library records when it chooses. It has the right to pick us off the street and take us into custody without probable cause. It can wiretap any phone it wants, as well as listen in to any voice message in the country, monitoring our private conversations. Today we are regularly surveilled upon, our histories deciphered, our lives dissected. Our Internet activities are frequently monitored, our emails read and scrutinized. Technology has allowed the government the capacity to overlook our movements using the ever-expanding public cameras, as well as each and every activity we do using our credit or debit cards. It can track our financial records as well as our purchases, all the while gathering files with our complete, bio-metric information. It can do all this in secrecy, without transparency, without accountability, without needing the color of law as a guiding instrument nor the legality of honest governance for inspiration. Activists and dissidents are spied upon and harassed, their activities monitored. Enemies of the state have their names placed on various lists, prohibiting them from enjoying the daily rights afforded to millions.

Free speech is oftentimes relegated to small corrals, called free speech zones by the fascists. The right to assemble is oftentimes denied, as the state tries to prevent the people from protesting and massing in numbers. More and more, to question the actions of governance is to be called a traitor, treasonous, an abettor of the enemy, a terrorist appeaser. To dissent and protest is to risk being labeled unpatriotic, un-American, an enemy of freedom. Yet it is those few thousands, out of a total population of 300 million, scattered in small clusters throughout the vast lands that comprise America, that are the true patriots, the true Americans, fighting for their nation, their rights and freedoms, fighting the real evildoers and terrorists. They are the real brave heroes of the republic, escaping the culture of cowardice, sacrificing beautiful minds full of Kool-Aid and comfort in order to confront the distressing truths of emerging tyranny. It is they fighting evil, trying to stop its carnage upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, trying to prevent it from triumphing, from destroying everything we hold dear, and take for granted. It is they who are Americans and they who are the new patriots. Yet it is also they who will be first to suffer the ramifications of a despotic America, for authoritarians hate dissent, protest and truth.

For those paying attention to the reality of America today and not to the distractions of a 500 ring circus saturated with distraction, gossip, celebrity, inconsequential political news of typical Republican debased behavior, and mind-numbing entertainment, the road to tyranny has continued on its seemingly unstoppable momentum, with each new year since 9/11 presenting new attacks on civil liberties, human rights and our cherished freedoms.

Every year has seen an attempt at expanding the powers of the executive, to the point where the President is today, for all intents and purposes, a dictator. He is free to interpret the law as he sees fit, using the over 700 signing statements to ignore laws passed by the legislature. He has reigned over an era of untold secrecy, where the state is no longer transparent and accountable. He has expanded greatly illegal wiretaps, warrants and domestic spying, increasing the mechanisms needed by a budding police state to thrive and grow. Congress has become but a rubber stamp legislature, as has the Supreme Court, itself now controlled by Bush yes-men. Using the presidential bully pulpit, he has transformed millions of Americans into quasi-authoritarians, followers one and all, ready to follow tyrant’s folly straight into human wickedness.

Today, the president claims himself the unitary executive, the Dictator in Chief, possessing absolute power, doing what he wants, when he wants and without a care in the world that he will ever be held to account. This is dictatorship. This is the end of America as we knew her and the birth of an America we wish never to know.

Tyranny Nurtured Through the Bosom of Lady Liberty

Such is the power of the president that the corporate media – today’s Ministry of Truth – serves his every wish, protecting him from truth being exposed, incompetence being discovered and his authority being questioned. The executive branch has not seen this level of unfettered and untouched power since the establishment of the republic. Indeed, it is the executive branch that has facilitated the rise of fascism since 9/11, from the Department of State to the Attorney General to the Department of War, through the CIA, NSA and FBI, with authoritarians at the helm prevalent in the various departments pursuing the establishment of despotic policies.

It is inside the executive branch where tyranny is being nurtured and raised, where it is feeding off the bosom of Lady Liberty, making her weaker by the day, growing ever stronger from its parasitic usurpation of governance, protected and guided until that time when its strength and maturity is ready to extend its power into omnipresent perpetuity. In the halls of power fascism rises; throughout Washington the last vestiges of freedom are under direct assault. Despotism is being set in motion, it is being prepared and orchestrated, slowly yet surely being implemented throughout the mechanisms of the state. It is being molded according to American culture, according to American thought, growing at its own pace and under different conditions, evolving like organisms do, differing from other forms of despotism according to blood and environment, according to time and place. Yet approaching it remains, like a gathering storm of unnerving energy ready to strike relentlessly throughout the landscape, transforming an America we knew into a nation of wickedness and malevolence, of the worst in the human condition. Its tentacles are now in place, freedoms and rights have been made weak, it is now only a matter of time before what has arrived makes itself fully known and what is about to be made fully known eradicates an America that has only existed in the delusions and dreams of the brainwashed.

Unlike Hollywood reality and events move at their own accord and pace, possessing the patience fictional movies cannot afford, developing fully in time and through the magic of fantasy, their creation almost never the perfection portrayed by acting and editing. As we can see, American fascism is both completely different than its Nazi counterpart yet eerily similar in its characteristics. No two forms of tyranny are crafted out of the same mold. No two systems are born under the same stars, and each takes into history’s cauldron its own personality and traits, its own crimes and punishments. Yet under the guise of “freedom and democracy,” under the illusion of the so-called “war on terror,” tyranny is being birthed inside America, born through the hemorrhaging of the World Trade Center and reared by the incessant fear of hundreds of millions of American citizens. In the death of 3,000 humans, fascists found new life; in the demolition of two 110 story monoliths to the nadir of Ground Zero, criminals and murderers reached the zenith of their power. From Reichstag Fire to World Trade Center demolition, the more things change the more things stay the same, and again and again New Pearl Harbors will be orchestrated from which to usurp power from the People and once again granting sustenance to tyranny.

Despotism arrives in many forms, under many disguises, and in America, along with all previous carriers of the disease, the virus has infiltrated into the consciousness of the ignorant masses under the rubric of waging peace, bringing security, and under the false assumption that scapegoat enemies must be defeated in battle, lest they destroy everything we stand for. That tyranny fails to achieve each measure is never discussed, nor the fact that authoritarians rely on waging war, fostering insecurity, concocting ever-newer enemies and destroying everything the people stand for in order to assure for themselves of greater and absolute power. It is fascism, after all, that enables authoritarians to control entire populations through the oppression and subjugation of the citizenry, usually at the behest of the state and usually using the intimidating presence of the barrel of the gun and the brute force of the omnipresent police state.

At no point have American freedoms, rights and liberties been under such duress than in the last five years, as the Bush cabal has taken full advantage of 9/11 to wage perpetual, preemptive, illegal and immoral war upon both Afghanistan and Iraq, the former with its geostrategic location and pipeline accessibility, the latter with its vast petroleum fields and geopolitical circumstance, each of vital importance to the Pax Americana in its pursuit of imperial hegemony, their conquest a long held goal of the military-energy-industrial complex. Of course, using 9/11 as the perfect Pearl Harbor-like event from which to launch imperial invasions in lands deemed vital and strategic, the fascists and corporatists in power lay claim to both nations under the rubric of the fictional war on terror.

The invasion of Afghanistan had nothing to do with fighting terrorism – since 9/11 was an inside job – and everything to do with American controlled oil and gas pipelines running through Afghan territory. In the same way, Iraq’s decimation and occupation by America’s military had nothing to do with WMD or with bringing freedom or democracy – to give just two of the myriad number of lies to justify invasion – and everything to do with control of Iraq’s petroleum, Israel’s hegemony and strategic gamesmanship.

Just as Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were brought to fruition based on lies, deceptions, manipulations and distortions, so too has the erosion of American rights and freedoms been implemented based on lies, manipulations and cynical deceptions of the American people, with the lies of war and the lies of authoritarianism oftentimes intertwined in an enormous knot of convenience. Thanks to the two invasions and subsequent occupations of Arab and Muslim lands, the executive branch has been able to expand its power in the homeland through the methodical erosion of rights and liberties, both of citizens and foreigners, using as pretext the prosecution and imprisonment of captured or kidnapped “unlawful enemy combatants,” as well as all ambiguous yet unfound evildoer terrorists, to destroy the basic tenets and principles of the American republic.

Under the rubric of the so-called war on terror, therefore, the executive has laid claim to supreme powers in the detention, treatment and prosecution of those deemed “unlawful enemy combatants,” invariably dismantling the freedoms and rights and liberties of the American people. For in lowering and ultimately altering the rights of so called enemy combatants, the executive branch has in essence also destroyed those same rights afforded American citizens. In pursuing the so called enemy combatant, who in any civilized society invariably must, in his prosecution by the state, be afforded the same rights and privileges as any suspect charged in the nation, the Bush cabal has instead ignored the rule of law as well as the central tenets of the Bill of Rights. This, of course, is not by accident.

In the last five years, Bush and his cabal of corporatists have triumphed, legislatively and through the sheer powers of the executive, to rewrite the laws of the nation enumerated for two centuries in the founding documents of the republic, as always arguing that the Constitution stands in the way of prosecuting enemy combatants and waging the perpetual war on terror. It has argued that to maintain security, to protect the American people from the Arab evildoers, the laws of the land, the cherished rights and liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the precedent of the judiciary, must all be altered according to the vision of the executive. The Bill of Rights, after all, interferes severely in the successful waging of war against the terrorists. It has thus rewritten laws and regulations, ignored statutes and rules, created new standards of law and enforced, without opposition, any and all opinions and laws it has unilaterally decided to enact. The Bush cabal has used the prosecution of enemy combatants to both erode the Bill of Rights as well as to give life to its totalitarian mechanisms for dealing with enemies of the state.

Once the “unlawful enemy combatant” excuse to destroy the Constitution is complete, all done in the name of national security, what is left of the Bill of Rights and of the freedoms and rights Americans once had will be insignificant, leaving it anemic and impotent, and what was once considered a vital “tool” for fighting the so called terrorist will fall like a gauntlet at the neck of the American people, severing at once the last vestiges of an America we once thought everlasting. For what is being done today to prisoners in the vast American gulag system will tomorrow be done to Americans themselves. The experiment is first perfected upon the guinea pigs, then it is unleashed upon the intended victims.

For the last five years the Bush cabal has successfully conditioned the population to its “New Normal,” the new America. It has manipulated both society and laws to accept gross violations of human rights, a suppression of liberties, and an authoritarian paradigm of disturbing wickedness. It is preparing us to incorporate into American law and culture the mechanisms used in totalitarian states. Using the incomprehensible ignorance and apathy of the American people against us, it has clandestinely destroyed the foundation of our principles and virtues. Using its vast power, its legions of authoritarians, its army of stenographers and it great arsenal of tools at its disposal, it has inexplicably made the American people tolerant and even acceptant of torture, rape, humiliation, illegal imprisonment, disappearances and criminal malfeasance, something thought unthinkable just years ago. The New Normal has become a reality, the new America now routinely tortures and inflicts horrible pain and suffering on human beings, all to the indifference and acceptance of the American people.

Without the notice or attention of the vast majority of Americans, most too busy addicted to the television and its 500 ring circus, the Congress, being the bunch of idiots, prostitutes, pedophiles and criminals that they usually are, have granted the executive, and by consequence the state, the unfettered power to make extinct the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. In one giant swoop of criminal culpability, in one hypnotized vote during a fascist’s wet dream, our so-called representatives eviscerated habeas corpus, the centuries old right to challenge the state regarding imprisonment, as always under the fictional guise of protecting national security from enemy combatants, as well as destroying the judicial review needed to fight and appeal detention. In an orgy of despotic glee, our elected leaders gave the Bush cabal the ability to detain suspects or “enemy combatants” into perpetuity, without ability to challenge incarceration, and to keep in ignorance those it chooses to detain, without ever divulging any information. Of course, the executive itself decides who and what is an “enemy combatant”.

Due process and right to counsel have been thrown into the heap of waste, as has the right to question and analyze the state’s evidence. Evidence based on hearsay, forced confession and torture can now be used against the accused, even, as likely, it has no merit in truth. Trials must be held in military tribunals, using only military attorneys. Regarding the Geneva Convention, that stalwart monument protecting human rights, the executive now has complete discretion in deciding what constitutes torture as well as cruel and unusual punishment. The president, it appears, can now torture when he wants, whoever he wants, whenever he wants, without concern or transparency.

The Decider in Chief has become the Torturer in Chief. Suspects deemed enemies of the state can, for all practical purposes, be sent to rot in the dungeons of the Commander in Chief, without ever seeing the light of day, without ever challenging their imprisonment and without ever to hear or fight the charges against them. In short, enemies of the executive can be made to disappear.

American Enemy Combatants

In an even more ominous development, the definition of “enemy combatant” has been expanded to include those who “have purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” As has been mentioned in many other recent articles, this devolution into classifying those hostile to the executive branch, or to the policies of the state, as possible enemy combatants, in many cases regardless of citizenship, is the weapon the fascists need to silence dissent, protest and debate throughout the nation. The threat of new ideas and opinions, which tyrants abhor, can now be managed and controlled, for in the broad language of the law virtually anyone can now be imprisoned and disappeared, forever. Since the executive branch determines who is being hostile against the United States, or who materially supports these so-called hostilities, it is easy to see that anyone at odds with the president, his administration or the government of the United States can be persecuted for expressing views no longer protected. Under this provision, any speech or activity deemed hostile to the state can be used to permanently imprison a person indefinitely.

This new interpretation and expansion of police powers virtually assures that American dissent and opposition to the state’s policies will be seen as hostile to the national security of the nation. What other reason exists to include such broad language into this provision other than to declare a war on dissent and on the opposition. Ostensibly this law is being marketed by the Ministry of Truth as a necessary tool to fight the evildoers, but in reality, can the imprisonment of dissenters and protestors, activists and intellectuals be far behind?

This gigantic step in the direction of totalitarianism is clear evidence the direction the Bush cabal is heading towards, with the American people being hijacked straight into despotism, our ankles slowly being shackled to the instruments of oppression. Already dissent is equaled to treason and of being unpatriotic in an age when being patriotic is almost compulsory. In certain authoritarian circles dissent and activism is seen as rendering aid and comfort to the enemy, while in others challenging the state is seen as wrongfully aiding the enemy. Activists seeking accountability and the truth are labeled terrorists, while others are seen as appeasers of terror. With such exaggerated language being used, oftentimes under complete levels of seriousness, can the accusations of supporting hostilities against the state be far behind, possibly leading to now legal and permanent imprisonment and torture?

The road less traveled is being paved with the concrete tablets of tyranny, and slowly, but most certainly surely, the caravan of authoritarians is approaching our towns and cities, eager to unleash their chained beast of oppression onto the most powerful nation on Earth. The momentum is theirs, as is the power and control to determine events and circumstances that can accelerate the approaching storm. Our destiny is in their hands, for they can do as they wish, counting the days when their plans and goals can be fully implemented. America as we once knew her is no more, thanks to the tyrants in power, thanks to our own ignorance and indifference.

Soon it will matter not that 9/11 was an inside job, for any talk of its truth will be severely punished, even banned, to be whispered in closets or over the sound of loud music. In fact, so much momentum is the movement gaining, so much traction among the People is its truth creating, that sooner rather than later the authoritarians may begin imprisoning truth seekers under the guise of “purposefully and materially supporting hostilities against the United States.” Such is the threat of exponentially growing numbers of Americans taking the red pill of reality, that the state’s handlers may very well deem the entire movement a terrorist organization, the easier to suppress and intimidate the truth from ever being exposed. It is only a matter of time until tyranny unleashes its instruments of repression against both truth seekers and America’s real patriots, dissenters and activists.

Already the Constitution has been dealt a death knell, meaning it has no more significance or worth. The Constitution has become, for all intents and purposes, just “another god damn piece of paper,” a relic of history, an obstacle overcome by America’s authoritarians. It will soon be said, as it always is, that at first the state came for the scapegoats, the marketed enemy, the chalice used to make drunk the masses, the bread used to destroy the system. Later it will come for its citizens, its threats, its People. Once everything is in place, once all the kinks have been ironed out, once all obstacles have been erased, the totalitarian evisceration of the Constitution will devastate a population conditioned to follow the letter of the law, now left unprotected, bewildered and condemned for the gross negligence it has allowed itself to perpetuate. Ironically, the People’s anger and hatred at the enemy scapegoat are themselves the catalysts for its own decimation, oppression and enslavement. In the end, we are our own worst enemies, both our Judas and our cyanide, not knowing what we do to ourselves, and each other.

When the masses finally see what has transpired in their country, when they finally wake to the morning fog, unable to see beyond the limits of their existence, they will see a landscape dark and ominous, a police state under the control of tyranny, a nation under the grip of repression. The America of their past and present gone, ignorant as any society has ever been, the masses will evolve to their new reality, their new normal. Most will welcome authoritarianism, for most are followers. The brainwashed will become tools of despotism, adapting to the brave new world of sheep oppressed and subjugated. Many will never really notice that freedom and rights and liberties no longer exist. Millions will teach their children to be good Americans, as fate has decided tyranny should rule. Imprisoned in their own minds, the masses will inevitably be conditioned to follow and obey the dictates of their masters.

Those who question authority, those who use their mind and those who see the slavery and oppression that has been birthed at the expense of liberty will become enemies of the state, threats to the system of tyranny, dissidents aiding and abetting the enemy, commissioned to never see light again. These dissidents the state will imprison and make disappear, to be erased from memory and time, their quest for truth and accountability buried six feet underground. To the obedient sheeple whose blind faith guides them in myth and state, totalitarianism will come naturally, becoming a nirvana to life-long followers; to free thinkers, independent minds, progressives and those who have escaped the incessant brainwashing from birth, it will be hell on Earth.

The approaching storm has reached the warm waters of America, rapidly gaining speed, ready to unleash its torrent of tyrannical laws and regulations upon our shores, its police state arriving with the sudden flash of thunder and lightning. The giant tempest has been building for over five years, granted life through death, rising high and mighty thanks to destruction and demolition, our own ignorance and sheer indifference granting it oxygen, our fear giving it power, our hatreds helping seal our own fate. America the Tyranny has risen to be born, the wickedness of humankind once more resurrected from the annals of history, free to repress and subjugate, eager to shackle and control. The destruction of the World Trade Center has made tyranny a reality; our continued impotence will allow it to flourish.

We Reap What We Sow

Perhaps it is fitting that a People that has cared not an ounce for systemic torture, preemptive war, illegal invasion, brutal occupation, mass murder, depleted uranium use, incessant rape, constant humiliation of human beings, destruction of Iraqi and Afghani society, renditions, illegal detentions, disappearances and untold levels of suffering should be made to suffer the realities of living in totalitarianism, under a police state, under constant paranoia and fear of both the state and your neighbors. Perhaps it is fitting that a People possessing such levels of ignorance, indifference and comfort be made to experience a reality that afflicts hundreds of millions of human beings. Perhaps in time we will learn humility and suffering, wisdom and the virtues of honor and peace.

America is a land so arrogant it calls itself and usurps as its own the name belonging to two entire continents; it is the country whose ego has been so aggrandized that it thinks itself the only nation blessed by the Christian god; it was a nation once cherished now thoroughly reviled; the land of the free now a land of tyranny, the home of the brave now nothing but the culture of cowardice, its bowels putrid with the smell of authoritarianism; its people enraptured by ignorance and fear, its moral foundations crumbling under the weight of pervasive corruptions and the evils of capitalism. The gluttony of comfort and the greed of excessiveness have made the American people the laughing stock of the world, our inability to escape the bubble of grandeur condemning us to be the spoiled child of wealth, unwise, unlearned and arrogant, never forced to confront suffering or trouble, condemning us to be the mirror image of our President.

The shining beacon on a hill has had its bright light extinguished, becoming in the span of half a decade a banana republic rotting from within, governed by incompetent dictatorship, its national elections routinely manipulated through the systemic impulses of blatant fraud, with representatives now nothing more than prostitutes bending over to receive the full gyrating assault of the corporate world, cannibalized by its own people addicted to consumerism and materialism, an army of ignorant sheep unaware of the future destiny they have helped chart, a population betraying their children’s future happiness for their short-term gratification.

The land of freedom and rights has ceased to exist, replaced by ever-growing authoritarianism. Perhaps, in the cosmic laws of the universe, where karma intertwines with fate, we are entering into the other side of midnight, journeying into exactly what we deserve, a taste of our own medicine, a taste of what we have exported to tens of dozens of other nations. We are reaping what we have sowed, and upon our shores now stands America the Tyranny, perhaps meant to suffer through another Hitler, another Stalin or Mao, or perhaps simply another Pinochet, Shah, Suharto or Saddam. America has entered its darkest hour, and as the clock approaches midnight the nation we once knew vanishes from the grip of the People. Nobody knows where we are headed, yet we do know in which direction we go, for the path has been paved, the pattern has begun to emerge, and through the horizon, no salvation can be found.

Instead of the world confronting the evil emblem of the swastika we must realize that it is the emblazoned red, white and blue that now represents despotic thinking and tyrannical rule. It was Old Glory that sprung up like a giant field of weeds in the aftermath of 9/11, flowing from every vehicle and every home, every business and every street, giving America the aura of jingoism and nationalism undoubtedly similar to 1930’s Germany, giving it the appearance, to anyone who cared to look and think, of what Germany’s streets in the 1930’s certainly looked like, right before society turned into barbarism. Perhaps this orgy of fanatical and jingoistic revelry was but the first sign of things to come, the birth pangs of America the Tyranny.

Five years later, the red, white and blue still flows proudly in the minds of followers and quasi-authoritarians, with knuckle dragging proto-patriots brainwashed to stand behind it in fear and terror of concocted enemies, their blind loyalty to anybody in power, even a little man with even smaller understanding. The stars and stripes has become the new symbol of jingoism, nationalism, xenophobia and blind loyalty and faith in tyrants, just as the swastika once did, even as it stands smeared in the blood of thousands, protecting torturers, rapists, war criminals, murderers and human rights violators, even as it has been besmirched by the destruction of innocent life and that of entire societies.

Old Glory now stands for the worst abuses of human rights, representing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram, the destruction of the Constitution and of Lady Liberty, the loss of habeas corpus and of the Geneva Convention. The red, white and blue, sadly enough, has become the symbol of what we most hate, of what we swore to never become. It has become a flag hijacked by tyrants, with the American People unconcerned and unwilling, to the point of embarrassment, to free it from its dungeon, with most too lazy or apathetic to care, most too ignorant to know. As a result, it has become, like the wretched symbol of the Nazis, a most reviled and despised emblem, an image of tyranny rising, wickedness growing and criminality evolving. Only Americans know how much more reviled and hated it will become in the coming years.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

Empire in the Mirror

Empire – A Tribe on Steroids

Inside the belly of the beast can the harbinger of what is to come be seen, for the internal machinations of the Pax Americana have become rusted and decrepit, its lifeblood infected and diseased by the spoils of its conquests and the narcissism of its hubris. In pursuit of unmatched wealth and power its internal organs have been infected by the malignancies of greed, arrogance and corruption, spreading from coast to coast, a haze of barrenness infiltrating every city and every town, afflicting a society 300 million strong, slowly yet invariably eroding the foundations of an Empire on fast-forward time, as if America’s domination has been accelerated, her reign compressed and her demise made absolute. Yet in her accelerated cycle can civilization once more bear witness that while the greatness of man may build empires, it is the deep flaws inherent in our nature that crumbles them as well.

What the genius of humankind helps construct the vices of the human condition will assuredly destroy, for what is history but a written record of our greatness always decimated by our weaknesses, of our vices, corruption and incurable penchant for death, violence and destruction as always laying waste to the marvels humankind is capable of constructing? What is history if not a linear pattern, repeated over and over and over again, regardless of time, location or of cultural differences, of the triumphs of humankind trumped and squashed by the mammalian passions and emotions inherent in our primate species, of our species taking a leap forward only to have us take two leaps back?

The story of America, whether as Empire or as superpower, is one of man’s penchant for absolute power, and how that power corrupts absolutely, as always without fail, along with man’s quest to continuously expand the power, wealth and reach of the tribe, usually at the behest of the leader(s), as always thanks to our inability to control our ingrained mammalian behaviors and psychology that, inasmuch as we would like to discard from our condition, remain deeply entrenched in our psyches and in our human-primate nature. We cannot compete with millions of years of evolution, after all, an existence based on epochs of survival and natural selection, on instincts and behaviors molded over eons that eventually determined who and what we are today. From our deep psychological need for a hierarchical structure in our societies, one based on rank or caste or socioeconomic status, to our almost universal acceptance – indeed a disturbing desire – in delineating power to an alpha male among us, usually chosen or tolerated as group leader, to the innate quest for wealth and power in men in order to attract the best possible mate for procreation to the primordial need to belong to a tribe, today categorized by the nation-state, to the insatiable protection of and desire for territory and its resources, our primate-mammalian behavior dominates every aspect of the human condition.

For what are we in reality – without the smoking mirrors of religion and the delusions of ego by which we see and judge ourselves – but a mammal that triumphed over all other hominid species, when such was the reality on the planet, destroying and making extinct all potential competitors through the violence and viciousness that are part of our nature and that we have seemingly perfected to an art form, until we alone remained, roaming the lands of Earth, in time becoming like locusts decimating forests and jungles and untold number of species in our quest towards becoming rulers of the planet? What are we if not a species born in violence and evolved through violence, forever bedeviled by our inability to control our animal urges, behaviors and instincts, always enslaved to the emotions of greed, ego, competition and selfishness, easily corrupted by the aura of money, materialism and wealth, frustrated by the always strong urge to copulate, controlled by our hunger to procreate, to attain the power and domination and wealth needed to successfully attract a mate and inevitably pass on our genes?

What is history if not a case study in the human condition, of our inability to cease war, violence, tribalism, destruction and of our inability to control the corruption spawned by power or the fragility of our psyches? What we are, is a species descended from the always brutal and difficult animal world, where survival is a matter of life and death, where selfishness is to live another day, where procreation is the driving force, where our greatest traits and most debilitating vices were first engendered and molded. Where we rose from and remained for hundreds of thousands of years determined who we are today, for 200,000 years as homo sapiens and 10,000 years of civilization cannot compete with millions of years of mammalian evolution nor millions of years of acquired behaviors, psychology, instincts and emotions that have contributed towards creating the most dominant species the world has every known. It is through studying Empire, therefore, that humanity, and civilization, can best be understood, for within its borders lies the greatness of man as well as the worst in the human condition, the reality of our enslavement to our evolutionary psychology as well as the necessary clues to escape our animal bondage.

What is Empire if not the basic human tribe on steroids, a case study into the success and failures of a collection of individuals comprising a vast population that has risen to the top of the human pyramid? Tribes of the past, bonded by and based on blood, ethic or religious similarities, competed with each other for marginal swaths of territory and resources, as far as small segments of land was concerned, relative to the size of Earth. Usually competition among rivals could be peaceful, based on diplomacy, or violent, based on the perpetual state of war humans have always lived in.

As humans grew in numbers so too did the size and numbers of tribes, invariably putting greater and greater stress on both land and resources, eventually creating a push phenomenon whereby weaker, less sophisticated, perhaps smaller tribes, unable to compete with the more powerful, larger ones, were forced out of the tract of land they inhabited. The strongest of these tribes usurped the land and resources they wanted and needed, usually by invasion or conquest, or by assimilation of the lesser, weaker tribe. These strong tribes thereby pushed weaker ones into new lands, as well as those new tribes created through discontent or due to differences among peers.

The push factor among tribes, as well as the search for lands full of resources and sustenance, gave rise to human migration patterns that eventually settled all of Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas. Over millennia, as tribes settled, grew distant to each other (both genetically and environmentally) and procreated within close genetic blood lines, similar ethnic traits appeared, showcasing homogeneity among populations, whether by the inter-breeding of close blood lines or by environmental evolutionary causes. Over generations various genetic mutations appeared, giving populations the distinctive ethnic or racial appearance we see today. It was the proximity of both genetic lines and tribal lands that created homogeneous peoples in various regions of the planet. It was the vast distances of Earth, or its naturally inaccessible barriers, that allowed multiple tribes to possess the genetic diversity we see today. Indeed, it could be said that Earth, with its continents and natural barriers, is to humanity what the Galapagos Islands are to its birds and lizards. Each region created its own ethnicities, based on distance, genetics and environment.

Once the available land’s resources and its habitability became compromised, a tribe would simply move to new land, either bumping into another tribe, where, depending on the size and power of the group, would proceed to invade, wage war, conquer and/or expel (assimilate) the new rival, or, if the tribe was stronger than the invaders, then sidestepping the territory and finding virgin land somewhere else, which would eventually over time run out of resources or be overrun by other tribes. In much the same way our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, as well as many other mammal species, establish territories that are zealously protected. Indeed, we as humans are extremely territorial, as much as any other mammal, as can be witnessed by the endless conflict over land and resources since we left the jungles of East Africa that has oftentimes resulted in brutal warfare, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and untold levels of human wickedness.

It is humans, in groups or tribes or clans or families or city-states or nation-states or Empires, which compete with other rival groups for the Earth’s finite lands and resources, all for the greatest game on the planet, that instinct all Earth’s organisms possess, that drive called survival. It is in the world of nature, of which our species has been a part of for millions of years – to be distinguished from that of civilization – where survival of the fittest decides winner and loser, life and death, prosperity and ruin, and where natural selection oftentimes creates brutal and violent competition among rivals, along with all corresponding survival behaviors, that elevates surviving into a joust where living one more day is the ultimate reward. The world of nature is harsh, difficult and oftentimes violent, yet it is the rule rather than the exception, where all of Earth’s organisms gather to give great balance to the planet’s living world. It is from this context, and this reality, from which our evolutionary psychology rises, where our ingrained behaviors evolved and our undeniable penchant for control of both land and resources developed.

In Empire’s Shadow can Humanity be Seen

Throughout human history Empires have risen to the zenith of human achievement, becoming a regional hegemony unmatched by rivals, for years enjoying the glory of power and wealth, the torch of human greatness passed onto its people, only to eventually and inevitably fall to the embedded vices of the human condition, becoming the spoiled, gluttonous, arrogant, greedy, warmongering and deluded society whose foundations crumble below the weight of corruption and decay, creating over time the nadir of our worst failures, a failed state.

With the death of one Empire another will always be waiting in the wings, eager to take its place among the great monuments of civilization, ready to be crowned the next step in our evolution as a civilization, ready to partake in its journey through Empire’s stages, rising, maturing and falling, traversing from the principled and humble to the debased and arrogant, once more falling for the trap of humankind’s making, destroying itself from within at the hands of its own hubris and corruption. This Empire will in time, guided by the deeply flawed hands of man and by the unshakable reality that is the human condition, inevitably crumble to the ground, crashing upon its foundations, assisted in its downfall by the inertia that is humankind’s embedded mammalian psychology.

The inability of man to escape the instincts of the animal world, with our hunger for survival, of power and wealth, our pursuit of domination, comfort and territory, our bondage to ego and competition, with our drive, whether conscious or subconscious, of pursuing and securing the best genes for procreation – just as all living organisms are designed to do – have condemned us to repeat history over and over, forever to disregard its most valuable lessons, forever to remain adrift in the ocean of delusion clinging to the raft of our hubristic and self-deluded greatness.

Our species is impotent to the winds of change for we are and forever will remain slaves shackled to the demons of the human condition, the gumbo of our evolutionary tinkering deeply ingrained into our psyches, from our inception as a species making us who and what we are, making us highly susceptible to the debasement and vices prevalent in modern civilization, especially modern forms of Empire. Unable to see past the foggy mirror placed in front of our eyes by theology and our deluded ego, hypnotized we remain to our self-aggrandized beliefs, destined to forever believe ourselves god-like creatures whose mastery is unrivaled, our denial blinding us to a reality altogether different.

Ironically, the same mammalian instincts, behaviors and psychology that enabled us to become the dominant species on Earth, enabling us to lay claim as rulers over all things living at the expense of all forms of life on the planet, will invariably also help seal our fate, for what we once did to others, and today do to the planet, will inevitably one day in the not to distant future be done to us. We are human, after all, all too human, embedded in our being the seeds of destruction and brutality and violence that for too long been the hallmarks of our existence, for millennia decimating the planet, its living organisms and ourselves.

It is in Empire’s decline, therefore, that we can see how the human heaven eventually becomes its hell, how our greatest triumphs become our greatest defeats, how Empire’s virtues steadily become its vices and how our fragile psyches fall prey, as they always do, to Empire’s follies. What man does at its height and full glory, at a time when the baskets are full, springs are flowing and minds are at ease, can tell us who and what we truly are, helping us decipher the human condition, for if when times are good we invariably descend into the ominous caverns of human vice and wickedness, what does that say about us as a species?

Empire’s Malignancies

It is inside the parameters of the lands called the United States that the downfall of humanity’s latest foray into Empire can readily be seen. Growing in size and proportion every passing year, her decline, while not imminent or yet seen, can nonetheless be felt, upon closer inspection, much like the movement of the winds or the arrival of the tides. Her destiny has always been foretold, much like every past attempt at human Empire, for nothing is as predictable as the human condition and our species’ inability to defeat the hands of evolution. In the delusion of our minds Empire seems like the chosen kingdom of the gods, yet in reality is but the consequence of our mammalian pathology, a quest achieved by gang warfare, violence, death, lust for territory, greed, arrogance, corruption of morality, hunger for resources, power, control and the always hovering ego.

The Pax Americana is as Empires have always been, growing internally at first thanks to comparative advantages in technology, population, philosophy or resources, flourishing regionally thanks to increased power and wealth, until that time that her belly overflows her waistline and the greed of man becomes the pursuit of imperial hegemony. To appease the growing hunger of her leaders for power and of her people for increased living standards expansion of her borders becomes state policy. Thus, Manifest Destiny is birthed and the hand of god is proclaimed to be the guiding force empowering the quest for expansion onward, thereby granting forgiveness, and an excuse, to the litany of crimes against humanity that is logically to follow.

Born through Manifest Destiny, growing and expanding, like any Empire before, through war, violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing of peoples whose lands she coveted, her appetite for land leading to rape, pillage and stolen territories, to the decimation and suffering of millions of indigenous peoples, enriching and gorging herself through the natural resources prevalent in the lands she stole in pursuit of Empire, her power and wealth growing exponentially through the mass exploitation and toil, not to mention the unpaid blood, sweat and tears of African enslavement, America set her sails on the course to hegemony, using the blueprints of Empires past to transform herself into a modern incarnation of Rome.

Ethnocentrically centered on her Anglo-Saxon pedigree, America would, in pursuit of possession of lands from Atlantic to Pacific, imitate her English predecessor, embarking on a Crusade of brutal warfare against America’s native and darker skinned peoples, decimating millions of human beings through destruction of cultures, decimation of societies, rape of women, pillage of land, genocide, ethnic cleansing and the devastation of a continent at one time fluid with heterogeneous cultures and peoples. It would be during her wars against the native peoples of America that the Empire’s xenophobia, racism, antipathy and hatred of those whose skin is the color of the land would be cultivated and conditioned into her population, to remain in perpetuity, transcending time and space, generation after generation.

It would be her sense of superiority over these “different” peoples that would nurture in America’s evolving character the belief that their death, cleansing and destruction – whether in the Great Plains or Southeast Asia or Latin America or Mesopotamia or among her very own urban jungles – would be of no consequence or importance, their death a product of expanding the Empire, their suffering seen as no more significant than that of an animal. In the quick span of time and conquest, between and during the intervals of constant warfare, those massacred and cleansed were seen as subhuman, savages and barbarians whose death and tragedy at the hands of Empire’s army were logical consequences to resisting Manifest Destiny and god’s chosen state.

Of course the torture, dehumanization, rape, pillage, brutal occupation, murder, humiliation, disappearances, decimation of human rights, false imprisonment, tyranny and utter contempt for human life prevalent in America’s disasters in Iraq or Afghanistan are not exclusive to the last few years. Rather, it has been methodical and systematic, an unending product of expanding Empire and of maintaining control over her vast fiefdoms throughout the globe, lasting over decades of time, past, present and future, afflicting millions from almost every land, of every religion, of every ethnic origin. It is the nature of Empires, and thus of humankind, from those in Mesopotamia, Asia and Africa and Mesoamerica, from Sumer to Babylon, from Egypt to Greece to Rome, from the Mayas to the Inca to the Aztec, from the Ottomans to the Persians, from the English to the Spanish.

The brutality of the Pax Americana, with the stench of death, indigence and suffering apparent everywhere it lays its omnipresent grip, is the result of policies created and enforced towards maintaining wealth and power, of expanding interests and of retaining control over the vast sphere of influence. It is the result of Empire building and of curtailing rivals and rebellions to its hegemony, of retaining for both the masses and the Establishment the greatest standard of living the world has ever seen. For the Empire, it is standard operating procedure, becoming the modus operandi of presidents, of time periods, of education and of generations born and dead, a policy to be continued until decline and fall or until its philosophy is altered from within.

To the heathens whose skin was and is the color of the earth, Manifest Destiny did not end with the extermination of the Native Indians. It has continued mercilessly, devastating millions of people whose only crime is inhabiting lands whose resources the Empire covets and whose slave labor her population depends on for their ever-expanding waistlines their voracious greed and ever-demanding standards of living. Indeed, it is because of the demands of the citizenry inside the Empire, whether made knowingly or not, by its sheer spending capacity, demand for goods, needs and wants, along with its refusal to institute change that America embarks on the destruction of lands and the near enslavement of peoples. Inside Empire her entrails must be fed and appeased to the engorgement of their lifestyles, less the hunger pains of having to live like the rest of the planet creep into existence, popping the infallible bubble shielded by predatory capitalism and debauched democracy.

The slaughter has not stopped, it has simply evolved, from smallpox-infected blankets, Fire Water and banishment into hellholes called reservations to the wholesale mass murder in the Philippines to the introduction of crack cocaine into America’s urban jungles to the devastation of economic genocide called sanctions to the virtual enslavement of land and peoples called market colonialism that has resulted in vast poverty and lost opportunity to the chemical WMD called Agent Orange in Vietnam that has killed hundreds of thousands and riddled with disease countless more to the herbicide warfare in Columbia to today’s dirty bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon called depleted uranium, with cluster bombs, missiles and artillery raining down on innocent populations who will have to live generations with cancers, disease, death and deformities, the American appetite for violence is and has remained unrelenting, a natural product of her imperial and Empire aspirations, along with the love of materialism by her population that has, with the passage of time, only continued to grow.

Unwilling to alter a standard of living that has reached unsustainable proportions, with its population expanding instead of curtailing its outrageous demands for ever-increasing standards of living, its greed of material wealth and love of consumerism outstripping all semblance of control, the population inside the Empire are complicit in the crimes furthered by America. In its locust-like appetite for materialism and consumerism the citizenry of the Empire has condemned billions of their fellow human beings to a life in utter indigence, their abilities and talents used not for the betterment of themselves or their families, but for the greed of the plague hemorrhaging the planet towards its ultimate limit.

Untold millions remain at the margins of society, sacrificing opportunity and happiness, having to live inside polluted lands, under corrupted governments and under extreme duress, all so that the chosen few in America can continue living in privilege, comfort and security, without the concerns and stresses of billions, without knowing what suffering is like, without seeing that reality for billions is a life harsh, brutal and oftentimes full of tragedy, where life is lived one day at a time, meal to meal, surviving living in shacks, drinking foul water, hoping to escape the fate of disease, forced to allow capitalism to exploit your full life, slowly, yet surely, eviscerating the energy inside you that makes you human.

For the prosperity of 300 million people five billion must be sacrificed, their lands pillaged, resources stolen, their nations made subservient vassal states squeezed of their energy, their soils despoiled, air poisoned, water made toxic. Billions of human beings make two dollars or less a day, with billions making a dollar more, all living on fumes, finding food from the garbage heaps of society, forced to become the automatons churning America’s unending addiction to materialistic goods, transforming thinking flesh into robotic automation, becoming the slaves of the Empire, of the Pax Americana, the only nation blessed by the Christian god.

Every Empire has its domestic slaves, as well as its foreign ones, a servant class of people engineered by society to do America’s dirty, dehumanizing and hard labor, the kind of work hidden from view, tucked away in the armpit of the state’s cesspool, jobs Empire’s citizens no longer care to perform. It is the labor of sweat, of blood and of tears, of unhinged and exerted energy that punishes the body and drains the mind and that has produced in the citizenry such aversion to its toil as to grant it exclusive reservation to the slave class.

America is no exception, and inside its bowels, where once those of African origin boiled under the midday sun or inside the scorching factory, to be whipped or raped or lynched, where once the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the Polish suffered severed limbs or broken backs and worn out bodies, today imported from Mexico and other “southern” nations a new generation of Empire’s slaves can be seen, picking up where the slaves of old left off, fighting xenophobia, injustice, inequality, discrimination and prejudice at work and at play, their dark skin and indigenous faces making them aliens and criminals in a foreign land, the new scapegoat to the native population, the new untouchable caste whose work and toil add comfort and relaxation to the citizenry, their only crimes the pursuit of a better life, the pursuit of happiness and the chance to be human, an opportunity to escape the market colonialism masked in neo-liberal colors and NAFTA language and sweatshop reality, as well as the corrosive omnipresence of the Empire that devastates all southern peoples not living inside its borders.

Wherever one cares not to look is where this new slave works, hidden behind the periphery, squeaking out a clandestine life, becoming a shadow of a human being, marginalized and blamed by the ignorant and fearful for the Empire’s ills, doing all the work the gluttonous citizenry has become too arrogant and lazy to perform, laboring so that the populace can retain their ravenous standard of living. Indeed, they have been allowed to enter the domain of the Empire undocumented with a wink and a nod, for the Establishment, as well as the intelligentsia and the corporate world, know that they are vitally important to the short and long term economic vitality and increased standard of living of America and its people, injecting new life and energy, as well as new ideas, into the Empire, regardless of what the ignorant, uneducated and fearful masses may think and notwithstanding the political spin so-called lawmakers give.

Over the last several decades it has been the Empire’s society itself, those hundreds of millions residing inside the only land blessed by the Christian god, that has raised the specter of worry among many who think that America has begun its eventual decline and fall. It is the Empire’s hubris and mentality of ignorance among its people, along with its materialist and consumerist addictions, bred from birth and through nurtured brainwashing, that has indeed launched the Pax Americana’s decline into orbit. Today’s citizenry has become lazy and complacent, with the absolute hypnotizing trance of television helping to morph normal human bodies into the obese creatures of gluttony. Television monitors have become the sun Americans revolve around, inside their little solar system the small moons of remote controls hover close by, with meteorites called crumbs landing and dotting the surface of the torso, the family couch becoming the Jupiter to our Uranus, the glow of our all powerful sun feeling warm and cozy and hypnotic to our brain dead thoughts.

The population has fused itself with the always-expanding vehicle, one becoming part of the other, with humans dependent on the driving and power of the car to transport them even to the nearest store, one block away. It is for those who drive and gorge on gas every week that Iraq is being destroyed by the Empire’s military. No longer walking or exercising, only doing snack and junk food aerobics with the wrist and fingers, Americans and their waistlines have exploded outwards, showcasing symptoms of the diseases of greed and gluttony, much of it the result of both laziness and the chemically-laced, hormone-full, preservative-saturated, sugar-coated garbage we call food.

The American people pray nightly to the television monitor, its human actors becoming the new mythological gods and goddesses, adored and elevated and seen in perfection, the Almighty Dollar becoming the new god of worship, the grand cathedrals of commerce called malls becoming the new sacred ground from which capitalism and human can be brought closer together, joined in a heavenly satisfaction of inner turmoil by the purchase of material goods. It is capitalism, and the mirage of comfort it spawns, that has made the Empire’s populace complacent, obedient, comfortable and unwilling to question authority. These are but the crumbs and bones and scraps capitalism’s masters give the masses to remain silent and acquiescent.

The Empire declares itself the land of the free, yet its population works the most of any developed nation, almost becoming automatons in need of no rest or relaxation. It becomes sacrilegious to take time off work and cherish one’s family; it is heresy to take time off in order to take care of personal duties. Americans either become addicts to work and slaves to their bosses or one becomes an unwanted pariah. The pressure to conform and remain complacent while the system shackles one’s life is omnipotent; its effects on stress and life become extreme burdens on one’s psychology. Every year hails the arrival of more police powers, more autocratic rule, less democracy and civil rights and liberties. Every year sees the government of, by and for the People transformed into one of, by and for the Corporate World.

The Empire leads the world in psychotropic, sedative and anti-depressant drug prescriptions, as if its populace is suffering extreme forms of mental disorders, with stress and depression rampant, unhappiness continuing to rise and the overall feeling of well-being eroding with the passing of the seasons. People are overworked, underpaid, struggling to make ends meet, even with two jobs, fearful and made insecure by the same government created to protect and defend them. Television has become teacher, parent, babysitter, best friend and role model for children whose brain waves are being rewired thanks to the rapid imagery and fast sound bites seen on the monitor, their behaviors being conditioned to suit the interests of the corporate world, in time becoming one more serf to the corporate master. Reality cannot offer perfection and so Americans seek the fictions of television, becoming glued to the shows that offer the greatest beauty, the best fantasy, the happiest ending, the joyful perfection that humanity always seeks yet can never achieve.

Every year that passes the decimation of education by government can be seen and felt, with students falling behind world leaders in the sciences, liberal arts, mathematics and in reading. Americans no longer have knowledge of the world outside their immediate bubbles, understanding little about other cultures and even less about history. University tuition and costs have seemingly continued to rise on a per year basis thus having the effect, along with the slashing of funds for both student loans and financial aid, of making college unattainable to millions of otherwise qualified individuals. Elementary and secondary schools now teach to standardized tests, besides having funds slashed across the board, creating entire generation of robots and automatons, thereby helping to erode free thought, reasoning skills, logic and critical thinking, in essence preparing children for a life as unthinking drones, engineered for obedience and blind loyalty, not one full of knowledge and free thought. This might be, in fact, exactly what leaders have had in mind all along, for an uneducated mind is easier to control and manipulate than a thinking, knowledgeable one.

In the most powerful and wealthiest nation on Earth, one that considers itself an Empire, superior to and above all other states on the planet, pregnant with a myriad number of colleges and universities, it is incomprehensible that inside its borders exists a level of fundamentalist religion that beckons the days of the Dark Ages, a time when humanity turned backwards in time, doing its best to declare open warfare against science, reason and logic. Where one would expect renaissance and enlightenment, because of education levels, wealth indicators and standards of living, instead one finds open hostility to knowledge and an uncompromising love for ignorance. Where one would expect secular thinking and scientific reasoning instead one finds religious conviction and archaic, primitive thought.

Indeed, the religious fanaticism prevalent among large segments of society is a symptom of the disease called under education, of the state purposefully creating millions of ignorant, unthinking citizens, the easier to control and dominate them. For if they can be brainwashed from youth to place blind faith and loyalty in an entity never seen or heard, thinking this hollow fantasy an Anglo-Saxon white man with a white beard hovering in the sky above, then how easy can it be to condition them to place blind faith and loyalty in a tangible, visible government creation that is manufactured to be the only human entity capable of protecting and securing their person and family?

Where one would expect common sense to prevail, such as in the use of contraception and in the reality of evolution and global warming, instead one finds the idiocy of abstinence, of creationism/intelligent design and of the Rapture, all based on the thousands-years-old, primitive, archaic and fantasy-laced fables and myths. Only in America, among developed nations, can scientific fact be challenged by theological ideology, making science fit the religious beliefs of the nation. Only in America can the obviousness of evolution be ignored and discarded, to be denied its teaching in a 21st century classroom. In America, pro-life means saving pin-size zygotes, but not the life of the diseased or of the suffering through stem-cell research. Pro-life would rather have a woman and child suffer in indigence and lost opportunity for life rather than giving the woman a chance at a better life down the road. It would call the destruction of microscopic cells murder but stay silent on the mass killing by America of over 250,000 innocent Iraqis.

It is in this religious zealotry that one can see the xenophobia, indeed the boiling hatred, that millions of Americans possess for the Empire’s new enemy, the dreaded Arab. Combined with the rabid patriotism, blind loyalty and love of the red, white and blue – betraying the high level of testosterone inherent in America’s tribal fascination – evangelical belief loves to hate dark-skinned enemies, bomb innocent heathens and wage war on the descendents of the New Testament people which, naturally, like Jesus himself, are Arab. Unlike Jesus, however, whom they hold in very high regard, they have no qualms unleashing state sponsored terror on the innocent, on children, babies, grandparents and women. Such is the culture of life.

In this frenzy of manufactured and conditioned hate we see the engine moving the pistons and spark plugs of America’s Middle East disasters, with blind loyalty to flag and cross, confident that the infidels will be brought under the boots of the great American military. In the mammoth churches of the evangelical cults can we see the grease lubricating the American military-industrial complex, granting it the green light needed to eradicate the lands of ancient Mesopotamia, where the Euphrates and the Tigris meet, where Babylon once stood, where civilization itself first breathed life. The fear and bigotry against those they do not know or understand, against those they are told are the enemy, are a corrosive and dangerous belief structure, one based on ignorance and blind faith. Millions of ethnic minorities throughout history have been exterminated for less hatred engendered.

War as the Health of the State

With the rise of the Industrial Revolution giving her the strong winds needed to maintain Empire’s momentum, America soon found herself growing exponentially, rivaling European powers, yet confidently knowing that her endowed resources, both natural and human, combined with her rivals’ lack thereof, would eventually allow her to supplant those she desired to become. All that was needed was time and perhaps even a little luck. Coincidentally, it would be the unlucky disasters of World Wars I and II, both of which devastated America’s European rivals, that would grant America the ascendancy, as well as the opportunity, she had been waiting for. It would be through war that the health of the state would be assured.

After the end of the Second World War, with her rivals decimated and in desperate need of both reconstruction and peace, America became the world Empire her masters had always envisioned. Not only would America rebuild Europe’s and Japan’s battered infrastructures and economies, not to mention Western Europe’s militaries, resulting in an immense shift in the balance of world power, she would also go on to usurp Europe’s colonies in the Middle East, with their vast petroleum fields, as well as those of Asia and Africa whose natural resources the western world coveted.

With Latin America already firmly in her tight grip, America would, thanks to the manipulations and fears of the Cold War, extend her imperial hegemony throughout the globe, using her military to overtly control the world’s natural resources, her growing intelligence services to covertly dominate the nations of the planet, her wealth and power to support and maintain puppet regimes, her corporations to supply the world with American goods and military equipment, and her political strength to dominate world affairs. The Pax Americana had, thanks to the wickedness that is human war, become the dominant nation in the free world, becoming, again, thanks to human destruction and violence, the new Empire, an entity whose dominance would not and has yet to be challenged.

World War II, with its eventual carnage and suffering, its devastated peoples and ruined cities, with the tens of millions of dead human beings, nonetheless was the catalyst that propelled the American Empire to new heights, leaving its motherland untouched and unharmed, allowing it to spread its military to all corners of the globe, creating a plethora of golden opportunities it would take full advantage of. Following years of depression that only entry into the war could alleviate, America was transformed from rising star to full-fledged Empire. If war was the health of the state, World War II was the wonder drug – the penicillin – that inoculated America from malady and gave it superpower status.

Like all Empires, America began her quest for hegemony through warfare, a tool that would suit her needs quite well in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though like a powerful narcotic would soon become an addiction she would not be able to exorcise from her psyche. From the inception of her creation war, and her ability to wage it, has been of paramount importance, both for the well being of the economy and to the mythology of her greatness. It has been war, along with her success, or failure, on the battlefield, that has defined both America’s history and her people’s belief in her omnipotence.

Indeed, the use of war has created the national character just as much as the national character has created war. America’s over 100 military interventions throughout the world since the start of the twentieth century, to say nothing of the various adventures against it own indigenous population in the nineteenth century, has conditioned the citizenry to an almost perpetual state of warfare, passed on from generation to generation, that has served to create a war culture ready almost at a moment’s notice to march lock step with the thunderous drums of war generated by the government and, most recently, by the military-energy-industrial complex.

War is as American as apple pie and baseball, a national pastime that serves to maintain the perpetual wartime economy so needed for a viable standard of living. It has been her many wars that have contributed to her unsurpassed wealth and power, for her military has at present established over 700 bases worldwide, most of them located in vital geostrategic lands full of important natural resources and interests. Firm control over the world’s natural resources, especially petroleum, has assured America of cheap raw materials from which to exploit, basically pilfering them from third world nations, offering very little in return, only enriching the elite majority at the expense of the indigent masses, while helping to increase the giant, though excessively gluttonous, America empire. Much of her wealth has been and continues to be generated from the suffering of billions of humans who will never see the benefits of the treasure that lies below their feet, as well as the pillaging of resources, along with the rape of land, air and water, that do not rightfully belong to her.

America’s addiction to war has created a war culture at ease with the idea of warfare as a means of securing for the nation and the citizenry a comfortable standard of living. In order to maintain the comfort and excesses afforded inside the Pax Americana, full of cheap gas, lumber, minerals, foodstuffs, goods, construction supplies and raw materials, the nations of the globe, especially those of the south, must supply America and her economy with the natural and human resources needed to quench the hunger emanating inside the belly of the beast. Using the allocation of power it maintains, along with its unequal bargaining power, America has established with the nations of the south very favorable trade terms so that it may continue pillaging the resources it needs to maintain its unsustainable development. It therefore supplies itself with great natural wealth at very low costs, exploiting and devastating the lands of the south so that its economy may continue expanding and so that its people may continue living in comfort and gluttony.

This is the reality of America, though today Empire, instead of stretching for a few thousand miles, encompasses all corners of the globe. Its reach is omnipresent; its grip omnipotent. From exploiting mineral wealth in Africa, timber in Asia, oil in the Middle East, produce in Latin America and cheap, slave labor throughout the southern nations of the globe, the Pax Americana has assured itself of the very best resources from all reaches of the planet, all at the lowest costs and prices. Since its corporations dominate world trade, since its political power is that of Empire, America determines policies as well as terms, assuring itself of free rape, pillage and destruction of lands, resources and peoples it wants to exploit.

With a myriad number of governments, dictators and so-called kings in firm, clenched American control, with reward given them if they obey the Empire’s dictates, with punishment if they do not, the nations of the planet are but fiefdoms of the Empire, with proconsuls and chieftains and lord and masters guarding America’s lands and resources, with its garrisons and centurions and legions protecting her interests. With the expansion of Empire also comes an expansion of its military, for citizens of the lands being exploited and pillaged need to be controlled and dominated, lest rebellions and revolutions and movements try to usurp power from America.

The peoples whose lands and resources are needed by the Empire do not take kindly to having their lands destroyed, their resources stolen and their lives made barren, and must therefore be controlled and made subservient to the dictates of Old Glory. It is therefore imperative for the Empire to maintain order in the lands it controls, and must thus have garrisons and bases throughout the globe. Today, these number over 700 worldwide, the product of protection of resources, assets, interests and geostrategic locations, of establishing a presence, of intimidating potential rivals, of squashing any form of challenge to the Empire. This is the reality of today’s Empire; a modern day version of Rome on steroids and human growth hormone, needing war, tyrannical vassals and all forms of unscrupulous accords to maintain power and control and a belief in its god-given right to exploit the entire planet for its continued, and dangerous, reign.

Lesson Learned or History Repeated?

It is within America’s borders that the erosion of her power and wealth can be studied, where the rampant decadence can be traced, where her lost values can be seen and where her afflictions can be analyzed. It is inside her where the human condition can be analyzed and where we can see, quite possibly, the direction where America and humanity are headed in. For over one hundred years she has been the Rome of the modern world, unrivaled in power and reach, for years the leader in introducing new technologies and medicines, her higher education once highly sought by the world’s university students, her cities expanding vertically as well as horizontally, their wealth apparent with the construction of giant skyscrapers, giving rise to a new paradigm in human ingenuity, creating steel and glass canyons populated by millions of human beings, her population rising from an amalgam of the world, her principles becoming a shining beacon upon civilization, a land like no other, at one time full of opportunity, sought after by millions of individual people from all over the world, her pursuit of equality, freedom and democracy spawning innumerable admirers throughout the planet. Her principles and culture have reached every corner of the globe, her wealth and influence have touched every single human being; like Rome before, she will undeniably leave a legacy wherever her hands have touched.

Yet the corruption of her society, its love for the Almighty dollar, the debasement of her principles, and the outward decay of her foundations can all be seen in the darkness that is her present existence, like a full moon finally giving light to dark surroundings. She is Empire, not unique and not new, not the first and not the last one; her methods are those used by all powers that have come before, regardless of size or power, of wealth or location. Empire is humanity just as much as humanity is Empire. It is our greatest desires giving rise to the best in humanity, only to have our deadliest vices entangle us in a web of corruption and debasement. Empire is war and conquest and destruction and suffering, regardless of time or of power, showing us, more than anything, that it is humanity that must change Empire, not the other way around. Only then can Empire as we know it be crushed, its violence and exploitation and corruption of human behavior finally suppressed and put to rest.

Yet for some reason the human condition demands that Empires rise and dominate, just like they have from the very beginning of our long journey on Earth. We as a species can never seem to escape this reality, just like we oftentimes fail to dominate our primate urges and behaviors. We must understand our origins in order to understand our psychology and our actions and maybe then, after careful examination and upon further introspection of ourselves, looking not into a foggy mirror but into a lucid image of who and what we really are, will we be able to exorcise our innermost demons, shedding our violent skin aside, understanding our mammalian origins, and hence our behaviors, and forever putting a stop to the human malady of warfare that always seems to resurrect itself from our psyche at the touch of our passions, emotions, behaviors or instincts. Perhaps we will one day learn to control the wickedness that for too long we have unleashed upon our fellow human beings. It is in Empire’s cycle that humanity’s truth can be seen. It is in its actions that our behaviors can be studied and analyzed. In Empires past, present and future we see ourselves; in their history can we see our future.

Like all Empires before and all that are surely yet to come, America has reached her apex and downward is she now headed. One day soon the torch will be passed on to a new generation of Empire, surely, like her predecessors before her, following the cycle of hegemony, rising, maturing and eventually falling, growing pure, reaching the pinnacle of power, declining, debased and corrupt just like her predecessors, her citizens growing self-aggrandized, gluttonous, ignorant and arrogant, their delusion of grandeur and superiority unleashing suffering and violence upon the world. Perhaps, however, tomorrow’s power will learn from the present’s errors, absorbing the lessons inherent in the rise and fall of the Pax Americana, understanding that our human nature is as powerful as our greatest technologies, if not more so. Perhaps humanity will learn as well, preferring to live in unison rather than die divided.

For Empire today is global, no longer is it the regional power of yesteryear. As a result, the playing field has shrunk, the powerful competitors are closer and the chances for conflict have intensified. With dwindling resources, especially those of water and oil, with a booming human population, with the existence of nuclear weaponry, with global warming soon to unleash its dastardly consequences upon our fragile civilization, with human nature being what it is and with the primitive love of tribe and theology embedded in our psychology, the danger of self-extermination has grown exponentially, threatening to destroy all life on the planet.

With a future based on more conflict, not less, with old Empires and new rivals ready to wage battle over territory and resources and power and control, there now emerges a vitally important decision to be made: do we continue our ways, which based on technology and human nature means certain extermination, or do we find common ground, understand who and what we are and deviate away from a path that continues to bring us closer to the brink of self-destruction? Unfortunately, momentum is with the former, just as it has always been. Dare we change it, and the course of human destiny as well?

Something much greater than humankind’s primitive fascination with the tribe or Empire must surely exist, waiting to be incorporated into human civilization, waiting to shed its enlightenment upon all of humanity.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

The Pestilent Presidency

A Nation Conditioned

The continued dismantling of America’s very essence, the decimation of its founding core and its evolving surface, has been a product of both purposeful malevolence as well as incompetent ignorance. While the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans continue to deteriorate, each day losing more knowledge, freedom, democracy and economic survivability – though with many remaining ignorant or blinded to their actual plight – the other America, that of the elite and the corporate world, has risen in exponential fashion to take the complete reigns of power away from the rest of us. As a result, the America of times past, where the People still ruled, has given way to the America of tomorrow, a corporatist ruled land where citizens are pawns and corporations kings.

In the five years since George W. Bush was anointed to the presidency a pestilence of decrepit efficiency has overtaken the nation, accelerating and magnifying what was already an empire in rapid decline. Since early 2001, very little has gone right in the America of working and middle class citizens, both of progressive and conservative beliefs, young and old, hundreds of millions strong, divided by differing opinion yet bonded by economic and social interests. At the same time, however, the reign of George Bush the Lesser has become a bonanza to the corporate and elite world as the nation is plundered of treasure and altered from deep within the halls of Washington, its wealth and resources reallocated to and misappropriated by the Establishment, thereby transforming a government once of, by and for the People into one strictly and efficiently receptive only to the interests of corporations.

The America born in 2001, first with the ascension of Bush and later with the psychological war on Americans begun on 9/11, has degenerated according to plan, methodically and perniciously engineered by entities intent on corporatist control, molded into an immovable ship on a collision course with a giant iceberg. In order for America to sink its people had to be molded to one day accept the fate awaiting us. Our brains had to be programmed and altered, our minds controlled and conditioned, our beliefs brainwashed and engineered. For years this has been achieved by the systematic evisceration of education, gutting knowledge and reason and learning in schools, transforming young sponge-like brains into rotting grey matter devoid of free thought.

Millions upon millions of citizens never stood a chance as the decrepit state of American education gutted all semblance of knowledge, our innate ability to learn manipulated instead to follow, obey and never question, with schools slowly but surely creating a nation of soldier ants and worker bees, teaching us historical propaganda and patriotic drivel, programming us to place unyielding devotion to flag and country, instructing us about the vast consortium of lies and fictions that comprise American history. We were brainwashed into always placing blind faith and trust in government and leaders, told to never question or dissent or protest the actions rising out of Washington.

Over years of anemic education, lacking the tools that makes the human mind free, devoid of reason, logic and analytical thought, with parental roles having become extinct, indoctrinated, taught and reared by the warm glow of television and the corporate world that controls it, our brain waves reprogrammed to the fictions and fantasy radiating from our monitors, with the brainwashing and controlling manipulations of our church, and with our minds becoming the receptive antennas to the voices and opinion of paid talking heads and media hacks tens of millions of us became, naturally, the very essence of the automatons our upbringing had systemically sculpted.

With schools under funded, subsisting in financial abandonment and teeming with reckless indifference, the state and the corporate world were free to educate us and our children through the monitor at home and propaganda laced schoolbooks, teaching only what was necessary to mold and create an army of unthinking drones through the purposeful evisceration of enlightened classes and curriculum. Over decades of discarded education, parenting and rearing, millions of children became the conduits and tools to power, enabling, through their large numbers, the continued decimation of the nation and giving rise, after years of patient lurking, to the debasement, corruption and corporatism that was resurrected with the appointment to power of the ultimate instrument of corporatist control, George W. Bush.

We became, over a series of subsequent decades, what we had allowed ourselves to become, following the blueprints of corporatist control, from birth mesmerized by the familiar warmth of television, absorbing the sounds and images carefully concocted by the corporate world which, as always, worked its magic, molding, caressing and reprogramming brainwaves along with the eventual destinies of millions of people. Over the years we allowed ourselves to be programmed and conditioned, engineered to become a society more and more willing to serve the interests of the powerful, in the process unknowingly sacrificing our own interests and becoming, by early 2001, a readied army standing silent, prepared, at the sound of corporatist trumpets, to march lockstep towards blind compliance, corporatist control and an ominous future.

Those trumpets calling Americans to arms would sound the last throes of the America of yesterday with the horrific implosion and subsequent destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Like a giant hypnotizing pendulum, 9/11 became the psychological instrument that brought life to an army molded over years of careful manipulation and conditioning. Falling towers and psychological operations thus acted in unison to enthrall millions who instinctively and blindly followed the emotions and behaviors that naturally arise from years of programmed conditioning.

Suddenly sprung to life after years waiting in the wings, millions of engineered Americans began doing what they had been taught to do for decades, becoming the rabidly patriotic and xenophobic citizenry unable to see forward because of myopic views and cloud covered thoughts, becoming the bed-wetting and fright-smeared beings gravitating to the only entity they had been taught was capable of protecting them from the evil bogeymen: the president.

Thus came to pass that George W. Bush, weak in character and in mind, failure in life and born to privilege, unlearned, unwise and incurious, corrupt and incompetent beyond repair, was thrust upon a paradigm shift of time, where differing dimensions crashed into each other, creating parallel universes and alternate realities, transforming America into a nation whose past would never again be allowed to thrive. In the engineered Americans he would find absolute power, along with the ingredients necessary to manipulate the fear and terror that have invariably become the oxygen-rich air feeding his oil thirsty veins. Thus, into the dawn of corporatist America George W. Bush stepped in, assuring the world that nothing would ever be the same again.

Bush’s Past, America’s Present

Upon the trail of tears following in the footsteps of democracy lost, a curse was birthed from Atlantic to Pacific, its dark fog covering the light of enlightenment and reality, replaced instead with the blackness of ignorance and blind faith. Into our lives has risen a most contemptuous figure, a man whose immorality knows no bounds, whose ability to lie in perpetuity is as great as his inability to competently lead a nation.

A man who was destined to become but a small herpes pimple appearing but once on history’s ass was granted a gift that has only kept on giving, becoming, since 9/11, the sustenance springing forth an oasis of political power to Republicans and to George W. Bush in particular. Without the horrific events that transpired on that fateful day, Bush would have been a certain one-term president, remembered more for his stolen election and both his subversion and contempt for democracy than for anything he could have ever done in the Oval Office.

Even before 9/11 his incompetence and lack of intelligence were readily apparent; yet his corruption was growing and evolving; his hunger to appease the corporatist world was evident. Hugely unpopular in his first few months in office, his administration was sinking even before sailing, for tens of millions of informed Americans had quickly realized the criminality of a man willing to selfishly place his stolen election over the interests and will of the People.

Yet his appointment to office was never designed to benefit the People, for inside political theater of compassionate conservatism chicanery festered and deception thrived. His was to be a presidency of, by and for the corporate world, an ascension to absolute power by the elite in control of corporations. He was to become the puppet of corporatism, doing the bidding for the powerful, his last name used as a marketing ploy to manipulate the minds of millions of voters. With a dynastic last name, an ignorant mind and an ever-weakening character, he became the perfect tool for the corporate world to clandestinely insert their powerful tentacles inside the highest office in the land.

Born to wealth and aristocracy, with a silver spoon in his mouth and a dark-skinned maid to acquiesce to his every demand, Bush never learned what life was like to the vast majority of Americans. Protected from the reality of the “real world,” the world of you and me, he never learned the lessons or the harshness of life difficult and unexpected, never suffering hunger, thirst, cold or the uncertainty of living paycheck to paycheck. He never experienced difficulty paying bills or sacrificing happiness for health.

Sequestered in the life of royalty, hidden from reality by his attending elitist prep schools, he was unable to empathize with anything other than the society he was born into. Needing the affirmative action of influence and legacy in order to attend Ivy League universities, he became a complacent and spoiled fraternity boy, growing from male cheerleader to partier extraordinaire, as always looking down upon the rest of America’s social classes with contempt, feeling himself superior by birth, failing to understand our ways of living life and our struggles, our needs and wants, forever devoid of a humanity and an understanding of life at the opposite end of the tracks.

Preferring to dwell in the spirits of the bottle instead of the philosophies of books, yet possessing all the resources needed by which to pursue a truly enlightened age of reason and age of discovery, he instead subsisted trailing behind his much more intelligent father’s footsteps, living off the laurels of his parents, in time branching off on his own, though as always using the vast resources of the family, not to mention the powerful influence of his last name that instantly opens doors and transcends the inertia of business, that would be the envy of any seemingly competent entrepreneur trying to succeed in life.

Yet even with the incredible opportunities granted him throughout his life, Bush could never succeed on his own. Time after time he needed the salvation and money of his father to bail him out of the trouble that usually followed him around. With the powerful influence of Bush the Wiser, Bush the Lesser, in spite of all his shortcomings, inevitably always found partners and business opportunities. It can safely be assumed that these individuals took in the son as a favor or to gain favor with the father, always knowing how incompetent the son was yet wanting to secure friendship with a man whose influence in Washington only grew.

In time, exploiting his last name, his family’s wealth, his father’s influence and the corruption and lack of integrity by which he has become well known today, he amassed a small fortune. Meanwhile, sinister demons lurked about, and over time, a fondness for alcohol developed, haunting him for years until he became a born again Christian, a natural result befalling truly lost souls possessing weak and vulnerable minds. It was in Scripture that he found meaning, it was in the Church structure that he found comfort, needing, like all lost souls, to find meaning to life both through control of his impulses and by placing blind faith in an unseen and unknown god.

His born again belief in the Almighty was in part a consequence of his psychologically fragile mind that had resulted after years of being unable to duplicate the success of his father, knowing that he would never surpass a legacy set in wisdom and intelligence, in better genes and talent. The deep psychological manifestation between an overachieving father and an underachieving son, so full of insecurities, an inferiority complex and internal conflict, resulted for Bush in a contempt for life only drowned either by filling the mind with alcoholic spirits and the high of drugs, or from kneeling down in subservient obedience to a metaphysical god demanding complete control and power over the individual.

One can suspect that it is this deep psychological vacuum – of a desire to be greater than his always competent father – that has driven Bush the Lesser during his presidency, trying desperately in every way possible to become a better president than his father. This quest, however, has been fruitless, resulting in even greater incompetence and in a further fogging of logic, reason, decision making and analytical thought, becoming a growing threat to the Republic, as can be clearly seen over the last five years, for Bush the Lesser is fighting a lost cause, demons that cannot be exorcised, his mental faculty never being able to reach or surpass that of Bush the Wiser.

It was this utterly weak-minded individual, bereft of inner strength and strong will, haunted by the deep insecurities of never being able to surpass the talents and abilities of his father, that would go on to become governor of Texas and later, President of the United States, once again using and exploiting his last name, not to mention the reputation of George Bush the Wiser, to carry him into power. For Bush the Lesser knew that his assets were not his mind or his talent, but something much more superficial, the legacy and reputation established by his father, the human infrastructure loyal to his father, the family wealth and the ever important Bush family name.

Even though he could not carry the weight of his father on his shoulders, Bush nonetheless exploited every mechanism established and left over by his father, knowing that if he could not surpass him, he could at least use his legacy to reach otherwise unattainable heights. Using all these weapons at his disposal, even a complete incompetent and buffoon such as Bush could achieve success. It was this infrastructure of assets established by his father that would eventually condemn America to a Pestilent Presidency and the world to an increased sense of threat and insecurity.

Bush’s Base

Nobody has benefited more from the tragedy of 9/11 than George W. Bush. He has exploited its emotions, its deep scars and its echoing voices from the grave. Without it he would be nothing, an insignificant one term has-been troubled by the psychological fragility his limitations engender. Yet because of his incompetence, and some would say willful negligence, America’s new Pearl Harbor was allowed to occur, as ever under his watch, as ever under his disastrous leadership, or lack thereof, that has followed him since birth. Because of 9/11 tens of millions have become addicted to his existence, to his smirk and his strut, mesmerized at the charade created by marketing geniuses, of a Napoleon-like being leading the herd through the forest of ghosts and goblins, with sword in hand slaying evildoer Arabs trying to destroy the sacred lands of America.

He is perceived by his base, tens of millions of individuals sharing many characteristics, composed of Christian fundamentalists, the conservative, the unenlightened, the selfish, the apathetic, the easily led, the weak-minded, the unthinking, the ignorant, those blinded by flag and cross, those more likely to hate based on race, gender and sexual preference, the xenophobic, the extreme patriotic, the war mongers, the greed addicts, the super wealthy, the corporatists, the neocons and the elite, as the father figure destiny has chosen to protect and defend them and their rights in these most “hideous times of trouble.” It is these individuals who blindly swear allegiance to a man of embarrassing ineptitude for various reasons, voting for him in droves, not wanting to listen to reason or logic even as their nation crumbles from underneath their legs and as their cherished freedoms and liberties vanish right in front of their eyes.

Even as he appeals to this collection of self-destruction and self-exploitation his interests lie in protecting, defending and expanding the powers of those like himself, namely, the elite and corporatists among his base. While courting the rest of his followers, he promises heaven and delivers hell, forever weaving and dealing and conniving in a clear pattern of deception. In Orwellian fashion, Bush uses terms for policies that signify the exact opposite of what he intends to do. He makes the unthinking in his base come to the conclusion that he has their best interests at heart.

Yet the blind and the deaf and those that cannot think for themselves fail to understand that they are but pawns in the game of power, used only for their vote, contribution and political power, never to see the benefits of what the Dear Leader preaches. In time he grants them the morsels and crumbs and bones of what is left over, enough to appease their illogical minds. These bits and pieces keep the base at ease, happy enough to chew on their given bones, content that a small sliver of what they asked for has been given them.

For years they are kept servile to the interests of Bush’s real base, yet they think themselves the true recipients of power. Deluded and easily manipulated, they feverishly support the myriad of policies that will, in the end, be of great detriment to their lives, wallets and future of their children. Blinded by the incapacity to understand or to read policy, knowledgeable only in the ten second sound bites shouted out, thirty second advertisements saturated with lies and the slogans written in cardboard propaganda, and possessing the attention span of a gnat, the majority of those that support Bush will invariably shoot themselves, and their children, in the foot, their lives made worse thanks to the ardent following of a man that undoubtedly sneers behind their backs, pillages their wages, robs them of jobs, increases their many expenses and sends them or their children to war. Even as they blindly follow, even as they sign loyalty pledges, Bush is working to eviscerate their country and their lives.

In reality he cares not an ounce for their plight or their lives, seeing in them only the exploited energy to be used by his corporate allies. The average American is alien to people like George W. Bush, enigmas that never encompassed the elitist lifestyle of families like the Bushes. George W. Bush only saw the masses through a looking glass, in small timeframes where by happenstance two differing social classes would meet. We were the hired help, the fish beyond the six inch compressed glass, the beings represented by television, far removed from the mansions and estates of northeastern aristocracy. To Bush the common man might be seen and touched for periods of time, but we are never understood and never seen as equals. We are the peasants to the ruling class, our lives made better if only someone like Bush would look our way.

The façade of Bush as a Texan cowboy, wearing his hat and his boots, strutting around with his cowboy demeanor, is but a clever public relations campaign designed to give Bush the appearance of normalcy. His Crawford ranch is but a hollow illusion created to make out of this pampered east coast elite a common folk that appeals to the masses. Yet most of his years were spent in Connecticut, living the life of luxury, attending institutions of prestige and landed gentry. It is this group of people that Bush represents, for they have been present throughout his bubble existence. He is them just as much as they are him. The rest of Bush’s followers lie far, far behind, walking where footprints disappear to an approaching wave, to be used and abused, like they have throughout American history, by the upper echelons of America’s hierarchy.

It is the corporate world, and the corporatists that control it, that are Bush’s true constituents. To this group he has been a raving success, one of the greatest presidents to ever take office. Through him they have hijacked the White House and the entire nation, transforming government into a prostitute for the corporate world. He has appointed a multitude of corporate executives, hacks, lackeys and talking heads to the middle and highest levels of governance, creating, inside Washington, a nest of corporatists gorging on a once-proud government of the People from the inside, mutating it into a breadbasket containing the tasty and succulent pastries making obese the bank accounts of both corporations and the elite. The halls of governance are littered with cronies and criminals, inept and talentless individuals whose only abilities are incompetence, donating money and smearing their noses with the fecal matter of power.

Since his anointment, Washington has become a bordello of cheap prostitutes, a red light district where government officials eagerly wait in street corners, ready to exchange money flows, anticipating unbuckling belts, bending over, spreading cheeks and selling their souls to corporate demons. The Beltway has become a city of corruption and debauchery, of greed and love of the Almighty Dollar, a perfect place for corporate interests to prevail. Laws, rules, regulations and appropriations have been written and rewritten, altered or created, amended or clandestinely introduced, the vast majority of which favor in some way, shape or form the corporate world. Science, education, reality and truth are being suppressed in order to grant favor to corporations whose profits rely on truth not being made public.

The nation’s treasure has been pillaged in one of the world’s greatest heists, a highway robbery that has left the nation and its economy close to imminent collapse. Untold billions of dollars have disappeared, given to cronies or to corporatist buddies, their companies made vastly wealthy thanks to the misappropriation of a treasure earned by the blood, sweat and tears of hard working Americans. Meanwhile, Bush has orchestrated, along with the Republican Party, one of the largest tax cuts to the wealthy in our history, at the expense of the middle class, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, leaving the nation without adequate funding and severely compromising the future economic prospects of the nation.

George W. Bush has declared that he is a ‘war president’ and indeed he has become one. The only problem is that he has declared a war against the American people, along with his ill-conceived war in Iraq, in the process inflicting severe damage to both working and middle class citizens, in a preemptive strike against the very foundations of America. This war has been planned for years, becoming a platform for Republican success. By robbing the nation of its treasure, by indebting America so severely, there will come a time when we will be forced, in order to maintain economic stability, to eviscerate the many social programs that are the hallmark of American principles of justice and equality.

With a war that will cost a trillion dollars, with tax cuts for the wealthy and for the corporate world, with almost $500 billion going to the military-industrial complex yearly, the corporatists in power will declare that in order to maintain a reasonable budget, social programs such as education, healthcare, welfare assistance, work assistance and any policy to help the poor will have to be gutted. We are seeing this already. For years social services have been hated by a Republican Party that has no empathy or understanding for the plight of the less fortunate. A party ideology that believes in social Darwinism and in the power of unfettered capitalism has wanted to do away with social safety nets for decades, as usual ignorant or unconcerned to the ramifications to their actions. Bush, ever the Jesus lover and conduit of the Almighty that he is, is helping to destroy these very foundations.

Almost every law and regulation enacted benefits corporations at the expense of average Americans. Today, corporations are free to run unobstructed as they race to make as much profit as possible, caring nothing for the people they harm in the process. Corporate profits today, along with CEO salaries, have become a ridiculous display of arrogance, with some companies earning profits of $10 billion per quarter. Thanks to Bush, war has been declared against average Americans, as corporations do as they wish, lowering wages, raising prices, cutting thousands of jobs, outsourcing their employees to bottom dwelling nations, using cost cutting mechanisms to further exploit workers or compromise customers. Pensions are being cut, healthcare is ever-more expensive, prescription pills are not affordable, gasoline is as expensive as ever and all around, laws are being enacted to further the interests of the corporate world at the expense of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Is it any wonder why companies in the oil/energy, pharmaceutical and defense industries have had some of the highest profits ever recorded? When your representative lives inside the White House, when his job is to empower and enlarge corporate control over America, all the while destroying the middle class and its freedoms and liberties, making hundreds of millions of citizens slaves subservient to the corporate world, you can declare mission accomplished. This, to all who can see clearly, is the reason for Bush’s ascension to the highest office in the land. The most powerful man in the world has as his objective the rise to total control of the corporate world, altering the balance of power away from We the People and towards the direction of corporatist control. This is Bush’s true base and to them, he has been a rousing success, a truly great President.

Rise of the Dictator

Since Bush took the reigns of power, corruption has become endemic in Washington. With the love of the Almighty Dollar running rampant throughout the corridors of governance, with politics becoming more important than policy, with public relations given more precedence than truth and with charlatans, criminals and callous destroyers of human life prevalent and in control, the ingredients exist to make of Washington a putrid cocktail of immorality representing everything that is wrong with America and the rise of unfettered capitalism.

The secrecy of government has never been as noticeable as it is today. With an arrogant contempt for the People’s right to know that has seldom been seen in our history, the Bush administration has sequestered, hidden, whitewashed, trashed, covered up and made to disappear what it does not want known. Whistleblowers are ruined, investigations are squashed, investigators are promoted away from their investigations, reports are quieted, science is trashed and true patriots are prevented from speaking truth. Transparency and accountability have become things of the past, as the activities of the executive have vanished from the public record. They do whatever they want, trash the Constitution when they so feel, creating rules and laws beneficial to their interests, hiding their criminality behind layers of newly concocted opinions and Constitutional interpretations by their hired cronies and lackeys.

Since 9/11 Bush has eroded many civil liberties, freedoms and rights, enveloping the nation into the grip of corporatism, more commonly called fascism. Wherever Bush travels, to give a speech or a fundraiser, is turned into a police state, with so-called “free speech zones,” with mandatory “loyalty oaths” to those attending Bush’s propaganda-laced speech and with a small army of police and secret service bullying and frightening. As opposition to the Iraq war has grown, suppressions of dissent and protest has increased, with police forces becoming the brownshirts and blackshirts of the Administration, intimidating and threatening peaceful protesters. Free speech is a dying right, and inside Bush’s gatherings, where he sits comfortably in his infallible bubble, only those who agree with his policies or support him are allowed inside.

With the arrival of Bush into office thanks to his illegal anointment, the erosion of democracy since 2000 has only accelerated, with questionable election results in 2002 and once again with the presidential election of 2004, where millions of votes, it is now known, were manipulated in favor of Bush. With two stolen presidential elections, easily provable and apparent to anyone with half a brain, American democracy has ceased to exist, becoming an archaic antique in the minds of those still able to remember the last clean election. The use of electronic voting, using Republican controlled machines such as Diebold, has cast an enormous cloud over the continued vitality of American democracy. For now, with electronic voting machines becoming the rule rather than the exception, their numbers growing throughout the nation, what we once knew as democracy has died, buried six feet under the crumbling foundations of what was once America. The question, then, becomes: Why does Bush hate us for our democracy? Why does he fear the principle of one person, one vote?

He has done more damage to America in this so-called war on terror than Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, destroying our freedoms and rights, severely compromising habeas corpus and due process, allowing for arrests without probable cause, surveillance of peaceful anti-war groups and unlawful wiretapping of American citizens. He has granted the right to spy on us as well as the right to enter our homes without warrants or permission or knowledge. Our computers can be hacked, our libraries can be asked to provide private information and private companies, it is now known, are cooperating with the government, providing private information regarding the accounts of Americans. Yet he has failed to adequately protect our ports and borders, our nuclear and chemical plants. The question should now be asked: Why does Bush hate us for our rights and freedoms? Does he want to destroy our way of life?

More importantly, Bush has introduced a reign of terror and fear upon the American people. Like a darkness that does not dissipate he has imported perpetual fear, perpetual war and perpetual terror to our shores. He has become the ultimate terrorist, greater than any Arab bogeyman, greater than any ghoul or goblin lurking in our closets, much more dangerous than any Muslim. Injecting fear into our consciousness, making millions feel insecure and unprotected, making them dependent on him and on government for psychological comfort enables Bush to expand his powers and his dominion over the citizens of the nation. It is the only way he can govern, and the only way he can maintain power. Both he and 9/11 were born on the same day, creatures of symbiotic affection, one unable to survive without the other. September 11, 2001, with its memories, engendered emotions and massive exploitation, is his twin sister.

Thus he, his handlers and his marketers terrorize the American public, manipulating fears and emotions and psychological fragility, eroding our inner strength and confidence, making us willingly sacrifice our remaining freedoms and rights. Through our fear his power grows, through our trust in him our nation is destroyed more each day. Little do they care about our health, our stress and our worries, preferring to continue haunting minds rather than alleviating them. To them, 9/11 remains manna from heaven, the essence of their power, the darkness enveloping and hiding every one of their lies, deceptions and manipulations.

Fear and terror must be maintained in the national spotlight, creating a nation of bed-wetters, underwear-soilers and cry babies asking Father Bush for protection. The Dear Leader belief must be kept alive. It is this fear that sustains and feeds George W. Bush, becoming his opiate, his new drug of choice. Without it he would be finished, his popularity eviscerated, his lies exposed, his ego trampled, his purple robe burned. With it he rules like an emperor, a dictator whose arrogance to ignore checks and balances becomes ever more dangerous the longer absolute power corrupts. The fear of tens of millions of Americans allows him to lie and deceive and manipulate and whitewash and escape all accountability, granting him powers never granted an executive, making him, to millions of rabid and blind supporters, a living god.

It is the terror he exposes and markets that makes submissive to his grip millions of Americans, robbing them of free thought or reason. It is the terror that he manufacturers and exaggerates that suppresses our freedoms and rights. It is the power we cede him that grants him the ability and desire to torture, kidnap, imprison and bomb, killing over 150,000 thousand innocent Iraqis and over 2,200 American soldiers. Our fears and insecurities have allowed him to build a network of gulags around the world, beginning with the concentration camp in Guantanamo. How many people have disappeared in these prisons, never to see daylight again? How many people in Iraq have been tortured, raped and sodomized, with Bush’s silent consent?

It is the terror he unleashes on the Arab world that is making our lives more dangerous, increasing our insecurity and the risk of further attacks. He has contributed in mass murder and devastating destruction, maiming, injuring and causing incredible amounts of suffering. He has completely and utterly destroyed the nation of Iraq. Under international definitions of terrorism, George W. Bush is the greatest terrorist alive today.

The Jesus he claims to follow is not the Jesus that guides him as a politician. Claiming to converse with the Almighty, claiming to be a conduit of the Almighty’s path for humanity, Bush as President has acted more like the God of the Old Testament than the one of the New, unleashing death, destruction and untold suffering on hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom are the descendents of those that first concocted the myth of Bush’s god. He has shown no remorse, no pity, no forgiveness and no love as he has unleashed the instruments and weapons of war upon millions of innocent civilians, waging his own personal jihad against Arabs and Muslims. And people by the millions think him a Christian?

He is an amateur dictator enraptured and corrupted by absolute power, depending on the army of conditioned Americans to continue his devastation, both in the Middle East and in the United States. Nothing he has ever done has been a success, and now he is sending one more business venture, the nation called America, down the precipice of failure. Never succeeding, always failing, forever bailed out by Bush the Wiser, he has never learned what it is like to suffer hardship and pain, never experiencing hunger and struggle. He is a callous and cold-hearted individual with deep psychological problems, weak-minded in character and a bully in spirit. His arrogance and hubris will be the demise of us all. Unfortunately, his father cannot save him, or the nation, any longer. He will fail on his own, becoming a curse upon our land, a pestilence infecting our principles and our virtues, our rivers and lands, our children and future.

Nothing has gone right since the curse called Bush entered office. His is a Pestilent Presidency, a rotting manifestation of corruption and immorality, a fraud and conniver, a most unethical human being incapable of honor or integrity. When we should be running away from scum such as this we instead allow him to steal two elections and remain the pestilence that he is, creating a diseased society devoid of the freedom it once possessed and the civil rights it fought so hard to attain.

George W. Bush is a corporatist without intelligence, an unknowing, incurious, detached and ignorant human being, a puppet to much brighter individuals, a tool for the corporate world. He does not care for the unenlightened souls that see him as Dear Leader, nor the soldiers he sends to either die or sacrifice mental health. In reality, he does not care about America, at least the America of you, me and everyone else. He is changing our lands, our society, giving our government to corporations and the corporatists that run them. In time, and with reflection, after the hypnosis of this most devastating of Presidents has passed, he will be seen for what he presently is, namely, the worst person to ever occupy the White House, becoming, through infamy, the mistake that was and the lesson learned.

The Pestilent Presidency was given all the tools in life to become a success, yet throughout his life, he has failed at everything, only succeeding in politics thanks to his last name and the power of his father. Born to wealth beyond our dreams, he became not a competent and able leader, but a man devoid of talent and ability, a person squandering the opportunity given him. Wrapped inside a bubble of luxury and elitism, he failed to understand the mass of humanity, seeing it as easily exploitable, easily suppressed and easily controlled. In his upbringing can we see the destruction he has unleashed upon our nation. In his failures can we understand today’s most troubled times.

The Pestilent Presidency has been a malignant tumor to the America of you, me and everyone else. He has been a grand success to the corporate world. Who do you think he represents? Whose interests does he help further? Only when he departs and exits our lives will the curse of Bush lift from our country, dissipating like a long, permanent haze, and perhaps only then can we try and reclaim what has been lost, if it is not already too late. The ruins of what George W. Bush will leave behind after he leaves our reality will be strewn all around us, rotting and eroding, the whispers of a better America barely audible, yet its horizon ready to be radiant once again.

With him gone we will finally try to rebuild and move forward, trying to erase memories of the Pestilent Presidency from our midst, trying, desperately, to make right the direction of America, trying, as much as possible, to never again allow a pestilence to destroy what we stand for, in the process inoculating ourselves with the antidote of harsh lessons learned, finally eradicating the diseases and fears that most ail us.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

The Army of Good Americans

Marching Forward

Festering in our midst like a toxic cloud of pollution the army of good Americans exists, living and working among us, inhabiting our neighborhoods and cities, co-existing peacefully with us, though perceiving an utterly different conception of reality than the rest of us. Their numbers, though dwindling more every day with the almost weekly revelations of corporatist lies built upon corporatist lies and government deceptions meshed with corporate criminality, remain high, thanks to those unable to escape the clouds of 9/11 and the manipulative propaganda of the corporatist media. The Kool-Aid drinking brigades remain strong, still ardent supporters of frivolous, fictitious and diminishing deceptions, still hypnotized to the dim-witted, slurred speech of their great Commander in Chief, still spewing the talking points they hear emanating from the corporatist media and still clinging to the ingrained and unenlightened selfishness that permeates their existence.

Today they are harder to recognize than in previous years, their once proud bumper stickers and car magnets on pickup trucks and SUVs praising their Dear Leader now nowhere to be seen, evaporating like a morning fog, thrown into trash bins or stored inside closets, lest they be fingered as part of the ignorant legions of automatons that helped steer America directly towards its present predicament. Gone are the large W’s emblazoned on their vehicles, that blue “Wastika” showcasing blind loyalty to criminality and fascism, while advertising mental fragility and propensities to be the followers of incompetence. Missing from the giant trucks and monstrous SUV’s masking quite apparent deficiencies below the belt are the plethora of patriotism-laced and nationalism-filled slogans that reeked of machismo yet betrayed delicate insecurity, now conveniently hidden from view as their precious war for fictitious democracy and freedom continues its decent into quagmire and debacle.

Yet this vast army of sheeple lingers throughout the American landscape, for they have not quite surrendered to truth or reality, two concepts as unfamiliar to them as reason and logic. They have simply retreated back to the canopied forests where barbarians live, crawling under rocks and boulders, returning home only to await the beckoning calls of further war through the trumpets of fear and hatred. Like fair-weathered fans, hiding at the first sign of defeat, rising with the arrival of victory, wanting only to be seen with winners and associated with success, this army of followers abandons ship when trouble can be seen and defeat smelled, forgetting that a war and quagmire exists in Iraq, evading their complicity in furtherance of criminality, finding it easy to whitewash from their minds war crimes and the murder of over 120,000 Iraqi and American lives.

For they are the Army of Good Americans, fearing what they do not know or understand, easily led into the dark expanses of human nature, ignorant to the ease with which they are manipulated and made blind to the power they willingly cede to the criminals and murderers in power. Birthed from the rubble of the World Trade Center, rising like a phoenix on 9/11 to claim dominion over America, this army has been the oxygen-rich blood maintaining alive the criminals in office. They are the defenders of war crimes and the apologizers of corruption. Filled with the emotions and passion of mammalian instinct, making them unthinking, uncritical, illogical and without reason, the army of good Americans has become the key used by corporatists to unlocking imperial aspirations abroad and destroying freedoms and rights at home. It is this army – a large part of American society – that has become an oasis to corporatists whose ambitions would have otherwise perished in the deserts of the Middle East.

Their legions, marching lock step behind their Dear Leader, filled to the rafters with the fear, hatred, xenophobia and patriotism needed by authoritarian regimes to thrive, have become the conduits of destruction, violence, rape and murder, the co-conspirators of illegality and death. Easily they answered the call to scapegoat and hate that which they did not know, their fear magnified and manipulated by their puppeteers, becoming the pawns of expendability and the tools of power, their emotions abused, their religious beliefs manipulated, their vote exploited, their majority numbers used to invade and occupy foreign lands and pilfer the treasury at home.

To them 9/11 was their call to arms, that transcendental moment where imploding towers falling birthed trance-like obedience and blind faith to criminals, though preferring the cowardice of chicken hawks, the timidity of yellow elephants and the comfort of armchair warriors rather than the bravery of enlistment and deployment. After all, in the demented mind of the army of good Americans, those less fortunate, those relegated to the lower castes of society due to the weaknesses espoused by the failed theories of social Darwinism are destined to become the cannon fodder of America, returning either dead or maimed for life serving their role where “survival of the fittest” governs.

Sitting comfortably on their couches, engorging themselves with microwave dinners, watching reality television and the latest exploits of sensationalist news reports while thousands of innocents die in order to appease their thirst for vengeance, the army of good Americans pretends to support the troops through car magnets and ribbons, hiding behind the red, white and blue, hiding insecurities through the bravado of tough talk, yet in reality sacrifices nothing both for a war they asked for or for the soldiers their loud voices sent to hell on Earth.

Instead, they bask in the glow of American comfort, kneeling down and praying nightly to the monitor in the center of their households, becoming the obedient drones of propaganda, absorbing and taking as their own the cocktail of talking points spewed by corporate media and its clusters of lackeys and hacks. On weekends they can be spotted playing with the many adult toys purchased through maxed out credit cards, thinking themselves beneficiaries of the mirage called the American Dream, not realizing their role in exponentially increasing the debt they will forever be enslaved to pay. After work they can be seen visiting the famed cathedrals of consumerism, those monstrous malls of materialism surveying suburbia, teeming with the products of overindulgence and the goods of escapism, sadly having become the center of American society and culture.

It is this army of good Americans that will, upon the next happenstance bogeyman atrocity, once again rise up in a fear-induced, hate-engendered frenzy, waving Old Glory, hiding behind its colors, its xenophobia metastasized to a rabid-filled, vengeance-seeking wickedness of blindness of reason and deafness of wisdom, asking, begging government and its corporatist masters to further usurp its civil liberties, freedoms and rights, gladly sacrificing the future of their children for the chance to be protected and be made secure from evildoers, both real and concocted, demanding, in its infinite ignorance, the full spectrum of the American police state.

Bubbles of Comfort and Fantasies of Deception

The army of good Americans would rather live in the slavery of ignorance rather than the freedom of knowledge, preferring shackles of fiction to the liberty of reality. Loyal followers to lies and deceit, easily manipulated and corralled, addicted to being misled and loving the exploitation of their emotions, they would rather not know truth than stop believing in fantasy, choosing to remain inside the bubble of comfortable deceptions rather than sit atop the mountain of concerns. Merrily they drink the Kool-Aid that enables them to remain unknowing, unconcerned and unrepentant sheeple, wishing to remain embedded into the same system that abuses, exploits and subjugates them. They would rather subsist in ignorance than thrive in truth, preferring to maintain the illusions and fictions manufactured by propagandists that allow them to escape the reality that is the human condition.

In the fantasy conjured up by their masters they see only the reality they want to believe in, the altered existence that they would much rather be part of. Weak minded in character, needing to be dominated and led, searching for a master to guide and exploit them, more likely to believe in the fables of archaic stories and fictions of metaphysical gods, and searching the periphery of the world for answers they do not know or understand, they will forever be made to believe any lie or manipulation or deception thrown at them, for they crave leadership, whether malignant or benign, and are in desperate need to place blind faith in fictional leadership, whether that of invisible gods or incompetent presidents. For this army follows, it does not lead, it relies on commands, not its own internal minds, and it appropriates the thoughts of others, incorporating them as their own, regurgitating them as if they have even a basic comprehension of the much broader issues.

The army of good Americans, like their counterpart in 1930’s Germany, blindly follows and seldom asks questions, always with a wink and a nod turning a blind eye to criminality, rapidly forgetting morality and humanity, pretending not to know the actions of their government and later, when the consequences to those actions finally arise, saying they did not understand, denying complicity and accepting ignorance. Yet purposefully they cover their eyes when it is convenient, but not when it is suitable to their wants and needs, when their fears and hatreds have fed on the vicarious crimes against humanity committed by their leaders. Through quiet acquiescence to the crimes of their masters they become complicit actors to the actions of madmen, their psyches becoming a vacuum devoid of virtue and morality, their failure to speak out or act against the crimes they allow to continue making them as guilty as those committing them.

Since 9/11 the crimes of the Bush administration have been known to all, yet to the army of good Americans, rabid with a hunger for Arab blood and entangled with the enraptured desire to inflict pain on that which is unknown and most feared, the crimes against humanity and the war crimes committed in their name are free to continue, allowed to permeate the conscious of America and enter the imagination of our once innocent children. The use of malevolent torture, false imprisonment, cruel and unusual punishment and dehumanization are seen as virtues that must be inflicted on Arabs and Muslims, lest the debauchery of American culture be laid to waste. The infliction of collective punishment, mass bombings, destruction of homes and lives, assassinations, shootings and suffering is seen as a necessary means to achieve victory, regardless of the amounts of innocent blood spilled and the level of misery spawned, for the full might of America’s military must be shown off and utilized.

To the army of good Americans, many of them undereducated and unenlightened, many filled with the hatred and fear becoming of all great pawns, unwise to long-term consequences and possessing the myopic lens of short-term satisfaction, war against brown-skinned peoples is a consequence of deep rooted racism and xenophobia, a chance to unleash the mightiest army in the world upon third world sub-humans who have conveniently been made scapegoats by those who decide reality. Lacking the fundamental precepts of humanity, empathy inside them as rare as underground fields of oil in New York City, unable to place Iraq and the Middle East on a world map, made unaware of alien cultures and of history itself, good Americans epitomize the ugly American, that creature molded by America’s degraded education system, reared by television and not parents, reprogrammed through fiction and not reality, unable to comprehend the world outside its bubble or the existence of cultures different than its own.

Sadly, it is the ugly American – millions of which comprise the army of good Americans – that would have no problem incinerating the Middle East with nuclear weapons, killing millions of Arabs in the process. Such was the thought process of the good Germans of yesteryear. Inside the minds of many ugly Americans, though they would deny it upon questioning, lives the growing desire to rid the nation of Arabs and Muslims and gays and all brown-skinned immigrants, for America is a “white, Christian nation,” their fear, hatred and xenophobia rising like a giant wave of testosterone, resurrecting a hypocrisy and bigotry lying dormant for decades.

Their buttons pushed expertly by hate radio, miscreant politicians and vitriol filled so-called men of god, the ugly American is a manifestation of frustrations and inner anger, of impotence of character, of deep seated insecurities and of malignant fundamentalist religions, born in ignorance and in a capitalist system espousing social engineering and social Darwinism, the worst of America, a creation that should not exist in a nation of such wealth and splendor.

An Army, Used and Abused

The army of good Americans is easily controlled through television, made to believe everything it hears, manipulated with the greatest of ease thanks to its inability to think on its own. No longer a free thinking individual, soldiers in this army depend on the stenographers of the state and the propagandists of the corporatists to feed him with information and opinion, lest he be left out in the wilderness, unable to think or understand, unable to spew talking points, susceptible to those wishing to pop his bubble of comfortable surroundings. He is a product of an education system now designed to make subservient to the state all students, indoctrinating the mechanisms of servitude and allegiance into young minds, no longer creating independent minds but rather robotic psyches both through standardized teaching and the purposeful bankruptcy of financial resources.

Taught to never question superiors or to analyze a situation using reason or logic, the good American is but a hollow figment of what used to be a human mind. He has become a producer and a consumer, trained from birth to desire the fruits of materialism and never question the evils of American capitalism. He has as responsibility allegiance to government and undying loyalty to corporations and their products. He is to blindly follow leadership, no matter how corrupt or criminal it might be, no matter how detrimental to his life it is. He is taught that the actions of government or of leaders are always right, never wrong. Blind faith and belief in the goodness of America’s government must always exist, for the Christian god has blessed America as a nation superior to all other lands, and its people have thus been made to be direct conduits of the Almighty itself.

The good American has been reared to never deviate away from the illusions concocted by his masters, for in these chimeras of control the population is better managed and manipulated. Purposefully made ignorant to the lands and cultures of the world, unable to understand the complexities of human civilization, the good American naturally is made to fear that which he does not understand, for fear of the unknown is a great harbinger of human warfare. Fear of the unknown is a tool of control, a reality of the human condition, and, therefore, it is of great importance that the good American be made to know as little about nothing as possible, lest fear be controlled and the unknown understood.

With blind faith enveloping his existence, with every lie and deception and manipulation told by governance taken as true, the good American can easily be molded to fear and hate any scapegoat or bogeyman created and enemy manufactured, for if his bubble of comfort is said to be threatened, if his way of life is in any way said to be compromised, he can be made to become mesmerized to threats real and created, transforming an ordinary citizen into an agitated piston serving to embolden the engines of war. In this way, one more soldier of hate is molded from the clay of those in control and one more slave of power is created, joining millions more as pawns in the games those at the top play.

Manipulating the ingrained hatred, fear and xenophobia of good Americans, the elite concoct a potent army of political power that allows them unfettered control over the direction of the nation. With the loyal allegiance of the most ignorant, unenlightened, gullible, naïve, weak-minded and easily led, by controlling the racists, bigots and the most faithful and religious, those that will never question and never challenge authority, an entire army of good Americans can be manufactured, combining an amalgam of personalities and characters, fusing them to the dictates of power, creating an easily manipulated army of citizens that will remain quiet, complacent and subservient, even when lies and deceptions become readily apparent, when the corruption and incompetence of leadership is made known and even when the worst war crimes upon innocents become manifest. For in the army of good Americans, like the good Germans of decades long past, the crimes of leaders are known and the wickedness is apparent, yet in the silence and failure to act complicity and acquiescence is inferred.

In spite of the tangled web of lies and deceptions by the corporatists having been exposed, despite the vast assortment of war crimes being uncovered, regardless of the enormous betrayal and exploitation of emotions of the citizenry by those in power, and notwithstanding the blatant corruption and incompetence by government that has been apparent for years, a vast percentage of the army of good Americans still refuses to deviate from its beliefs, maintaining its grand illusion of the fantasy concocted for its consumption, reluctant to escape the bubble of comfort it would rather not deviate away from.

Even with the obvious criminality and the apparent debauchery of its heroes and leaders, in spite of what truth and reality have uncovered, good Americans still cling to the belief in an illusion they have been living in since 9/11, that the president is an honorable man, not the immoral deviant he appears to be, that he has restored integrity to the White House, not brought the quite evident level of incompetence and criminality, and that he has their best interests at heart, not those of the corporate world that owns him. They fail to escape their insulated bubble of infallible circumstances, unable to see that their devout faith has been exploited, their fears abused and their ignorance fomented, all for their precious vote and political allegiance, failing to comprehend that their emotions have been molded to enable the corporatists in power to maintain hegemony over the nation. In furtherance of criminality and corruption they have been manipulated, falling for the propaganda of the keepers at the gate, still to this day unable to see that their blind faith and loyalty to the same government damaging their interests is inevitably eroding the fabric of the country and the freedoms and rights both of themselves and their progeny.

They are being used and abused, becoming the pawns of power, a citizenry robbed of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without their knowledge or understanding, the clandestine pillage of their rights taking place with their silent acquiescence, dragging all of us down with them. They are a large segment of American culture whose metamorphosis is transforming them from placid citizens to legions of soldiers helping to cement their own downfall. Living in the denial that has caressed them for years, becoming the comfort their insecure lives depend on, they fail to see a reality afforded to billions of human beings the world over. This army of good Americans, like their German predecessors before them, believes itself the voice of sanity in a battle of fear and insecurity, of good versus evil, yet the exact opposite is true. They are the paranoid and psychotic fire whose flames sustain the insanity and wickedness emanating from America’s present government. Through their political power and influence the criminality in government can continue eviscerating the nation’s freedoms, rights and treasure; their denial sustains the growing division between supporters of the cabal of criminality and those opposed.

Their Own Worst Enemy

The seeds planted on 9/11 by the new Pearl Harbor have grown into a pestilence of weeds spreading like wildfire throughout the lands of the free and the home of the brave, causing a great rift among the peoples of America. Slowly this vast field of weed dries up the further away from reality it travels, the more denial it reaches for the more its branches turn crisp brown and attractive to the fire raging from Atlantic to Pacific that threatens the America both of good Americans and the rest of us.

The army of good Americans is its own worst enemy, yet it refuses to escape the denial enveloping its collective mind that like a parasite refuses to excrete itself from its host. Easily its members blame everything but themselves for their diluted thoughts; the fantasy they are made to believe in cannot be altered, its flawless truth is smeared by the “liberal media”; everyone is to blame for the Iraq debacle except George the Lesser; in every corner they find scapegoats to blame for the afflictions demonizing the nation; France is to be blamed for everything that goes wrong with America; blind faith and loyalty makes them unable to visualize and analyze the much broader issues haunting our current troubles, failing to see outside the parameters of the box that sits like a golden calf in their living rooms, speaking and preaching to them on a nightly basis while spellbound they sit, staring at its images, absorbing its sounds, believing its fables.

Sadly, this army, thinking itself righteous and loyal, and no doubt full of decent, law abiding people, yet unable to see beyond the limits of its own fear, hatred and paranoia, is dragging America down into the periphery of a most ominous black hole. Refusing to think outside the box of what they have been programmed to see, reluctant to question the authority they have been trained to always follow, hesitant to form opinion based on reason and logic, instead of regurgitating the programmed responses of talking heads and professional deceivers, the army of good Americans fails to understand the ramifications upon their lives and the future of their cherished nation.

In thinking themselves patriots loyal to the Bush administration, believing the corporatists in power have their interests at heart, refusing to see reality or hear truth, maintaining their illusion of embedded propaganda and deceit, being unable to escape their bubble of comfort and of consumerist escapism they are giving comfort and assistance to the enemy of all American people, a cabal of criminality lurking within our shores, hidden in the hallways of governance, having hijacked the levers of power, commandeering American society straight towards the iceberg called fascism, its benign-looking top hiding a most dangerous underside.

Without the army of good Americans the corporatists in power cannot survive, for the legions obedient and loyal to them act as the buffer of protest, dissent and debate. They are a great wall holding waves of truth and reality at bay, creating a nation living under two distinct and separate realities, cementing division and animosity, fracturing friends and family, causing rumbles in the underbelly of American culture, maintaining in elected office the lackeys and prostitutes protecting those at the highest echelons of corruption, and governance. Without the army of good Americans the criminals drunk with power would have no mandate, no power or ability to steer the nation and its people to ruination.

It is this army that grants Bush, Cheney and the corporatists the energy to declare absolute power, regressing the nation backwards towards a veritable state of fascist affairs, enabling the continued, planned and systematic erosion of civil liberties and eviscerated freedoms along with the gutting of a democracy that has mutated into a charade full of smoking mirrors, broken glass and compromised electronic voting machines, becoming the illusion normally reserved for the peoples of the third world, those ruled by dictators and despots. Like no army to ever march in the United States, the army of good Americans has granted life to criminals, corruptors, corporatists, autocrats and murderers, allowing human wickedness to flourish, becoming, in the span of four years, the bodyguards of tyranny abroad and criminality at home, the brainwashed automatons granting validity to torture, kidnappings, illegal renditions, bombings, depleted uranium, cluster bombs, collective punishment, gulags, misery, false imprisonment, rapes, murder and utter destruction in the Middle East while enabling the onslaught upon civil liberties, the decimation of due process, the erosion of the Bill of Rights, the disregard of the Constitution, the senseless death and maiming, both physically and mentally, of tens of thousands of American soldiers for a war based on lies and criminality, and the rise of the police state inside America. The army of good Americans has become the tool used to implode the foundations of the republic.

The America before 9/11 and the America afterwards have, thanks in large part to the army of good Americans, with their lust for Arab blood, their omnipresent fear, their enraptured hatred of chosen scapegoats and their addiction to being led by corrupt, immoral and incompetent corporatists, become two different distinct nations, separated by paradigm shifts and societal tremors, by abdications of citizenry and usurpations of what used to be the People’s government. The army of good Americans is willingly sacrificing its rights and liberties as well as those of the rest of us to appease its fears and insecurities, exchanging freedom for authoritarianism, democracy for corporatism.

Thinking that in allowing for warrantless wiretaps and NSA eavesdropping because they have nothing to hide will not affect them, they have helped seal their own fates, for in the evisceration of rights of minorities those of the majority are next to follow. In granting dictatorial powers to their Dear Leader, in the misguided belief that only he can protect them from bogeymen, the army of good Americans is opening the doors to the coming police state, for in such a place those apologizers of criminality soon find themselves on the receiving end of what they helped engender. In pushing for the extension of the Patriot Act, in the naïve belief that its laws only affect bogeymen, the army of good Americans is conditioning its children to a future of less freedom and rights, for the future will never miss what they never had.

This group will in the next few years become the eyes and ears of the police state, informers, spies, snitches and narks spawning fear, mistrust and insecurity, helping to maintain tyranny inside a nation that once fought to eviscerate it. It is in their character, their selfishness and lack of empathy assisting in persecuting neighbors, customers, friends and relatives. They will have become traitors to the republic they claim to love and the freedoms they swore to protect, becoming betrayers to its principles and founding vision, to its citizens and to the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Yet the hand that feeds them will inevitably come back to haunt them, for they will invariably cannibalize each other, seeking the favor of authority yet receiving as payback that which they helped birth.

One day, in the not too distant future, in the middle of the night, a knock will come at their door, it being not a dream nor a fantasy, its noise an ominous reminder of the police state now upon America, coming to serve power on those who thought they had nothing to fear by sacrificing liberty and freedom for so-called security. When that day arrives, the army of good Americans will look back to the past, afraid to peer at the future, wishing for the days of old, contemplating memories of what used to be, the life that was taken for granted, unsure what they were thinking when in their fear and hatred-filled days they released the valves that opened the flood of corporatist rule upon their children, ashamed of themselves for allowing such a fate to devour what was once a great and shining beacon on a hill.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

The Making of the Enemy – Part Two

The Myth of the Superhuman Enemy

There is purpose behind having enemies, for their existence is the backbone of the corporatists. Indeed, there is a method behind their madness. Having enemies means having control both of fear and hatred of the people, as well as having control of the masses along with their animalistic emotions. Psychology can be manipulated at the push of a few buttons; an entire nation can be mobilized toward war in the time it takes two skyscrapers to be imploded. Nationalism and xenophobia make blind rational thought; ignorance makes deaf the sounds of wisdom.

The use of enemies distracts the minds of the people from their daily lives and chains truth to the dungeons of corporatists and neocons. The silhouette of the enemy helps supply the armies of invasion and occupation, it assists in mobilizing the nation’s economy into perpetual war readiness, and it distracts the people as their treasure is pillaged, just as it demands patience of the citizenry in the face of utter debacle.

The abstract illusion of the unseen enemy forces its disseminators and marketers to put a human face on clandestine evildoers. It is a technique used by the keepers at the gate to personify and insert a sense of reality to a war of fiction, thereby granting human flesh to illusion and cementing the idea of real struggle and real evil in the eyes of the masses. The appearance must be made to exist that the enemy is real, a human being whose evil ways must be stopped, regardless of the consequences.

Yet while the faces are real, the deeds and actions of the enemy’s masterminds are but the stuff of Hollywood legend, making of mere mortals demons of unnatural superhuman strength and ability, seemingly unable to be killed, leading their armies with the intelligence of gods and the leadership of generals. Present in multiple theatres of operation, these evildoers extraordinaire always evade capture, appearing to escape death and injury, as always inflicting damage upon our soldiers. Not even a $25 million bounty on their heads is of benefit to America’s soldiers and mercenaries.

The Osama’s and Zarqawi’s of the so-called war on terror are elevated by the propagandists and marketers to realms beyond mere mortality. It is as if these terrorists have had their fates decided by the scripts written by Hollywood writers, their abilities seemingly beyond comparison in the realm of human understanding. Yet their faces and names must be maintained and posterized, their reputation made to resound throughout America, for they are the symbols of the enemy we are fighting over there so we do not have to fight them over here. Their fictitious reputation, an illusion of psychological warfare against us, must be birthed sinister and wicked, deranged and psychotic, for the more dangerous the terrorist the greater the need to continue the war on terror.

With the abrupt disappearance of Osama the poster child of the enemy had to find new life. Thus the impenetrable Zarqawi was born, for his name and reputation impute Al-Qaeda directly into Iraq, allowing the corporatists to manipulate the war on terror, creating the impression that our soldiers are in Iraq because the enemy has made its nest there as well. The illusion of Zarqawi allows the government to claim that Iraq is infested with terrorists, that all attacks on our forces are directly attributed to Al-Qaeda. To the creators of reality the Iraqi resistance does not exist and native Iraqis are not fighting an insurrection against oppressive occupation of their lands.

Therefore the war in Iraq is marketed not as a battle of nationalistic freedom fighters combating oppressive occupiers, wanting American forces expelled, which it is, but rather as the convenient masquerade of pitting American forces against our enemy, jihadi terrorists belonging to Al-Qaeda (in truth, less than 6 percent of all arrests made by US forces are of foreigners, according to War Department research). The Iraqi homegrown resistance, along with the support of them by more than 80 percent of the population is never divulged to the masses, for this would fracture the smoking mirror that has sustained the Iraqi war chimera for three years.

The illusion that America is fighting terrorists, conveniently blamed for 9/11 so as to reenergize the emotions we suffered that horrific day, has helped sustain support for an illegal and immoral war based on lies. After all, we are fighting them there so we do not have to fight them here. In reality, the guerilla war being waged has the support of the vast majority of the Iraqi people whose lives have been spent in Hell on Earth thanks to America’s invasion and occupation.

Yet to the propagandists, we can never be seen as the evildoer or villain in this Hollywood production, which we are, murdering, oppressing, maiming, bombing, torturing, dehumanizing and utterly eviscerating an entire people and culture. And so, it is said we fight terrorists, not freedom fighters, we fight for freedom and democracy, not oil and geopolitical expediency, and we invaded to topple a dictator, even if tyranny is worse than before.

The day will soon come when the face and name of Zarqawi will stop having the desired effect on the American population, his brand having matured. When that time arrives, a new evildoer extraordinaire will rise to claim the throne of propaganda matrix for the corporatists in power, his arrival launched like a new product, ready, willing and able to unleash terror upon the lands of Earth, intent to destroy America, hating us for our freedoms and democracy.

Like Osama and Zarqawi before him, this new evil one will see his reputation grow exponentially, his words and deeds disseminated for our consumption, and manipulation. We will be made to fear him, demanding he be killed after every act of barbarity attributed to him. One hundred of his second and third in commands will be killed in combat, his lieutenants’ names grazing the news sound bites we are given, and he will have evaded imminent capture dozens of times.

He will orchestrate bombings and death and heinous acts of terror, his face posterized for the masses to see and memorize. For a few years he will be most useful to those committing psychological warfare on the people, becoming a treasure trove of propaganda and distraction, his reputation growing with each newscast by the corporate media. His name will be uttered repeatedly, bombarded into our conscious, becoming, thanks to the airplay granted him, evildoer, terrorist, America’s new enemy. The new poster child for perpetual war for perpetual profit will captivate the minds of millions, who will be told to be afraid of attacks against their city and children.

His fictitious legend will live in infamy, giving fresh oxygen to the war on terror, rejuvenating a weakened marketing campaign. The deeds and actions attributed to him will make the Establishment more powerful, granting it sustenance for the continued embezzlement of billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Our treasure will disappear, going straight into the coffers of corporatists and capitalists who will have instructions to assemble and build the instruments of death and destruction the military-industrial complex will need for the next fifty years. Our children will be sent to foreign lands under the pretext of killing him, dying and being maimed for lies upon lies. Never captured, never found, existing like a ghost in our midst, the mightiest army the world has ever known will fail to bring him to justice, for in his freedom the corporatists maintain the illusion, the psychological war upon us, their most profitable war on terror.

In a war of fantasy, without a nation to blame, a face must be given to mystery and ambiguity, enabling the masses to maintain their illusion of a fight against terror, doing battle with an enemy possessing Hollywood prowess, engaged in conflict against Arabs and Persians and Muslims whose only crime is having lived for millennia atop a resource both addictive and essential to maintaining standards of living unsustainable and excessive.

Psychological Warfare

The manufacture of the war on terror – along with the systematic branding of Arabs and Persians as America’s enemy – has coincided perfectly with the race in a geopolitical chess match to see who can secure the remaining fields of the resource known as the devil’s excrement, the black blood needed to run the machines of mankind. Had the vast amounts of oil fields been in Latin America instead of in the Middle East and Central Asia the war on terror would be taking place in Brazil or Ecuador or Venezuela, and Hispanics would be today’s bogeymen. Instead, America finds herself having lied and deceived her own people, trying to find justifications to penetrate and control the remaining oil fields, unleashing psychological war on us the easier to manipulate the population and using terror as a pretext to invade and occupy a most important geopolitical and geostrategic prize, Iraq.

Subsequently, the occupation of Iraq has opened the door to the rest of the Middle East and has become a gateway to Central Asia and its vast quantities of oil. In its own right, Afghanistan, now in the hands of the Americans, has become a geopolitical prize of grand strategic importance, used for oil and gas pipelines and for the permanent military bases and the presence they provide needed to contain America’s next enemies, namely Iran, China and Russia. With Iraq and Afghanistan now for all practical purposes American colonies, its military firmly entrenched in permanent bases designed to protect and control the flow of oil, the high possibility exists of further intervention in Iran and/or Central Asia.

The war on terror, born on 9/11, has been the perfect instrument of control for the corporatists in power, its mechanisms allowing the preemptive invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq as well as the perfect excuse to retain a permanent stronghold in Afghanistan. Had the fierce Iraqi resistance not created the debacle now witnessed, trapping American forces in a tar pit of carnage, the charade that is the war on terror would have inevitably been expanded to invade Iran and Syria on the way to Central Asia.

Inside the hallways where neocon and corporatist vultures reside, the thinking was that 9/11 would be the new Pearl Harbor needed to mobilize the citizenry, by exploiting our fragile psychology, toward a perpetual war footing, that invading Afghanistan would be justified and very easy to take, that Iraq would be a cakewalk and that, in the wake of America’s blitzkrieg in the Middle East, the invasion of Iran and Syria would soon follow.

Thereafter, America would dictate terms to all remaining Middle East nations, controlling their leaders but most importantly, their oil fields, pipes, ports, waterways and infrastructure, deciding to sell oil from American and British markets, in dollars, not euros. From controlling the Middle East it would only be a matter of time before Central Asia offered herself to America, granting her terms, prices and barrels of oil favorable to her, deciding it safer to befriend the superpower rather than the Asian giants.

9/11 was the catalyst to the war on terror, the spring that gave sustenance to the imperialistic wet dreams of corporatists and neocons. It was a moment in time, though only affecting a few blocks of downtown New York City, that sent concussions of fear and hatred and immediate calls of anger and vengeance reverberating throughout the land, as if a nuclear bomb of psychological warfare had been unleashed into our atmosphere, transforming us into unthinking animals, our primate psychology and emotions set free, usurping our normal human intelligence.

At that point, after seeing the televised images of the horror and evil spawned that day, its recording repeated continuously without end, with angle after angle of carnage and death shown us, with the immediate propaganda of journalist buffoons penetrating our pores, with stenographers for power injecting us with their venom, we mutated into an army of robots, unwilling to listen to reason, unwise to the lessons of humanity, failing to control our raw emotions, becoming, in the end, a united herd of sheep that was easily corralled into following and obeying the dictates of the corporatists.

We became, with our jingoism, nationalism, patriotism and Nazi-like militarization of the nation a people on the verge of mass psychosis, ready to bomb and murder entire nations, ready to lose all sense of morality in order to attain the vengeance our mammalian brains sought.

Upon the destruction of the Twin Towers we succumbed to our masters’ wishes, allowing ourselves to be molded like fresh clay, becoming exactly what the Establishment wanted us to become. The hatred we felt was manipulated and directed, our attention made to focus on the dark skins and alien religion of the Middle East. Our fear was exploited, our fragile psychology abused, steered toward war against Arabs and Persians and Muslims, for clandestine reasons we did not wish to know or understand.

For control of oil and continued expansion of the economy psychological war was declared on 300 million Americans, the mechanisms of corporatism acting in unison to make of us a marching army of unthinking drones, willing to give up our rights and freedoms, willing to sacrifice our sons, daughters and treasure for the vengeance we felt and the thirst for blood we craved. We came under the myopic control of power, distracted from the war against us. Our animal instincts had taken over us; our human intellect vanished inside the clouds of 9/11, only returning a few years later to claim its rightful place alongside reason and logic. Such is the power of psychological war upon a population and such is the level of human wickedness by corporatists and neocons alike.

In the end, we allowed corporatism to fast forward in time, firmly cementing its claws into our land, slowly rising in stature, growing in power, its instruments becoming ingrained into society, our rights and freedoms slowly eroding. Its rise to prominence now seems inevitable, this stage of American capitalism feeds and sustains it, our acquiescence and apathy helps it grow. With another attack, real or created, America will usher in the era of the police state. Perhaps this has been the plan the overlords of Earth have had all along.

Into Orwellian times have we descended, and, after the corporatists no longer find usefulness to the Arab/Persian terrorist as enemy, a new one will be created, just in time to fit into the grand plans and goals of those in power, molded to entertain and distract us yet again, rising from the Far East to manipulate and control us.

Perpetual Enemy, Perpetual Control

Marketed to exploit our fears and hatreds, manufactured to mobilize our talents towards wickedness, the new enemy will evolve from the carcass of all those that have come before, rising from its cocoon, metamorphosis enabling it to acquire a different appearance, ready to terrorize and frighten us into obedience. It will once again work like magic, capturing our minds, manipulating our psychologies, pushing society in the direction the corporatists want us to follow. Those in power will make barbarians of an entire people, creating subhuman creatures wanting to destroy us for our freedom and democracy.

America’s new enemy will work like a charm, for it always does, always ready to push the interests of the few, willing to demonize the innocent and enrapture the ignorant.

Yes, a new enemy can be seen in the horizon. In a few years time the rivalry with China will grow and intensify, for this world cannot sustain both America and a nation of 1.4 billion people whose economy will surpass our own in a decade or two. A new Cold War will ensue, new enemies will be delineated, and new forms of conditioning will evolve. Two peoples will be taught to hate each other, brainwashed to see the other as evildoer extraordinaire, for the race to the last vestiges of natural resources has begun as the world runs out of water, oil and space.

Like the Soviet and Arab/Persian Muslim terrorist before him, the Chinese enemy will be deviously marketed, his exploits and evil deeds will be told and retold, his hatred of our way of life made to be everlasting. Our minds will be programmed to believe not reality but what the corporatists want reality to be. We will be manipulated to seek victory against the Red menace of China, told to sacrifice blood, sweat, and tears for the cause, for the salvation of America, and that of the corporatists. We will be forced to toil in the sweatshops and assembly lines of the military-energy industrial complex, our corporatist government engorging itself through conquest of land and resources, our wages given to the corporations that own us.

In time the Arab/Persian Muslim terrorist as enemy of America will vanish from our conscious, perhaps once again becoming the freedom fighter he has usually been marketed as, coming full circle in the minds of Americans. Perhaps he will join us in the new Cold War, ready to fight with us against the Chinese, becoming our friend and our ally. For China waits in the wings, growing by leaps and bounds, an ancient civilization wise and patient, a growing behemoth whose drums we now hear, methodically letting her future rival hemorrhage itself to death, letting America defeat itself.

In time we will once again be allowed to see the beauty and grandeur of Arab and Persian cultures, from Morocco to Iraq to Iran, free to explore lands both alien and mesmerizing, with architecture and fashion and decoration and design and music and ideas and ways of thinking as alien as they are appealing. Perhaps we will incorporate some of their culture into our own, for that which has never been seen by human eyes becomes beautiful, soon thereafter coveted and imitated. With the passage of time we will be able to learn from our Arab and Persian friends, for theirs is an old civilization, in many ways different than ours, yet in many ways similar as well, offering, like any culture, both good and bad traits.

In time we will see that the charade we have been living in since mid-2001 has degraded us as a culture, making us torturers and invaders and occupiers and murderers and pillager of human rights, in the process destroying history and culture and ancient civilizations. We will see that America is crumbling under the weight of its hypocrisy and its immorality, her foundations severely damaged by her crimes both against the planet and humanity. Perhaps we will even see the error of our ways, the madness we have allowed to enter our conscious and the destruction we allowed our power and wealth to unleash on innocent human beings.

But just as we are ready to forgive ourselves for what we have allowed to be done in our name and as we seek closure by asking for forgiveness from the world and the Iraqi people in particular a new enemy will be created to distract us away from the anger we now feel for being lied, deceived and manipulated. As the fear, hatred, nationalism and xenophobia engendered by 9/11 evaporates thanks to the passage of time and the escape from psychosis a new adaptation of psychological warfare will be thrust upon us, used to damage our minds and control our lives.

Just as we are finally ready to seek the justice denied us, ready to confront the real enemy among us, new terror will be unleashed to quiet us. New 9/11s, perhaps more destructive and deadly, will usher in an era of the coming American police state, granted to the corporatists by our own willful yet manipulated emotions. Just as we begin to ask questions and seek the accountability that has so far alluded us a new threat will be born, a new attack inside one of our cities will take place, conveniently captured by television, disseminated widely by a corporate media eager to recreate the cycle of propaganda seen on 9/11. Its inevitability is a foregone conclusion.

Once again we will fall for the same trap, becoming the pawns of corporatists, the army of “good Germans.” Terror new and real will arrive on our shores just in time to once again take possession of our minds, making us, yet again, unthinking animals sustained by raw emotion and instinct, becoming the sheep easily corralled, led and controlled by our masters. We will mobilize once more, marching to the trumpets of war and violence, becoming the instrument the corporatists need to further their goals.

An enemy will be chosen, his lands will be targeted, those that look like him will be bombed and all the while, sitting idly on our couches, languishing away our lives next to the television, we will be told what to think and believe, our animal brains commandeering our rational minds. We will be told that we are to fear, even though there is nothing to fear. We will be told we should hate, even though there is nothing to hate. We will be told our security is in peril, even though we are very secure. We will be told that reality is what we see on the monitor, not what our daily lives make it out to be.

We will be told to follow the orders of corporatist leaders, to place undying loyalty and trust in them and that, even though it seems they are pilfering our treasure and sending our children to certain death and destroying our reputation and bringing shame upon our land and leading us into incompetent debacle after debacle, we are never to question, never to protest, never to dissent, yet forever to become the ignorant drone that unbuckles his belt, bends over to the dictates of power and allows for the raping of his mind and the sodomy of his existence.

With the minds of tens of millions lined up, their ability to think independently erased from memory, ready, willing and able to sacrifice children, treasure and morality to professional puppeteers, becoming slaves to the system, the games of geopolitical and geostrategic chess can continue and the power of our corporatist masters can expand.

The name of the game is control, of our society, culture, lives and futures. The game of control is played for world domination, of its resources, peoples and lands, like a grand chess contest dictated by the sacrifice of pawns and the movement of kings. To the overlords of Earth, humanity is but a herd needing to be dominated and controlled; our lives and fates decided by the realities created and decisions made of those players who hold the reigns of ultimate power. It is the story of humankind, of a corrosive pyramid of hierarchy, of a system of castes, of the fortunate and the doomed, of a mechanism of perpetual control.

Civilization has not changed for millennia, it remains its predictable self, with the few at the top as always aggrandized by their control over the masses, and the masses forever easily led and maneuvered, electing to remain captives to what has always been, afraid to confront what could become. The making of the enemy is but one more form of control over us, for those whose power, control and wealth grows exponentially thanks to the making and marketing of enemies would not have it any other way.

Part One

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

The Making of the Enemy – Part One

Part One of Two
Only in America

The coming years, like those of the present and the past, will see the continued spewing of fictionalized propaganda designed to manipulate the fears, hatreds, xenophobia and nationalistic tendencies of the population. The level of control over the masses and power over the nation in the years after 9/11 by corporatists intent on hijacking the country became, to them, a rousing success, thanks to the intense levels of fear and hatred engendered by the horrific events of that day. In the span of a few infamous days the corporatists had unleashed massive psychological warfare upon us, its effects still lingering in the minds of millions. Suddenly, those in power had become the puppeteers of the citizenry, free to manage us as they saw fit, our fragile and damaged psychologies traumatized, our thinking, human minds replaced by our more primitive, mammalian instincts and behaviors. An entire nation had succumbed, thanks to television, to images and emotions no people had ever witnessed, repeated over and over and over again. The making of America’s new enemy had begun.

The manufacture, marketing and dissemination of bogeymen enemies, both real and fictional, for a long time endemic in American society, has always worked to perfection, becoming the inertia used to control the population. It becomes the energy needed to maintain America’s permanent wartime economy. The creation of unseen bogeymen into supernatural evildoers fits the perfect mold of how the American citizenry has been brainwashed over the years through the use of Hollywood movies and television, with the constant themes of good versus evil, of fantasy and sensationalism, and of course the always needed happy ending, where the good guy always triumphs over the villain.

The struggle against America’s enemy, conveniently chosen and designed to fit the policies and goals of those in power, is purposefully made out to be like a struggle in a typical Hollywood film of good and evil characters, where America is seen as the force of good confronting the evildoer afflicting the world, a hero that ultimately, in the end, will triumph, leading to the happy ending that in reality rarely, if ever, bears fruit. Yet to the reprogrammed mind of the average American, our conception of real life rewired, our brainwaves reconfigured through the incessant fictions and altered states of reality bombarded into our heads by movies and sitcoms, the battle of superhero and evildoer must continue, because America can do no wrong, it is the shining beacon on a hill, the savior of humankind, incapable of committing human evil, fighting forces intent on destroying the nation. Inevitably, in our warped mind good always triumphs over evil, the hero always gets the girl and normalcy eventually returns to life.

To say that televised fantasy bears no resemblance to real human outcomes is an understatement, yet in a fictional war that remains but a fleeting illusion in the minds of the population, becoming more intangible than visible, hardly affecting the daily lives of the majority, the deception works like magic thanks to the blitzkrieg of propaganda sent out through the airwaves. In a sense, the so-called war against America’s enemy becomes a Hollywood production, existing in the conscious of the people but never truly being felt, its puppeteers hiding its reality and its truth, the keepers at the gate filtering what needs to be seen and what does not. Our reality is what they make it to be, after all.

Voiced loudly by America’s paid opinion makers yet hardly seen, the struggle against our new enemy exists as if in a vacuum, yet the citizenry gobbles it up like fast food, devouring what is spoon fed them, believing, like they have been trained to do since birth, that this Hollywood movie is a frightening reality, yet, as always, will invariably end with good defeating evil, and America killing our enemy. Never mind that we are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a bomb or act of terrorism.

Such is the power of movies and television and newscasts that from an insignificant group of terrorists, concerned mostly with expelling America from their lands and toppling American sponsored despots, a giant evildoer can be created, mutating from our hired freedom fighters of times past to the dreaded terrorists of today, mutating from friend to enemy, possessing super human strength and powers, seemingly dying and being reborn, capable of destroying the mightiest nation the world has ever seen.

These fictions, of course, were pure deception, yet inside the minds of average Americans they are as real, and as serious, as any threat America has ever confronted. For the Establishment has wished it so, knowing that having enemies translates into power, control and vast sums of wealth for themselves, all at the expense of the masses who can be easily steered any direction they are needed to take. American society has been, for the last century, conditioned to exist in a state of anxiety and fear, not of internal factors, which are much more dangerous, but of the external enemy that seemingly arises like a phoenix from the ashes of those previous ones now discarded, their usefulness having died out, reborn to become the new barbarians at the gates.

America’s tomorrow will be made to confront the same Madison Avenue marketing techniques that have for too long now steered the population in the direction of control through fear of enemies, both real and concocted. For the corporatists and elite wishing to retain the power, wealth and control of the nation, the population must always have conditioned and ingrained inside them the fear of bogeymen and the uncertainty of violence. The masses must be made to believe that external enemies, both alien and clandestine, are a menace and threat to destroy their way of life and the very foundation of the nation they inhabit.

It is the fear, anxiety and insecurity of man that blinds thinking and births subservience to power, making of us primates desiring the comfort and security of our masters. Through fear we allow our impulses for survival to dominate, the emotions of tribalism and xenophobia to thrive, and our trust in upper hierarchy to permeate. Therefore, if an enemy of unnatural power and ability can be concocted from which to frighten the population into submission, into granting away its rights and freedoms, its blood and treasure, made to trust that its survival is dependent on the protection of its overlords, an entire nation can be brought to its knees, impotent to revolt and seek change. Willingly the people kneel in submission, allowing themselves to be ruled by today’s version of yesteryear’s totalitarians, the corporatists.

Through the spreading of our fear the power of the Establishment arises, and expands. Enemies that are created and given prominence can capture the minds of hundreds of millions of people, and can make us subservient to the dictates of power. Is it any wonder, then, why for decades, and some would say a couple of centuries, enemies of America have existed, lingering in our consciousness, becoming great threats to our way of life, dying and being reborn, evolving and adapting, changing according to the times, and yet always hating us for our way of life, for our freedoms and our democracy? Yet somehow Americans manage to thrive, our lives are lived in comfort and gluttony, our nation rarely, if ever, attacked, our people rarely, if ever killed.

From Indians to Mexicans to Spanish to Filipinos to Germans to Soviets to Communists to Vietnamese to Arab Muslims to the future Chinese an external enemy has always been a threat, a thorn on our side, seemingly rising out of thin air, molded by the hands of greed addicts, warmongers, criminal capitalists and authoritarian corporatists, allowed to be born in order to cover up for the real and much more dangerous enemy.

External enemies have always existed in our reality because they are an invaluable tool to those who aspire to control the people and the resources of the planet. What was the Cold War but a charade used to gain control of and dominate southern nations, rich in natural resources and cheap labor, and to control their people, and hence their economies, both through market colonialism and the use of proctors? What is the so-called war on terror but a charade for the geostrategic race being waged to control the oil fields of the Middle East and Central Asia, knowing full well that oil is not finite and that the nation that controls the oil will invariably control the world?

The Birth of Enemies from the Middle East

Hidden behind dark corners, lurking underneath beds, fantasy bogeymen not known or understood are mutated by marketers and propagandists who understand human psychology well into demons haunting the deep and frail recesses of the human mind. Humans not known or understood, alien in culture and language, masked in foreign appearance and color are easily transformed into creatures evil and degenerate, threats to the vitality of so-called freedom and democracy. For ignorance invariably leads to fear of the unknown and, if propagandized correctly, an entire population can be easily manipulated into allowing itself to be controlled and exploited by the Establishment. The ingrained mammalian instinct of security, both of the citizenry and that of their children, can be easily exploited by the corporatists, made to be of paramount importance, manipulated as only being made secure by purchasing the products of the corporation and by acquiescing to the draconian measures of the state.

Through the televised media, the attempt to birth perpetual fear into the populace has never been easier to accomplish. Images, sound and opinion can be bombarded day in and day out to the easily receptive American citizen, many of which have become dumbed-down couch potatoes spoon fed their thoughts through the monitor they have become addicted to. Through the manipulation of televised images and sounds, the doctors of propaganda can hypnotize and control the thoughts of Americans, using all tools at their disposal to concoct the perfect bogeymen.

The evildoers designed to captivate the fear-controlled mind of the masses are created to serve the interests of the Establishment, helping to steer the population in the direction most beneficial to the elite while at the same time working to mobilize millions into supporting the activities and illegalities ultimately detrimental to the people themselves.

During the so-called Cold War, for example, the enemy created was the dreaded Soviet Communist, birthed to unleash terror in the dreams of average Americans. At the time, America’s military industrial complex, along with the omnipresent corporate world, saw that a nation in a perpetual war footing could be more readily controlled, its people made to serve the interests of the Establishment. Using a cocktail of jingoism, nationalism, xenophobia, fear mongering and hate baiting, the propagandists were successful in breeding a hatred of anything related to Soviet Russia, including its innocent citizens. Through the control of the masses, manipulated to accept and even demand a perpetual war footing, profits to corporations became enormous, power over government became real and control over the course of America became a reality.

With the population in the stupor of fear and hatred, dominated by fascinations of nationalism and sensationalistic displays of greatness, its collective mind occupied by the rabid pursuit of Soviet defeat, the corporatist dominion over America, as well as the Third World, triumphed, giving rise to a geopolitical chess match for corporate control over the lands, resources and peoples of the underdeveloped world. This game, a fight for profit, power and hegemony, resulted in the ceaseless poverty, disease, under-education, exploitation and death of millions of human beings, for generations now their destinies made to subsist in endemic poverty, with talents eroded and lives in perpetual limbo, their lands and economies still to this day not having recovered from the devastation the Cold War years spawned.

Just like the corporatist elite were able to control their own masses, conquer the resources, lands and peoples of the south, thereby enriching themselves beyond compare, manipulating Cold War indoctrinated fears and hatreds to silence, control and make indifferent the masses, using the media to maintain a state of ignorance throughout the nation, so now in the Middle East and Central Asia do they see the grand prize: further empowerment over us as well as control of the world’s remaining underground fields of oil. Once again, an enemy has been conveniently manufactured out of the dark rooms of Madison Avenue focus groups to fit nicely into the agenda of the corporatists and neocons in power.

Serving the interests of the corporatists, fundamentalist Islamicists, of which only a small minority exists willing to commit violence, make a great enemy from which to hypnotize the population: unknown, alien, of different culture and language, existing in multiple desired states, dark skinned, invisible, violent and perhaps most importantly, of a religious belief system at odds with the fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy dominant in today’s America.

The systemic marketing of Muslims and Arabs and Persians as external threats capable of destroying our way of life, our religious norms, and the cherished charades of freedom and democracy is, therefore, the perfect weapon launched against the masses, for naturally we impute the actions of a minute lunatic fringe with all Muslim people, allowing the terror of a few miscreants to penetrate our fragile psyches and our even more fragile belief structure.

Through the methodical brainwashing used in Hollywood and the corporate media, the Arab/Persian is made to be a rabid demon wishing death upon our children’s future, ready at any moment to blow himself up, committing heinous acts of barbarity, murdering and bombing and rampaging, for he is a terrorist, the descendant of the Soviet, the next adaptation of American enemy, the next marketable wonder the corporatists exploit to enrapture our minds and control our lives.

The Arab/Persian as enemy serves to militarize the mind of the population, to distract us from more ominous, internal threats, to control and brainwash the weaker minded among us, creating a marching army of “good Germans.” It helps mobilize the country towards a perpetual war footing, acting as an excuse to wage war, to increase the profits and wealth and power of the corporatists, and to further lead America down the road to eventual fascism. Through war the military-energy-industrial complex and the corporate world can further engorge themselves, using the energy and wages of the masses for the construction of their weapons of death and suffering. Through war they can lay claim to the resources of the Middle East, the all-important lifeline to continued economic dominance.

Using Arabs and/or Persians – who just happen to be native peoples of the Middle East, the very same lands saturated with underground fields of oil that the military-energy industrial complex craves – as the new American enemy gives our corporatist government the perfect excuse to invade, occupy and devastate desired lands with American imposed capitalism. Accorded the face of evildoer extraordinaire, stereotyped and marginalized through the lens of fiction, the Arab/Persian people, diverse and complex, unknown to the undereducated, act as the key to unlocking the American people’s historical reluctance to fight wars both immoral and of choice.

If the Arab/Persian can be demonized to be hated and feared by a population brainwashed by the hypnotizing glare of television, the nation will be much easier to militarize, the people’s children will be much easier to enlist as cannon fodder and the internal policies of the nation will be much easier to control and manipulate.

The sustained viability of the nation’s militarization – and some would say the ongoing embezzlement of the people’s treasure by corporatists – desired by corporatists in power depends on the Arab and Persian and Muslim people remaining, in the conscious of the masses, forever an enemy, always a demon, their reputation strong enough to make of them a most potent adversary, capable of hijacking airplanes, destroying skyscrapers and threatening to strike fear amongst the population, as always hating our way of life.

What better scapegoat than the Arab/Persian population if one wants to conquer the resources of the Middle East and Central Asia? What greater marketing ploy could be manufactured to make enemies of the same people whose resources you desire?

And, with the war on terror acting as a vicious circle of recruitment, by becoming a self fulfilling prophesy, having violence beget violence, with more and more Arabs incensed at the actions of America, ready to join in jihad where only few extremists existed before, (Al-Qaeda has become a mass movement, franchised and claimed by many insurgents, most of whom have never met a real member of the group) thereby creating ever more non-fictitious enemies, the military-energy industrial complex has the capacity and will to continue the war into perpetuity, using the anger on the Muslim street, along with the fear and hatred of Americans, to further its own interests, exploiting both Muslim and American, pitting one against the other, creating fictitious conflict where none exists, concocting enemies out of two peoples whose similarities as humans quashes our differences of culture.

For a citizenry made to fear an alien people of which little is known about, with hatred and xenophobia running through their veins, programmed by the keepers at the gate to demand blood and death, can, at the push of a few psychological buttons, be mobilized into a war frenzy where the human brain, thinking, analytical and logical, is set aside and replaced by our primitive, mammalian brain, full of primordial behaviors and emotions. Once the population’s collective conscious has mutated according to the designs of their puppeteers the march towards war, invasion and occupation can commence.

Part Two

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

The Project for a New American Century for Dummies

How to Dominate the World and still receive Social Security!

I opened my inbox yesterday. Some guy had sent me a whole bunch of website links about world domination conspiracies. It really freaked me out! There were all these photos of jet bombers and missile weapons systems and underground bunkers in Idaho and top secret plots by evil madmen to conquer the world and…you get the picture. “James Bond tried to warn us!” My paranoia ran free.

Then some Congressman from Colorado came on some talk show and started chit-chatting about how if there was an attack on America, the Bush guys were gonna nuke Mecca — and if THAT happened, someone (it wasn’t clear exactly who — maybe Russia allied with China or some teenagers from London with backpacks) would nuke Israel and Israel in turn would launch a giant Tsunami that would bury New York all the way to Ohio. Okay.

I was into this! “What REALLY goes on at the top secret level that we normal schmucks are not privy to?” I asked myself. At the Kremlin/Pentagon/Downing Street/caves of Afghanistan level, I bet there really ARE wheels within wheels. Even after just one DAY of reading the back pages of the Wall Street Journal or browsing through www.Janes.com, it all becomes obvious: Us Americans are just hapless dupes and set decorations — happily shopping at the mall and voting on “for show” voting machines while being exploited by secretive mutants who live in some underground shadow government control center a la HG Well’s book “The Time machine”.

But if I am not just happily wallowing in cheap paranoia and this IS true, then who would be running these games?

Just exactly WHICH evil masterminds would be in control of the secret ultra-high-tech world domination operation that this website was talking about? Chinese, Arab, Russian? American? Okay, let’s start searching for Doctor Doom.

Surely said evil masterminds would not be the idiots in the White House. Surely even Karl Rove is too bumbling to know how to come up with this stuff. And definitely not Georgie. Anyone who sees him stumble and stutter and listen to his earpiece on television knows it surely isn’t he. Who then? Rumsfeld? Cheney? Bush senior? Putin? The aging Red Guard? Osama bin Ladin? Ariel Sharon?

The sinister masterminds in charge of world domination would have to be American. Nobody else could afford all those toys.

So. Who behind the scenes in American government (besides Dr. Strangelove) is weird enough to come up with all this Goldfinger/Doctor No/Doctor Evil global world order uber-overlord hyper-control stuff?

I put on my spy outfit and Googled “World Domination”.

Just like that, up popped “The Project for a New American Century”. Hummmm… And then, when I went to check out their website, my screen froze, my whole hard drive crashed and even my free cell computer solitaire game stopped working. Now I was REALLY getting paranoid!

Fortunately, when I re-booted, everything was fine. Except for that still, small voice inside my head that keeps saying, “Jane, they have spent trillions and trillions of (our tax) dollars on weapons. They have purchased over half of the Congress. They bought up the media. They own all the oil. They can’t have done that for nothing.” And all those weapons and bunkers and missiles and jet airplanes and tanks and…and all under the control of the PNAC.

But the PNAC boys are getting old now. It’s not like it was back in the day of the Kennedy assassinations and the Bay of Pigs invasion when they were young lions with hopes. That was thirty or forty years ago! Maybe they started the War on Iraq at this point in time so that they would still be young enough to enjoy the fireworks without the use of Viagra — and can still get it up when they stage the NEXT New Pearl Harbor, the one that will put the Middle East and even the whole world and Kansas under their control (and the Rapture comes in a red fireball too…. )

Forget it. All this paranoia stuff is getting to me. I’m going off to shop at the mall.

PS: When I was a kid, our teachers solemnly informed us that the world could blow up at any minute and that we had better be careful. I practiced ducking and covering faithfully — totally convinced that when the Big One hit Millbrae, I alone would somehow survive. Maybe THAT’S why I’m still so paranoid about major weaponry. I’ll have to ask Freud.

“Sigmund, I still have these dreams. I’ve had them since I was a kid. I’m sitting in the school cafeteria (chatting with my friend Terry Hughes, trying to flirt with that dreamboat John Palmer and eating creamed chipped beef and peas). Then I look out the window and the whole sky has lit up. Then I melt into ashes and am totally destroyed….”

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From APFN: Rove-Plame Scandal Leading to Deeper White House Horrors? “What’s being covered up in the Plame/Rove case seems to revolve around the Bush Administration’s orchestrated propaganda campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq. Valerie Plame and her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson — who wrote the op-ed in the New York Times that got this whole thing going — are just the tips of very large icebergs, and one of those icebergs has a name: The White House Iraq Group.”

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays-w/horrors.htm

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?disc=149495;article=87622;title=APFN

Jane Stillwater is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
She can be reached at

Taps for America

Bush is about to unleash The Final Solution

“Day is done. Gone the sun…”

There are 26,074,906 Iraqis in Iraq. There are 130,000 American soldiers there. That is a ratio of approximately 200 to one. These are not good odds.

As he tries to soak up every last crumb of U.S. taxpayer money to give to his cronies even if it means slaughtering tens of thousands of Iraqi women and children in an effort to sell more weapons, George Bush’s greedy bumbling in Iraq has finally gone over the top. As his generals torture and murder their way across the Cradle of Civilization, they have finally managed to alienate and humiliate Iraqis WAY far beyond the point of no return, instigating a rebellion that is bound to turn out badly for everyone — and to add whole new meaning to the term “In harm’s way” for our sons and daughters there.

How is Bush going to pull his chestnuts out of the fire on this one? You don’t even want to know. I’m shaking as I write this because I just learned what his (non) exit strategy is: The Final Solution.

My father was in the Navy during World War II. While he was in the Pacific and occupied Japan, my mother, sister and I stayed in Naval housing near San Diego. He wrote us a letter almost every day. “Tokyo and Yokohama are leveled masses of rubbish with nothing standing except for a few smoke stacks and bank vaults,” he wrote. “Thirty miles of desolation stretches between Tokyo and Yokohama — yet an unescorted American soldier can get on the Tokyo express and ride from one end of Honshu to the other safely. Can you imagine a Japanese soldier receiving the same treatment had they conquered us? No one can understand these people and no one wants to. The crying need is to get the hell out of here and let them have the place.”

America “got the hell out” of Japan and Japan turned out okay without us.

Bush’s war on Iraq has several other things in common with World War II besides “occupation”. Can you guess what they are? Or do I have to spell them out for you….

Make no mistake. George Bush plans on winning the war on Iraq. And, given his disgustingly inhuman approach to occupying that country, he and his generals will NOT be able to achieve an on-the-ground military victory because the Iraqis — like we would do if we were in their place — will do what they have to do to protect their homeland. Like the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II, Iraqi Muslims will NOT “go gentle into that good night.” They will fight to the death rather than endure living in a country-wide Abu Ghraib for the rest of their lives. Bush knows that. He KNOWS that he will not be able to win a traditional “land war in Asia” any more than Johnson or Nixon could. And yet Bush wants to win so badly that he will do ANYTHING for victory. And I do mean anything.

Even as we speak, Bush is preparing to go down in history — to be recorded for all posterity — as someone who, like Stalin, Pot Pol and Hitler, is willing to resort to The Final Solution.

Gentlemen, start your ovens.

“Sure. Go ahead. Kill all those savages,” far too many Americans are saying. “Bomb them. Blow them up. Gas them. They don’t deserve to live.” Whenever I hear this, I realize that Iraq is not the only country that will be defeated by Bush and his generals. I am hearing Taps for America as well. I, me, Jane am actually witnessing the end of my country as I have always known it — the end of America’s great experiment with freedom, democracy, idealism and hope.

Just like my father participated in another moment of great historical significance, I am about to be an actual participant in a huge chunk of history myself — history that I had never dreamed that I would be witnessing. Nor that I want to see. The end of my country. I never thought that I would live to see this happen.

After World War II, MacArthur and Truman helped Japan back on its feet. Now Rumsfeld and Bush have a whole other plan. When I was a child we fought the fascists. Now I am a grownup and we have BECOME the fascists. “Fallugah and Ramadi are leveled masses of rubbish with nothing standing except for a few smoke stacks and bank vaults. Thirty miles of desolation stretches….” And there is much more to come.

If Bush wins his “war” on Iraq by sending six million Muslims to the ovens, America as we know it will also be finished. Yet Bush already has his plans designed and on the table — starting with the “Salvadoran Option” and moving quickly from there. What more can I say?

Taps for America? Remember how that song ends. “All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.” What can WE do to make sure that those words will still apply to us?

PS: Maybe I’m being too subtle and flowery here. Let me spell it out for you in Plain English: Bush plans to do to Iraq what Custer planned to do to the Cheyenne and Sioux: Kill them all off and take their land.

In addition, the weapons industry is using “The Rapture” concept as a cutting-edge marketing ploy to convince otherwise God-fearing Christians that it is their religious duty to buy as many high-tech weapons as humanly possible (and use them). But since “God don’t like ugly,” this selling of the Apocalypse could all-too-easily backfire on them — just like it did for Custer at the Little Big Horn.

PPS: To quote psychologist Rita Corriel, “What if, out of the ashes of the Holocaust, we declared that ‘Never Again’ applies to all people?” To quote news commentator Bill Moyers, “A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.”

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Days of Remembrance — from the US Holocaust Museum: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.â€? Justice Robert Jackson, Chief U.S. Counsel to the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg,

****

Taps: Day is done, gone the sun, from the hills, from the lake, from the skies. All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

****

The holocaust is being outsourced!: More than 175 private firms are operating in Iraq and many of them are providing fire support, logistical support and even are involved in armed combat in Iraq in total violation of Geneva Convention which grants protection only to legitimate armed forces of a nation [not their mercenaries]. About 60 firms have been short-listed by the Pentagon for outsourcing the War.

****

How do I know what Bush is planning? Psychology, inside information and Shock and Awe!: Bush’s Choice for Pentagon Chief is Nuclear Missile Lobbyist:

Already on the drawing board — “The Salvador Option“: What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called “the Salvador option”…. “We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing.” …But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be needed-perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.

And then there’s Bush’s love of Shock and Awe. Remember, our Dubya used to blow up frogs when he was a kid. Blowing stuff up looms large in his profile. Why not blow up Iraq?

Inside sources: I’m NOT going to say anything about my secret inside sources. I do NOT want to become some “Reporter goes to Jail for Protecting Sources” headline.

Then there’s this (from Nuc News): Not Just A Last Resort? A Global Strike Plan, With a Nuclear Option, Washington Post Sunday, May 15, 2005:

Early last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret “Interim Global Strike Alert Order” directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea.

Two months later, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, told a reporter that his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had changed its way of operating so that it could be ready to carry out such missions. “We’re now at the point where we are essentially on alert,” Carlson said in an interview with the Shreveport Times….

In the secret world of military planning, global strike has become the term of art to describe a specific preemptive attack. When military officials refer to global strike, they stress its conventional elements. Surprisingly, however,
global strike also includes a nuclear option, which runs counter to traditional U.S. notions about the defensive role of nuclear weapons….

President [sic] Bush spelled out the definition of “full-spectrum” global strike in a January 2003 classified directive, describing it as “a capability to
deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives.”

As U.S. military forces have gotten bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, the attractiveness of global strike planning has increased in the minds of many in the military. Stratcom planners, recognizing that U.S. ground forces are already overcommitted, say that global strike must be able to be implemented “without resort to large numbers of general purpose forces.”

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From CLG News: After getting the opium trade up and running again in Afghanistan, Bush turns to Iraq: Lawless Iraq is ‘key drug route’ –Drug smugglers exploiting internal chaos in Iraq have turned the country into a transit route for Afghan heroin, an influential drug agency says. High levels of insurgent violence and porous borders have drawn [Bush's] traffickers to Iraq, according to the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB). …Authorities in Afghanistan say their drug problem is so severe the country’s existence could be threatened.

What happened to the $82 billion we just gave you three days ago? $50 billion more asked for Iraq, Afghan terror wars 13 May 2005 –The Senate Armed Services Committee has recommended a further $50 billion be set aside for Halliburton [‘to fund U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S.-declared global war on [of] terrorism.’] The proposed new war spending for fiscal 2006, which starts Oct. 1, would push the cost of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and its aftermath toward $250 billion. Three days ago, Congress gave final approval for an $82 billion emergency war-spending bill… Even with such a large, emergency funding measure, the Pentagon has said more money would be needed as early as October. By 2010, war costs could top $500 billion, some experts have projected.
Address to receive newsletter: http://www.legitgov.org/#subscribe_clg

Jane Stillwater is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
She can be reached at

No Child “Left Behind”

Code words for a children’s cookbook?

Remember that Twilight Zone episode where the aliens arrived on Earth and presented our leaders with this glorious plan for the planet entitled “How to Serve Man”. Well. In the final scene, “How to Serve Man” turns out to be a COOKBOOK!

For those of you familiar with the “Left Behind” series of books dealing with cult Christian longings for Armageddon, you will immediately recognize no child “Left Behind” as code words too.

According to www.leftbehind.com, the plot of the “Left Behind” series is basically that, “Passengers aboard a Boeing 747 en route to Europe disappear. Instantly. Nothing remains except their rumpled piles of clothes, jewelry, fillings, surgical pins, and the like. All over the world, in a flash, cars are left unmanned. Terror and chaos continues worldwide as the cataclysm unfolds. For those left behind, the apocalypse has just begun.”

The book series goes on to describe what happens next. We who are left get stuck in “The Tribulation,” a down-and-dirty war where life for the average American begins to resemble Fallugah and our children are brainwashed into fighting to the death for “Jesus”.

In the series’ children’s books, the heroes are told that killing and killing and killing is the only way to worship God. Should they have doubts about this ACTUALLY being the will of a loving Jesus, they are immediately set straight! “Judd, Vicki, Lionel, and Ryan have decisions to make. Will they accept Christ’s forgiveness, or will they blame God for abandoning them and taking away their families?” Sounds like a neo-con push-poll, doesn’t it.

The future that “born again” George Bush and his friends have in store for us and our children is endless war. Are we fighting for Jesus? Hardly. We are fighting so that rich men like Bush and Cheney can get richer. The whole Jesus con is a trick with smoke and mirrors. It is a cookbook designed for us — and for our children.

Neo-cons and cult Christians are embracing the idea of boot camps for children in a big way. They appear to think that it’s a good idea to have a supply of fresh meat available to the “Trib Force” — brainwashed new recruits all psyched up for “Endless War”.

“What exactly,” your next question may be, “are these kiddie boot camps like?” Aside from being training grounds for future cannon fodder, they are prototypes of what life will be like during The Tribulation — stark and hard places where no love is ever shown. One children’s boot camp in Florida run by neo-con “Christians” has been accused of torture, rape and starvation. Images of Abu Ghraib come to mind.

Are these camps toughening our children up for when they miss The Rapture and have to stew in the cauldron of The Tribulation? You bet.

Part 2: Throw-away Children

Another sad thing about the new “send your child off to boot camp” movement is that it is creating a whole new generation of “throw-away children”. Tired of being a parent? Buy your way out.

Affluent adults are now sending their children off to the Utah desert or the swamps of Florida as a response to normal everyday-life parent-child situations. Twenty years ago, if Junior broke the crockery, he would have been sent to his room. Now he is tortured and starved instead.

My daughter’s friend “Jordan” recently disappeared down the rabbit hole to boot camp. We just found out that he will be there until he turns 18 — THREE MORE YEARS. What kind of a person will he be when he gets out? One cannot even begin to imagine.

When we FINALLY got a letter from Jordan, he said, “If my father wanted to spend all that money on me [boot camp is $400 a day!], he could have sent me some place that might actually have helped me.” Julliard comes to mind. Or Harvard. Or even a trip around the world. Instead he gets abused and starved and put in with a bunch of drug addicts for three years. So much for the idyllic life of a happy American teenager.

There will be no football games and proms for these throw-away children. According to other teen boot camp survivors, Jordan will be lucky if he returns with his sanity intact — not to mention the nightmares.

The new “Throw Away” concept of parenting is this: If a robust energetic enthusiastic boy is being a bother and the Ritalin isn’t working, send him off to boot camp.

When I was a kid, we had girls in our school who would disappear — allegedly to “visit relatives” for eight or nine months. They would always come back looking older and sadder.

Now it is our boys who disappear and come back looking older and sadder. Whenever a boy re-appears at my daughter’s school with that “deer in the headlights” look in his eyes, we know there has been a boot camp involved. And that this child had not been “Left Behind” either.

Part 3: Send a letter to Jesse

Want to help? Just becoming aware that there is a problem is a good start.

Or take a bigger step and help just one child: Send a letter to a boy stuck in “Wilderness Therapy”. His name is Jesse Collins Zipperman and he is at the Aspen Achievement Academy in Loa, Utah. Tell him the gossip, chit-chat about the weather and sign it Aunt or Uncle Your-Name-Here (Be aware that all mail is heavily censored). We just got a letter from Jesse; he is truly miserable and could use some cheering up! Address: Aspen Achievement Academy, Loa, Utah 84747. Or send him a post card. Or fax a letter to or . Or e-mail him at He’s somewhere near Zion National Park. Take a vacation. Go try to visit him.

Or think BIG. Call your Congressperson. Run for School Board. Let’s give our schools enough money to actually TEACH our kids. And let’s help parents too. EVERY child should have at least 20 people ready, willing and able to help him or her grow up to be a pride to America — not just another victim.

Sources: Left Behind

International Survivors Action Committee: http://www.isaccorp.org/ Thousands of children are currently in privately owned “behavior modification” programs. Unfortunately, the “treatment” offered at some of these programs could be considered child abuse.

Kids end up in behavior modification programs, boot camps, wilderness camps, and drug rehabs for all kinds of reasons….. For the kids who end up in a harsh, abusive program, it can be the beginning of a life-long battle with nightmares, depression, rage, and thoughts of suicide.

Suicide in Montana, American children kept in dog cages: — Suicide

This one made me cry

Comments on the Aspen Achievement Academy: “I desparately want to find out anything I can about the Aspen facilities. My adorable 14 year old granddaughter was recently kidnapped (at her parents’ request), and wisked off to a wilderness camp in Idaho run by SUWS (now owned by Aspen), and then sent to an Aspen boarding facility, which I think is probably in Utah. I am completely heartsick because this little girl has never been into drugs, alcohol, never been on a date, let alone had sex, never been in trouble with the law, etc. Her only sin has been talking back to her dictatorial, arrogant stepfather, who did legally adopt her so can do whatever he wants with her. She was sent away prior to any form of traditional counseling being attempted. I can’t believe that these kids can be taken over state lines against their will and incarcerated without due process, all at the wim of a parent who is the one who needs the behavior modification.”

Good news: Someone else in my same postition has filed a Guardian Ad Litem and Habeas Corpus writ to try to get a child released from one of these programs. The hearing is in federal court next week. If the writ is granted, it will mean that non-guardians can have input into whether or not chidren can be carted away to boot camps by their parents with no repercussions from the community. (See Feldman v. Youth Care of Utah et al, Case No.: 2:04-CV-00933PGC)

Then there’s the CYA: With regard to children who have no sugar daddies to send them off to “Boarding School,” poor children are not being left behind either. Their schools are being systematically un-funded and instead of Boot Camp, lower income youth have the California Youth Authority to teach them about The Tribulation!

College tuition: I am about to go into debt for the rest of my life — and my daughter is about to go into debt Bigtime too — so that she might possibly go to college next year. That’s not right! Let’s educate our kids. It is the BEST way to keep America safe.

Great new book: Iraq, Inc. A Profitable Occupation. “Pratap Chatterjee takes us into the fast-spinning revolving door between the government officials who attacked Iraq and the corporations who have profited so handsomely from the war. A powerful combination of investigative research and on-the-ground reporting, Iraq, Inc. is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has really gone wrong in Iraq.” —Naomi Klein, author No Logo, columnist The Nation

From Michael: To me, the No Child Left Behind ploy was a signaling to the end of the Department of Education. While in DC did you happen to see the DOE Building? It was virtually lifeless. Absolutely no activity whatsoever.

The “How to Serve Iraq” cookbook: What is happening in Iraq is not a war. It is a massacre. Thanks to the Bush cartel, every man, woman and child in Iraq has become a member of the underground resistance. And when our children come back from murdering civilians in Iraq as part of their “wilderness therapy,” they will need years of counseling to get over their nightmares.

Jane Stillwater is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
She can be reached at

Where Are The WMDs?

In Iran and Syria of course

My last article caused many of you to write that I was coming on a bit too strong in my criticisms of the oligarchy and its head honcho boy George. So, I did what any honest writer would do when criticized by his or her readers, I sat back, sipped some hot coffee and examined my writing modus operandi of late. In this somewhat amusing process, several analogies entered my shocking mind, the first being, how would one react when being pick pocketed? Or, how does a human being react when lied to over and over again by someone you are supposed to trust? Or, even worse, how does a human being react when someone who you look for leadership and that that person in authority not only incessantly lies to you but thieves from you also? Are you to be a well behaved lap dog and go along with the deceivers and thieves and allow yourselves to be fooled and erroneously conclude that this perverse process is for your own good and well being, or are you going to stand up for yourself and say no more?

The prostitutes in the mainstream media have no problem fornicating with their masters in the corporate state and will not bother with such formalities as reporting the truth, but then again, that’s why you are here reading this article on this publication, you are tired of being lied to as well. The America that is your heritage is being systematically dismantled by a few greedy elitists and this writer is not going to pussy foot about. Your government is destroying your future by going into massive debt so they can play war games and profit greatly by it while lying to you that it is for your own security. Your dollar that you work for is becoming worthless by the day and when you look at your pay check stub and see how much of it your government appropriates, you begin to wonder who are you really working for, that is if you are fortunate enough to still have a job. So let’s get on with it shall we, I promise to be gentle this time.

Should we be surprised that U.S. forces have not been able to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction? Of course not, it was always a bunch of fabrications from the start so that the neocons within the Bush administration can create an illusion of a legitimate “casus belliï” and threat. Presidents Bush’s , was deliberate in its accusations and produced evidence that supposedly was gathered by British and American intelligence agencies, proving that Iraq had thousands of liters in anthrax and botulinum toxins that could produce vast amounts of WMDs. And if given the time Saddam would also develop nuclear weapons therefore the threat was immediate and great. So we were told, in which he also gave the arguments and reasons for his patriotic usurping of the constitution and his determination to lead the United States into an internationally illegal act of war on another sovereign nation.

Newsday’s Marie Cocco has written a pretty good article titled: Iraqi Arsenal Now Seems a Phantom Menace where she asks some pertinent questions, one being in a very concerning manner: “I am hoping they find something soon. I am hoping President George W. Bush’s chief justification for the invasion of Iraq – that Saddam Hussein held a fearsome arsenal of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons that posed an imminent threat to the United States – was not concocted in those Washington salons where conservative ideology and a lust for expanding American power merge.” Unfortunately, Cocco’s hope is in vain here, I believe she knows better, the neocons needed a reason to hood wink the public for what amounts to outright criminality on their part, and fabricating evidence was nothing compared to the rape of an entire nation, the neocons are ideologically motivated and they will not be stopped by the truth or by the law, which is all relative to them anyway.

Cocco goes on to point out that: “Teams of U.S. weapons inspectors who have been running down lists of high-priority sites in Iraq are coming up dry” and that “Some teams in this hunt have now diverted to look for different evidence of Hussein’s perfidy – mass graves, financial wrongdoing.” Nothing like diverting attention from certain uncomfortable truths that would expose certain people in the Bush administration of flat out lying to the American people especially the honcho at the top boy George himself. This is all reminiscent of so called atrocities by the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo; the reasons given by the Clinton regime for their illegal acts of aggression, all of which have turned out to be nothing more than fabrications by the spin doctors in the Clinton administration, the Bush clan in this case have proved to be much like the Clintonians.

Cocco goes on to write that she does not believe that the Bush government flat out lied about the necessity for the invasion of Iraq, but rather a manipulation of certain information and intelligence, where she draws a historical parallel with Vietnam and writes: “The historic parallel is that those bright, shining lies that sustained American involvement in Vietnam were not always rank falsehoods. They were often manipulations of information and intelligence. And these were put forward by men compelled by ideology and their own concept of political necessity to pursue a course that turned out to be utter folly”. Cocco seems to sincerely give the Bush clan the benefit of the doubt in the Bush clan’s inability to flat out lie to the public; I am under no such illusion.

There is plenty of evidence to prove that it was a deliberate strategy by the Bush government to lie to Americans and the world of the dangers posed by Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powel went to the United Nations to present to the world a plagiaristic expose on the specter of a mad man on the verge of nuclear capability, with stock piles of lethal chemicals who intended to use it against the most powerful force on earth, or to give it to terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida, which was being at the same time contradicted by CIA reports, was clearly a cynical and disingenuous attempt to justify the morally bankrupt. It is clear by the lack of evidence in Iraq of WMDs and any legitimate links with al-Qaida that the war was for the purposes of a perverse element within the American government.

Also, the simple question of why did a mad man like Saddam not use these weapons in defense of his nation and palaces? Could it be because he did not have them all along? Or maybe he is not such a mad man after all, a mass murderer for sure, but smart enough to make a deal with the Bush government to go into hiding with some of his generals in the republican guards which just happened not to put up much of a fight in its defense of Baghdad. Where is Saddam? Could he be with bin Laden, another one of those evil characters who has conveniently disappeared only to surface when things quiet down to much in the unending war against terrorism?

Listening to some leading neocons lately, we are to expect to find those pesky WMDs within a matter of years and that in any case there are real threats now to deal with like al-Qaida’s links to Iran. Iran has been on Washington’s hot sauce lately with the pentagon proposing regime change in Tehran, after reports that al-Qaida leaders are coordinating terrorist attacks from Iran and the nefarious Bill Kristol also echoing the dangers now posed to the United States by the Ayatollahs. And like Iraq, there is no evidence to support these accusations other than the neocons hatred for all of Israel’s cantankerous enemies.

The Washington Post that the Bush administration appears “ready to embrace an aggressive policy of trying to destabilize the Iranian government”, also, along the same lines, the Bush clan’s special democratic friend U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut said: “It would be in the interest of the world and most particularly of the Iranian people to have a regime change in Iran.” Here we go again; the United States is going to start killing Iranians for their own good. This is really a declaration of war as far as the Iranian government is concerned and further evidence that we have a bunch of criminals running the United States government. Will the next invasion be Iran or Syria? It does not matter really, an attack on one by the United States is an attack on both, and the next neocon war will probably be with at least two nations (Iran and Syria) if not more.

These wars of democratic liberation, was and always will be about American preponderance and getting rid of Israel’s enemies. It rarely had anything to do with getting rid of terrorist organizations that threatened the United States, if we were attacked it was because the United States was in the Middle East meddling in the internal affairs of other nations and supporting a nation that has nothing to do with any vital American interest, excluding that of the oligarchy. The war in Iraq has only just begun, and
will slowly trickle in and add up, the occupiers will be slowly driven out and the cost in American blood and money will become great.

And low and behold substantiation from the dragon bitch National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice who said that the security of Israel is the key to security of the world.” Wow, pretty heady stuff, did Rice think this up all by herself? The security of the United States and the World is intertwined with Israel’s security; I guess that is good enough reason to fight Israel’s wars. Did any one ask her why and how our security is linked to Israel? This ties in well with the dispensationalists who believe that the center of world troubles and tribulation will be over Israel. Beam me up Scotty, the rapture is soon to be upon us.

This is the mindset permeating within the Bush regime; Condoleezza Rice went on to say that she feels “deep bond to Israel” and that “I first visited Israel in 2000. I already then felt that I am returning home despite the fact that this was a place I never visited. I have a deep affinity with Israel”. To Rice and her neocon friends the center of the universe is Israel and to hell with the legitimate interests of the United States. Condoleezza Rice, how about you and your neocon friends do us a little favor? Take your subversive buddies and return home to Israel permanently, and let us return to a Republic here in America.

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