Letter to Wendy McElroy
Thank you for the outstanding piece you wrote published by Fox News, "War Comes With Unintended Consequences." Tragically, the warmongers and the jingoists in the USA are now ruling the day, bamboozled by the classic scaremongering tactics which have echoed down the ages from Caesar's "Spartacus approaches" to the "Reichstag Fire," to "vast right wing conspiracies," the "globally ambitious Red Chinese" and latest on the scene of all-encompassing evil--Washington, DC's former best Cold War friend and 21st century version of Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden.
It comes down to this. Our government is interested in one thing, more and more power for itself and will stop at nothing, including deliberately taking the lives of its own citizens to do so. First the Weavers at Ruby Ridge. Then the Davidians at Waco. Then OKC. Now, four planeloads of innocent airline passengers. And the perpetrators on the planes are also conveniently dead. The body count just somehow keeps going up, doesn't it? All we are getting are endlessly repeated images of crumbling skyscrapers, a prolonged "Two-Minutes Hate" directed at Osama bin-Goldstein and blather about how the four destroyed airliners' "black boxes" are somehow destroyed or unsalvageable. Meanwhile, our anti-Islamic Pope George has said nothing about ending years of US support for the barbaric Albanian Moslem KLA "freedom fighters" (infested with bin-Laden-trained operatives) waging a war of extermination against the Serbs and Macedonians.
We have another Reichstag Fire on our hands--and already, even as the smoke and dust has barely cleared, people are listening to calls for martial law, mass expulsion of all foreigners and police state legislation; look at the Constitution-busting "antiterrorist" legislation we in the USA got after OKC, where another "lone nut Oswald" Timothy McVeigh supposedly did all of the damage he did solo. And a lot of good that legislation did, if the media's initial claims of what really happened are true. Like Oswald, McVeigh is dead, as are the skyjackers, and the dead can't talk. The OKC bombing left far more troubling questions than it ever answered, as probably will this conflagration. JFK lied about Cuba, LBJ lied about Vietnam. Dick Nixon lied about Watergate. Bill Clinton lied about everything including his shoe size. Jimmy Carter couldn't tell the difference.
The US government freely piled sophisticated arms, military training and billions of dollars in financial aid on these Islamic countries for decades. This, as part of our longstanding Mideastern policy of "arms for oil," (or, in the classic Kissingerese of the era--"enabling the energy-rich nations to recycle their surplus oil revenues"--is bearing bitter fruit. We give away tons of complex military weaponry on the US taxpayer tab to any yahoo who claims to be a "freedom fighter" while politicians here quake in their boots at the thought of the average Joe and Jane having a firearm magazine that can hold more than ten measly rounds. The song from DC will remain the same--spew some hot air, launch a few missiles, give the strutting Walter Mitty warmongers and corporate socialists their vicarious thrills, then fast dispose of the whole thing down the memory hole when the opinion polls head south. Bush and Co. are spinning this for their own purposes and those dead air travelers and occupants of the wrecked WTC are their convenient "Bloody Shirt" to wave at the public. Bush AG John "I Don't Dance" Ashcroft babbles about "increased security" in the USA. Defense Secretary and former chief G.D. Searle pill-pusher Don Rumsfeld tells our GIs to "make more sacrifices." Everything is a big psychological test to gauge our reactions. For what, is the $64,000 question. The final touches of a fascist police state?
Our government snuffed Vickie Weaver, it incinerated the Davidians less than a year later and probably was instrumental in killing the occupants of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building two years to the day after that. It gleefully (and pusillanimously) carpet bombed innocent Serb civilians from 15,000 feet and is playing cat and mouse with what's left of Macedonia--and there is still no call for cutting off aid to the KLA or pulling our troops out of the Balkans. Our Drug Warriors and jack-booted thugs continue their depredations, the deaths in Santa Clarita, Calif. and Vandalia, Mich., now utterly forgotten. Rep. Gary Condit got the best "get out of jail free card" any crook could ever dream of. The day late and a dollar short dolts at the FBI and CIA are quickly labeling bin Laden as the culprit, but their claims sound strangely more like off-key ass-covering (amid solid evidence both agencies ignored several warnings of the disaster in advance) than thoughtful analysis.
Recall the German "Operation Himmler" on August 31, 1939? After weeks of Goebbels' propaganda against Warsaw, German troops dressed in Polish army uniforms crossed into Poland in the dead of night, crossed back into Germany and torched a Rundfunk commercial radio station near the town of Gleiwitz, leaving behind the body of a concentration camp inmate dressed in a Polish army uniform. Berlin shouted about "Polish aggression" and W.W. II began the next day. Could another sort of "Operation Himmler," this time larger and much more sophisticated, have been carried out? Were the actual executors of the 9/11 disaster the "Polish uniforms," so to speak? What's to stop our government from doing or allowing something like what happened on that fateful day for its own complex and nefarious purposes? I am certain that there are various types of well-supported agents provocateurs who in the interests of covering their tracks, employ various scattered groups in temporary "blind alliance" covers, groups who, after the fact, are truly surprised that another, diametrically opposite group was involved. For all we know, at the moment, the culprits could be little green men from Mars, disgruntled Bob Marley fans or Colombian narco-terrorists, which would cast a whole new light on the situation. And isn't it strange our smug and shrill but dumb and dangerous Drug Warriors haven't chimed in with their pet "international drug dealer theory" yet? Our government has repeatedly lied to us about so many things for so long, why should this calamity make any difference in the spin? Don't count on ever finding out anything for certain.
In reaction, the 2001 version of the "Remember the Maine" crowd is in full bloom and the spin (from a mainstream media who had bleated that Bill Clinton's crimes in office "did not rise to the level of impeachment") is vicious. Those like Captain Charles Sigsbee (the USS Maine skipper who unsuccessfully tried to quash Hearst/TR-led war fever in 1898 by demanding that no one be blamed until a full investigation of the battleship's explosion and sinking was complete) are again being labeled as traitors and degenerates and other off-color names that too many infantilized, video-vitiated, self-absorbed Americans use against anyone anywhere who intelligently and constructively disagrees with them in any way. Note: A 1976 Navy investigation directed by the famed Admiral Hyman Rickover (the renowned father of the US "nuclear-powered Navy") found the Maine was actually destroyed and sunk by an explosion and fire started when fine coal dust in its fuel bunkers ignited which also, in chain-reaction, detonated munitions stored in adjoining ammunition lockers, not by "a Spanish mine" as the Hearst papers of the day screamed.
Chancellor Bush and friends will try to get more restrictive legislation of some kind enacted, sooner or later--and the self-proclaimed "patriots and constitutionalists," phony tough and crazy brave, deluded by momentary bloodlust and by decades of the mindless deification of an unconstitutionally ever-more powerful US executive branch, will gleefully give it to him, no questions asked. Can't happen? It already has. On Sept. 15, 2001, Congress passed a resolution giving President Bush broad and unlimited authority to wage war against terrorism anywhere in the world--the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution meets Nazi Germany's 1934 Enabling Act. Calls for national ID cards with implanted personal and biometric data have arisen. Many ISP's that staunchly opposed installing the FBI's "Carnivore" surveillance system are now reversing course. The US Senate, days after the disaster, passed a measure intended to massively expand federal warrantless wiretap and surveillance powers (the House of Representatives has yet to vote on the measure.) And don't be surprised if that massive illegal alien amnesty bill that Dubya and his corporate buddies in industries ranging from software to underwear want so badly and is the ticket for turning the US Southwest into an giant American Kosovo is quietly tacked on as a rider to a huge defense appropriations bill as well as a massive tax hike.
Bush, Clinton and the rest are on the same team of UN globonazis. What's next, bluehelmets coming to a neighborhood near you? Henry Kissinger said a decade ago that Americans would soon welcome UN peackeepers in their communities.
We knew what could possibly happen. We chose to ignore it for a long time. Our thoughtless greed and overweening imperial arrogance are biting us back, hard. More specifically, our past decade's trinity of pampered, loathsome Ivy League degenerates and their minions in the White House and elsewhere have the blood of thousands on their hands and their only concern is the next election. And the worst is yet to come. Ohio GOP Senator Robert A. Taft's August 1943 jeremiad that imperialism abroad, no matter how well intentioned, eventually leads to totalitarianism at home has tragically come to pass, as has proof that poet Robinson Jeffers' long ago view that the USA does indeed suffer from a severe "introversion complex."
One thing I have learned during this entire debacle is who one's friends really are. The phony "conservatives" who secretly love state power when it fulfills their camo-clad Rambo wannabe fantasies (which seems to be the case right now--look at the appalling wholesale bigotry, censorship and saber-rattling at FreeRepublic.com, for example) are worse than the "liberals"--who at least are upfront and consistent about their nefarious statist motives and goals. I wonder what the hadcore "keep and bear arms" types will do when Dubya asks that Americans "turn over any unused or extra firearms" for the needs of the "war effort?" Probably gleefully comply.
This "beer commercial patriotism" now tragically infests much of our nation, exhibited mainly by those who act out their infantile anger over their personal insignificance and neurotic need for some bizarre kind of "celebrity" by indulging in a bogus "TR-style" swagger. A lot of these people live in small, molecular worlds--I'll bet a lot of them have never left their home county much less their home country, and, like the character of Chance, the poorly educated gardener Peter Sellers brilliantly played in the 1979 film "Being There," they have all of their views of the world moderated through the idiot box, their minds rubbish heaps of cotton-candy trivia and moronic sound bites passed off (and thoughtlessly accepted) as definitive knowledge about and understanding of the world around them. Plato had these sort of people in mind in his dialogue, "Allegory of a Cave."
The greatest threat to liberty are people just like that, ones Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand called "the second-raters," the well-fed, smug, unmoored, clueless folk like the character of Peter Keating in her novel "The Fountainhead"--whose deliberate self-absorption, haughty cultivated ignorance and obsessively self-referential chauvinism keeps a society mindlessly slouching toward totalitarianism.
_____________
Note: This work is undated and it is not known if it was ever sent to Ms. McElroy, or if it was ever published.
Thanks to Aeryn-Sun for this contribution.
It comes down to this. Our government is interested in one thing, more and more power for itself and will stop at nothing, including deliberately taking the lives of its own citizens to do so. First the Weavers at Ruby Ridge. Then the Davidians at Waco. Then OKC. Now, four planeloads of innocent airline passengers. And the perpetrators on the planes are also conveniently dead. The body count just somehow keeps going up, doesn't it? All we are getting are endlessly repeated images of crumbling skyscrapers, a prolonged "Two-Minutes Hate" directed at Osama bin-Goldstein and blather about how the four destroyed airliners' "black boxes" are somehow destroyed or unsalvageable. Meanwhile, our anti-Islamic Pope George has said nothing about ending years of US support for the barbaric Albanian Moslem KLA "freedom fighters" (infested with bin-Laden-trained operatives) waging a war of extermination against the Serbs and Macedonians. We have another Reichstag Fire on our hands--and already, even as the smoke and dust has barely cleared, people are listening to calls for martial law, mass expulsion of all foreigners and police state legislation; look at the Constitution-busting "antiterrorist" legislation we in the USA got after OKC, where another "lone nut Oswald" Timothy McVeigh supposedly did all of the damage he did solo. And a lot of good that legislation did, if the media's initial claims of what really happened are true. Like Oswald, McVeigh is dead, as are the skyjackers, and the dead can't talk. The OKC bombing left far more troubling questions than it ever answered, as probably will this conflagration. JFK lied about Cuba, LBJ lied about Vietnam. Dick Nixon lied about Watergate. Bill Clinton lied about everything including his shoe size. Jimmy Carter couldn't tell the difference.
The US government freely piled sophisticated arms, military training and billions of dollars in financial aid on these Islamic countries for decades. This, as part of our longstanding Mideastern policy of "arms for oil," (or, in the classic Kissingerese of the era--"enabling the energy-rich nations to recycle their surplus oil revenues"--is bearing bitter fruit. We give away tons of complex military weaponry on the US taxpayer tab to any yahoo who claims to be a "freedom fighter" while politicians here quake in their boots at the thought of the average Joe and Jane having a firearm magazine that can hold more than ten measly rounds. The song from DC will remain the same--spew some hot air, launch a few missiles, give the strutting Walter Mitty warmongers and corporate socialists their vicarious thrills, then fast dispose of the whole thing down the memory hole when the opinion polls head south. Bush and Co. are spinning this for their own purposes and those dead air travelers and occupants of the wrecked WTC are their convenient "Bloody Shirt" to wave at the public. Bush AG John "I Don't Dance" Ashcroft babbles about "increased security" in the USA. Defense Secretary and former chief G.D. Searle pill-pusher Don Rumsfeld tells our GIs to "make more sacrifices." Everything is a big psychological test to gauge our reactions. For what, is the $64,000 question. The final touches of a fascist police state?
Our government snuffed Vickie Weaver, it incinerated the Davidians less than a year later and probably was instrumental in killing the occupants of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building two years to the day after that. It gleefully (and pusillanimously) carpet bombed innocent Serb civilians from 15,000 feet and is playing cat and mouse with what's left of Macedonia--and there is still no call for cutting off aid to the KLA or pulling our troops out of the Balkans. Our Drug Warriors and jack-booted thugs continue their depredations, the deaths in Santa Clarita, Calif. and Vandalia, Mich., now utterly forgotten. Rep. Gary Condit got the best "get out of jail free card" any crook could ever dream of. The day late and a dollar short dolts at the FBI and CIA are quickly labeling bin Laden as the culprit, but their claims sound strangely more like off-key ass-covering (amid solid evidence both agencies ignored several warnings of the disaster in advance) than thoughtful analysis.
Recall the German "Operation Himmler" on August 31, 1939? After weeks of Goebbels' propaganda against Warsaw, German troops dressed in Polish army uniforms crossed into Poland in the dead of night, crossed back into Germany and torched a Rundfunk commercial radio station near the town of Gleiwitz, leaving behind the body of a concentration camp inmate dressed in a Polish army uniform. Berlin shouted about "Polish aggression" and W.W. II began the next day. Could another sort of "Operation Himmler," this time larger and much more sophisticated, have been carried out? Were the actual executors of the 9/11 disaster the "Polish uniforms," so to speak? What's to stop our government from doing or allowing something like what happened on that fateful day for its own complex and nefarious purposes? I am certain that there are various types of well-supported agents provocateurs who in the interests of covering their tracks, employ various scattered groups in temporary "blind alliance" covers, groups who, after the fact, are truly surprised that another, diametrically opposite group was involved. For all we know, at the moment, the culprits could be little green men from Mars, disgruntled Bob Marley fans or Colombian narco-terrorists, which would cast a whole new light on the situation. And isn't it strange our smug and shrill but dumb and dangerous Drug Warriors haven't chimed in with their pet "international drug dealer theory" yet? Our government has repeatedly lied to us about so many things for so long, why should this calamity make any difference in the spin? Don't count on ever finding out anything for certain.
In reaction, the 2001 version of the "Remember the Maine" crowd is in full bloom and the spin (from a mainstream media who had bleated that Bill Clinton's crimes in office "did not rise to the level of impeachment") is vicious. Those like Captain Charles Sigsbee (the USS Maine skipper who unsuccessfully tried to quash Hearst/TR-led war fever in 1898 by demanding that no one be blamed until a full investigation of the battleship's explosion and sinking was complete) are again being labeled as traitors and degenerates and other off-color names that too many infantilized, video-vitiated, self-absorbed Americans use against anyone anywhere who intelligently and constructively disagrees with them in any way. Note: A 1976 Navy investigation directed by the famed Admiral Hyman Rickover (the renowned father of the US "nuclear-powered Navy") found the Maine was actually destroyed and sunk by an explosion and fire started when fine coal dust in its fuel bunkers ignited which also, in chain-reaction, detonated munitions stored in adjoining ammunition lockers, not by "a Spanish mine" as the Hearst papers of the day screamed.
Chancellor Bush and friends will try to get more restrictive legislation of some kind enacted, sooner or later--and the self-proclaimed "patriots and constitutionalists," phony tough and crazy brave, deluded by momentary bloodlust and by decades of the mindless deification of an unconstitutionally ever-more powerful US executive branch, will gleefully give it to him, no questions asked. Can't happen? It already has. On Sept. 15, 2001, Congress passed a resolution giving President Bush broad and unlimited authority to wage war against terrorism anywhere in the world--the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution meets Nazi Germany's 1934 Enabling Act. Calls for national ID cards with implanted personal and biometric data have arisen. Many ISP's that staunchly opposed installing the FBI's "Carnivore" surveillance system are now reversing course. The US Senate, days after the disaster, passed a measure intended to massively expand federal warrantless wiretap and surveillance powers (the House of Representatives has yet to vote on the measure.) And don't be surprised if that massive illegal alien amnesty bill that Dubya and his corporate buddies in industries ranging from software to underwear want so badly and is the ticket for turning the US Southwest into an giant American Kosovo is quietly tacked on as a rider to a huge defense appropriations bill as well as a massive tax hike.
Bush, Clinton and the rest are on the same team of UN globonazis. What's next, bluehelmets coming to a neighborhood near you? Henry Kissinger said a decade ago that Americans would soon welcome UN peackeepers in their communities.
We knew what could possibly happen. We chose to ignore it for a long time. Our thoughtless greed and overweening imperial arrogance are biting us back, hard. More specifically, our past decade's trinity of pampered, loathsome Ivy League degenerates and their minions in the White House and elsewhere have the blood of thousands on their hands and their only concern is the next election. And the worst is yet to come. Ohio GOP Senator Robert A. Taft's August 1943 jeremiad that imperialism abroad, no matter how well intentioned, eventually leads to totalitarianism at home has tragically come to pass, as has proof that poet Robinson Jeffers' long ago view that the USA does indeed suffer from a severe "introversion complex."
One thing I have learned during this entire debacle is who one's friends really are. The phony "conservatives" who secretly love state power when it fulfills their camo-clad Rambo wannabe fantasies (which seems to be the case right now--look at the appalling wholesale bigotry, censorship and saber-rattling at FreeRepublic.com, for example) are worse than the "liberals"--who at least are upfront and consistent about their nefarious statist motives and goals. I wonder what the hadcore "keep and bear arms" types will do when Dubya asks that Americans "turn over any unused or extra firearms" for the needs of the "war effort?" Probably gleefully comply.
This "beer commercial patriotism" now tragically infests much of our nation, exhibited mainly by those who act out their infantile anger over their personal insignificance and neurotic need for some bizarre kind of "celebrity" by indulging in a bogus "TR-style" swagger. A lot of these people live in small, molecular worlds--I'll bet a lot of them have never left their home county much less their home country, and, like the character of Chance, the poorly educated gardener Peter Sellers brilliantly played in the 1979 film "Being There," they have all of their views of the world moderated through the idiot box, their minds rubbish heaps of cotton-candy trivia and moronic sound bites passed off (and thoughtlessly accepted) as definitive knowledge about and understanding of the world around them. Plato had these sort of people in mind in his dialogue, "Allegory of a Cave."
The greatest threat to liberty are people just like that, ones Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand called "the second-raters," the well-fed, smug, unmoored, clueless folk like the character of Peter Keating in her novel "The Fountainhead"--whose deliberate self-absorption, haughty cultivated ignorance and obsessively self-referential chauvinism keeps a society mindlessly slouching toward totalitarianism.
_____________
Note: This work is undated and it is not known if it was ever sent to Ms. McElroy, or if it was ever published.
Thanks to Aeryn-Sun for this contribution.
posted by tribute at 3:37 PM
2 Comments:
"We give away tons of complex military weaponry on the US taxpayer tab to any yahoo who claims to be a "freedom fighter" while politicians here quake in their boots at the thought of the average Joe and Jane having a firearm magazine that can hold more than ten measly rounds."
Super article by Michael Kreca!
Were they ever able to straighten out Michael's medication?
He must have written this in a dark and confused time in his tragiclly short life.
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