Valenzuela's Veritas

In ominous times truth always finds a way out from darkness into light. Always. Through truth knowledge grows into the power and strength to question the actions of governance. In times that try men's souls it is those who seek enlightenment who are truly free. Given the choice of possessing ignorance or knowledge, even when ignorance would lead to an easier life, I would choose knowledge,thus escaping the life of sheeple, escaping the bondage of not knowing, not caring and not understanding.

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Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, commentator, Internet essayist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. His essays appear regularly at various alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. He encourages readers to surf the collection of over 100 essays he has written which can be found visiting his archives and by searching the Internet. He welcomes comments at euromeximan@yahoo.com

Monday, August 30, 2004

The Cradle of Devastation

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam [Iraq]?..How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” John Kerry, 1971

"How will he [Bush] meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes… I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?...Everyone [in Falluja] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies.
---- Ahmad Manajid, Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team Member


"My problems are not with the American people…They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"
---- Adnan Hamad, Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team Member


"We don't wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away."
Salih Sadir, Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team Member and team leader


"You cannot speak about a team that represents freedom. We do not have freedom in Iraq, we have an occupying force. This is one of our most miserable times….Freedom is just a word for the media. We are living in hard times, under occupation."
---- Head coach Adnan Hamad, critical of George Bush’s exploitation of the Iraqi Olympic team in recent re-election advertisements



Gunboat soldiers of wars past and brutal, bitter at the truths spoken thirty years ago, have taken us back to bloody deltas and haunting demons, purposefully smearing one man and making an entire nation relive memories still too fragile to exorcise from the collective mind of the American people. Traversing waters of painful history so that we ignore the now toxic waterways of the Tigris and Euphrates, tools of proxy and pawns of convenience have only succeeded in reminding us of the putrid morality and dishonor residing in mansions old and white that have and continue to stain the once bright American beacon of light.

Taking us back to the jungles of Vietnam so that we can forget the present debacle in the deserts of Iraq, gunboat soldiers and their puppeteers wish to deviate an amnesia-riddled populace from the lands of the once Fertile Crescent, manipulating our short-attention span away from a foreign policy blunder more and more resembling a cocktail offering equal opportunity to an amalgam of failure, including a massive debacle, quagmire, catastrophe and collapse rolled into one.

Iraq is on the verge of implosion, a pussing scab never to heal, forever to pain America through the salts of bitterness and the unyielding defeat of failure. The inevitability of failure cannot be denied nor can it be questioned. It is only a matter of when, not if, as alien lands and divergent peoples resist and revolt imperial armies and crusading delusions. How can the sinister intentions of the few, nothing more than a malignant cluster of miscreants at the top, bring down a nation of so much splendor and potential, belonging to the total spectrum of humanity, not just the sewers of the elite?

Trapped in the sand dunes of Mesopotamia the American dream has awoken to, unable to extricate one soldier from an occupation besmirched by the leadership of George W. Bush and his neocon vultures. Condemned soldiers of misfortune find themselves in, their caste of indigence and lack of opportunity helping seal their fates, fighting and dying for mistakes, furthering the power trips of the elite, suffering through the indifference of their anointed leaders and sacrificing for the welfare of another nation. How many more will have to die or have their extremities ripped apart for a mistake and a fight sought by few to the detriment of the many? How many more sons and daughters will we have to bury, when the world entire smells the decaying smell of failure and sees the maggots prospering in our carcass?

Something has gone terribly wrong when the same people you are claiming to have liberated, showering them with the mirages of American freedom and democracy, exhibit nothing but animosity and hostility toward you. Such is the situation in Iraq, vividly exhibited by members of the Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team, who echo the sentiments of the vast majority of their countrymen. To understand the comments emanated, with the strong emotions and powerful words used, Americans must see themselves through the eyes of Iraqis. We must empathize with and place ourselves inside their lands and cities and homes. Only then will we understand why members of Iraq’s soccer team, like so many of their fellow citizens, feel the way they do, spouting bitterness and animosity towards the devastation enveloping their nation, and why the debacle that George W. Bush and the neocons have created will inevitably be doomed to fail.

The question thus becomes how many more American soldiers and Iraqi citizens need to die for a mistake? How much more suffering, death, destruction and human evil, both here and in Iraq, needs to arise from the rotting flesh of a minute cabal of lunatics that took two nations to war and hundreds of millions of people towards division, hatred and perpetual conflict? Who will be the last person to die for the mistake of an inept and ignoramus leader? How much more human energy need be extinguished until the people of America have their insatiable hunger for conflict, revenge and blood satisfied?

Yet statements such as those made by members of the Iraqi Olympic soccer team will never be disseminated to the American people who continue to be trapped in the quicksand of propaganda and mass manipulation delivered by a complicit corporate media loyal only to its parent companies and the government they own. Once more, it seems, the truth of what the Iraq debacle is will be sequestered, never to see the light of day and forever to be altered so the masses remain clueless to the implosion about to befall the American occupation of Iraq.

Iraq has become a phantom that is not seen, lingering in our midst yet invisible to the conscious. The intensity of guerilla war and the devastating attacks by Iraqi freedom fighters and the resistance routinely go unnoticed, instead only making a ten second sound bite proclaiming the death of dozens of dead-enders, thugs, Baathist remnants and foreign fighters. It seems the reality of who it is American troops are fighting cannot be blurted out since it was our forefathers who waged the same kind of war for Independence more than 225 years ago. We would not want to call the Founding Fathers and their army of patriots ‘terrorists,’ would we?

The fact is we have become the occupiers, the Red Coats exploiting and subjugating the Iraqi people, and today their George Washington’s, their patriots and minutemen are waging battles to rid their lands of us. And so the nonsense about bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to Iraq fails to disappear as straight-faced journalists and anchors who know better continue disseminating lies that mask a truth that can never be uncovered. Because if we are today’s Red Coats, and Iraqi freedom fighters are yesterday’s American Revolution, wouldn’t that make us the bad guys, nothing more than imperial thugs seeking out world conquest for natural resources and human exploitation? Would not invaders and occupiers lose all altitude in the moral high ground, waging war and destroying an entire society so that the thirst for black blood can be quenched and the geo-strategic goal of empire building satisfied?

The Bush administration would rather distort the success of the soccer team in its favor, politicizing and spinning its triumph of the human spirit, like it does everything else, airing an advertisement exploiting those that despise what it has unleashed, even while team members openly condemn what the occupation has done. The administration, with its legions of spinmeisters, professional liars, propagandists, manipulators and marketers is also doing everything in its power to muzzle the truth from ever escaping the deserts of Mesopotamia. Iraq is such a mess, such a cesspool of chaos that any news coming out of there inevitably damages a president whose sole preoccupation is how best to politicize, spin, connive, lie and corrupt himself and his pack of wolves back into office.

With an occupation that resembles the very real and frightening nightmares we desperately seek to wake from and never experience again, with every decision made only succeeding to make volatile an already highly flammable situation, the question must be asked if American foreign policy knows what it is doing, both to the present populace and the future to come. Every action leads to reaction, every cause has its effect, and just as butterflies flap their wings, typhoons of rampage can we expect. What is our purpose in the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates? Who is the greatest beneficiary in this failed experiment? Why did we invade, based on lies and deceptions? For what reason must so many, on both sides, keep dying and getting injured, forever to be maimed, if not in body then in soul?

The need to preserve in the American mind the illusion of American grandeur and the façade of the occupation’s noble intentions prevents the corporate media and its minions from reporting the gravity of the situation. The very idea of America the Beautiful must remain intact; the illusion of bringing freedom and democracy to ‘barbarians’ must be made to persevere. For if the truth of what America and its military have done to Iraq and its people is ever made known, mirages of grandeur and virtue would vanish like a morning fog, and the dream of America as the enabler of liberty, human rights and worldwide peace and harmony would come crashing down with the force of ten thousand Tomahawk missiles raining from the sky above.

The American people would see that our government is not what it portends to be. We would finally see the devastation upon land and man that the greatest military machine unleashes in the name of freedom and democracy. We would see our soldiers winning the battles but losing the war, losing their humanity amidst the growing hatred of the Iraqi people. One step forward and one-hundred back, the United States’ only success is in exporting death and importing shame, in bringing misery and returning bodies devoid of energy. It has only achieved the monumental rage now boiling in Iraq and the Middle East that only grows and that will last entire generations, forever condemning our presence in their lands and infiltration into their affairs.

If allowed to see truth, we would finally be privy to the images denied us for decades, of third-world countries decimated and poisoned, their people slaughtered and laid to waste, rotting among cesspools of misery and mechanisms of slavery. Destroyed homes, cratered cities, unending cemeteries and children playing in raw sewage would only begin to erode the blinders that have for too long hidden us from a world devastated by our government’s foreign policies and military interventions. What our eyes have never been allowed to see would finally blind us in shame.

Hospitals lacking medicines, the infirm dying, doctors who can no longer use their ability to save condemned ‘collateral damage’ and a healthcare system in shambles might finally open our minds to the evils our government does in our name. Malnourished children, bloated babies, all with lower immune systems and all with severe mental deficiencies that have and continue to foster stunted intelligence thanks to a decade of economic genocide imposed by the US continue to suffer. Those sanctions, you may recall, left over one million Iraqis dead, over half of them children.

Genocide by clandestine economic depravity is still genocide, under the name of sanctions or under the rubric of containment of one man. One man for one million deaths plus the destruction and impoverishment of a once flourishing society is a formula created by sinister men and only understood by the malevolent that walk among us. All in a day’s work for a government we trust and military we cherish, both of which unleashed the fires of hell on a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 or the so-called fiction labeled the ‘war on terror’. And we wonder why they hate us?

In this present imperial exercise in futility for natural resources, strategic base construction and war by proxy, anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 innocent Iraqi deaths and hundreds of thousands of severe injuries have been estimated thanks to America’s invasion and subsequent occupation. Given that the population of the nation is 25 million, this is an alarming number, signifying a huge percentage of the population. The United States, on the other hand, lost 3000 energies on 9/11, out of a population of 285 million. What we have done to Iraq pales in comparison to the World Trade Center, in essence superceding 9/11 on a magnitude 1000 times worse, reaching titanic proportions of death, destruction and incredible and ongoing suffering. So much suffering for a nation 9/11-innocent and WMD free, so many monstrosities created to enrich the military industrial complex and the Corporate Leviathan.

Crimes against humanity have been omnipresent, thanks to the human evil festering in Washington and a complicit media whose failures betray its motives. The warmonger junta and its minions belong at The Hague, or better, Texas’ death row. For the Iraqis, unlike America, their 9/11 still festers, never healing or dissipating, continuing to murder, contaminate and decimate on a daily basis, each day becoming greater in scale as the terrorist invasion and occupation upon their nation continues to send them further down the sewer of eternal damnation. Their nation and society will take generations to recover; their hatred of America may never erode.

The devastation has been so severe, and the destruction of an entire society so systemic, that to awaken the fiction-living, bubble-inhabiting, fantasy-aspiring, chemically-altered, stupor-existing, pill-popping American mind from its catatonically endemic state with the unfiltered truth of the wasteland created in Iraq would send shockwaves through our brainwashed and acquiescent society. We have been led to believe in victory, in altruism and the exportation of the American way of life abroad. Deceived we have been conditioned to think all is well in Iraq, that the occupation is only temporary, just as long as is needed to ‘stay the course’, and that only a few bumps in the road are in the way of instilling freedom and democracy on a people ever-thankful for their liberty.

Through the manipulations of both the media and the Bush administration the charade that is the Prime Minister and the Interim government breathes life, gorging on our naïve belief that sovereignty has been passed. Never mind that 140,000 American troops remain, going from holy city to holy city to unearth the seeds of Armageddon from the embittered population. Never mind that the Iraqi economy has been privatized to serve American corporate interests, that democracy is another term for crony capitalism and that ‘advisers’ sit at every ministry, becoming the overlords of the Iraqi government. Never mind that oil revenues are being pilfered, that it is being usurped by American oil conglomerates and that much needed profits are going not to the people of Iraq but to Bush cronies, contributors and profiteers.

The biggest scam in the history of the world is taking place, with Iraqi oil that should belong to Iraqis disappearing, its revenues enriching American interests, while only two percent of $18 billion in reconstruction money has been spent. Where, then, is all this remaining money? Where is the much marketed reconstruction of Iraq, meant to alleviate the painful life of the average Iraqi citizen? Where are the schools, the medicines and the improved infrastructure? Where are the electricity and the security once promised but yet to be delivered? The trail of sorrow, the trail of corruption and of highway robbery begins with Halliburton and others like it, nothing but fronts to the greatest misappropriation of American taxpayer funds and Iraqi oil revenues ever devised. The criminals in office, through their abuse of power, are orchestrating the complete looting of the American treasury, giving our hard earned wages to the American and Israeli military industrial complexes and the Corporate Leviathan.

Getting rich has never been this easy, and, with an unquestioning and indifferent American public who refuses to ask for transparency or accountability, the pilferage of their taxes will likely persist and the evisceration of education, healthcare and social services gutted.

Officially, the one-thousandth soldier has now died, his ‘transfer tube’ clandestinely sneaked back under cover of warm darkness and cold indifference, surpassing a barrier few ever thought reachable. Thanks to Kevlar vests, 6,500 can claim to be alive, though forever destined to live with the demons of missing appendages, seared bodies and tortured souls. Unofficially, however, the tally of dead and injured is much higher, easily pro-rated by the day or week through the macabre accounting schemes of the same criminals sponsored by Enron and at the helm of Halliburton. The American public, after all, naively believes every distortion and propaganda spewed by the Department of War, even when the first casualty of war is the truth and when deception is part of and indeed a major tool of war. Can we possibly imagine the same administration that lied to us into war, concocting bogus and sexed up intelligence, that has not once told the American people the truth about anything it has ever done and whose president can be psychoanalyzed as a compulsive liar would ever tell us the truth about deaths and injuries? Hiding bodies under cover of sky lit night and sneaking the maimed and burned under the radar should be proof enough that our men and women are getting slaughtered and torn to shreds in Iraq.

When there has been a pattern of incessant lies coming from the Pentagon and White House, at the same time that a barrage of propaganda streams into our conscious, it seems unbelievable American citizens take the word of their government as if descended from the heavens above. Perhaps ingrained in each of us is the belief that governments are altruistic entities with our best interests as their main focus. Maybe it is denial that leads us to trust what cannot be trusted, a refusal to acknowledge that we are being used and taken advantage of.

In the end, it is possible that we do not want to learn the truth for fear of what it might divulge, awakening us to the failure and chaos, the unrelenting guerilla war that will never subside and whose tenacity will only escalate, the incessant war crimes being committed in our name and the proposition that America will lose yet again to a “third-world, rag-tag, decrepit waste of a nation.” It is pride that bites the most, and it could help explain why the vast majority of us would rather dwell in the fields grazing like sheep, seeking to be led by our shepherds in government, wanting no part in escaping the fiction we have been living for so long.

History, for those who heed its lessons, is against the occupying forces who invade another people’s land. When history repeats itself, as it is now, it is because those who sought what could never be achieved failed to learn or understand the codes of human mistakes littered within the verses of man’s short recorded time. The sands of time were not consulted, and the price of ignorance are we today suffering. Man does not change over short periods of time; indeed, mentally our brains and bodies haven’t for hundreds of thousands of years. We are prevented from rapid leaps of change by the inertia of evolution, both mental and physical. The same creature of violence, territorial competition, instinct of survival (selfishness), hierarchy, sexual drive, and animal passions and emotions resides inside us. Is it any wonder war, death, violence and destruction are endemic in our collective history and civilization, regardless of which corner of the globe we reside from, as common in humanity as the television and movies we watch, saturated to the brim with images and plots mirroring the symptoms of our disease?

The devastation of the Cradle of Civilization is but the latest resurrection of the virus we cannot purge from our human nature. And it will not be the last, for it will continue as long as we fail to realize the reality of who and what we truly are.

Lingering in the sands and air of Iraq are remnants of the malevolence of human evil. The nation whose rivers Tigris and Euphrates helped spawn human civilization has been poisoned by toxins so deadly and disease-ridden that it will take billions of years to once more be cleansed. Thousands of tons of Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions have been used by the US military in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, not to mention in Gulf War I also. The equivalent of thousands of Hiroshimas has been unleashed upon the peoples of Mesopotamia, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of US soldiers as well. Depleted Uranium is radiation, overwhelmingly dangerous, and enormous amounts of it now taint the environs of Iraq. As a result, cancers, leukemia and pandemics of disease have increased exponentially, only to grow more pronounced in the coming years and decades. Child deformities that have never been witnessed are now commonplace, so grotesque are the babies born to send chills down one’s spine. The genetic code and DNA sequence of Iraqis is being destroyed, mutating due to the radiation in the air, the ground, the water and the food. The United States has unleashed nuclear war onto millions of innocent people.

This devastation cannot be seen on television or read in newspapers, it will never be mentioned by a government intent on covering up the greatest mass genocide in history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, are dead men, women and children walking, waiting for America’s radiation, the ultimate WMD, to strike them down with one disease or another. Entire generations of children will be born deformed or with mutated genetic codes. Deformities in newborns will continue to rise, becoming prevalent with the passage of time. Iraqis have been poisoned, just as Vietnamese once were (toxic defoliating chemicals) and continue to be. They have been sentenced to death and perpetual misery thanks to the murderers in Washington, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

And if you think they do not know what they have unleashed or what is transpiring, think again. Once more, our government covers up what it does not want the masses to know. One of the most devastating implications of DU is the fact that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have been exposed to the radiation emanating from the same bombs, munitions, bullets and artillery they have fired. What is happening to Iraqi civilians can also be seen in the men and women of Gulf Wars I and II. Already, 11,000 veterans of Gulf War I have died, most of them in the prime of their lives, and over half of those who served, about 325,000 out of 580,400, suffer various medical ailments related to their time in the Middle East. The same symptoms are starting to be seen with military personnel returning home from Iraq. Child deformities, cancers, disease, premature death and ceaseless pain and suffering are the sacrifice America’s soldiers and new veterans must endure to do the dirty work of the elite in government and those who run the vast military-industrial complex.

Once again, however, the corporate media refuses to do its job. It refuses to inform the American public or to report the truth of the devastation that our government and military have condemned Iraq and its people with. It fails yet again to report the betrayal of American soldiers by their government, many of whom have been sentenced to death by their exposure to DU. Our corporate media serves no truth telling purpose. On the contrary, its only role is to disseminate propaganda and lies, manipulations and brainwashing material. It hides a reality we are not supposed to see, distracting us with brainless fiction and purposefully guiding us down the wrong path so that lost we remain inside forests of disinformation and ignorance. The system is at work, and its great accomplishment can be seen in the total control of the dumbed-down, worker-bee, short-term memory, amnesia-laden, ignorant-conditioned and apathetically-subservient creature called the average American citizen.

In worlds once teeming with happiness and vibrancy disease now prospers. In rivers that once birthed life only sewage and toxins now flow. The Cradle of Civilization is now the Cradle of Devastation; its deserts glow with radiation, not human warmth; its cities crawling with trash, not commerce; its oil is disappearing into the pockets of westerners, not transferred to the purses of breadwinners; its economy has been neo-liberalized and privatized, assuring market colonization and economic strangulation; untold thousands have died and many more have yet to perish, their children now born mutants and deformed creatures fated by human evil; occupation will last years, if not decades, tormenting Iraqi society every second of every day; guerilla war has been reincarnated, sure to outlast the invading army.

The inevitable failure continues and the futility of persisting will only exacerbate the loss of life, limb and mind. The defeat of military might is already assured while winning battles yet losing the war. History does not lie, nor does the strength of the human spirit. Freedom fighters, the resistance and Iraqi patriots will not relent, they will not stop fighting until the last group of American combat boots leaves the sand-filled ground they love. Their land has been invaded, exploited, occupied and robbed. Their people have been humiliated, carpet bombed, raped and dehumanized. Their holy cities have been destroyed through the sacrilege of bombs and bullets. Entire neighborhoods have been made to vanish, tens of thousands now lie buried.

Human history and nature does not deceive, it does not manipulate and it certainly does not lie. The path has been forged for millennia, leading to constant battles for freedom and wars for sovereignty. Those invaded and occupied never stop against those thinking themselves overlords of alien lands, peoples and resources. The human spirit never alters, from the dawn of time, it refuses to be conquered. Iraq is no different, and is why through the study of history we can see the inevitable failure and defeat of the United States.

It is already happening, and it will only continue, snowballing until ego-driven leaders see the fallacy of their power trip and the corrosiveness of their mistakes. Until then, the prolonged march of death down the road of perdition will go on, killing, maiming and destroying minds, forever scarring lives and futures.

Who will be the last man or woman to die for a mistake? Who will be the last to die for the ineptitude of leadership and the corruption of morality of those at the top? We can stay the course and thousands more can be killed, thousands more can be maimed in body and mind, and thousands more mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, wives and husbands can forever mourn the death of their loved ones. Or we can learn from history, learn from our mistakes, see the writing on the wall and get the hell out of the debacle that Bush and the neocons have manufactured.

The cause is lost, the war has been determined and the inevitability that is American defeat now lingers in the air we breathe, becoming the foul odor penetrating our lungs. We can get out, saving thousands of lives on both sides, moving on with our lives, preventing the blowback that is sure to come, or we can remain, thinking in our omnipotence and our pride, thinking of fake freedom and democracy, in our macho chest-thumping that victory is near, and slowly but surely becoming entangled in a battle extending its cruel tentacles outside the borders of Iraq from which our world may never return. Thousands more will die, thousands more will suffer and the great American Empire will come tumbling down.

The choice is up to us. It is up to America. Remember history and its many lessons, for in it can the mistakes and errors of man be deciphered. Remember the lasting images of the last days of Vietnam, and the 58,000 Americans and millions of native inhabitants who lost their energies in a war of madness. Watch The Battle of Algiers (1965), a great and educational movie about the colonization of Algeria by the French and the urban guerilla warfare that followed. Focus your attention to Chechnya and Palestine, for that is what Iraq is to become if America stays. Gaze upon human nature, and realize the inevitable war of attrition that is to come by freedom fighters against American soldiers who are trapped in an unending vicious circle of devastation not of their own making.

Only the people can act, for those in government will not, for they care not an ounce for you or I or the hundreds of thousands of cannon fodder soldiers now risking life and limb that call urban and rural communities home. They are but pawns in the game of power and control, mere expendable grunts doing the military-industrial complex’s dirty work. Those sitting pretty in houses old and white and in the bordello called Congress would rather your son or daughter die than declare that a mistake has been made and a debacle is taking place. Those that represent and those that we elect are cowards, some of the most immoral and dishonorable people to walk the green grasses of Earth. They will do nothing, and so we must.

Upon the radiation-filled deserts of Babylon can the ruins of invaders past be seen. In the streets and faces of Iraq the truth is hidden. Like a giant maze that must be traversed and understood reality awaits. From the mouths of soccer players can the writing on the wall be seen. Who will be the last person to die for a mistake? The cradle of devastation eagerly awaits our reply.

Sunday, August 22, 2004

The Untermensch Syndrome: Israel's Moral Decay


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The labeling as anti-Semitic of anyone critical of the state of Israel’s policies in the continued destruction of Palestinian identity and the increasing domination into American foreign policy no longer has the sting of threat or intimidation it once mastered. For too long this masquerade has been used to silence those opposing anything Israel, shouted at anyone disseminating truth and seeking justice. Like the boy who cried wolf, this charade has lost its power or hypnotic control, and today only serves to breed more anger and resentment against the apologists and smear mongers protecting the cancerous tentacles of Zionism and the crimes against humanity it spawns.

A once powerful marketing tool used to sequester valid criticism and deny truth to millions has been eroded thanks to its overlords’ continued over abuse and labeling of the term ‘anti-Semite’ to anyone even remotely critical of anything associated with Israel and the tentacles of Zionism. To criticize Christianity does not make one anti-Christian. To criticize Islam does not make one anti-Muslim or anti-Arab, just as uncovering truths about the Bush administration does not make one anti-American or unpatriotic. To speak truth about any government in the world does not make us racist or xenophobic to the people of that nation. Why then should criticism of Israeli and/or Sharon’s policies subject us to false labeling and acts of intimidation whose only purpose is to silence truth into submission and hijacking justice from ever emerging and being served?

The time has come to stop bending over to the dictates of intimidation and scare tactics used by Israel’s protectors, defenders and apologists. The time has come to say “Never Again” to such fictional libel and slander whose only purpose is the continued subjugation of truth and awakening. The labeling of “anti-Semite” does not bother us, nor does it stop us from writing truth to justice and reality to intimidation because we refuse to be frightened into submission and silenced into acquiescence by a mechanism we know to be false.

Our convictions, search for truth and want for justice supercedes the trash invented to protect the malfeasance ruining humanity and the crimes perpetrated against our fellow human beings. The time has come to stand up and be heard, refusing to believe the smears and the labels, instead living life in truth, devoid of veiled threats and intimidation tactics whose power over us continues to erode thanks to its incessant overuse and abuse. So smear if you must, defenders, appeasers and apologists of human wickedness, continue to blindly believe in the majesty of a fiction you know to be false, ensuring your daily complicity in the crimes against humanity being committed by those you protect and defend.

We are above your labels, above your intimidation and smear tactics, following the path of truth in the voice of our writings and in the convictions of humanity. If pursuing truth, fighting criminality and awakening justice makes us anti-Semites, then guilty we are. If seeing the dehumanization, exploitation and utter destruction of the Palestinian people makes the voices of reason anti-Semitic, then guilty we stand. To defend the humanity of other Semitic people is to defend humanity itself. To speak out against injustice and dehumanization makes us human, to defend it makes you complicit.


An Unbearable Likeness of Being

Here we are, living in the first decade of the 21st century, and still the violent animal in the human condition exists, thriving inside our carnal passions and still primitive mammalian brains, oozing out of humanity to release the demons of evil that only homo sapiens are capable of wielding.

Persisting in our primate selves as it has for millions of years, the greatest symptom of our disease remains uncontrolled, dominating the far reaches of man’s Earth, turning barren once fertile soil and forever despoiling the utter beauty our civilization possesses. Man killing man, erupting violence upon our fellow humans, destroying what our own hands create, decimating energy and beauty, life and opportunity, this is the story of what our species has become. Through tribal affiliation and identity, which the nation state now is, (a tribe on steroids) the potency of violence and ill-treatment against others seen as different or alien is manifested.

The human condition dictates that auras of superiority appear with every tribe. What is nationalism today but a belief that our tribe is the best in the world, that the group of humans we are attached to in unity, be it of ethnic, racial, religious or regional (nation state) parameters, is the preeminent assembly of all humanity? Beliefs of supremacy of one’s tribe and inferiority of others have marked man from the very first cluster of family clans. In order to achieve this most human psychological need, other subgroups have to be considered lower in stature, considered third-world, savages, barbarians and lesser humans, while others must be conquered and subjugated.

In the minds of those groups seeking to invade, conquer, pilfer and exploit, the invaded and conquered must be seen as sub-human, creatures not worthy of protection or life. The human mind, in order to justify the ruthlessness it will inflict on less able peoples, creates the impression that those now controlled are sub-humans and therefore not immune to the restrictions of human morality. Sub-humans are not humans, after all, and can be treated like animals or worse, like dirt.

The Nazi ideology of placing its Aryan blood above all others, believing its Germanic peoples the pinnacle of civilization, reflects a perverted mass psychosis brought on by a malevolent leader and a hypnotized tribe – namely Germany. In the delusional world of the Nazis, Jews, Gypsies and Slavs were considered inferior. These peoples were labeled ‘untermensch,’ the German word for sub-human. As such, labels became reality and reality became a holocaust, resulting in millions of deaths and untold levels of suffering. When a group of people like the Nazis begin to believe in the sub-human label they propel, the group afflicted becomes the equivalent of animals, free to be killed, tortured and dehumanized, free to be robbed of freedom, opportunity and happiness.

The Nazis, however, are not alone in exacerbating this phenomenon. On the contrary, it has been as pronounced in human history as advancements in technology. As long as there have been competing tribes the concept of untermensch has existed, released over and over through centuries and millennia. No nation or culture is immune; no epoch is innocent. With every war, invasion, occupation, domination, enslavement, oppression, exploitation, genocide and ethnic cleansing that has marked human time on Earth untermensch has been implemented, used by the powerful to justify the crimes, rapes, murders and dehumanization inflicted upon innocent fellow human beings. Untermensch is the tool used by the human brain that grants man the power to destroy humanity and all its virtues while inflicting untold levels of misery onto men, women and children without the interference or burden of human guilt, laws, theology, morality or righteousness getting in the way.

Yet our minds cannot fathom the long reaches of a history marked by incessant war, death and violence. Understanding the constructs of time and space are not talents we have evolved. Grasping the enormity of the passage of time, with the rise and fall of tribes, clans, city states and empires, the evolution of human society and spirituality from cave to metropolis, the genetic altering and evolution of diversity coming together and adding to the human spectrum, and the conquests, genocides and environmental changes created by our ancestors is not a skill endowed into our primate brains, and thus the enormous jigsaw puzzle that is human history remains a mystery. We can barely put together the pieces of our own eighty year existence on the planet, even as it is a puzzle that we experience first hand. How then are we to fathom hundreds of thousands of years of modern human existence, generation upon generation, century after century?

In an existence estimated at five million years, from primates living in trees to the dawn of living in one-hundred story skyscrapers, man has not deviated from our mammal selves. Our passions, emotions and behaviors yield to the animal inside us, and throughout our existence it has come out again and again to unleash terror on our unsuspecting species. For millions of years our species has consisted of one continuous epoch of aggression against each other, with periods of calm in between, – controlled at the individual level but becoming an unleashed monster at the tribal – destroying all we have achieved and the beauty inherent in our existence. Mammals we are, and mammals we will remain, yet the ego of our existence and the theology of our beliefs will not let us awake to our greatest truth.

Humankind’s greatest demon is also our greatest threat, condemning us to continue a long history of self-inflicted war, death, suffering and subjugation. In this quandary we find ourselves trapped in, much like every generation that has come before, and, if we fail to learn and evolve, every generation that has yet to come. The worst of humanity opens the books of history once more, and in Iraq and Palestine we find what has been, what is, and what will become. The Reign of Terror upon ourselves continues the slow erosion of our existence along the inevitable path of self-destruction we traverse.

Is it any wonder that the virus attached to us since we left the jungles of east Africa keeps reappearing again and again, stomping its seal of death, violence and misery
on the face of human civilization, especially when we punish our own kind with the tools of despair, suffering and dehumanization? Can we expect the microscopic reign of modern man to purge an evil that primitive man could not exorcise in hundreds of thousands of years?

Untermensch is part of the disease we possess, or rather possesses us, attached to the constructs of fear and hatred, ignorance and superiority, emboldened by the tribe or nation state. The mega-tribes of today only serve to strengthen and release the fury of human evil onto those less fortunate. It is a syndrome that, until now, has yet to be contained. Its vicious mechanisms erode the basic foundations of humankind, birthing suffering and human destruction, both in spirit and in life, rendering all six billion of us less human every day. Into the depths we descend, living the misery of Iraqis and Palestinians, feeling the pain that the powerful inflict on the weak, losing energy with each drop of blood that is shed and cowering in shame with each act of decaying dehumanization.

The Untermensch Syndrome is alive and well, resilient as ever, surviving as long as humans exist, thriving off our own shortcomings, evolving with each passing generation and festering once more to infect yet one more amalgam of human tribes from which enlightenment seems never to arrive.


Unholy Land


In the land claimed holy and promised the madness of humankind persists, extending the perpetual violence and oppression of the weak by the powerful. Palestine today tells a story of human evils past and present, of the worst actions capable of being manifested by the human phenomenon. Lands ancient and strategic, crossroads and focal points of man’s brief history, once more seem engulfed by competing claims and boiling hatreds.

Malevolent crimes against humanity, those activities that repulse and anger, are methodically being perpetrated against peoples who have been raped of all their ancestors once possessed. Atrocities and dehumanization on an unparalleled scale are being committed, becoming the present reincarnation of the past’s dreaded evils.

In no other place on Earth is the suffering of our brothers and sisters so prevalent. In no other region is the tyranny and wickedness of humanity so present. For the lands holy and promised have been cursed by archaic fables, beliefs and myths, by fictional claims of days long extinct, condemning its native inhabitants to the bowels of Hades and the desolate realities from which loud cries go unheard.

To be Palestinian Arab in the land usurped by European Jews is to be considered untermensch in the territory your forefathers once called home. The devastation fifty-five years of invasion, occupation and state terrorism has had on both people and land has created the conditions by which Gaza and the West Bank can today be called Hell on Earth, pockets of destitute emptiness where opportunity is extinct and any relevant future is a but a hollow fantasy.

Unearthed from the colon of the planet Palestinians dwell, the squalor in the occupied territories is beyond compare, instituted and exacerbated by the state of Israel in acts of unhindered and systemic malevolence. The intent of such inflictions of emotional distress and incessant pain and suffering is the breaking point of millions of Palestinians, the realization that it is better to leave the land you know and love rather than live in perpetual imprisonment of spirit and humanity.

The desire to expand borders and territory, an addiction to greed and the aspiration to cleanse Palestine of Arabs manufactures in the Israeli government a policy of wicked objectives bursting with cold and calculated cruelty. Thus, the ill-treatment of Palestinians by Israel makes life so unbearable, so hard and depressing that it is a triumph of the human spirit that so many remain, unwavering and strong, even as the weight of utter wickedness is enforced generation to generation.

Living in the occupied territories is like living in Warsaw ghettos of the 1930’s and South African Bantustans. It is akin to dwelling in Indian reservations, those cesspools of nothingness in the lands of America from where millions rotted away their once vibrant existence. Gaza and the West Bank are squalors of humanity acting as giant prisons, where dense refugee camps are considered cities, their perimeters encircled by fences, walls, Israeli tanks and the ever watchful eyes of trigger-friendly snipers. Enormous prisons within occupied lands, preventing contiguity, freedom of movement and any semblance of a sovereign state are the true definition of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

To live inside these vast prisons and internment camps is to struggle with the daily existence of Israeli suffocation and dehumanization that you know is purposeful as it is deliberate. It is to feel Israeli claws strangulating your esophagus, denying you of the air to breathe and the sustenance you need to survive. Life under Israel’s merciless rule means that sixty to seventy percent of your people are unemployed, unable to provide for their families, as commerce is almost non-existent and access to Israeli business almost impossible. It is to live in worlds of child undernourishment and lack of healthcare, as Israel’s policies make indigent millions of families who desperately need to feed and treat their children.

To be Palestinian is to be trapped in a vicious circle that refuses to let you escape. From birth your undernourishment outmaneuvers your development, stunting your growth, making your immune system weak and altering your ability to learn. Lack of nutrients and perpetual levels of stress make your environmental upbringing unlike anything on Earth, a constant battle being lost by both your body and mind.

Psychological behaviors associated with extreme levels of stress and dangerous levels of undernourishment affect hundreds of thousands of your fellow brothers and sisters. Feelings of imprisonment and virtual subjugation, not to mention the extreme hatred of anything Israel your environment forces upon you creates unsurpassed hatred in your mind. Education is limited, resources to tap the oasis inside you is but a dream and the talents and abilities ingrained in your being get eroded more and more with each passing year.

You see the vanishing energies of neighbors, acquaintances and family that die at the hands of the IDF and the Israeli government’s callous disregard for your people. After all, to them you are nothing but untermensch, lower to or on equal par with animals. From an early age you realize that, since you are seen as sub-human, IDF soldiers treat you with impunity, allowing themselves the pleasure of taunting your friends, shooting your cousins, demolishing your home and dehumanizing your mother, all done knowing that accountability does not exist.

Growing up Palestinian is to see with one’s eyes the hatred boiling inside the cities you live in, where the fruitless throwing of rocks towards tanks by dozens of youth is the only vent from where their bursting fumes can be released. Later on in life, these youngsters will become members of the resistance, graduating to Kalashnikovs and home-made bombs, lurking at night to defend their ever disappearing homeland. In this society, death at the hands of the Israelis is so commonplace that it is celebrated, becoming both a rallying cry and mechanism of strength. Martyrs are elevated to the skies above, becoming the role models of the very young and the heroes of the populace, their faces plastered on posters lining streets and walls.

In this society, born of occupation and seething hatred, the only way to keep living is to keep dying, and the sadness of such reality is that just as our children wish to become pilots and firemen, theirs strive for nothing more than martyrdom. It is this that Israel’s policy of untermensch has created, a mechanism where every day creates new resistance fighters and revolutionaries seeking the triumph of the human spirit and the dawn of independent freedom.

Collective punishment upon millions of Palestinians goes hand in hand with the Untermensch Syndrome, where the acts of a few result in the decimation of the many. When millions of Arabs are considered sub-human, long living in lands claimed by false divinity and thousand year old fables of peoples primitive and unenlightened, their death, destruction and prolonged suffering is inconsequential. It is state sponsored terrorism that has lasted more than eighty years in a pre-emptive attempt to ethnically cleanse by subjugation, dehumanization and cold and calculated suffering.

Breeding of fear by the intimidation of army incursions, tank deployments, sniper killings, Apache helicopter missiles and fighter jet low altitude flyovers is state sponsored terror, stressing out millions and making life under occupation an unbearable existence. Imprisoning millions and subjecting them to perpetual indigence, without ability to traverse their own lands or go one day breathing tranquil airs of calm and freedom is collective terror upon a populace. Not knowing if your home is next to be demolished by monstrous Caterpillar bulldozers, usually with a few minutes warning by the IDF is state terrorism, robbing families of their homes and their belongings, leaving thousands without the only dignity they ever possessed.

Treating Palestinians as untermensch allows young Israeli soldiers, most of whom are born hating Palestinians, to walk over innocent people only trying to survive day to day. Stinging verbal abuse, humiliating body searches, purposeful closures and damning delays at checkpoints, where the Untermensch Syndrome can be seen in full bloom, exhibits the wicked treatment of the powerful over the weak. Selected closures that can last days that in effect prevent Palestinians from getting to work, indiscriminate authority to harass and stop anyone from passing, the apartheid mechanism of different license plates for Jewish settlers – with unhindered passage through checkpoints – and Palestinians – who oftentimes wait hours in line before being allowed through – are all symptoms of the sub-human treatment and collective punishment of Palestinians.

Even ambulances, oftentimes transporting gravely injured or sick people, many of them pregnant women on the verge of giving birth, are forced to endure long hours waiting at IDF checkpoints, with the full knowledge of soldiers. Many of these people, not unexpectedly, end up dying while waiting, as precious time is squandered and criminally left to pass. If this is not terror, then what is? If this is not collective punishment and a symptom of the Untermensch Syndrome, then where has our humanity gone?

When an occupying power gives carte blanche to its military to treat the occupied as sub-human, crimes against humanity are not too far behind and the moral fabric of those imposing the will of the powerful through the barrel of a gun quickly vanishes. In Palestine, and as has become quite apparent in Iraq, indiscriminate and methodical dehumanization, without regard for human rights, has flourished through the aura of ethnic, state and cultural superiority and the invincibility of modern military might.

Pitting rock throwers against Apache helicopters and Abrams tanks is nobody’s idea of a fair fight, and in this unequal capacity to wage war we can see how the Untermensch Syndrome is furthered. One side seeks independence using only the weapons their dwindling land provides while the other is provided with the most sophisticated and lethal technology known to man. It is a battle of primitive versus modern, the Arab animals versus the Israeli westerner. And so, in order to try evening out the fight, suicide bombers, with the desperation, hate, thirst for vengeance and hopelessness ingrained in their atrocious actions, compete with the state sponsored terrorism of guided missiles raining down from the sky, artillery from tanks and incursions by an infantry trained and supplied with the best equipment American money can buy.

The equation of occupied and occupier has been the same for time immemorial, with the subjugated resorting to the creations of the human imagination and the resources at their disposal for weapons while the conqueror uses rationales of untermensch to deceive its own morality and unleash the fires of human hell with the grand weapons of war that riches provide onto the people invaded.

In Palestine, untermensch has meant the demolition of thousands of homes without regard for human life. It has meant the dehumanizing conditions by which millions live under, usually in poverty and lacking meaningful education, healthcare, infrastructure, opportunity and future. Israel’s treatment of an entire race of people has destroyed the fabric of society and the aspirations of its citizens. The Untermensch Syndrome has resulted in centuries old olive trees bulldozed for no reason other than to make miserable the lives of the farmers who owned them. It has categorized Palestinian as inferior to Jew, marginalizing millions who are expropriated of their land and homes.

Because of the Untermensch Syndrome Palestine has been carved up into dozens of enclaves, separated by walls or fences, imprisoning people in their towns and refugee camps. Traveling from town to town is virtually impossible. Children have been separated from their schools, university students from their colleges, workers from their jobs, families from each other and farmers from their fields. This has been accomplished by Israel systematically and without remorse, serving no purpose other than to dehumanize and make unlivable the daily lives of millions.

Lands with higher ground are routinely expropriated, as are those with fertile soil and abundant water aquifers. These stolen lands are then granted to the swell of settlers rushing into once Palestinian lands and farms. In other instances, Palestinian land is taken for bypass road construction that now dissects the West Bank into easily controllable blocks. Of course these roads can only be used by Israelis and Jewish settlers, while the Palestinians, whose land is now covered by asphalt, can only watch as Jewish cars circumvent the last vestiges of a land they once flourished in.

In the course of the present intifadah 3000 Palestinians have died compared to 1000 Israelis. The terrorism has been mutual, one modern and technological, the other born out of hatred and desperation. Palestinians see their native contiguously- inhabited land being gobbled up by Israel and the never-ending stream of European and American settlers. Their water is being taken, their crops destroyed, their livelihoods eviscerated. An enormous apartheid wall is being built, separating camp from camp, robbing them of still more land as it snakes deep into occupied territory, making the West Bank an amalgam of Bantustan-style reservations and internment camps. The Untermensch Syndrome has been unleashed by an Israel that is intent on ‘transferring’ out an entire race of people.


Like a Virus the Syndrome Spreads


Like an enormous wave crashing on shore, the Untermensch Syndrome is devastating everything in its path. In order to maintain a Jewish majority, which demographics tells us is impossible if Arabs remain, Israel is making the life of Palestinians a virtual dungeon of misery from where air and light are squeezed out of the dark, damp caves where Palestinians now dwell. The goal is as simple as it is macabre: the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the ‘Promised Land’ by means of starving millions of a life worth living and through the self-exodus of Palestinians who cannot take the severe punishment and dehumanization any more. This clandestine maneuver would thus be seen as self-inflicted and as an independent move by the Palestinians, yet it is Israel pushing them off the cliff through its criminal acts against humanity.

Much is said of physical torture, yet it is the mental kind that truly kills and maims, condemning the millions of Palestinians to a life unbearable at best and cruel at worst. For many decades now Israel has waged collective war against the native inhabitants of Palestine, slowly but surely implementing the means by which it can achieve its ends. Mental torture is a crime against humanity, in direct contradiction to universal principles of humanity. It has been persistent, incessant and coldly calculated. If the treatment of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel is not terrorist in nature and evil in substance, then we have vanished underneath a rock of shamelessness and barbarity, becoming that which we most loathe.

What is occurring in Palestine today is nothing short of criminal, reminiscent of the Nazi treatment of Jews and all other untermensch during 1930’s Germany. It reminds us of the extermination and subsequent incarceration of Native Americans by a fledgling US government riding the coattails of Manifest Destiny. Reservations are today a sad reminder of the cruelty and inhumanity by which the American government methodically eliminated the indigenous peoples from the birth of a new nation. Parallels with the South African Apartheid Bantustans are being made as more truth emerges from the cages of the West Bank. The worst in humanity is now compared to the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people, and not without merit.

The Nazi ghettos and treatment of all untermensch in 1930’s Europe during the reign of human malevolence, which caused untold levels of suffering, anguish and mental torture, lasted about a decade. The Palestinian ghettos, Bantustans, reservations, cantons, prisons, gulags or enclaves, – however you wish to call them – on the other hand, have withstood the sands of time for several decades now. Under virtual imprisonment, unable to move freely, without rights, liberties and freedoms and increasingly under a state of siege and apartheid, Palestinians find themselves struggling to survive and remain living in the lands they have continuously inhabited for thousands of years. Their very existence is being threatened; their society is being imploded. Mental torture has become their way of life, like an unrelenting leash controlling their lives, ceaseless in time and devastating in magnitude.

They are, if you will, an endangered species, considered sub-human by their occupiers and the Israeli puppets in the White House and the Congress, who, even after the International Court of Justice overwhelmingly condemned the Apartheid Wall as illegal under international law, voted overwhelmingly to support Israel and condemn the Court, also pressuring the cowardly UN to prevent the imposition of sanctions on Israel. If our elected leaders in Washington show such solidarity with the state of Israel in its inhuman acts of criminality, do they think of Palestinians as untermensch as well? The implication sure makes it seem that way, as does their treatment of the Iraqi people.

Those who were once called untermensch are today subjugating those they consider untermensch. The sub-humans of decades past have become the subjugators and exploiters, spreading the disease that once tormented their ancestors. Those who once suffered enormously are today inflicting untold levels of suffering onto an entire group of human beings. As if committing human evil on those it considers sub-humans will exorcise the demons of horrors past, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians serves no possible purpose other than to devastate millions who are rotting away their existence in sewers of hopelessness, hoping an entire people will simply disappear or pack up and leave, thereby springing forth a final solution to the Palestinian question.

The Untermensch has become the Übermensch, the Nazi word for overlord, or supermen. The cleansed have become the ones doing the cleansing, and those upon whom human evil once enveloped are today reincarnating that same malice onto a world trying to never again repeat the errors of past generations. Yet the Untermensch Syndrome refuses to be laid to rest, living like rats among humans, forever to follow in our footsteps, feeding off our crumbs and forever destined to haunt our inner demons. If those it was once inflicted upon are today its conductors and proliferators, does there exist hope for the human race?

As long as we let it control us, the Untermensch Syndrome will linger, separating us from each other, seeing ourselves as superior and others as sub-human. The situation in Iraq is a truth to this reality, it simply repeats itself, no matter how enlightened we think we are and no matter how modern we claim to be. If the pattern persists throughout our existence, is there reason to hope for its demise?

What makes us human is not our ability to kill and destroy each other but our vast potential to bring goodness to our fellow beings. Killing, maiming and inflicting misery onto ourselves is nothing new. It is rather easy for humans to do this. Just look back at history. What is hard, and what makes us human, differentiating us from the animal world, is the ability to turn the other cheek, see each other as equals, accept our incredible diversity and stop the madness before we all end up smoldering from the fiery hell we have contained in silos and missiles. If we can create nuclear technology, enough to destroy this planet thousands of times over, can we not put our heads together and get along?

What is happening to the Palestinian people is a travesty, one more black mark on an already bruised human society. It is up to the Other Superpower to seek change, helping to bring an oasis of humanity to a suddenly barren strip of earth. Our elected leaders will not act, and neither will world organizations. It is up to us, the people of the world, to stand tall and shout with one united voice from deep within our bodies that we are in solidarity with those considered as untermensch, that if Palestinians are sub-human, then so are we, because they are human just like you and me, deserving of a life lived in happiness and opportunity, free of occupation and tyranny.

For the moral high ground cannot be usurped as easily as Israel robs Palestinian lands bearing higher ground, strategic locations, water aquifers and fertile land. The moral high ground in this battle is on the side of the occupied and subjugated, of justice and humanity, of those resisting and fighting for land they once possessed and freedom once enjoyed. It is void and non-existent in the grip of the occupiers, exploiters and criminals who produce life unbearable and dehumanizing. For this battle they cannot win because the travesty of the Palestinians is the reality billions of eyes and minds now see. Is it any wonder why the rise in anti-Semitism worldwide coincides with the escalating campaign to destroy the Palestinian people? Can we not see why Israel is considered the most hated nation on Earth, from opinions resulting in the last few years, and why its policies are endangering innocent and peace loving people of Jewish faith worldwide who only want to live free of the hatreds of the past and in full acceptance of the happiness of the years to come?


Never Again, Never Again


The time to boycott Israeli products has arrived. Let the sanctions imposed by the Other Superpower begin, unleashing the economic might of billions to punish those few who care nothing for international law or the universal declarations of human rights. May the cancer spreading dehumanization and misery on our fellow human beings stop being spread by the power and medicine of the people of the world. We succeeded once before, halting the destructive forces of apartheid South Africa, now a nation evolving forward in time, not regressing backwards in history. We will once more quash wrongness, wickedness and human evil. It is the echoes of justice and human rights emanated by the voices of truth that will tear down yet another wall of shame being built to imprison and condemn.

Let us punish American and multinational corporations that help arm the IDF, those that help bulldoze homes and lives, those that profit from human misery and those that through their instruments of death and destruction contribute to the murder and slaughter of innocents. Let us pressure our so-called representatives to stand for human rights, dignity and justice, not tyranny, misery and subjugation.

What is transpiring in the Holy Land is anathema to human civilization; it is an embarrassment to six billion people who are good, decent human beings. If our governments refuse to act, then so we must, for the sake of innocent and peaceful Palestinian and Israeli people, for the sake of human decency and for the sake of our future generations. Walls and fences that imprison and dehumanize cannot stand, for they help set mankind back in time to days dark and repressive, unenlightened and barbaric. Together, united as one we can become the massive tremor that helps bring walls and tyranny down.

“Never Again” should not just be a catchy slogan, an artifact at museums, a banner espoused but never practiced or a phrase attached to nostalgia. It should mean what it says, and, as the Other Superpower, we should interpret it literally, enforcing it upon those whose crimes against humanity make us all less human by the day.

In numbers we find strength; in conviction, reason to exist. Those seeking freedom can never be defeated; the triumph of the human spirit can never be erased. The seeds of justice have been planted, let us reap its bountiful reward. Let us once more make a beautiful oasis of a land both holy and promised, devoid of barren intentions and evil inclinations. Let olive trees grow anew, let children play and laugh, may the light of day return and once more bring forth skies of blue.


This essay, first published in August 2004, is dedicated to the 3000 Palestinian and 1000 Israeli dead, who, in the last four years, have perished thanks to the sickness of human nature. It is also dedicated to the terrorized Lebanese and Northern Israelis struggling to find logic behind madness. This essay is also dedicated to the thousands of injured on both sides, the thousands more who have lost loved ones, and the peace-loving, tolerance-striving, justice-seeking peoples of the Holy Land, all of whom have suffered enormously for the last four years. May you have the strength to put an end to madness and the worst in the human condition. May your troubled land find the peace you and the world desperately needs.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Gods of War, Gods of Greed and Profiteers of Misery

“The process of transformation [American empire building]…is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

-- From PNAC plan entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, endorsed by neocons in the Bush Administration, the corporate media and Washington think-tanks. Ingrained in the plan are ever-increasing levels of military spending, incessant empire building, pre-emptive invasions and, inherently, a perpetual state of war and fear.

Manna from Heaven

Like bolts of lightning sent from the gods above, airline jets appeared out of parting skies, slamming thunderously into grandeurs of human achievement, transforming towering monuments of steel and glass into blinding avalanches of ashen dust and debris that have yet to clear from the residue-filled eyes of most Americans. The omnipresent haze that remains is deeply entrenched into our primitive and mammalian brain, reawakening dormant animalistic passions and emotions that are corroding our ability to think like the human beings we claim to be.

Like a pathogen this malady exists, attaching itself to the cells of reason and analytical thinking, infecting us with fear, insecurity, paranoia, hatred, anger, vengeance and a blind, degenerative patriotism that has placed the future course of American history in the claws of a small cabal of corrupt, malevolent and warmongering few.

They are the military-industrial complex (MIC) and the Corporate Leviathan, and the gods of war and greed they are called. This powerful group of elite is comprised of profiteers of misery, purveyors of death, immoral scoundrels addicted to power and debased monsters whose faces are stained with the blood of thousands upon thousands of innocent human beings. For them, the horrors perpetrated on 9/11 were the Pearl Harbor they had long been seeking.

It was on that day that the misery of millions became the fortune of a few thousand. It was on that day that the MIC and the Corporate Leviathan wrestled ultimate control from the people of the world, usurping global power and forever altering the future of humanity. Our 9/11 became their Pearl Harbor, a moment in time needed to unleash already predetermined plans to expand power and control on a now easily manipulated and mobilized citizenry. The greatest profiteers in the history of the United States were now free to release their hounds of war, conquest, greed and violence upon the rest of civilization.

On that fateful day, particles of asbestos, computers, furniture, glass, concrete and other pathogens that would eventually kill thousands had yet to settle on the street of New York and already the gods of war and greed were busy implementing their plans for empire expansion, wars for profit and revenue, battles for control, and mobilization of a perpetual war economy. Those entities with vested interests at home and those with vested interests abroad joined forces to spawn the greatest manipulation of a population in the history of the world, one that would lie, connive, distort, deceive and condition its way towards the bloody fields of war from where the human mind rarely, if ever, escapes from.

The military-industrial complex and the Corporate Leviathan, controlling government, the media and the mind of the psychologically fragile post-9/11 American citizen, quickly unfolded designs for mobilizing the richest nation on Earth towards war. All mechanisms at its disposal were used to guide America and its people down the path of invasion, death and occupation. The engines were started, the assembly lines turned on and the conveyor belts of the war machine were soon warmed up, eager to excrete instruments of death in exchange for the benefits of the grandest pilferage of the American taxpayer in the entire history of the United States.

The neocon/Likud, MIC and Leviathan cabal’s Pearl Harbor was a godsend from above, manna from heaven blessed by the gods of war and greed, the exact instrument the group of profit, greed and warmongers had been seeking for years. With the death of 3000 citizens of the world a new course of history had begun, designed years before, now being written page by page and chapter by chapter with the blood-soaked pen of those now guiding us through paths unknown inside dark and ominous forests from which humanity has never emerged from.


Part I: The Conditioning Begins


Like all good propagandists seeking to mobilize the masses, the gods of war had unlimited means by which to brainwash an already schizophrenic population. Through their control of the televised, radio and written media the morsels of war were quickly introduced, usually with a rather apparent absence of dissent and an overflowing commentary favoring war. At a time when blind patriotism raged and misguided anger seethed, the media became an unyielding loudspeaker pushing the agenda of the gods of war. It became, in short time, the instrument spewing out the brainwashed thoughts sent into the homes of the American public. The tool of the gods of war entered every home and every mind, from cradle to grave, using television, radio and newspapers/magazines to set the nation on a war footing it has yet to escape.

The American mind had been made fragile from hours of seeing human carnage unfold and the manifest suffering it spawned. Psychologically destroyed the nation found itself in, unable to make any sense of a world gone mad or of images never seen before by human eyes, caught on tape, to be played and replayed, over and over, thereby cementing human horror upon still primitive and mammalian brains. Predictably, we did not respond well. Fear and paranoia overcame the nation; suddenly the economy halted as we ceased our ingrained consumer-driven ways. Our children suffered nightmares; millions were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Many found religion once more, as humans tend to do when the four corners of the world come crashing down. Depression and anxiety enveloped all cities and states as our animal fear and emotions tried desperately to make sense of the horror we had all seen. What our brain was not ready to experience or digest was nonetheless forced upon it, making us vulnerable creatures existing on the fumes emanating from the remains of the World Trade Center. Through the magic of television the reality of human horror and suffering we were witness to, releasing emotions and passions the human mind is not capable of understanding.

We became the easy targets of circumstance to the gods of war and greed and the profiteers of misery. The bombs and torpedoes of Pearl Harbor had been reincarnated for the eyes of the world to see, taped and replayed, analyzed and dissected, exploited to serve the purposes of those hidden behind veils of governance and offices of high rise skyscrapers. The gods of war and greed at last had their massacre; the world now had a most ominous and violent future ahead.

Patriotic unity manifested by an entire nation draped in the red, white and blue played right into the master plan of the gods of war and greed. Like a vicious circle with no end, united patriotism fed blind patriotism, granting the cabal in power unfettered power and control. The tentacles in the media assured that the populace remain blind and unquestioning, making acquiescent servants of millions who, like Pavlovian dogs, drooled and obeyed at the first sight of Old Glory waving proudly in the corner of their television monitors.

To dissent was to be with the terrorists; to question falsity was to be unpatriotic. All objectivity ceased, all patriotism thrived, and lost in the flag-draped graphics and the bravado of freedom-loving anchors was any semblance of the truth. In a nation saturated with flags, from cars to homes to stores to clothing to everything in between, bleeding a nationalism not seen since the days of 1930’s Germany and bombarded with unending brainwashing and war conditioning, to be against the propaganda and manipulation spewing from the MIC, Leviathan and government was to be a traitor, a friend of the terrorists. With an entire population in the grip of the gods of war and greed, unable and unwilling to see truth or hear reason, reality ceased to exist and the demons of distorted fiction were free to roam the confines of the great lands of the United States.

Following the footsteps of Fox News, whose deceptions and manipulations betray its warmonger, right-wing, Christian fundamentalist and pro-Bush agenda, the rest of the available media soon saw in the 9/11 tragedy the makings of a money making cash cow. When an entire population had lost its ability to reason – mutating into rabid nationalists and patriots seeking vengeance – the media, always seeking the favors of the gods of greed and profit, turned from an objective source of news into a disseminator of myopic views favoring the lies and distortions birthed by the government and the gods of war. To be against the wave of patriotism was to be foolish, after all, and, following the dictates of polls, ratings and focus groups, corporate media thus fell prey to the vicious circle created by those whose war plans were now in full swing.

To seek truth was to commit suicide; to show dissent was to risk alienation. In times of human fragility, where the blood of the state is avowed over that of the individual, where manipulation is easily achieved and subservience becomes pandemic, the only road for the media to take, under tremendous pressure from the public and its corporate parent, is that of governmental disseminator of propaganda. For profit, for ratings, for job security and popularity, journalists and editors in media collectively unbuckled their belts, bent over forwards and allowed their integrity and honor to dissolve, allowing themselves instead to be raped by the power of the flag, the gun and the drums of war.

The American public was spoon fed into war from the very beginning in an organized campaign by government and corporate interests. In coordinated efforts, television and newspapers began showcasing story after story after story implicating Saddam Hussein and Iraq with ever growing imminent dangers. False lies under cover of exclusive news reporting were introduced into the system, making Saddam and Iraq the next coming of Hitler and the Nazis. From the most respectable newspapers in the country to the most trustworthy television news anchors, the lies and fabrications that began in the Bush administration found a welcome home. No attempt was made to report opposing views or of uncovering truths; no attempt was made to give objective viewpoints or to even have a national debate on so important an issue.

On the contrary, the sole voices of the warmongers and those with vested interests in an Iraq war were given a forum, both in television and in print. To this day, the neocons in government and those in think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute fill the airwaves and the op-ed columns. Only the voice of the gods of war and greed made its way into our ears. Only their graphics, information, so-called intelligence and faces were allowed to grace the monitors Americans pray to on a daily basis.

And so, as days turned into months, as stories of WMDs dotted the landscape and insinuations of an Iraq, al-Qaeda connection swirled into our homes, the conditioning of the American people continued unabated. False story after false story made the headlines, helping send the nation to war as the boots of soldiers marched and the unwavering flags of support graced the neighborhoods of a citizenry that has been both bamboozled and exploited by the gods of war and greed and the profiteers of misery who used the death of 3000 innocent energies to spearhead their drive for war, death and ultimate profit and power.


Part II: The Trumpets of War Sound Out


The decimation and utter destruction of Iraq and its society by the military-industrial complex and its vast arsenal of instruments of violence commenced with stealth bombers releasing massive bombs from the dark skies above. Invisible and undetectable death rained down from the heavens as the gods of war and greed unleashed mighty fury at millions of innocent Iraqis. The campaign to destroy infrastructure, ministries, the military and the fabric of society had begun. There is no profit from unharmed structures, after all, no reconstruction contracts from that which has not been destroyed.

Like hyenas drooling and fighting at the prospect of a dead carcass, the MIC and Leviathan lined up to share in the spoils of the carnage their tentacles had just unleashed. Billions of dollars in pilfered American taxpayer money was at hand, manna from heaven sent to the entities of destruction and rape by a government subservient to the gods of war and greed. An entire nation of 25 million people was in shambles after a decade of economic genocide and two wars of imperial showmanship. And, with $200 billion available from the hard earned wages of American taxpayers, the MIC and Leviathan could only envisage the feeding frenzy that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would create.

Electricity plants were torn to shreds, sewage infrastructure was decimated. Government ministries were bombed and burned, while water treatments centers were destroyed. Bridges and roads were carpet bombed, fertile lands were poisoned by depleted uranium. Mesopotamia’s history and culture was looted, allowed to be pillaged by American forces. Sanctions had eviscerated hospitals, universities and schools, making anemic healthcare and education, while Iraqi society lingered in utter indigence. Meanwhile, everything related to oil was secured, given the utmost attention and protection, so as to leave everything in working order for the great American and British petrochemical conglomerates. The Leviathan was thirsty, and needed to be fed.

A war for profit and pillage had commenced, naturally without humanity or concern for innocent human life. For the gods of war and greed and the profiteers of misery care not an ounce for humanity or the beating energy of a human body. They care nothing for the suffering their policies unearth nor the death and violence their instruments of death advance. The gods of war and greed care only about power and control; they care only about profit and revenues. Those who profit from misery breathe and feed off of human suffering and pain. They thrive only when humanity dies. It is this reason that a Pearl Harbor was desperately needed, the only mechanism that could stop the hemorrhaging of profits and power due to the drought of war created by the disappearance of the Cold War and the enemy it so ably marketed.

The military-industrial complex, corporate Leviathan, the neocons/Likudniks and the American government, fused together through their ritualistic mating tango of death, have formed a cocktail of fascism mixed with the undeniable parameters that power and control allows. The revolving door and circular Ferris wheel that has become the American government, where corporate executives and defense contractor elite play a sinister game of musical chairs with top military personnel and government officials, is transforming a government of, by and for the people into a twisted game of corporatist and military control where government is now nothing more than an instrument to further the interests of both the MIC and the Leviathan.

Executives and lobbyists are now commonly appointed to policy making positions in government, eviscerating laws, rules and regulations not favorable to industry. Former government officials and military brass, many with top decision making authority, now work for defense contractors and consortiums, using vast connections in government to further the interests of their newfound employers. Slowly but surely government is being infected with corporate insiders intent on turning their newfound power to the benefit of the hand that feeds them. The revolving door of corporatist domination is in full swing, perpetually turning in a never-ending cycle of cronyism that has infected a government that once served the American people.

When the gods of war and greed and profiteers of misery possess the Almighty Dollar in vast quantities, however, a government that once protected and furthered our cause now exploits and even endangers every last one of us.

Melted into this growing cabal of croniness, corruption and connivance has been the infiltration into the seats of power and policy by those furthering the interests of a foreign nation. These individuals, vested with several interests in both foreign and national defense contractors, foreign political parties and clearly pushing American foreign policy to mirror the interests of other sovereign nations, have, over the last decade, waited patiently in the wings until the day arrived, much like 9/11 under the power of George W. Bush, from which to unleash their devious plans of war by proxy.

Since 9/11, these individuals have done more to create and market the war with Iraq than any other group. From the Pentagon they concocted intelligence, manipulated truths and created lies in order to justify a war against an enemy of their client state. Inside the Bush administration they took control of foreign policy, as they perched from the top of the Pentagon and the Vice President’s office, advising and consulting the President, cooking up intelligence and stove-piping distorted and fabricated material past other government institutions. The neocons this group is called, festering the halls of Washington in furtherment of Israel’s interests, conning a nation blind, endangering the American people more and more with each wave of their ignorant and self-delusional ideology.

The trumpets of war have sounded out, the thundering stampede of soldier boots can be heard, marching toward a battle the MIC hopes will continue into perpetuity, lasting as long as Arab Muslim enemies can be created and the American mind manipulated. As long as 290 million citizens remain passive and submissive to the pillaging of their treasury and as long as the robbery of $200 billion dollars in taxpayer money goes unquestioned without seeking accountability the MIC and its minions will continue devastating American society. With each failure to demand questions and seek answers our way of life is eroded more and more. Without realizing and combating the arranged marriage between MIC, Leviathan and the elite in government the further decay of what America once was will persist.

Corporations and industries have usurped our safety, using fear to mobilize and freeze us at the same time. They steal us of treasure, rob us of blood, put us in the crosshairs of danger and exploit the love we have of America. They care nothing about the certain and devastating blowback we will experience due to their addicting quest for the perfect enemy and the perfect perpetual war. Thanks to MIC, the Leviathan and malfeasant government officials, our shores will be forever threatened by those who have been devastated by American foreign policy. It will be the relatives of the tens of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqis and the countless millions whose anger and hatred we have monopolized that will unleash fury at our innocent sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. It will be our progeny that will have to suffer the consequences of letting the corporatist elites dictate what is done in our name. It will be us who experience the misery of the tornadoes and hurricanes coming our way thanks to the profit making formulas of death and destruction of the few who control the direction the United States is on.

Greed has transformed the way they do business. War is once more a for-profit enterprise, a ratings and advertisement revenues bonanza where riches are made and careers cemented. It is assembly lines and conveyor belts spitting out instruments of human evil, designed to maim, kill and inflict horrendous suffering. War is the cold-blooded and carefully planned out decision to send America’s poor to die and sacrifice both body and mind in order to conquer the lands of those even more indigent so that the few elite can carve up the spoils of war between themselves. War is the Almighty Dollar and the adrenalin of power and control. It is exploitation of American citizens and pilfering of their hard-earned wages. It is American evil at its worst, pre-empting, invading, conquering and occupying for geopolitical military bases, economic oil control and Israeli enemy eradication.

War is opportunity, wealth and power, destroying a nation only to rebuild it once more, helping to enrich your donors, contributors and even family in the process. War has been glamorized, enemies are dissected, deaths are whitewashed and images of war ignored. We are the good guys, the land of freedom and democracy, even if we kill tens of thousands, invade innocent lands and pilfer foreign resources. It does not matter that our armies unleash hell onto civilians, destroying the lives of ten year old girls, baby boys and young adults. It does not matter that entire families vanish thanks to our instruments of death, nor that millions suffer in perpetuity thanks to our complicity through acquiescence of a foreign policy that is debased at best and barbaric at worst.

But to Joe Six-pack, we are “bringing freedom and democracy” to the world and the beacon of liberty still shines as bright as ever. The tools of propaganda are as sinister as they are effective.

Today, corporate media keeps protecting the gods of war and greed and the profiteers of misery who continue to enrich their own pockets through the exploitation of American minds and devastation of Arab lives. The war in Iraq has been forgotten, as if it never existed, the debacle taking place hidden from the conscious of Americans. Corporations such as Halliburton that have pillaged, raped and stolen our tax money and Iraqi oil revenues are left to continue their crimes. War criminals and murderous dictators are ignored, inept policies hardly scrutinized. Lies continue to be furnished, distortions of reality keep being reported while deaths of Iraqis and Americans are manipulated and numerically twisted. Propaganda has not ceased, and it will not relent. The tools of the gods of war and greed are serving their purpose.

The Leviathan grows more powerful every day, gorging on our ignorance of Middle East peoples who have, thanks to the new Pearl Harbor and the synergetic tentacles of propaganda, been made into the new enemy of the United States.

From Soviet Communists to Arab terrorists the MIC and Leviathan have simply shifted gears, moving their focus from the frozen tundra of Russia to the arid deserts of the Middle East. From Eurasia to Eastasia, a new enemy has been found, one that will yield vast wealth to the few as well as control of the population. In the American imagination the new Arab bogeyman will linger, growing more dangerous each year, becoming threats to our freedom and democracy.

The same formula that was successfully used to make evil the peoples of the old Soviet Union is once more at work, only having gone a face lift and an extreme makeover. From the nuclear bomb shelters, drills and communist propaganda designed to spawn fear and control of yesterday to color coded alerts, duct tape rooms and the incessant terror warnings of today, the system is once more working its magic on the people of the United States. Fear is alive, insecurity is in the air and paranoia has been set free. The MIC and the gods of war and greed would not want it any other way. Through fear they control. Through fear they govern. Through fear they exploit, making us subservient and obedient drones whose rights and freedoms we gleefully and without thinking allow them to shred.

As long as the corporatists rule war will be perpetual, robbing us of our humanity, our flesh and blood and our treasure. The grip over us will only increase, becoming a mechanism we will soon be impotent to outmaneuver. Perpetual war for perpetual profit has been created; propaganda designed to make us hate over one billion people of divergent cultures and religions is now in motion. Like Russians of old, -- enemies created for political relevance and control over us – Arabs and Muslims have been chosen as the new face of evil, the enemy to help launch decades of war, violence and death. Arab faces are now deeply entrenched in our primitive mammalian brains, giving the corporatist elite brand recognition from which to terrorize the American populace.

With each new terror warning their profits grow. With each new Arab face shown in their media their revenues increase. The military budget is now near $420 billion, more than all industrialized nations, combined. Our healthcare, education, infrastructure, security and other social services are being demolished as a result. There is no reason to believe that the so-called war on terror will ever be allowed to stop. It is a cash cow for the few at the top. It has opened up levels of power and control once thought impossible to grasp. As long as the assembly lines of death and conveyor belts of destruction continue running at full speed, war is what the new American value will be. In ever more danger will we all be as well, living in perpetual fear and experiencing the paranoia ingrained in the coming police state.

The gods of war, the gods of greed and the profiteers of misery would not want it any other way.
Welcome to reality at the dawn of the 21st century, a world where new Pearl Harbors usher in radical tremors in human civilization along with sinister hijackings into most foreboding times.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

The Ghost of Orwell is Upon Us

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-- President George W. Bush, Aug. 5, 2004in an apparent gaffe or a Freudian slip.


A rather sad state of affairs has risen out of the propaganda-laced, nationalism-spewing, draped-in-the flag-espousing and testosterone-filled Democratic National Convention that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud. The party of peace and progress has mutated into one of warmongers and military might, whoring itself to the evils of war and violence in order to regain power, forgetting principles of pacifism and humanism for those espousing death and destruction. The leaders of the Democratic Party know that to once more sit in the White House, to replace lunatics and liars, they must become George W. Bush, albeit with a brain, proclaiming the drums of war and the strength of violence. In a nation addicted to the smells of human blood and of growing hatred for the Arab and Muslim world, only mirages of warmongers and charades of military might can compete with the façade that propels Bush today.

Granted, this cynical conversion has been strategically made in order to elect John Kerry into office, knowing that the American public sits on its collective couch, as always glued to the television, furthering society’s decline as they are made ignorant, unthinking and conditioned drones, chips in one hand, beer in the other, believing the fictions being bombarded into their minds, frightened of Arab bogeymen and cowering to the insecurity and fear conditioned into daily life by a government and military-industrial complex basking in the euphoria of an easily controlled populace. Thus, needing to project strength and the ability to protect the populace in this so-called ‘war on terror’ the Democrats unleashed a wave of military symbolism, personalities and speeches, trying to recapture the ‘security’ and ‘leadership in times of war’ mantra from George W. Bush and the Republicans.

This carefully orchestrated reinventing of the Party, full of colorful signs and light choreography, jingoistic speeches, unity of personalities and hypocritical support by peacemakers of yet another warmonger has let it be known that, even if Kerry is elected, America’s foreign policy, especially that of the Middle East, will surely continue its self-destructive agenda. The Democrats know they cannot be elected without projecting a macabre fascination with the continuance of the ‘war on terror’ that has become a most omnipotent force since the devastation of 9/11. This snowball effect continues to feed a vicious cycle of death, war and destruction that, with every passing month, grows in momentum and power, thus making it virtually impossible that one day it can be halted. Spiraling into the hands of the military-industrial complex, the corporate Leviathan and the warmongers/criminals/neocons in government, the Democrats have assured the American people that the debacle in Iraq will persist, the occupation and exploitation of the Middle East will linger, and the cancer created by Israel will continue to endanger all of humanity.

For Bush and his cronies have given life to a beast that has wrapped its malicious tentacles around the American psyche, breathing not oxygen but our exhaling fear, growing more powerful every day, feeding off our insecurity and continued dumbing down, enveloping our lives with our silent passivity, becoming omnipotent and omnipresent through our acquiescent complicity. Rolling down a snow-filled mountain as it gains unstoppable momentum, growing into a giant boulder intent on destroying 200 years of progress and hope, the disease created by Bush has become an unstoppable entity spiraling out of the control of humanity.

The “War on Terror” is this malevolent demon called, a virus that is infecting America, catapulting us straight into the pages of a fiction – or a prophesy – long ago written by George Orwell. Immersed in 1984 we presently find ourselves trapped in, living the chapters of a great book that today has become our nightmarish reality. As each day passes in these days of George the Lesser we continue to turn the pages of a once-thought fantasy, traversing bound passages horrific in print that are inevitably becoming the truth of our daily existence.

The fabrication that is the ‘war on terror’ thus continues to propel itself, becoming a mechanism created by man that is slowly spiraling out of our ability to rein it in and control it. It continues to expand, corrupt and divide, free to enrapture humanity with its dark haze of violence and hatred whose ramifications we do not yet fully comprehend. The perfect enemy has been created, the perfect sheep we have become, and in the dark constructs of human power, greed and control a military/ police state begins to grow.

What is coming cannot yet be fully seen, it cannot be grasped by the human mind, for our brains work in the present, not the future, in conceptualizing small pieces, not large amalgams. We are unable to put the pieces of the puzzle together, failing in connecting the dots of a fascism rearing its ugly head over the horizon and the slowly emerging wars and battles being designed against the lands of the Middle East. Eurasia, Oceania and Eastasia have come into existence, conveniently designed to wage perpetual war against each other, propping up created enemies and hated foes that captivate our minds and souls.

We are told that new bogeymen now breathe away our air of freedom. Blindly we believe that these evildoers hate our democracy, liberties and ways of living, and so we must wage war, destroying countries, cities, buildings, families and innocents, sacrificing our children and husbands, our wallets and wages, our own freedoms and liberties. In order to battle that dark-skinned phantom which has been conditioned into our frightful minds we are willing to contribute to the erosion both to our way of living and the future freedom of our progeny. The Red and Communist Russian has given way to the Turban and Muslim Arab, and so we must obey our government, as criminal and corrupt as it may be, like sheep blindly following the shepherd to slaughter.

The fear of our conscious and the silence of our being are robbing us of more than Arab bogeymen ever could. Our own government is terrorizing more than Osama ever imagined. Our own government has us capitulating to fear, using the psychology of the weak-minded human brain to ensnarl us in terror, insecurity and the acquiescence of its criminal actions. It is using human fear to erode our freedoms and rights, turning a once grand beacon of hope into a Soviet Russia-style police state. In order to feel secure, in order to have a sense of safety our fellow citizens are gladly eviscerating their rights and freedoms, granting their evil government unprecedented levels of power over us. We are blindly giving up the beauty of America and the future of our children for the perceived security provided by government. The mechanisms of fear are working their black magic yet again, condemning the masses to their own ruination.

As can be expected, humanity creates without understanding the implications of what it helps unleash. Our still primitive brains cannot fathom the ramifications our actions have into a future we are incapable of grasping. We create only to see what we birth spiral beyond our ability to control and understand it. To humans, forethought is but an afterthought, and, as our history eerily reminds us, what we spawn in the present comes back to haunt us in our future. Creating without thinking, forcing actions without planning, implementing policies without visionary imagination, the human mind cannot fully envisage more than a few years into the unseen future. The examples of this are littered throughout the pages of history. But, as is usually the case with mankind, we fail to learn from our tumultuous past, and so we repeat the mistakes of our ancestors through the folly of our mammalian passions and instincts.

Already, the stage has been set for the further implementation of a police state in America, now seen in New York and Washington, that is changing the very fabric of what America once was and stood for. Those in power, a small cabal of immoral and elite miscreants, are spreading the virus of fear for their own sinister motives, entrenching in the populace a continuous flow of scare tactics designed to manipulate human emotions. The cover of threat is spreading beyond the Northeast to other large cities and regions. Under cover of fear and terror, Bush and company are altering the very fabric of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They are forcing us to voluntarily give up our freedoms and rights for the sake of protection and safety from the same state engulfing us with those same elements of fear mongering we now confront on a daily basis. The disease is being spread nationally; the cloud of fear is enveloping America from sea to shining sea.

These mechanisms of fear are inundating our daily lives, from local to national news, we are being conditioned to the new economy of fear, a new society based on terror that, since 9/11, has and will only continue to increase. Human emotions are being meddled with, our insecurities are being manipulated, and soon, whether in one year or five, a police state existing and thriving on fear will arise out of the blazing bonfires of all our burning rights and freedoms. The stage is being set, this path we are now on, and if we decide to put the jigsaw puzzle together a police state is what America is to become.

The parameters of time and space will dictate its speed and severity, yet if the pieces of this most ominous puzzle are put together, the inevitability of this reality will become manifest. We must look to the totality of the circumstances, both the short and long term, to the present and future, to momentum and current events, to the direction the nation is taking and the increased fear mongering by our government. The winds of fear are giving way to the resounding army of despotic boots marching toward the coming police state.

Incessant fear-mongering has begun to control the populace into both submission and complicity through acquiescence. Weekly terror alerts are conditioning us to an insecurity that, we are told, can only be alleviated by self-erasing our rights and freedoms, granting our government unlimited powers to “protect” us, and believing the plethora of lies and propaganda our “cherished” government tells us. Slowly, 290 million Americans are helping to seal their own fates, destined to live in perpetual fear and in the hands of a fascist form of governance.

The Department of Homeland Insecurity is doing a masterful job of scaring the populace into giving up its rights. It is transforming the land of the free into a nation bordering tyranny. It is making the home of the brave a country gripped by fear. In truth, Tom Ridge is doing exactly as told, hitting the airwaves, reading the script, scaring millions, helping to re-elect a fear-mongering, warmongering, unpatriotic and treasonous administration that has exploited all Americans, using us as pawns in the greatest transformation of American society and governance in our brief history.

The expansion of the police state can today be seen on the streets of New York and Washington, D.C., with a constant police presence roaming streets and important buildings. Armed to the teeth, donning the intimidating attire of riot police, black in color, armor protected, machine gun in hand, thousands of officers now patrol the sidewalks you and I walk, observing, surveilling, spying and helping to keep us quiet and obedient worker bees. Roadblocks, evasive personal inspections of self and possessions, security checkpoints, racial profiling, illegal stops and questioning, demands to see ID’s and a police presence on every corner are the hallmark and the beginning stages of a police state. In sectors of New York and Washington the future of America can today be seen.

The threats of terror spewing like a hot geyser keep coming out of the Department of Homeland Insecurity, adding more cities and buildings scheduled for “government protection.” Today New York and Washington, tomorrow Chicago and San Francisco. The fear hovering throughout the land continues to emanate from the “War” President’s White House, as always erupting lie after continuous lie. The destruction of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution perseveres in the hallways of the Injustice Department, its shredders hard at work eliminating the last vestiges of American freedoms and rights. Meanwhile, the Department of War has once more turned on the conveyor belts of death and destruction, getting ready for yet another invasion and subsequent occupation where the poor castes of America kill and get killed by the poor classes of Iran and/or Syria.

With each new terror warning, with each new city listed as a “potential target” the police state will increase. Soon police and the military will guard us side by side, in every street corner and every subway station, every airport and every mall, M-16 or M-4 Carbines at the ready, intimidating our every move and glance. The days of military checkpoints, army Hummers lining the streets, police dogs at the ready and an aura of military rule are not far off.

Already America’s truckers have been recruited to spy on their fellow Americans, told to be vigilant on the nation’s highways and rest stops. Fear is gripping millions who live in cities, and, whether we see it or not, are being transformed into tools of the state, spies ever vigilant to whatever captures their eyes. Tourists with video equipment and photographers with cameras are now seen with suspicion. Anyone of Arab ethnicity, Middle East name or Muslim faith is now a suspect, guilty first, innocent only after investigation. The inevitability that is the emerging police state dictates that one day soon our own children will be brainwashed to spy on us and our friends, to report anything that might constitute danger to the state. Entire neighborhoods now maintain watchful eyes, becoming ever-suspicious of one another. The day is fast approaching when co-workers and one’s boss will report the activities of those they see as different or as suspicious. Conditioning of our children in schools might one day transform them through programming into conduits and defenders of the powerful who control the state, becoming robots unaware of the splendors their parents were once free to live under and enjoy.

With further evisceration of our rights and the increased powers spawned by technology, it is not hard to conceive of a state aware of every movement and activity. Our government already has, through the mechanisms of Project Echelon, the capacity to record every email, fax, phone call and text message we receive and/or send. Every form of communication can be traced and inspected. Every financial transaction can be tracked, pinpointing our movements. Library books checked out are monitored, internet surfing surveilled. More and more cameras line the streets and buildings, no doubt to continue their exponential growth in the years to come. Satellites in space can read license plates, thermal imaging can see inside our homes. Eye scanning technology is upon us, as is instant fingerprint analysis and public DNA identification. Advancements in technology will undoubtedly assist the coming police state to suppress crime and potential terror, yet it will also act to find and halt dissent, suppress freedoms and rights and transform the citizenry into a collection of scared humans afraid to question authority and exhibit an ounce of individual thought.

The road America has embarked on has no end in sight. Up ahead, only the entrance to a most ominous tunnel can be seen, dark and dangerous, pulling us towards it, sucking the last pebbles of light from the once-great beacon of hope and freedom. The future under this reality does not look bright as a once progressive light of human existence is extinguished under the rubric of fear, terror and security. With each new terror warning the beacon shining high and proud for the world to see is made dimmer, now unable to inspire or embolden. Instead, under the Bush administration, a thick and black cloth now covers what once gave us daylight, transforming day into night, courage into fear and security into terror.

In these days of fear we now live, being driven to re-elect a cabal of madmen intent on destroying an America our Founding Fathers created and believed in. In these times we are made to exist, with fear being politicized, dissent being marginalized and patriotism being questioned. Our emotions are being manipulated by those in power. We are being used and exploited into sacrificing the future of our progeny. We are being made to self-cannibalize our remaining rights and freedoms under the name of security and the lies of the “war on terror.” Yet the day is fast approaching when we will wake from this state of hypnosis, spawned by the fake fear being conditioned into us on a daily basis, only to see society transformed into a nation of spies whose eyes, ears and mouths have become the tools of the same system subjugating them.

Today New York, militarized and under a police state, tomorrow your city and neighborhood. Think it unlikely? Look around, it is already happening. Pay close attention to New York City in late August and early September to see the police state in action, protecting Republican elite from dissenters, protesters and average citizens. Silencing free speech and squashing rights to protest, coralling citizens into free-speech zones, macing innocent and peaceful protesters, arresting and intimidating hundreds, this will be the reality of New York City under partial military rule, all under the lie of security and under the rubric of terror. The stage has been set to halt the expected half a million to a million protesters. With little less than a month to go before the Republican Convention is to begin terror warnings have been put in motion, allowing the police and military to be introduced into the City, allowing the government to impose a police state during the Convention that will have the effect of shutting down protests, dissent and the unity of a million people. Through fear the government can do as it pleases. Through terror it controls the populace and its behaviors.

Under a crimson sky of fear human psychology becomes a dangerous amalgam of animal passions and human evil. Survival becomes a carnal principle; rational thought becomes blurred. The instinct for safety and security places unlimited trust in governance, to the point that humankind willingly cedes freedoms and rights in order to be protected by that which is most feared. Those in power use this truth to increase control over the masses, using us as the means to an end. Through our fear and insecurity their power grows. They are able to unleash war upon the lands of Eurasia and Eastasia, create bogeymen and enemies, encourage retaliation, which in effect acts to grant them still more power over their populace, and foster an era of intertwined interdependence between two competing ideologies whose vicious cycle of terror and violence billions of innocents find themselves immersed in.

To live in 2004 is to live in Orwell’s 1984, and, if the same road continues to be taken, the America of tomorrow will cease to parallel the one of yesterday. At the crossroads we stand, and the failure to act will no doubt condemn our future generations to the mistakes of their forefathers. The America they will inhabit will be a vastly different land than the one enjoying its last remaining days. They will never miss what they never had, and they will never fight for what they always deserved. Our actions, our fear and our complicity are helping to seal the fate of those millions that will come after us. History is being repeated, but not learned; it is being forgotten, and once more a collection of humans is committing the mistakes that have condemned millions before.

Humanity seems never to learn. The fear will continue to increase, the insecurity will not cease. Warnings will only grow louder; attacks will eventually come to our shores, adding to the vicious circle that cannot be stopped. A police state is upon us, yet hundreds of millions seem oblivious to the coming chasm that will affect their lives forever. The mechanism spawned by humanity has taken a life of its own, possessing unstoppable momentum, breathing and living through the fear-laced air we exhale, enveloping our energies and our daily lives as it continues to grow and expand, sending us spiraling out of control.

Whether you wish to live in fear is up to you because it will not stop. On the contrary, incessantly it will grow, spreading like the virus it is throughout the lands of the United States, gripping millions in fright and insecurity. From frightened mind to frightened mind the virus will proliferate, creating a pandemic of human emotions captured by fear and terror, capitalized by a government exploiting its citizens, empowering a few at the top and placing in destiny’s hands the future course of humanity.

The virus is upon us, and it is spreading rapidly. Like a giant wild fire in times of drought, it has become uncontainable, burning everything in its path. Only the powerful monsoons of the Other Superpower can save America now. Will the rains come, or will the drought continue?



Writer's Note: I urge everyone who reads this article to pick up a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” and read or re-read it. Its relevance to today’s America will awaken and scare you. If you want to understand America in 2004, and the direction it is embarking on, this work of art becomes of vital significance.