The Abyss Looks Back

“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Blindness is a modern American tradition. I was once blind myself until the day that the scales fell from my eyes and I was finally able to see the entire system for what it truly is – a passel of interrelated myths, fallacies and outright lies. The system you see is designed to suppress any individual thought; keep you bewildered and buying commodities, consumer goods and a accpting a colossal line of bullshit as truth. You are to believe in the trappings of a parallel reality while shuffling brainwashed through an all consuming matrix of extremely well orchestrated and financed make-believe. A world where America is exceptional and just, where a radical reinterpreted Jesus is lord and capitalism is king; where vices are virtues and virtues likewise are vices. This is a ‘reality’ in which up is down, black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery and most importantly father always knows best. From cradle to grave there is an onslaught of sly, subliminal persuasive techniques that are constantly driven into our brains so subtly and so overwhelmingly that we don’t even notice them.

The simple fact is that the majority of the boiling frogs that are Americans are unable to comprehend even the most rudimentary concepts that they are living a meticulously fabricated lie that serves as a control mechanism with which to stigmatize or otherwise ostracize any who would dare to rise above the herd in order to speak out against the television culture that is the post-Reagan American fantasyland where it is always back to the future in search of a return to the ‘good old days’. Our society is a perfect example of the slaves in the great allegory of Plato’s cave, today’s Americans have undergone such a successful collective electronic lobotomy that they are completely unable to understand that their entire lives are nothing more than carefully formulated and constructed illusions, exactly like the shadow creatures that were projected on the walls of the cave to those who were physically restrained and unable to turn to see that what they believed was reality was merely the projection of shadow figures on the rock wall in front of them. Unlike those in the cave there are no physical restraints, save obesity and a constant exhaustion from overwork to restrain the slaves…it is all mental, the result of an illusory version of reality that has been fed to us since the earliest stages of our cognitive consciousnesses. As Earling Carothers ‘Jim’ Garrison once prophetically stated:

“In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line.”

We are in that concentration camp of the mind now, we have been for quite some time and God help us all for what we have become in the aftermath of that terrible Tuesday in September 2001 when the gates of hell swung open and beckoned us to step inside. We were driven insane by our thirst for vengeance, deceived by our leaders into untertaking wars of conquest wrapped in the bloody cloak of righteous revenge and the always underlying but unspoken crusade for the cross, divided into factions and pitted against our very own families, friends and neighbors all under the watchful eye of a surveillance state controlled by monstrously insane war-hungry immoral men with a terrifying vision for the future.

Our contemptible media is at the root of all evil. It is obsessed with market share, controlled by corporatists and manipulated by the state to do it’s bidding. Herr Goebbels would be proud of the power of the all encompassing world of celebrity, sleaze and disinformation that underwrites our empire. Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of the real world and perfectly content to stay that way like cows grazing in a pasture unaware that they one day are destined for the slaughterhouse. Many have a tendency to overly spoil and deify their children often trying to live vicariously through their young ones who represent a chance at salvaging something from their own failed lives. Do you really think that even the most ignorant and insulated of all parents would still support illegal wars of imperialism with their accompanying ruthless psychopathic counter insurgency tactics if they were able to see the truth? How long do you think that it would take to pull out of Iraq if Americans were allowed to see the beloved babies of their dark complected third world counterparts brutalized, maimed and murdered, their mothers gang raped in front of their families? Real life shit like that may be too much to handle for happy consumer occupants of fantasyland but it is a daily occurrence as well as standard operating procedure for the good squads that walk point for the army of God’s capitalist crusaders.

The horror, the horror

Those who have flirted with the creatures that dwell in the darkness of the abyss and found them to be seductive can understand the dangers of such an embrace. When vengeance becomes as wonderfully exhilarating as a lover’s passionate kiss, when the corrosiveness of pure ideological hatred and the accompanying wrath become an obsession, all consuming, energizing then is when one is in most danger of losing one’s soul, or of finding it.

Unless you have been there you can’t understand.

Some pull back when there is what an alcoholic would call a moment of clarity and a glimpse at the destructive nature of frolicking with those demons is suddenly seen…it is shocking. Perhaps the worse thing to occur when flirting with the darkness of the abyss is that it is all too easy to drag others down into it as well, others who are not equipped to handle it. Some are driven insane, some go into deep denial and simply hit the disconnect switch while going about their daily lives as though the netherworld does not exist. The rulers of this country know all too well the sweet allure of the siren songs of the devils that dwell in the abyss, they embrace them, they love them and while engaging in orgies of great debauchery with them they drag the rest down into its ever blackening maw along with them.

In Steven Spielberg’s Munich the consequences of violence for the sake of revenge as well as the human costs are examined in a movie far more reminiscent to the serious and provocative films of the 1970’s when Americans were questioning institutions that had so badly gone awry leading to the devastating and bloody defeat of Vietnam and the scandal plagued administration of Richard M. Nixon and his thugs. I have always personally felt that the movies of that decade were far more real than what the social engineers pulling the levers of society have sold us as their version of reality today. We once openly questioned authority in this country and were sickened at what we were misled into accepting as true and just by the criminals who were our leaders. Munich is as unrelenting as it is courageous and the numerous denunciations by the extreme right and their Israeli lobbyist counterparts that the movie received through either disputes of the accuracy of the material or the demagoguery that it somehow offered sympathy to terrorists are a testament to it’s message. Munich is brutal in it’s graphic portrayal of violence but it is also brutally honest in presenting the idea that violence only feeds upon itself and builds to levels that will ultimately destroy the souls of men and nations, as Nietzsche famously said “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” The quest for revenge in the aftermath of the botched rescue of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team who were the doomed victims of a spectacular hostage crisis that played out on the world screen and that lead to a massacre by the Black September terrorist group as well as the mission of the government sponsored covert assassination squad to exact revenge that is portrayed in the movie shows the escalating toll on their humanity as well as ability of the opposition to also escalate their tactics in a bloody tit for tat tango that never ends until one side or the other is ultimately annihilated once and for all.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks we are trapped in this same cycle of violence and are too easily becoming monsters as a result. The simplistic wasteland that is the American mind is unable to conceptualize or otherwise draw any sort of correlation to the simple fact that violence always begets more violence which is then used as justification for even more violence and further bloodshed by both ‘terrorist’ groups as well as governments. It’s a fucking brutal dance and it only perpetuates itself with each further escalation. Older societies know this, they have seen it throughout their histories, America being a relatively new nation and still naive in the belief that we are somehow different do not understand this most basic aspect of human nature. Every action has the potential for a reaction, often one of unintended consequences or what is defined as blowback by the CIA. 9/11 was (if you buy the official story) an attack by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists on God’s chosen land ostensibly because they hate us for our freedoms, at least so goes the party line peddled by the propaganda pimps. What is never addressed by our craven and corrupt media is that the true reason why we are so reviled in much of the world is the result of our immoral foreign policy which is one of empire, exploitation and the choosing of sides in the ongoing Middle East conflict but even if we had an honest media it is doubtful that our pathetic and ignorant populace would be able to comprehend what it was told, the damage is just too great now, it will take several generations to correct and to even begin to do so will be to halt the momentum of our national descent into the flames of Perdition and our imminent rendezvous with historical infamy.

Reaping the whirlwind of an immoral lie of a war

As with the watershed event of the Vietnam war that was the exposure of the atrocities committed by our own soldiers in the earthly hell of a charnel house that was ‘Pinkville’ or as it is more infamously known My Lai, the massacre in Haditha may finally drive home the caustic effects on a nation’s soul caused by an illegal war sold to both the soldiers and to the public on another pack of government lies. In March of 1968 an American company of soldiers crazed and drunk on vengeance ran amok and slaughtered hundreds of civilians in the village of My Lai. Women were raped, children including babies brutalized….they dragged it out, turned it into sport. The villagers who were not killed during the ‘festivities’ were eventually herded into a trench and murdered en masse by an deadly barrage of automatic rifle fire the ditch was filled with bodies and blood and the men who perpetrated the slaughter had become renegades. Once the story eventually leaked out, the public either went into denial that this sort of rampage could never be commited by our own always just military, rationalized that the communists did worse things or were outraged, ashamed and betrayed. Back then the media brought the horrors home into America’s living rooms and stories appeared in the newspapers when more than a wretched eleven percent of the populace bothered to read them but that was before the first amendment became a pejorative to large segments of the population and writers were real journalists and not public relations flacks or overly ambitious hacks determined not to let trivial matters like integrity or ethics block their career paths.

The government then as now with the Haditha massacre attempted to cover it all up and against the odds despite our woeful, dumbed down, homogenized corporate media the true story of Iraq attrocities are slowly seeping out and growing legs on the internet the last bastion for free speech in this sad country and one that has been targeted for extinction in its current form by the ruling party. It may be far too much to hope for but perhaps this time the carnage and horror of killing innocents may finally awaken a credulous, timorous self-centered American public out of their long, fear wracked post 9/11 fever dream which has been seized upon and cynically manipulated by a ruthlessly corrupt illegitimate junta with a festering contempt for liberty, truth and American values. The terror factor has been exploited at every opportunity, the propaganda incessant, the lies and deceit in using the weapons of mass destruction myth and the apocalyptic conjecture of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds within our cities became a constant drumbeat. In the run up to shock and awe debate was stifled, the legislature, itself irredeemably corrupt was cowed by their fear of being tarred as unpatriotic, upset with the lack of France’s backing for war they decreed that the capitol cafeteria would serve only freedom toast and freedom fries, god damn any country who would dare question American intent or stand of the way of our vengeance. The media became cheerleaders, the few honest news reporters who attempted to be true to their trade and to report to the public the news were smeared and subsequently banished from the airwaves. Big names the likes of Peter Arnett, Ashleigh Banfield and Phil Donahue had their careers damaged, their loyalty called into question while government PR shops pumped out feel good, nationalism wrapped in the flag, they peddled tales of wonder like the miraculous saving of Pvt. Jessica Lynch the all American femme fatale fighting machine; the staged toppling of Saddam’s statue in a mostly empty square and the ultimate sacrifice by former Arizona Cardinal safety Pat Tillman who gave up the holy grail of celebrity that is the dream life of an NFL star to serve his country in a time of crisis. All were eventually debunked as the garbage that they were and Tillman whose honest intent and dignity were exploited for propaganda purposes before he was killed by the guys on his own side in what as perfect a metaphor for this bloody clusterfuck war as it is an American tragedy. All were used as a cover for the intentions of an evil and treasonous government that is as hellbent on the spread of uber-capitalist imperialism abroad that it is on the robbery and incremental increases of its power at the expense of the very freedoms and civil liberties for the poor, dumb serfs here in the homeland.

The incredulity over Haditha that is expressed is as outrageous as it is unbelievable and in most cases ultimately insincere. The one that I most commonly hear is “but American’s don’t do things like that” followed by the stock lie of blaming the liberal media for blowing the whole thing out of proportion and as the insidiously stupid armchair patriots have a tendency to say “things happen in war” not that they would ever be bothered to get off of their asses and join the military to see for themselves . The truth is that it is all crap, Americans are as capable of atrocities as any other civilization in the history of man and the denial of this is the ultimate in arrogance. The myth of our exceptionalism must be taken down if we are ever to return to semblance of sanity in this morally deteriorating empire. Once Haditha became national news the typical coordinated damage control offensive was rolled out as it always is to provide cover for this criminal administration. Donald Rumsfeld’s personal military flack Gen. Peter Pace hit the Sunday morning electronic PR circuit to bandy about the latest talking point that the Haditha murderers acted in a rogue manner that is inconsistent with that of “99-point-nine percent of their fellow Marines.”

Bullshit I say!

The Haditha slaughter is only the very tip of a huge iceberg of immoral and illegal conduct by American personnel and thousands of mercenaries in the conduct of a vicious campaign of counter insurgency and ethnic cleansing and more will begin to escape the central control of the government information chop shops to seep out into the public domain. The true story of the razing of Fallujah has yet to be told along with the military’s use of incendiaries on civilians, it briefly leaked out but the information warfare pros quickly coaxed the genie back into the bottle but the devastation and human toll is too great to stay hidden forever. Just this past Wednesday a pregnant woman was killed by U.S. troops for failing to stop at a roadblock while rushing to the hospital. Such collateral damage is a given in a chaotic urban environment where there is no way to definitively identify ‘the enemy’ who could truly be anybody but didn’t the strategists learn this lesson by studying the guerilla morass of Vietnam? The ones who did were quickly given their walking papers in the run up to the bombing and invasion of Baghdad. Rummy, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith and the rest of the finely dressed war criminals who would prefer to fight their wars in the relative comfort of air-conditioned situation rooms filled with television screens and computer monitors instead of sweltering filthy streets stinking of rotting bodies, feces and garbage didn’t want to hear it.

Who is to blame?

The political forces whose misjudgment of the reaction of the locals in the aftermath of the original invasion…hey you pompous fucking assholes, they didn’t come waving flowers after all did they? Once the deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq became became a detriment to maintaining sufficient political support for their Social Darwinist homeland policies to be implemented and allow for the fulfillment of the pathological determination to destroy all elements of the New Deal and Great Society it became apparent that the insurgency had to be crushed at all costs for the glory of the emperor. There was also a hurry to begin to expand the war throughout the Middle East working in a silent partnership with Israeli hardliners and it became necessary to ratchet up the intensity of excessively violent Phoenix Program style counter insurgency tactics including the covert sponsorship of death squads. Command should
certainly certainly bear the brunt of the blame but they are far from alone, immoral wars breed depravity and atrocity which are attracted like maggots to the corpses of the disappeared who are tortured and murdered and then left to lie decomposing in shallow graves.

The American people themselves should bear at least as much guilt as the marines whose fingers pulled the triggers for after all it was they who were led to believe that an illegal and immoral war like this could be fought on the cheap without the need for compromise or sacrifice on their part. Whipped into a xenophobic rage by the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon and continually by fed the mainline high of nationalism exhorted by the Republican party operatives and the neocons who wanted this war each for their own reasons we allowed ourselves to become disinterested and were fed distorted information in the form of carefully constructed public relations pieces in place of honest war reporting. We kept shuffling like George Romero’s zombies through our shopping malls and mega marts, exhorted the warlike Jesus of the Left Behind series en masse in our taxpayer subsidized mega-churches, gassed up our SUV’s and slapped yellow ribbon magnets on their asses and went about our daily lives oblivious to the long term consequences of our government’s actions that are being undertaken in our name.

After Abu Ghraib and the perversion of the sado-sexual horrors that occurred there made the world realize that not only were Americans misguided but something far worse, something more akin to evil, the malevolent decomposition of our damnable souls was momentarily glimpsed and then quickly hidden away by spin doctors who descended on Baghdad to hermetically seal the area to contain the bad news…and the truth. When Lyndie Englund, that ignorant little peckerwood slut dragged a naked Arab man around on a leash it was all of us Americans who where holding the end in the eyes of the world. There was much horror and outrage expressed over Abu Ghraib but it was quickly forgotten domestically, we had better things to do. There was American Idol, there was shopping, there were summer blockbuster movies and sports, there was fear of the terrorists, there was the Rapture to prepare for, Big Macs to be devoured, you know, the really important stuff.

The general American lack of truly serious outrage over Haditha is a result of our ‘freedoms’, we are free to remain ignorant, free to practice bigotry, free to gorge ourselves while the poor starve, free to be as mean as are capable of being, free to shop, free to remain detached, free to create our own little t.v. based realities, free to remain in denial, free to hate, free to worship the favored God of the state, free to empower George W. Bush and his extremists to act as our agents. Well here is something for the ‘free’ to contemplate for a bit of much needed perspective:

Just imagine yourself at home with your family. Say one day the front door is kicked open, your elderly father or grandfather who is confined to a wheelchair is the first to confront the heavily armed intruders, he is torn to shreds by a hail of automatic gunfire. Yourself and the rest of your family is terrified, shocked, confused, women are screaming, children crying, infants wailing, shouted orders and profanity in a foreign language fill the air. Furniture is thrown, heirlooms broken, your spouse, children, siblings, parents along with yourself are herded into a central room, violently handcuffed and forced to kneel. The pets are killed first…the tableu is dragged out for the sake of inflicting the most cruelty, maybe there are rapes first but certainly there are beatings, then the executions begin….you are forced to watch your family slaughtered like animals in front of you, it is agony watching them suffer, you want to die to be spared the horror but they are saving you for last.

Get the picture?

If we are hated as we are so often told by our government by the ‘terrorists’ for our ‘freedom’ and our selfish way of life with so many choosing to pursue their own ‘freedom’ to remain free of outrage or responsibility is it any wonder why this is so? We are free to our ignorance and callousness but we are no longer innocent once a certain line has been crossed. When we choose to remain ‘free’ of outrage when our soldiers begin murdering civilians the Rubicon has been crossed, morally it is the equivalent of the same type of butchery that occurred in My Lai, El Mozote, Srebrenica or the Warsaw Ghetto. And if we fail to act and hold criminals to account for their actions we are no better than the unquestioning good Germans who lived downwind of Auschwitz, Dachau or Treblinka.

The administration and our depraved government of WASP millionaires for WASP millionaires fear Haditha and they have every reason to. As with Abu Ghraib there is pictorial evidence in nothing is able to convey an idea to a badly educated, poorly informed populace like an image.

The truth is what is feared most, the lies have been so incessant in weaving the tapestry of evil that once a tread is pulled it could all potentially unravel and what then? Institutions such as governments and churches fear the truth as a vampire fears sunlight, once questions begin to be asked their entire control structure is threatened. The lies are exposed and the criminals in charge held accountable by a suddenly aroused and transformed mass angry at being duped. Once the myriad lies come to be known one with an inquisitive mind begins to wonder if it is ALL a lie.

Therein lies the danger with building a temple on a foundation of lies, noble or ignoble, it makes no difference because the truth is the ultimate trump card…. but will sheeple so long accustomed to living in the decadence of ignorance, materialism and irrational fear ever muster up the courage to play it?

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”

-Martin Luther King Jr.

GOD BLESS AMERICA