Number 1.2.1
(NEW SERIES-2008)
(NEW SERIES-2008)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
NOTES FROM
A DYING NATION
NUMBER ONE, Part 2
NOTES FROM
A DYING NATION
NUMBER ONE, Part 2
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
1
THE REAL
THE REAL
..........
..........Part one of this essay ended with these words:
..............................Next time, following the start that Tom Tvedten has given us,
..............................I'm going to look at some of the examples, large and small,
..............................of the sorts of lies that are being used—purposely, incess
..............................antly, and programmatically—to destroy our nation, destroy
..............................our republic, destroy our people, and destroy our culture.
..............................Then, once the enemy and its motives are exposed and known,
..............................we can look at the way to stand up and try to prevent the awful
..............................entirety of that massive, insidious, ruinous destruction—to
..............................fight against it, with the real as our weapon.
..........To me, these paragraphs seem now too optimistic, an octave or so more sure-footed and hopeful than I can go along with this much later, a week or so after writing them. But, then, that's one of the effects—to raise some hope—that writing of the kind I'm doing here is supposed to have, isn't it? But what if the hope is fleeting, weak, quickly defeated? The old question comes up, asking why write at all if the result of it is nothing? Whether you're standing in the face of total adversity or not—as we are now—if the result of writing brings no hope, lift, or encouragement, then why do it?
..........Well, for me, the answer has always been, how could you not write about it? Whatever the situation is, that situation provides the truth that's got to be studied and dealt with. People who've read my novels sometimes say I'm too gloomy, writing about death and loss all the time, and maybe they're right. But I do know that I've never understood the curious need so many people seem to have—or say they have—to turn their eyes away from anything awful, terrible, hopeless, or ghastly.
..........Part of what I object to about this trait is the whiff of hypocrisy that goes along with it. Plenty of the people who say they don't want to look directly or for more than a nano-second at anything fearsome or absolute—like, death, say—are just as likely as the next person to seek out the scariest of Hitchcock or the goriest of mysteries or the most horrifying of thrillers, where all of earthly life hangs in the balance. I think the truth is that the "aversion" to dark and terrifying things I'm talking about doesn't have a single thing at all to do with people not wanting to be scared or frightened. What it's got to do with is their not wanting to think about things fearsome or overwhelmingly awful.
..........But what I want to do, and what I've always wanted to do, is think about that sort of thing endlessly—and get others to do the same thing. Otherwise, in what conceivable way will we ever get those most awful things fixed? I know that nobody can "fix" death, but it's still one of the most serious things in life and I'm not going to stop thinking about it just because other people don't "want" to. And some things can be fixed, like the republic, for one very good example. But that can happen only if enough people are willing to look at the situation the republic is in for what it really is and think about it long, hard, deep, and for real.
..........And so when I read Paul Craig Roberts on, say, Jane Harman's despicable and hair-raisingly Orwellian thought-control bill, the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act;" or when I pick up his essay "Thinking for Yourself Is Now a Crime" and read that "We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract"; or even when Roberts says straight-faced that "The light of liberty has gone out in the United States"—well, in all these cases I do feel some kind of encouragement and lift, and the last thing I want to do is look away, avert my eyes, or stop thinking about it. Looking is knowing, looking away is indulgence and ignorance. If things are desperate, vile, or evil, I want them to be looked at straight, because if they aren't looked at straight, the desperate, vile, and evil things are the ones that will win for certain and we'll have no chance. Sometimes Paul Craig Roberts is even more bitter, despairing, and accusatory than in "Thinking for Yourself Is Now a Crime." Look at this passage from "We're All Prisoners Now":
..............................Any and every American can be arrested by unaccount-
..............................able authority, held indefinitely without charges and tor-
..............................tured until he or she can no longer stand the abuse and
..............................confesses.
..............................This predicament, which can now befall any American,
..............................is our reward for our stupidity, our indifference, our gul-
..............................libility, and our lack of compassion for anyone but
..............................ourselves.
..........Even though Roberts is saying that we could all be put into internment camps the day after tomorrow and left to rot until death, I still find some sense of "encouragement and lift" in his despairing—and blaming—words. And here's why. It's because they're real. And it's because in writing them he's looking at, talking about, and addressing the real instead of turning away.
..........However grim or awful, however terrifying, however grotesque or enraging or frightening, the real is still always better than the false, the hollow, the deceitful, or the ignorant. The real is always better than the fake. Later, whether in this essay not, I hope to say more about why this is true, and to show how it's true. But for the moment, let me put it simply this way: The real and authentic and honest and true are on the side of life. The false, hollow, fraudulent, fake, and deceitful are on the side of death.
..........This is true and always will be. Therefore, however unsettling, frightening, or grim an experience it may be to read Paul Craig Roberts or writers like him, he's still on the side of life. On the other hand, however meliorative, easeful, or comforting it may be to avoid reading such writers, or actually to believe or allow oneself to believe, that the "war on terror" is in truth a real thing and therefore also to believe that the destruction of constitutional rights and liberties in order the better to defeat the "terrorists" that one allows oneself to "believe" in—however comforting any of these things may be or seem to be, every single one of them puts the "believer," precisely like the Bushiscti themselves, firmly on the side and in the camp of death.
..........Part one of this essay ended with these words:
..............................Next time, following the start that Tom Tvedten has given us,
..............................I'm going to look at some of the examples, large and small,
..............................of the sorts of lies that are being used—purposely, incess
..............................antly, and programmatically—to destroy our nation, destroy
..............................our republic, destroy our people, and destroy our culture.
..............................Then, once the enemy and its motives are exposed and known,
..............................we can look at the way to stand up and try to prevent the awful
..............................entirety of that massive, insidious, ruinous destruction—to
..............................fight against it, with the real as our weapon.
..........To me, these paragraphs seem now too optimistic, an octave or so more sure-footed and hopeful than I can go along with this much later, a week or so after writing them. But, then, that's one of the effects—to raise some hope—that writing of the kind I'm doing here is supposed to have, isn't it? But what if the hope is fleeting, weak, quickly defeated? The old question comes up, asking why write at all if the result of it is nothing? Whether you're standing in the face of total adversity or not—as we are now—if the result of writing brings no hope, lift, or encouragement, then why do it?
..........Well, for me, the answer has always been, how could you not write about it? Whatever the situation is, that situation provides the truth that's got to be studied and dealt with. People who've read my novels sometimes say I'm too gloomy, writing about death and loss all the time, and maybe they're right. But I do know that I've never understood the curious need so many people seem to have—or say they have—to turn their eyes away from anything awful, terrible, hopeless, or ghastly.
..........Part of what I object to about this trait is the whiff of hypocrisy that goes along with it. Plenty of the people who say they don't want to look directly or for more than a nano-second at anything fearsome or absolute—like, death, say—are just as likely as the next person to seek out the scariest of Hitchcock or the goriest of mysteries or the most horrifying of thrillers, where all of earthly life hangs in the balance. I think the truth is that the "aversion" to dark and terrifying things I'm talking about doesn't have a single thing at all to do with people not wanting to be scared or frightened. What it's got to do with is their not wanting to think about things fearsome or overwhelmingly awful.
..........But what I want to do, and what I've always wanted to do, is think about that sort of thing endlessly—and get others to do the same thing. Otherwise, in what conceivable way will we ever get those most awful things fixed? I know that nobody can "fix" death, but it's still one of the most serious things in life and I'm not going to stop thinking about it just because other people don't "want" to. And some things can be fixed, like the republic, for one very good example. But that can happen only if enough people are willing to look at the situation the republic is in for what it really is and think about it long, hard, deep, and for real.
..........And so when I read Paul Craig Roberts on, say, Jane Harman's despicable and hair-raisingly Orwellian thought-control bill, the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act;" or when I pick up his essay "Thinking for Yourself Is Now a Crime" and read that "We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract"; or even when Roberts says straight-faced that "The light of liberty has gone out in the United States"—well, in all these cases I do feel some kind of encouragement and lift, and the last thing I want to do is look away, avert my eyes, or stop thinking about it. Looking is knowing, looking away is indulgence and ignorance. If things are desperate, vile, or evil, I want them to be looked at straight, because if they aren't looked at straight, the desperate, vile, and evil things are the ones that will win for certain and we'll have no chance. Sometimes Paul Craig Roberts is even more bitter, despairing, and accusatory than in "Thinking for Yourself Is Now a Crime." Look at this passage from "We're All Prisoners Now":
..............................Any and every American can be arrested by unaccount-
..............................able authority, held indefinitely without charges and tor-
..............................tured until he or she can no longer stand the abuse and
..............................confesses.
..............................This predicament, which can now befall any American,
..............................is our reward for our stupidity, our indifference, our gul-
..............................libility, and our lack of compassion for anyone but
..............................ourselves.
..........Even though Roberts is saying that we could all be put into internment camps the day after tomorrow and left to rot until death, I still find some sense of "encouragement and lift" in his despairing—and blaming—words. And here's why. It's because they're real. And it's because in writing them he's looking at, talking about, and addressing the real instead of turning away.
..........However grim or awful, however terrifying, however grotesque or enraging or frightening, the real is still always better than the false, the hollow, the deceitful, or the ignorant. The real is always better than the fake. Later, whether in this essay not, I hope to say more about why this is true, and to show how it's true. But for the moment, let me put it simply this way: The real and authentic and honest and true are on the side of life. The false, hollow, fraudulent, fake, and deceitful are on the side of death.
..........This is true and always will be. Therefore, however unsettling, frightening, or grim an experience it may be to read Paul Craig Roberts or writers like him, he's still on the side of life. On the other hand, however meliorative, easeful, or comforting it may be to avoid reading such writers, or actually to believe or allow oneself to believe, that the "war on terror" is in truth a real thing and therefore also to believe that the destruction of constitutional rights and liberties in order the better to defeat the "terrorists" that one allows oneself to "believe" in—however comforting any of these things may be or seem to be, every single one of them puts the "believer," precisely like the Bushiscti themselves, firmly on the side and in the camp of death.
2
A NATION DEDICATED TO DEATH
A NATION DEDICATED TO DEATH
..........
..........In the early pages of A Nation Gone Blind I wrote that "The sixty years that have brought us the new America have brought us also a virtually perfected socio-political culture of lies and lying, a culture built on a foundation of lying, framed by walls of lying, covered by a roof of lying."
..........At that time, I was talking primarily about the mass media. I was describing the way that the media had created a "new" America by means of more than six decades of growth in their destructively exploitative power—a power destructive not only of intellect and emotion, but also of people's ability to see or determine reality for themselves. There had come to exist what I call a pervasive "aesthetic" of the mass media, and that "aesthetic" is what has come to be taken as the real. Individual ability—or will—to look at things as and for what they are has diminished enormously. At the same time, individual willingness to (or individual inability not to) accept as real all and everything that's pre-fabricated by the media as being the real—this ability, or inability, has grown exponentially.
..........In light of all this, it's perfectly natural and right to say not just that the US is "a virtually perfected socio-political culture of lies and lying, a culture built on a foundation of lying, framed by walls of lying, covered by a roof of lying," but to go two steps further.
..........The first step is to say that the US is now "a virtually perfected socio-political culture built upon and composed of not merely lies, but built upon and composed of every kind of socio-political and cultural fakery, fraud, trickery, hypocrisy, deceit, hollowness, and every method of diversion from the real that might be imaginable."
..........That's the first step. The second step is every bit as frightening, grotesque, repugnant, and vile as it is inescapable. The second step is to acknowledge that the US is now "therefore a virtually perfected socio-political culture built upon, composed of, and dedicated to, not life, but death."
..........Look and consider. Legislation has simply by the declaration of a national emergency, for the cancelling of elections and for dictatorial rule over all three branches of government by the president alone.
..........Concentration camps are already prepared, among them the ones mentioned by Paul Craig Roberts as having been built by Cheney's beloved Halliburton to the tune of a contract "worth up to $385 million." The Iraq war shows no signs of being anything other than never-ending. Foreign "policy" continues to be rapacious, murderous, and piratical, as can easily be seen, among many other ways, by a look at the blogging of Layla Anwar, or a look at this powerful and revelatory analysis of it.
..........Paul Craig Roberts wrote recently that "Americans do not think of themselves or of Israel as terrorist states, but the evidence is complete and overwhelming." He added:
..............................Every country in the world, except America, knows by
..............................now that the US is the world's leading state sponsor of
..............................terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegem-
..............................ony over the world threatens the security of nations
..............................everywhere.
..........Meanwhile, the Democratic congress elected in 2006 has proven itself entirely complicit in the full range of US criminality and murder, and anyone who thinks that the election now approaching can or will provide any correction, melioration, or condemnation of the nation's unleashed program of corpo-fascist rape, brigandage, murder, and destruction is, it seems to me, a person delusional. Mike Ruppert gave up on elections long ago. After puppet-Kerry's staged "defeat" in 2004, he wrote that "The rest of the world has known for some time that it is pointless to oppose this Empire either militarily or electorally." Two years later, as reported by Deanna Spingola, he compared the two major parties "to two Mafia crime families, . . . [both] heavily engaged in highly illegal activities for which they are rarely prosecuted."
..........There's been no change in election policy—unless for the worse—since then. "We are, after all, legally barred from inspecting electronic voting machines," Mike Ruppert observed after election day 2004. After the New Hampshire primary this year, Mike Whitney expressed few doubts in "The Winning Ticket: Hillary and Diebold in 2008," saying that "The primary was stolen. End of story." And Margie Burns, in her highly convincing and data-filled "Hand-Counted Ballots Favor Obama, Electronic Tallies Give Clinton the Edge," more than makes the case for close and careful investigation. But meanwhile the complicit-in-crime New York Times editorialized blithely and with a straight face (on Jan. 25, 2008), that one of its reasons for endorsing Hillary in the upcoming NY State primary was "her comeback in New Hampshire." The only oppositionist to the NY Times and other corpo-fascisti in that election was Dennis Kucinich, and now even he is gone. Jack Balkwill, in "The Murdering of the Kucinich Campaign," says the obvious—to anyone, that is, paying close attention:
..............................Now that Kucinich is gone, platform particulars are un-
..............................important. The CEO peace programs are Orwellian war
..............................programs, their health care is run lock stock and barrel
..............................by the same corporations that will run Republican health
..............................care, and they may drown in the campaign contributions
..............................they are given to toe the line.
..........To any interested person—interested in the fate of the republic and of world, that is—I'd definitely recommend Mary Pitt's "Sitting Out the Election." And how about the outrage and despair that are created in the eloquent David Michael Green simply by keeping himself informed—like Tom Tvedten—by looking at things as and for what they are instead of accepting them the way they're said to be by the NY Times, CNN, NPR, Pacifica Radio, and other organs of omission and deceit? Have a taste of "You're Damn Right I'm Angry. Why Isn't Everybody?":
..............................What an unbelievable record of deceit, destruction, hypo-
..............................crisy, incompetence, treason and greed. What a tragic tale
..............................of debt, lost wars, stolen elections, environmental crises,
..............................Constitution shredding, national shame and diminished
..............................security.
..............................All done by the very most pious amongst us, of course.
..............................Merry Christmas, eh? I guess those are our presents, all
..............................carefully wrapped in spin, contempt, and preemptive
..............................attacks on any of us impertinent enough to say "No
..............................thanks, Santa."
..............................So, yeah, you're goddam right I'm angry about what's
..............................been done to my country, and what's been done by my
..............................country in my name.
..............................How could anyone who claims to care about America
..............................not be?
..........How could anyone not be, indeed. And that's the level of the sorrow and the pity and the rage in one observant person who doesn't know—yet—the even worse fact that 9/11 itself, the start of it all, was planned and pulled off by the buddies and pals of the very same Clintoniscti and Hillaryiscti and McCainiscti and Assorted Otheriscti who now, as they run like mad for the presidency, feather and strut and preen day after day after day before the poor, victimized, ignorant, blind masses, who, Pavlovian dogs, greet them like saviors, with roars and cheers, wholly unaware that these candidates will be leaders only into death, and into more death after that.
..........1)
..........How can it be that the US really has come to be "a virtually perfected socio-political culture built upon, composed of, and dedicated to, not life, but death"?
..........2)
..........How can it be that this situation has come into being and yet that the masses of Americans appear to have not so much as a clue about it?
..........3)
..........How can it be that seemingly nothing is being effectively done, if not necessarily to stop the US immediately from functioning as a force of death, ruin, and destruction, then at least to slow it in its rapaciousness, or even simply to begin an amelioration of its repugnant nature and behavior in the hope of someday making both of those productive and humane?
..........4)
..........And, finally, how—if it were even possible—would such a thing be done?
..........The four questions, obviously, ask about matters that are closely related to one another, and perhaps even intermingled. Even so, I propose taking them up in sequence, numbers one and two this time, and numbers three and four in the next part of this essay.
..........In the early pages of A Nation Gone Blind I wrote that "The sixty years that have brought us the new America have brought us also a virtually perfected socio-political culture of lies and lying, a culture built on a foundation of lying, framed by walls of lying, covered by a roof of lying."
..........At that time, I was talking primarily about the mass media. I was describing the way that the media had created a "new" America by means of more than six decades of growth in their destructively exploitative power—a power destructive not only of intellect and emotion, but also of people's ability to see or determine reality for themselves. There had come to exist what I call a pervasive "aesthetic" of the mass media, and that "aesthetic" is what has come to be taken as the real. Individual ability—or will—to look at things as and for what they are has diminished enormously. At the same time, individual willingness to (or individual inability not to) accept as real all and everything that's pre-fabricated by the media as being the real—this ability, or inability, has grown exponentially.
..........In light of all this, it's perfectly natural and right to say not just that the US is "a virtually perfected socio-political culture of lies and lying, a culture built on a foundation of lying, framed by walls of lying, covered by a roof of lying," but to go two steps further.
..........The first step is to say that the US is now "a virtually perfected socio-political culture built upon and composed of not merely lies, but built upon and composed of every kind of socio-political and cultural fakery, fraud, trickery, hypocrisy, deceit, hollowness, and every method of diversion from the real that might be imaginable."
..........That's the first step. The second step is every bit as frightening, grotesque, repugnant, and vile as it is inescapable. The second step is to acknowledge that the US is now "therefore a virtually perfected socio-political culture built upon, composed of, and dedicated to, not life, but death."
·
..........Let me return again to the end of the first part of this essay. When I said, back there, that lies are being used deliberately "to destroy our nation, destroy our republic, destroy our people, and destroy our culture," I meant every bit of it. I meant it as to the first part of the sentence—that lies are the weapon being used deliberately to bring death and destruction. And I mean it as to the second part—that the death and destruction being brought about by this means are death and destruction on a scale unimaginably large...........Look and consider. Legislation has simply by the declaration of a national emergency, for the cancelling of elections and for dictatorial rule over all three branches of government by the president alone.
..........Concentration camps are already prepared, among them the ones mentioned by Paul Craig Roberts as having been built by Cheney's beloved Halliburton to the tune of a contract "worth up to $385 million." The Iraq war shows no signs of being anything other than never-ending. Foreign "policy" continues to be rapacious, murderous, and piratical, as can easily be seen, among many other ways, by a look at the blogging of Layla Anwar, or a look at this powerful and revelatory analysis of it.
..........Paul Craig Roberts wrote recently that "Americans do not think of themselves or of Israel as terrorist states, but the evidence is complete and overwhelming." He added:
..............................Every country in the world, except America, knows by
..............................now that the US is the world's leading state sponsor of
..............................terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegem-
..............................ony over the world threatens the security of nations
..............................everywhere.
..........Meanwhile, the Democratic congress elected in 2006 has proven itself entirely complicit in the full range of US criminality and murder, and anyone who thinks that the election now approaching can or will provide any correction, melioration, or condemnation of the nation's unleashed program of corpo-fascist rape, brigandage, murder, and destruction is, it seems to me, a person delusional. Mike Ruppert gave up on elections long ago. After puppet-Kerry's staged "defeat" in 2004, he wrote that "The rest of the world has known for some time that it is pointless to oppose this Empire either militarily or electorally." Two years later, as reported by Deanna Spingola, he compared the two major parties "to two Mafia crime families, . . . [both] heavily engaged in highly illegal activities for which they are rarely prosecuted."
..........There's been no change in election policy—unless for the worse—since then. "We are, after all, legally barred from inspecting electronic voting machines," Mike Ruppert observed after election day 2004. After the New Hampshire primary this year, Mike Whitney expressed few doubts in "The Winning Ticket: Hillary and Diebold in 2008," saying that "The primary was stolen. End of story." And Margie Burns, in her highly convincing and data-filled "Hand-Counted Ballots Favor Obama, Electronic Tallies Give Clinton the Edge," more than makes the case for close and careful investigation. But meanwhile the complicit-in-crime New York Times editorialized blithely and with a straight face (on Jan. 25, 2008), that one of its reasons for endorsing Hillary in the upcoming NY State primary was "her comeback in New Hampshire." The only oppositionist to the NY Times and other corpo-fascisti in that election was Dennis Kucinich, and now even he is gone. Jack Balkwill, in "The Murdering of the Kucinich Campaign," says the obvious—to anyone, that is, paying close attention:
..............................Now that Kucinich is gone, platform particulars are un-
..............................important. The CEO peace programs are Orwellian war
..............................programs, their health care is run lock stock and barrel
..............................by the same corporations that will run Republican health
..............................care, and they may drown in the campaign contributions
..............................they are given to toe the line.
..........To any interested person—interested in the fate of the republic and of world, that is—I'd definitely recommend Mary Pitt's "Sitting Out the Election." And how about the outrage and despair that are created in the eloquent David Michael Green simply by keeping himself informed—like Tom Tvedten—by looking at things as and for what they are instead of accepting them the way they're said to be by the NY Times, CNN, NPR, Pacifica Radio, and other organs of omission and deceit? Have a taste of "You're Damn Right I'm Angry. Why Isn't Everybody?":
..............................What an unbelievable record of deceit, destruction, hypo-
..............................crisy, incompetence, treason and greed. What a tragic tale
..............................of debt, lost wars, stolen elections, environmental crises,
..............................Constitution shredding, national shame and diminished
..............................security.
..............................All done by the very most pious amongst us, of course.
..............................Merry Christmas, eh? I guess those are our presents, all
..............................carefully wrapped in spin, contempt, and preemptive
..............................attacks on any of us impertinent enough to say "No
..............................thanks, Santa."
..............................So, yeah, you're goddam right I'm angry about what's
..............................been done to my country, and what's been done by my
..............................country in my name.
..............................How could anyone who claims to care about America
..............................not be?
..........How could anyone not be, indeed. And that's the level of the sorrow and the pity and the rage in one observant person who doesn't know—yet—the even worse fact that 9/11 itself, the start of it all, was planned and pulled off by the buddies and pals of the very same Clintoniscti and Hillaryiscti and McCainiscti and Assorted Otheriscti who now, as they run like mad for the presidency, feather and strut and preen day after day after day before the poor, victimized, ignorant, blind masses, who, Pavlovian dogs, greet them like saviors, with roars and cheers, wholly unaware that these candidates will be leaders only into death, and into more death after that.
·
..........Four questions, each beginning with an implicit, and agonized, How can it be?..........1)
..........How can it be that the US really has come to be "a virtually perfected socio-political culture built upon, composed of, and dedicated to, not life, but death"?
..........2)
..........How can it be that this situation has come into being and yet that the masses of Americans appear to have not so much as a clue about it?
..........3)
..........How can it be that seemingly nothing is being effectively done, if not necessarily to stop the US immediately from functioning as a force of death, ruin, and destruction, then at least to slow it in its rapaciousness, or even simply to begin an amelioration of its repugnant nature and behavior in the hope of someday making both of those productive and humane?
..........4)
..........And, finally, how—if it were even possible—would such a thing be done?
..........The four questions, obviously, ask about matters that are closely related to one another, and perhaps even intermingled. Even so, I propose taking them up in sequence, numbers one and two this time, and numbers three and four in the next part of this essay.
3
HOW DID IT COME ABOUT
THAT AMERICA BECAME
A NATION DEDICATED
TO DEATH?
HOW DID IT COME ABOUT
THAT AMERICA BECAME
A NATION DEDICATED
TO DEATH?
..........
..........Americans don't read anymore, and so they fail to get educated in one of the central ways that people used to get educated—and that way, of course, was by reading. A Nation Gone Blind talks about this tremendous cultural loss—and about the even more tremendous calamity of there never having been anything educational created to compensate for the loss of reading, let alone serve as a true replacement for it. This failure occurred largely because, at the same time as reading ended, two other things happened. One of these was that the mass media rose, grew, and with almost the speed of light achieved overwhelming power and sophistication as a tool—a tool whose sole purpose was to create and then maintain a national population that was essentially uninformed, uninquisitive, unintellectual, ostentatious in person and in possessions but not in the use of ideas, and, above all, always desirous to "consume."
..........With the disappearance of reading and the meteoric growth of the mass media's power not only to form attitude but also to diminish both knowledge and curiosity, there occurred a third cultural and educational loss. This third loss, taking place in various ways, was the loss of community. "Community" is itself a word now so over-used and so universally abused as to be both dehumanizing and a barrier to clear thought or expression ("she was a member of the artistic community"), but it once meant something real—and that real thing was also a source of knowledge and education now lost to almost all Americans. Where, for example, are elders now to be found, those older members of family or community who served as initiators and educators of the younger? A look at Robert Bly's classically powerful and in certain ways grieving book, The Sibling Society, reveals the full dimension of cultural and educational emptiness in later America. And, if I dare say, so will a look at A Nation Gone Blind.
..........The result of what I've merely synopsized in the preceding two paragraphs is that a new American population—including all classes, top to bottom—has been produced that is now without doubt the most ignorant, unthinking, passive, consumerized national population in the entire literate world.
..........This population was—in a process all perfectly deliberate if looked at from a corpo-fascist point of view—gradually devolved into a population that was more than ready to accept, was ready in its ignorance to embrace, the springing on it of the totalitarian trap.
..........The totalitarian trap, this particular time around, had been actively in the planning since the 1990's, when the Clinton administration was in office. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the world stage was cleared of major adversaries, and the US found itself left as the world's only remaining super power. It was time, in the eyes of the corpo-fascisti, for an American power grab that would be both global and total. Thus (in 1997), the neoconservative Project for the New American Century was organized and brought into existence, and planning for world conquest was openly undertaken, with 9/11 to be the trigger that would release global war and be the catalyst that would speed the whole process up. It remained only for the 2000 election to be stolen and for the new administration to be staffed by rabidly power-hungry and anti-constitutional neocons for the initial law-breaking and pillaging to begin. After 9/11, as anyone can see—by studying the criminalized election process, the bleeding white of the national economy, or the programmatic nullifying of the Bill of Rights—the process of purposely destroying the republic went forward expeditiously, the stage thus being prepared for the plutocratic police-state at home and the global one everywhere else, should the bringing about of these twin delights be the endgame choice of the "over-powers" running things, or the "rogue state" running things, or the neocon think-tank elites running things.
..........And the resistance of the American population against all of this? Well, they're blind, asleep, ignorant, happy, and utterly, utterly gullible. Yesterday, as it happens, was "super Tuesday." And today, the New York Times ran this as its "Quotation of the Day":
.............................."It's the most exciting presidential race, certainly in my
..............................lifetime."
............................................................MARK M. BAKER, a 60-year-old voter
............................................................in the Bronx. [P7]
..........It would appear that Mr. Baker has slept through the entirety of his sixty years, having no consciousness of races where openly humane rather than secretly tyrannical ideas were fought for by politicians like Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and even, dare we add, the assassinated Robert Kennedy. Or perhaps it's not that at all. Perhaps Mr. Baker really does get excited by watching traitors, liars, hypocrites, war criminals, and aiders and abettors of crimes against humanity preening day after day before the television cameras and, shills that they are, lying through their teeth, by omission or commission, about it all.
..........Certainly the New York Times couldn't care less what Mr. Baker's real feelings or motives are, just so long as he doesn't make a fuss about any part whatsoever of the vast and limitless criminality represented by the high-stakes front men—and woman—he's so tickled by.
..........If Americans—even one out of ten, or twenty, enough to influence the rest—were still readers, they'd not only be less brain-dead as far as seeing when they're being jerked around and lied to (all the time) and when they're not (never), but they'd also have some knowledge of exactly where the present American death-cult came from and some idea of its dreadful, immitigable horrors.
..........If Americans were still readers, and if the books written today were as whole and inclusive and alert as the best written in past decades, they'd know as well as they know the backs of their hands things like this: They'd know that hucksterism is cheap, shallow, and vicious—ditto for hucksters themselves—and and they'd know, by means of having had learning-experience that they don't have now—how how to tell the difference between openness and insincerity, between honesty and fakery, between the fraudulent and the genuine. They'd be better readers of character—Americans today are among the worst readers of character in the world, seldom able to see, understand, or intuit even the simplest of character elements in and of those around them, let alone in themselves. After all, almost all Americans almost all of the time see only pre-fabricated "characters," experience only pre-fabricated "personalities," pay attention solely to the surfaces of things, these surfaces being the "reality" that's been created and provided for them by the mass media, otherwise known as the Ministry of Lies in the service of the Corpo-Fascisti-Government.
..........I'm thinking now only of fiction—the rest can come later—and of how much the very history of the novel is the history of character and of the reading of character. Think what a person learns about how to distinguish between fakery and sincerity in others—or between smugness and naiveté in one's self—just by reading Pride and Prejudice and Emma, let alone the other novels of Jane Austen. Or read Crime and Punishment and just try to come away with learning any less than in Austen or any differently from in Austen about the reading of character and the self's reading of his or her own character. If Raskolnikov doesn't learn those things, no one does, and, by experiencing them with and through Raskolnikov, so does the reader. And then there's understanding of social class, about what it does mean and doesn't mean, about the difference between the fake and the genuine in people of high class or low—Americans know almost nothing about these things, never having visited entire worlds made up mainly of that experience of learning about and distinguishing among and between matters of character and class—Wharton, James, Flaubert, Dickens, George Elliot, Huck Finn, and on and on. Americans miss all of that. Bodice rippers and techno-thrillers won't cut it, even for the tiny percentage of people who read even those. And what about the entire matter of learning to understand failure in character, failure in the spiritual self, failures that lead not only to social failure but go on to social destructiveness, and from social—or familial—destructiveness go on to all that's death-dealing on the greatest of scales, death-dealing both to body and to spirit.
..........Even the best movies, for all their many merits and greatnesses, reveal and internalize these kinds of understandings far less successfully than the best of books. But a look at Citizen Kane will show anyone a portrayal of what seems today to have been altogether lost to American consciousness. This lost understanding is, namely the death-dealing emptiness of the hollow self that, aggrandizing ever greater wealth and power as a substitute for real life and real human feeling, becomes, in inverse proportion to the accumulation of wealth and power, less human, less feeling, more cruel, and, finally, expansively destructive and—since the absence of the human is the presence of death—death-dealing.
..........Dick Cheney and Citizen Kane are parallel, but what an ignorant—that is, a non-reading—population doesn't, can't, isn't equippedto, see is that John Kerry is a parallel also to Dick Cheney, that Hillary Clinton is a parallel also to Dick Cheney, that Bill Clinton is a parallel also to Dick Cheney. The voting population doesn't, can't, isn't equipped to, see that any such figure would, if in office, be and do exactly what Dick Cheney, in office, is and does.
..........It was once understood that the corporation was an abstract version or model of precisely this same kind of Citizen Kane cum Dick Cheney cum Hillary Clinton human being. It was once understood that selling things as a compensation for real or felt or lived human and intimate life—read The Death of a Salesman again—was corrupting and destructive not only of character but also of human intercourse both social and personal. For god's sake, if Americans, simply, would still read the novels of Sinclair Lewis, far from the top line in artistic or aesthetic accomplishment, but the very gold standard of exhibit after exhibit after exhibit of the corrupting and death-dealing effects of "selling" over "being," of false and falsified community over natural and genuine community, and of money as a death-dealing replacement for an absent human nourishment. Main Street, Babbitt, Dodsworth. Read any or all of them and then see how Hillary stacks up, not to mention how truly evil Frankensteinian figures, whether dumb or smart—Huckabee or Cheney—stack up.
..........Once people read some of those books, they'll know how Cheney and Hillary and Huckabee stack up. They'll know that there's nothing inside them. And they'll know that, because there's nothing human inside them, they can and will be murderers when in power, since seeking more power is the only purpose of their seeking power.
..........Harder will be the answering of our two remaining questions:
..............................3)
..............................How can it be that seemingly nothing is being effectively
..............................done, if not necessarily to stop the US immediately from
..............................functioning as a force of death, ruin, and destruction, then
..............................at least to slow it in its rapaciousness, or even simply to
..............................begin an amelioration of its repugnant nature and behavior
..............................in the hope of someday making both of these productive
..............................and humane?
..............................4)
..............................And, finally, how—if it were even possible—would such
..............................a thing be done?
..........It's time, however, to draw this segment of "Notes from a Dying Nation" toward an end. After all, the project is enormous. The dying nation is a subject as huge as it is urgent. If life remains, "Notes from a Dying Nation" will go on.
..........I suggested earlier that 9/11 was just one part, albeit an essential and major one, of the deliberate destruction of the republic and of the power-grab for the entire globe that we're witnessing on the part of our corpo-fascist "leadership" now, including those parts of our "leadership" clamoring to get into the White House. Back in 2001, but after 9/11, Michael C. Ruppert wrote a piece with this huge long title:
..........Ruppert's piece pulls together a number of things he'd been studying and doing from as far back as 1997. As a result, the present essay is, in part, a review of Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book—The Grand Chessboard—a kind of neocon manual or book of instructions about how the US should and can take over the world and commandeer all its resources. Ruppert's piece is also, in part, a reprise of much of his own thinking and research prior to 9/11, including a repeat of his case—proven—that plans and movements for war in Afghanistan and Iraq existed before 9/11. And, finally, the piece is a revisiting of an important interview by Ruppert of a once-influential diplomat, Dr. Johannes B. Koepple.
..........I'll do some quoting as we end.
.........."World events since the attacks of September 11, 2001," Ruppert writes,
..............................have not only been predicted, but also planned, orch-
..............................estrated and—as their architects would like to believe—
..............................controlled. The current Central Asian war is not a response
..............................to terrorism, nor is it a reaction to Islamic fundamentalism.
..............................It is in fact, in the words of one of the most powerful men
..............................on the planet, the beginning of a final conflict before total
..............................world domination by the United States leads to the disso-
..............................lution of all national governments. This, says Council on
..............................Foreign Relations (CFR) member and former Carter Nat-
..............................ional Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, will lead to
..............................nation states being incorporated into a new world order,
..............................controlled solely by economic interests as dictated by
..............................banks, corporations and ruling elites concerned with the
..............................maintenance (by manipulation and war) of their power.
..............................As a means of intimidation for the unenlightened reader
..............................who happens upon this frightening plan—the plan of the
..............................CFR—Brzezinski offers the alternative of a world in chaos
..............................unless the U.S. controls the planet by whatever means
..............................are necessary and likely to succeed.
..............................This position is corroborated by Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl,
..............................Ph.D., a former German defense ministry official and
..............................advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred
..............................Werner. On November 6, he told FTW, "The interests be-
..............................hind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Tri-
..............................lateral Commission—founded by Brzezinski for David
..............................Rockefeller—and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared
..............................for and are now moving to implement open world dictator-
..............................ship within the next five years. They are not fighting against
..............................terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."
..........We're not about to hear anything this sort on the evening news—not even, or certainly not, on Democracy Now—nor is any of the presidential candidates going to whisper a single morpheme of any such truth. Ruppert, on the other hand, offers us a paragraph from the Brzezinski text that ends with this sentence—one that may remind some readers of the Halliburton camps that Paul Craig Roberts mentioned:
..............................
..........Now for the career of Dr. Johannes Koeppl, then to a close.
..........In a word, Koepple ranked very high in the circles of global diplomats, having been "German defense ministry to NATO in the late 1970s," privileged with a great many extremely high-level contacts in Washington, and having been, Ruppert tells us,
..............................the first person I have ever interviewed who has made a
..............................direct presentation at a Bilderberger conference and he
..............................has also made numerous presentations to sub-groups
..............................of the Trilateral Commission.
.........."That," however, Ruppert goes on, "was before he spoke out against them."
..........And what happened to Koeppl after he spoke out against the secret policies of the Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberg Group, and the Council on Foreign Relations? Back to Ruppert's telling:
..............................His fall was rapid after he realized that Brzezinski was part
..............................of a group intending to impose a world dictatorship. "In
..............................1983/4 I warned of a take-over of world governments being
..............................orchestrated by these people. There was an obvious plan
..............................to subvert true democracies and selected leaders were not
..............................being chosen based upon character but upon their loyalty
..............................to an economic system run by the elites and dedicated to
..............................preserving their power.
.............................."All we have now are pseudo-democracies."
..........Time for a quiz. Two questions, four points:
..........1)
..........Name the world's most powerful "pseudo-democracy"
..........2)
..........Name at least three 2008 presidential candidates who would never, ever, tell or admit the truth of your answer to question #1.
..........On that dismal note, back to Ruppert and the equally dismal tale of Dr. Johannes Koeppl's career:
..............................Koeppl recalls meeting U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald
..............................in Nuremburg in the early 80s. McDonald, who was then con-
..............................templating a run for the Presidency, was a severe critic of
..............................these elites. He was killed in the Russian shootdown of Kor-
..............................ean Air flight 007 in 1985. Koeppl believes that it might have
..............................been an assassination. Over the years many writers have
..............................made these allegations about 007 and the fact that some-
..............................one with Koeppl's credentials believes that an entire plane
..............................full of passengers would be destroyed to eliminate one man
..............................offers a chilling opinion of the value placed on human life by
..............................the powers that be.
..............................In 1983, Koeppl warned, through Op-Ed pieces published
..............................in Newsweek and elsewhere, that Brzezinski and the CFR
..............................were part of an effort to impose a global dictatorship. His
..............................fall from grace was swift. "It was a criminal society that I
..............................was dealing with. It was not possible to publish anymore
..............................in the so-called respected publications. My 30 year car-
..............................eer in politics ended."
..........And, in closing, Koeppl touches on much of what we've been talking about here ourselves, in "Notes from a Dying Nation, Part 2."
..............................The people of the western world have been trained to be
..............................good consumers; to focus on money, sports cars, beauty,
..............................consumer goods. They have not been trained to look for
..............................character in people. Therefore what we need is education
..............................for politicians, a form of training that instills in them a higher
..............................sense of ethics than service to money. There is no training
..............................now for world leaders. This is a shame because of the re-
..............................sponsibility that leaders hold to benefit all mankind rather
..............................than to blindly pursue destructive paths.
..............................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..............................................................................................................—Febuary 7, 2008
>CLICK HERE FOR PART THREE OF "NOTES FROM A DYING NATION>>
..........
>READ, PRINT, OR DOWNLOAD IN PDF FORMAT>>
>EMAIL ERIC LARSEN>>
>GO BACK TO IDEAS>>
¹..........The Council on Foreign Relations
²..........From the Wilderness
..........Americans don't read anymore, and so they fail to get educated in one of the central ways that people used to get educated—and that way, of course, was by reading. A Nation Gone Blind talks about this tremendous cultural loss—and about the even more tremendous calamity of there never having been anything educational created to compensate for the loss of reading, let alone serve as a true replacement for it. This failure occurred largely because, at the same time as reading ended, two other things happened. One of these was that the mass media rose, grew, and with almost the speed of light achieved overwhelming power and sophistication as a tool—a tool whose sole purpose was to create and then maintain a national population that was essentially uninformed, uninquisitive, unintellectual, ostentatious in person and in possessions but not in the use of ideas, and, above all, always desirous to "consume."
..........With the disappearance of reading and the meteoric growth of the mass media's power not only to form attitude but also to diminish both knowledge and curiosity, there occurred a third cultural and educational loss. This third loss, taking place in various ways, was the loss of community. "Community" is itself a word now so over-used and so universally abused as to be both dehumanizing and a barrier to clear thought or expression ("she was a member of the artistic community"), but it once meant something real—and that real thing was also a source of knowledge and education now lost to almost all Americans. Where, for example, are elders now to be found, those older members of family or community who served as initiators and educators of the younger? A look at Robert Bly's classically powerful and in certain ways grieving book, The Sibling Society, reveals the full dimension of cultural and educational emptiness in later America. And, if I dare say, so will a look at A Nation Gone Blind.
..........The result of what I've merely synopsized in the preceding two paragraphs is that a new American population—including all classes, top to bottom—has been produced that is now without doubt the most ignorant, unthinking, passive, consumerized national population in the entire literate world.
..........This population was—in a process all perfectly deliberate if looked at from a corpo-fascist point of view—gradually devolved into a population that was more than ready to accept, was ready in its ignorance to embrace, the springing on it of the totalitarian trap.
..........The totalitarian trap, this particular time around, had been actively in the planning since the 1990's, when the Clinton administration was in office. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the world stage was cleared of major adversaries, and the US found itself left as the world's only remaining super power. It was time, in the eyes of the corpo-fascisti, for an American power grab that would be both global and total. Thus (in 1997), the neoconservative Project for the New American Century was organized and brought into existence, and planning for world conquest was openly undertaken, with 9/11 to be the trigger that would release global war and be the catalyst that would speed the whole process up. It remained only for the 2000 election to be stolen and for the new administration to be staffed by rabidly power-hungry and anti-constitutional neocons for the initial law-breaking and pillaging to begin. After 9/11, as anyone can see—by studying the criminalized election process, the bleeding white of the national economy, or the programmatic nullifying of the Bill of Rights—the process of purposely destroying the republic went forward expeditiously, the stage thus being prepared for the plutocratic police-state at home and the global one everywhere else, should the bringing about of these twin delights be the endgame choice of the "over-powers" running things, or the "rogue state" running things, or the neocon think-tank elites running things.
..........And the resistance of the American population against all of this? Well, they're blind, asleep, ignorant, happy, and utterly, utterly gullible. Yesterday, as it happens, was "super Tuesday." And today, the New York Times ran this as its "Quotation of the Day":
.............................."It's the most exciting presidential race, certainly in my
..............................lifetime."
............................................................MARK M. BAKER, a 60-year-old voter
............................................................in the Bronx. [P7]
..........It would appear that Mr. Baker has slept through the entirety of his sixty years, having no consciousness of races where openly humane rather than secretly tyrannical ideas were fought for by politicians like Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and even, dare we add, the assassinated Robert Kennedy. Or perhaps it's not that at all. Perhaps Mr. Baker really does get excited by watching traitors, liars, hypocrites, war criminals, and aiders and abettors of crimes against humanity preening day after day before the television cameras and, shills that they are, lying through their teeth, by omission or commission, about it all.
..........Certainly the New York Times couldn't care less what Mr. Baker's real feelings or motives are, just so long as he doesn't make a fuss about any part whatsoever of the vast and limitless criminality represented by the high-stakes front men—and woman—he's so tickled by.
·
..........And so there it is, I've gone and answered—somewhat—two questions at once. For one, how it can be that the US is now "a virtually perfected socio-political culture built upon, composed of, and dedicated to, not life, but death." And for another, how it can be that the masses of Americans "appear to have not so much as a clue about it."..........If Americans—even one out of ten, or twenty, enough to influence the rest—were still readers, they'd not only be less brain-dead as far as seeing when they're being jerked around and lied to (all the time) and when they're not (never), but they'd also have some knowledge of exactly where the present American death-cult came from and some idea of its dreadful, immitigable horrors.
..........If Americans were still readers, and if the books written today were as whole and inclusive and alert as the best written in past decades, they'd know as well as they know the backs of their hands things like this: They'd know that hucksterism is cheap, shallow, and vicious—ditto for hucksters themselves—and and they'd know, by means of having had learning-experience that they don't have now—how how to tell the difference between openness and insincerity, between honesty and fakery, between the fraudulent and the genuine. They'd be better readers of character—Americans today are among the worst readers of character in the world, seldom able to see, understand, or intuit even the simplest of character elements in and of those around them, let alone in themselves. After all, almost all Americans almost all of the time see only pre-fabricated "characters," experience only pre-fabricated "personalities," pay attention solely to the surfaces of things, these surfaces being the "reality" that's been created and provided for them by the mass media, otherwise known as the Ministry of Lies in the service of the Corpo-Fascisti-Government.
..........I'm thinking now only of fiction—the rest can come later—and of how much the very history of the novel is the history of character and of the reading of character. Think what a person learns about how to distinguish between fakery and sincerity in others—or between smugness and naiveté in one's self—just by reading Pride and Prejudice and Emma, let alone the other novels of Jane Austen. Or read Crime and Punishment and just try to come away with learning any less than in Austen or any differently from in Austen about the reading of character and the self's reading of his or her own character. If Raskolnikov doesn't learn those things, no one does, and, by experiencing them with and through Raskolnikov, so does the reader. And then there's understanding of social class, about what it does mean and doesn't mean, about the difference between the fake and the genuine in people of high class or low—Americans know almost nothing about these things, never having visited entire worlds made up mainly of that experience of learning about and distinguishing among and between matters of character and class—Wharton, James, Flaubert, Dickens, George Elliot, Huck Finn, and on and on. Americans miss all of that. Bodice rippers and techno-thrillers won't cut it, even for the tiny percentage of people who read even those. And what about the entire matter of learning to understand failure in character, failure in the spiritual self, failures that lead not only to social failure but go on to social destructiveness, and from social—or familial—destructiveness go on to all that's death-dealing on the greatest of scales, death-dealing both to body and to spirit.
..........Even the best movies, for all their many merits and greatnesses, reveal and internalize these kinds of understandings far less successfully than the best of books. But a look at Citizen Kane will show anyone a portrayal of what seems today to have been altogether lost to American consciousness. This lost understanding is, namely the death-dealing emptiness of the hollow self that, aggrandizing ever greater wealth and power as a substitute for real life and real human feeling, becomes, in inverse proportion to the accumulation of wealth and power, less human, less feeling, more cruel, and, finally, expansively destructive and—since the absence of the human is the presence of death—death-dealing.
..........Dick Cheney and Citizen Kane are parallel, but what an ignorant—that is, a non-reading—population doesn't, can't, isn't equippedto, see is that John Kerry is a parallel also to Dick Cheney, that Hillary Clinton is a parallel also to Dick Cheney, that Bill Clinton is a parallel also to Dick Cheney. The voting population doesn't, can't, isn't equipped to, see that any such figure would, if in office, be and do exactly what Dick Cheney, in office, is and does.
..........It was once understood that the corporation was an abstract version or model of precisely this same kind of Citizen Kane cum Dick Cheney cum Hillary Clinton human being. It was once understood that selling things as a compensation for real or felt or lived human and intimate life—read The Death of a Salesman again—was corrupting and destructive not only of character but also of human intercourse both social and personal. For god's sake, if Americans, simply, would still read the novels of Sinclair Lewis, far from the top line in artistic or aesthetic accomplishment, but the very gold standard of exhibit after exhibit after exhibit of the corrupting and death-dealing effects of "selling" over "being," of false and falsified community over natural and genuine community, and of money as a death-dealing replacement for an absent human nourishment. Main Street, Babbitt, Dodsworth. Read any or all of them and then see how Hillary stacks up, not to mention how truly evil Frankensteinian figures, whether dumb or smart—Huckabee or Cheney—stack up.
..........Once people read some of those books, they'll know how Cheney and Hillary and Huckabee stack up. They'll know that there's nothing inside them. And they'll know that, because there's nothing human inside them, they can and will be murderers when in power, since seeking more power is the only purpose of their seeking power.
..........Harder will be the answering of our two remaining questions:
..............................3)
..............................How can it be that seemingly nothing is being effectively
..............................done, if not necessarily to stop the US immediately from
..............................functioning as a force of death, ruin, and destruction, then
..............................at least to slow it in its rapaciousness, or even simply to
..............................begin an amelioration of its repugnant nature and behavior
..............................in the hope of someday making both of these productive
..............................and humane?
..............................4)
..............................And, finally, how—if it were even possible—would such
..............................a thing be done?
..........It's time, however, to draw this segment of "Notes from a Dying Nation" toward an end. After all, the project is enormous. The dying nation is a subject as huge as it is urgent. If life remains, "Notes from a Dying Nation" will go on.
..........I suggested earlier that 9/11 was just one part, albeit an essential and major one, of the deliberate destruction of the republic and of the power-grab for the entire globe that we're witnessing on the part of our corpo-fascist "leadership" now, including those parts of our "leadership" clamoring to get into the White House. Back in 2001, but after 9/11, Michael C. Ruppert wrote a piece with this huge long title:
A War in the Planning for Four Years
HOW STUPID DO THEY THINK WE ARE?
Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CFR¹ Put War Plans in a 1997 Book—
It Is "A Blueprint for World Dictatorship," Says a Former German Defense and NATO Official Who
Warned of Global Domination in 1984,
in an Exclusive Interview With FTW²
HOW STUPID DO THEY THINK WE ARE?
Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CFR¹ Put War Plans in a 1997 Book—
It Is "A Blueprint for World Dictatorship," Says a Former German Defense and NATO Official Who
Warned of Global Domination in 1984,
in an Exclusive Interview With FTW²
..........Ruppert's piece pulls together a number of things he'd been studying and doing from as far back as 1997. As a result, the present essay is, in part, a review of Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book—The Grand Chessboard—a kind of neocon manual or book of instructions about how the US should and can take over the world and commandeer all its resources. Ruppert's piece is also, in part, a reprise of much of his own thinking and research prior to 9/11, including a repeat of his case—proven—that plans and movements for war in Afghanistan and Iraq existed before 9/11. And, finally, the piece is a revisiting of an important interview by Ruppert of a once-influential diplomat, Dr. Johannes B. Koepple.
..........I'll do some quoting as we end.
.........."World events since the attacks of September 11, 2001," Ruppert writes,
..............................have not only been predicted, but also planned, orch-
..............................estrated and—as their architects would like to believe—
..............................controlled. The current Central Asian war is not a response
..............................to terrorism, nor is it a reaction to Islamic fundamentalism.
..............................It is in fact, in the words of one of the most powerful men
..............................on the planet, the beginning of a final conflict before total
..............................world domination by the United States leads to the disso-
..............................lution of all national governments. This, says Council on
..............................Foreign Relations (CFR) member and former Carter Nat-
..............................ional Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, will lead to
..............................nation states being incorporated into a new world order,
..............................controlled solely by economic interests as dictated by
..............................banks, corporations and ruling elites concerned with the
..............................maintenance (by manipulation and war) of their power.
..............................As a means of intimidation for the unenlightened reader
..............................who happens upon this frightening plan—the plan of the
..............................CFR—Brzezinski offers the alternative of a world in chaos
..............................unless the U.S. controls the planet by whatever means
..............................are necessary and likely to succeed.
..............................This position is corroborated by Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl,
..............................Ph.D., a former German defense ministry official and
..............................advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred
..............................Werner. On November 6, he told FTW, "The interests be-
..............................hind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Tri-
..............................lateral Commission—founded by Brzezinski for David
..............................Rockefeller—and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared
..............................for and are now moving to implement open world dictator-
..............................ship within the next five years. They are not fighting against
..............................terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."
..........We're not about to hear anything this sort on the evening news—not even, or certainly not, on Democracy Now—nor is any of the presidential candidates going to whisper a single morpheme of any such truth. Ruppert, on the other hand, offers us a paragraph from the Brzezinski text that ends with this sentence—one that may remind some readers of the Halliburton camps that Paul Craig Roberts mentioned:
..............................
Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization. (p.35)
..........Now for the career of Dr. Johannes Koeppl, then to a close.
..........In a word, Koepple ranked very high in the circles of global diplomats, having been "German defense ministry to NATO in the late 1970s," privileged with a great many extremely high-level contacts in Washington, and having been, Ruppert tells us,
..............................the first person I have ever interviewed who has made a
..............................direct presentation at a Bilderberger conference and he
..............................has also made numerous presentations to sub-groups
..............................of the Trilateral Commission.
.........."That," however, Ruppert goes on, "was before he spoke out against them."
..........And what happened to Koeppl after he spoke out against the secret policies of the Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberg Group, and the Council on Foreign Relations? Back to Ruppert's telling:
..............................His fall was rapid after he realized that Brzezinski was part
..............................of a group intending to impose a world dictatorship. "In
..............................1983/4 I warned of a take-over of world governments being
..............................orchestrated by these people. There was an obvious plan
..............................to subvert true democracies and selected leaders were not
..............................being chosen based upon character but upon their loyalty
..............................to an economic system run by the elites and dedicated to
..............................preserving their power.
.............................."All we have now are pseudo-democracies."
..........Time for a quiz. Two questions, four points:
..........1)
..........Name the world's most powerful "pseudo-democracy"
..........2)
..........Name at least three 2008 presidential candidates who would never, ever, tell or admit the truth of your answer to question #1.
..........On that dismal note, back to Ruppert and the equally dismal tale of Dr. Johannes Koeppl's career:
..............................Koeppl recalls meeting U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald
..............................in Nuremburg in the early 80s. McDonald, who was then con-
..............................templating a run for the Presidency, was a severe critic of
..............................these elites. He was killed in the Russian shootdown of Kor-
..............................ean Air flight 007 in 1985. Koeppl believes that it might have
..............................been an assassination. Over the years many writers have
..............................made these allegations about 007 and the fact that some-
..............................one with Koeppl's credentials believes that an entire plane
..............................full of passengers would be destroyed to eliminate one man
..............................offers a chilling opinion of the value placed on human life by
..............................the powers that be.
..............................In 1983, Koeppl warned, through Op-Ed pieces published
..............................in Newsweek and elsewhere, that Brzezinski and the CFR
..............................were part of an effort to impose a global dictatorship. His
..............................fall from grace was swift. "It was a criminal society that I
..............................was dealing with. It was not possible to publish anymore
..............................in the so-called respected publications. My 30 year car-
..............................eer in politics ended."
..........And, in closing, Koeppl touches on much of what we've been talking about here ourselves, in "Notes from a Dying Nation, Part 2."
..............................The people of the western world have been trained to be
..............................good consumers; to focus on money, sports cars, beauty,
..............................consumer goods. They have not been trained to look for
..............................character in people. Therefore what we need is education
..............................for politicians, a form of training that instills in them a higher
..............................sense of ethics than service to money. There is no training
..............................now for world leaders. This is a shame because of the re-
..............................sponsibility that leaders hold to benefit all mankind rather
..............................than to blindly pursue destructive paths.
..............................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..............................................................................................................—Febuary 7, 2008
>CLICK HERE FOR PART THREE OF "NOTES FROM A DYING NATION>>
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¹..........The Council on Foreign Relations
²..........From the Wilderness