Shuck and Jive


Sunday, September 12, 2010

Our New Imperial Religion

I keep wondering about the "no stories"-- the so called mosque at ground zero and the guy who either did or didn't (I can't keep up) burn a Qur'an for our new High Holy Day, September 11th.

September 11th has become America's Good Friday. We celebrate victimization at the hands of the Muslim Horde. Not even our gadzillion dollar defense system could defend our skies against these evil geniuses.

We must pull out all the stops and go after these demons, these radical Muslims--these terrorists. With ritual and superstition usually reserved for the faithful, we remember 9/11. As medieval Christians remembered Good Friday as the day "the Jews killed our Lord" so we remember September 11th as the day when "Radical Muslims attacked our Freedoms."

Just mix in some hocus pocus and little holy juice and you got yourself a new religion.

Here are a couple of thoughtful pieces by Michel Chossudovsky. I think he nails it:


September 11th, 2008, 9/11 and The American Inquisition.

"The Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT) is presented as a "Clash of Civilizations", a war between competing values and religions, when in reality it is an outright war of conquest, guided by strategic and economic objectives.

The GWOT is the ideological backbone of the American Empire. It defines US military doctrine, including the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against the "state sponsors" of terrorism.

The preemptive "defensive war" doctrine and the "war on terrorism" against Al Qaeda constitute essential building blocks of America’s National Security Strategy as formulated in early 2002. The objective is to present "preemptive military action" —meaning war as an act of "self-defense" against two categories of enemies, "rogue States" and "Islamic terrorists", both of which are said to possess weapons of mass destruction.

The logic of the "outside enemy" and the evildoer, allegedly responsible for American civilian deaths, prevails over common sense. In the inner consciousness of Americans, the attacks of September 11, 2001 justify acts of war and conquest....

....Washington does not silence its antiwar critics. Quite the opposite. The inquisitorial social order allows certain forms of dissent. It is politically correct under a "democracy" to condemn US foreign policy in the strongest terms.

What is not allowed is to question the inquisition.

Those who oppose the US Administration are not branded as heretics. Many "Progressives", Liberals and Antiwar activists, led by prominent intellectuals, firmly believe that Muslims were behind the 9/11 attacks. "We are against the war, but we support the war on terrorism."

The New World Order builds a political and media consensus (i.e. the GWOT) but at the same time it creates and moulds its own opposition. It establishes the limits of dissent. It "manufactures dissent".

The presidential candidates in the bipartisan race are supported by powerful corporate interests including the oil companies, Wall Street and the defense contractors.

At the same time, these same corporate interests, through their various foundations (including Ford, Rockefeller, Gates, et al), support and finance a number of Liberal/Progressive organizations and alternative media.

9/11 is the cornerstone of the American Inquisition.

The lies underlying 9/11 are accepted by the mainstream antiwar movement.

US foreign policy is condemned, but the "Global War on Terrorism" is upheld. Wittingly or unwittingly, this endorsement of the GWOT by those who claim to be opposed to the US administration, provides a legitimacy to the inquisitorial order, which underlies the actual practice of US foreign policy.

On the other hand, those who have serious doubts regarding the official 9/11 narrative, including the 9/11 Truth Movement, are branded as heretics and nonbelievers.
January 4th 2007, The "Demonization" of Muslims and the Battle for Oil.
Demonization is a PSYOP, used to sway public opinion and build a consensus in favor of war. Psychological warfare is directly sponsored by the Pentagon and the US intelligence apparatus. It is not limited to assassinating or executing the rulers of Muslim countries, it extends to entire populations. It also targets Muslims in Western Europe and North America. It purports to break national consciousness and the ability to resist the invader. It denigrates Islam. It creates social divisions. It is intended to divide national societies and ultimately trigger "civil war". While it creates an environment which facilitates the outright appropriation of the countries' resources, at the same time, it potentially backlashes, creates a new national consciousness, develops inter-ethnic solidarity, brings people together in confronting the invaders.
Genuflect and carry on.

13 comments:

  1. The New American High Holy Day - boy you nailed that one! I ran across a quote this afternoon that seems apt for those who are trying to lump all Christians in with Terry Jones or all Muslims in with Mohamed Atta:
    "The worst thing about any philosophy, good or bad, is that it has absolutely no control over who believes in it."

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  2. If I didn't despise organized religion so much I might actually join your church because I love how you tell it like it is. Great post my friend.

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  3. It is actually a perverse form of racism and nationalism when it is believed that the US was somehow behind the 9-11 attacks or that the US is somehow responsible for all the evils in the world (as a poem a couple of posts ago seems to say). To believe that noone else in the world could possibly be behind such an attack or that other peoples and nations could not possibly be behind some of their own troubles, massacres, and tragedies is to seem to say that it falls into our laps...the all powerful who pull the strings of everyone else to cause all these tragedies for our own evil reasons. It is the chest-thumping guilt-ridden other-side-of-the-coin to the chest-thumping "aren't we greatism" that you seem to deride so much. It is still the same coin, my friend.

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  4. "It is still the same coin, my friend."

    It kinda is. A form of national narcissism.

    I live in LA. Narcissistic capital of the planet. Everybody knows where Hollywood is, right?

    I ran into some people in Tanzania who, when I told them where I was from, just gave me a blank stare. They didn't know where LA and Hollywood are. Seriously.

    There are people and places in the world who don't know and don't give a hoot for who or where we are. Just not on their map. They do what they do and are what they are for their own reasons.

    Refreshing.

    (we really are self obsessed)

    Interestingly enough, they had heard of Jesus Christ and Mohamed. The Muslims pray five times a day, and the Christians sing all day.

    They can really sing.

    Both seemed to know how to put God at the center of their lives.

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  5. Hmmm....

    The U.S. is 4% of the world population consumes 25% of the world's oil. We produce 6 (on a good day 8) million barrels of oil everyday. We consume 20 million.

    The math is not hard. How many foreign countries have U.S. military bases. Or another way, what countries do not?

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  6. John,

    some of that is a bit misleading. We have military personnel assigned to virtually every embassy in the world. So if you just ask a black and white question "do we or do we not have a military presence in such and such a country" you will get a lot of trifling affirmative responses.

    One of the references you mention talks about how we have over 250 thousand troops deployed all over the globe.

    I remember when it was 3 million at the peak of the cold war. We had nearly 600 thousand troops in Viet Nam alone.

    So, seriously, we are at the lowest overseas deployment since before World War II.

    Fewest ships, fewest bombers, fewest fighters, fewest troops, fewest bases. And some of the stuff is really old. B52s? Them things go back to the 50s.

    And the number of nukes is about 17% of what it was at the peak, per president Obama (stuff used to be classified).

    So yes, the sun never sets on the American Empire, but I wouldn't oversell it.

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  7. Yep. Since we aren't nearly as bad as we used to be, we must be just fine!

    46.5% of all the world's military budget is owned by the US. As a comparison:
    China owns 6.6%
    France - 4.2%
    UK - 3.8%
    Russia - 3.5%
    The next 10 countries combined own 20.7%
    Everyone else combined owns 14.7%

    Yes, we "police the world." But that is only because it is in the US's best interest to do so, to give us control of resources or, as Noam Chomsky refers to it, the 5th Freedom - the freedom to rob.

    Go team!

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  8. yeah, I know,

    But just because we spend a fortune on it does not mean we get something for it.

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  9. Jodie,

    "We" do get something. That is the point. We are in exotic places above the ground because of what is under the ground.

    Until we make the connections between energy, money, and military we will continue to be swept up in nonsense like burning Qur'ans and whatever that do nothing but reinforce Empire's narrative.

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  10. Jodie - what an odd response. Does that somehow make it better? Less ugly, anyway?

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