When Army Became A Four-Letter  Word

                     us troops syria

“There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me, when I know that I know that I know” …Alan W Watts.

Propaganda is a language that deals in fear. Its’ modus operandi is to deliver…in pied piper fashion… misnomer after misnomer…defence fighter becoming terrorist…with the objective of welding faux credentials onto public consciousness.In Washington, as in Tel Aviv, it is the army that wields most power, having secured a pre-eminent position for itself in the social order.Propaganda’s mission is to inject fear into the public’s mind by means of circumscription-controls that attest to the belief that what is not known to be true is false.But, just as language and action go together like horse and cart, so also goes propaganda and the armaments industry as bedfellows conspiring to maintain their place in the hierarchial order of things.

The appalling depravity which illustrates American and Israeli military culture is manifest in their respective inability to distinguish right from wrong. Both states, America vis-à-vis the Pentagon, and Israel vis-à-vis the IDF, have become the perennial warmongering states of modern times.In the case of either state, their aggressive actions belie their right to be included in the democratic pantheon. Again, and again, they have demonstrated a penchant for rapacious adventurism when occupying another’s country.

The American warmongering Jekyllis the flip side to the feel-good, can-do, pseudo democratic enlightenment persona called Hyde, who accepts what the military is doing because he feels that America must retain its’ top-dog status.In Israel, it is Jekyll the occupier who plants his jackboot on the neck of the Palestinian Hyde and ploughs him back into obscurity. From either perspective, the view is one where arrogance rides roughshod over defenceless people, simply because one side is militarily strong.In calling themselves unilateralists, they reserve the right to continue doing the expedient thing…exploiting others!

That the army has come to be the maker of people’s futures, there is no doubt. The Project for the American Century and the colonisation of Palestine attest to the existence of two states, America and Israel,mired in self-righteous propaganda and murder that exemplify the sort of cruelty we associate with barbarians. It seems though, that the four-star generals in both states calculate that they can get away with murder…even genocide…because they know that their populations are essentially indifferent to their immoral behaviour. On becoming willing pawns in a system that fosters blind patriotism, they soon come to believe that everything beyond their borders is a threat.

The army is atavistic by nature as its’ origins were founded in tribalistic warfare. It established its’ pre-eminently hierarchical status at a time when diplomacy was in its’ infancy. Its’ provenance belonging to an era…one we find hard to exit from…where military force determined all outcomes. But lo and behold, the military franchise lives on in a world where competition for natural resources is still fought, tooth and nail,by armed forces and elites connected to an a priori set of rules that promote might as right at the expense of social awareness.

The American Century (PNAC) proclaiming that America needed to reassert itself abroad meant that the bloated military, recipients of exorbitant defence spending dollars, could deploy their offensive strategies to the oil rich Muslim countries in the knowledge that these  resources were there for the taking. Their mission was to occupy weaker countries in the full-blown confidence that they could and should, shape the world economy.But what the world witnessed, was the might of the American military machine, in cahoots with Wall Street, reduce much of the Muslim world to a dystopian wasteland. As human life didn’t occupy pride of place in the military purview, the outcome was unspeakable carnage wrought on people of brown skin because America coveted their oil reserves. Conditioned to support the belief that the army knows what ‘they’ know to be true is false, the American public saluted the myopic military alphabet when it appeared on their TV screens to remind them that America was still great…at killing civilians!

To witness the arrogant and callous disregard for human life in connection to the Great Return March in Gaza where Israeli snipers killed at least 112 people and wounded over 13,000 (332 with life-threatening injuries and 27 requiring amputations) in total disregard of the rights of the Palestinians trapped in their open-air prison, is to recognise naked collusion between two colonial powers, USA and Israel…the former, a duplicitous peace broker committed to military solutions…when it came to bringing Israel to account for its’ bestial treatment of the Palestinians trapped within the occupation zone known as Gaza, the victors demanded that their propagandized version of events…at the UN or wherever…would be the only one permitted to edit out the truth by declaring ‘what is known to be true is false’.

Pause a moment then to reflect on the Jewish only state and the almost total indifference of its’ population to the blatant, out-in-the-open murderous behaviour of its’ army as it slaughtered Palestinians who were demanding justice for themselves and their kids.If you stop for a moment to consider the barbaric conditions imposed on the children of Gazaby the supposedly civilised people of Israel, you might come to know what more and more of the world now knows… that it took the Zionist’s dream 2000 years to incubate a feral state committed to apartheid bigotry. The USA on the other hand, thanks to a bottomless pit of ‘defence-spending’ money, took only 30 years to smash through Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran in its’ role as global enforcer of an army playbook loyal to the formulaic circumscription-controls that service the hierarchical interests of the wealthy 1% amongst us.

The American government, political parties and the media which support and make possible these crimes, are disgraceful criminal accomplices in a system of spoliation that professes to promote democracy but accomplishes the opposite. The more America travels along the path of aggression, the more cheapened its’ brand becomes. If making America great again only means making money for money sake, American culture will disappear up its’ own arse where it will discover that Hollywood-style inverted delusions of tinsel-town grandeur is for ne’er-do-wells’.

Hollywood…America as performance art…feeds the public propaganda that suggests that Americans can do no wrong and have the right to choke-off the life-blood of all things non-American simply because, in not being of ‘America’,they are of a lesser breed. The public, indoctrinated in the belief that the only real news is American news, continues to uncritically ingest mother-milk-pap manufactured by the Pentagon and Wall Street which suggests that ignorance is bliss. The upshot of this pernicious diet is that ignorance-obesity, a condition that stultifies critical thinking in the national polity, flourishes to the point where the average Joe and Jane fail to comprehend what they connive at. Caught between a rock and a hard place…the Pentagon and the Flag…the uninformed voter keeps on repeating his or her impotent role in a farce that allots them the chance of choosing between the movers-and-shakers within the dark political underbelly of congress as against the movers-and-shakers of an even darker place we know as the geopolitical zone.

Hollywood has fed ‘feel-good’ and ‘can-do’ pap to the American public for 80 years.It contains the circumspective properties of an instrument whose function it is to harness collective identity in support of popular domestic mythologies.It appears that its’ main function is to steer the public toward acceptance of the status quo while keeping them ignorant or indifferent to what exists beyond America’s borders.It suffices that Hollywood endlessly trots out images of American heroism. American populism exists only within parameters of homegrown illusions, and Hollywood’s role is to coddle the aspirations of the average Joe and Janeat home into a national franchise, while leaving themes that enable Great Game rivalry, national security, post-modern imperialism and racism,in the realm of metaphor.

But in 2018 we find that the big silver screen is losing its’ lustre in a society riven by inequality. The American dream is being overshadowed by nightmarish events that can only be explained by experts who are mainly in the employ of the people who don’t want truth to become public property. Great game rivalry is such that all the organs of media are subjected to the requirements of the people who now own the political system and need fake reportage to offset the possibility that the public might get to know that they are being lied to, and that would be tantamount to knowing that truth is knowable.

And lying is the name of the game played by the deep-state players who do their business in secret chambers far from the prying eyes of mere socially minded citizens. There is never ever information available that reveals how private interests go about their business when coveting the resources or property of a foreign country. But knowledge of the history of colonial exploitation indicates that those in possession of oil are prime targets for take-over or regime-change. There are also colonial operations like the occupation and colonization of Palestine that fudge what is known to be true per means of falsification and propaganda.

Once having escaped the glossary of misinformation and gotten inside that chamber where the sun never shines, what would we expect to find?Perhaps a plaque bearing homage to the Zionists who helped America destroy the Middle East when participating in‘The Project for the New American Century’.Foremost on the plaque we should expect the following miscreants to be named; Robert Kagan, William Kristol, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams…accomplices all!So in pausing a moment to reflect on the wretched plight of Iraq, Libya, Palestine or Afghanistan in 2018, the thought that these architects of death and destruction remain free men walking the street in spite of their terrible legacy.

So, ever since Israel was grafted onto the USA and the USA grafted onto Israel, the world is left wondering what ever happened to the American constitution. Has it been shredded in some machine that transforms concrete documents of state into metaphoric land-fill to paper over the lies coming from Washington’s geopolitical inner-sanctum where the armed forces and the secret services operate in a world of their own, amplifying the terror dirge with monotonous regularity as the military never fails to find a war it doesn’t like.

The American constitution is no longer a critique of anything. The Pentagon and Wall Street, in conjunction with the media have, in not so subtle ways, imposed a charter of their own on the USA,that has more to do with chicanery than good council.Becoming win-win crazy to the point where it can conflate war with peace and expect to pick up a Nobel prize,suggests that the US of A is slowly disappearing up its’ own dark place. It seems that the USA feels compelled to go to war because it has the technology to do so. Even better, it can simultaneously conduct six wars because it has the means to do so…to the delight of Madeleine Albright,needless to say!

The vestigial values of supremacy that connect America to Israel may have parallels in an earlier era. But what is unique to this present era, is that we can now see our tech-savvy selves murder the natives in far- away places on our TV screens and shrug it off because its’ happening far from home. It is as though the munitions that were used in Fallujah, causing deformities in babies doesn’t matter anymore.War seems to have become an irritation or even an interruption to feelgood TV timeshare moments that immerse us in ourselves. Images, songs, tech-gadgetry,what celebrity is fucking which celebrity represents our cultural ethos.In fact, anything and everything that we, as potential consumers, might aspire to, but especially not be troubled by the sight of Israeli army snipers shooting children demonstrating against cruel confinement…that may be entertainment for the Israeli public…but in America, its’ a waste of time.

Meanwhile, there were many young men and women sitting before TV screens in Israel watching their army buddies inflict death and destruction onthe Palestinian people corralled in the Gaza stockyard and felt smug because they thought…it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me, when I know that I know that I know that I don’t care a fig about  people who are not of our ilk…the chosen few!

Denis A. Conroy,Freelance Writer, Australia.

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