WHITE MANS BURDEN
The Quixotic “Charge of the Light Brigade” in Iraq & The Peloponnesian Perpetual Mimitic warfare in Afghanistan is generating an Orwellian “1984″ blowback in America.
It is creating the image of “Brazil” in Pakistan & Iran, the Middle East, South America and the Central Asia
By
Moin Ansari
A “Free Press” gets is wrong? How could the $80 Billion American think-tank industry get it all wrong in Iraq, and Afghanistan? How could both political parties get caught up in endless political “cul de sacs” and be clueless? Thomas Kuhn explains it as being incarcerated in the wrong paradigm. Kuhn describes it as “believing in the wrong framework” which is setup by vested interests. Military experts and Business leaders caught up in a tsunami of the same “esoteric intellectual straight-jacket” mimic each other’s inscribed opinions to such an extent that they simply become burlesque parodies of each others.
..many conservatives have come to the conclusion that the only way they can save America and get if off its present downslope is to become a regime with a greater military presence and drive toward empire. My fear is that Americans might lose their democracy in the process.
” … Iraq is the excuse for moving in an imperial direction. War with Iraq, as they originally conceived it, would be a quick, dramatic step that would enable them to control the Near East as a powerful base – not least because of the oil there, as well as the water supplies from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – to build a world empire.”Norman Mailer
When the intellectual capital of the comedian Jon Stewart begins to dwarf the combined consonance of our febrile intellectual elite, our president, our congress and our cerebral leaders should know that, something is very wrong. Our public has figured it out. Polls show that America knows the truth. Our nation facing mass vertigo has muddled through the obfuscation and confusion and now has a clearer vision of the truth than our branches of government. How can we deconstruct and decompose the popular but wrong concepts?
In Ninteen Eighty Four, the three Slogans of the Party on display everywhere are:
- WAR IS PEACE
- FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
- IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Is our conscience clear?
“Whence is that knocking? How is ‘t with me when every noise appals me? What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather. The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.” (Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.)
For the beacon of democracy to incessantly wage perpetual mimetic warfare and conduct a series of brutal military occupations against other countries in the name of liberty seems, on the face of it, too contradictory to elicit more than hoots of derision and cat-calls of aspersions at the credulousness and hypocrisy of it all. The ardent appartchiks of the Neocons, the suspected acolytes of Belzeebub copiously mushrooming in the augean avairys of shoddy and amorphous yellow journalism are not an aberrant phenomenon nor a anachronistic mutation-they are ubiquitous.
Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’ other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator. (The Porter in Shakespeare’s Macbeth)
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.(The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
A cornucopia of our Neoliberals, the alleged abbettors of Abaddon, along with the chosen cognoscenti of our craven claque of Xenophobes refuses to anathematizes the tsunami of bigotry and chauvinism blowing across our shores.
“My hands are of your color, but I shame. To wear a heart so white” (Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth)
Nineteen Eighty Four by H.G. Wells begins on April 4, 1984 at 13:00 hours: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen…” The date’s relevance is questionable, because it is what Winston Smith perceives. In the story’s course, he concludes that the date is irrelevant, because the State can arbitrarily alter it to be whatever it says it to be. The year 1984 and its world are chronologically transmutable onto any society that surrenders its freedom to the State.
A cabal of polemicists, some public officials and their claque in the licensed media seek to ensnare our country in a series of proxy wars that are not in America’s interests. The ethereal example of Penopolesian perpetual and mimetic warfare between Athens and Sparta led to the emaciation of the Athenian democracy and the denouement of the Athenian republic. (Socrates was on the side of the anti-democrats)
The sane tocsin from our founding fathers about these “foreign entanglements” was perennial and is still valid. We ignore the advice at our own peril. Sure enough these entanglements are deleterious to our freedoms, and are rusting our very foundations for which our progeny may have to pay a ponderous price.
”Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad.”-Norman Mailer from Why Are We at War?
Belonging to the White House Press Corps (WHPC) has it’s privileges in terms of interviews and ‘scoops”. The acquiescent WHPP is imbedded too deep into the pockets of the establishment “Ministry of Truth” to challenge “Big Brother.” Our Lady Liberty, the cynosure of the land of the free is bedraggled and buckling under the onslaught of acerbic acid rain emanating from the amorphous and bilious commentariat which seems to know everything and owns the media.
Nineteen Eighty-Four introduces the intercontinental nation of Oceania, one of the world’s three superstates, which is run by an oppressive totalitarian government
Nineteen Eighty-Four is an anti-totalitarian cautionary tale about the betrayal of a revolution by its defenders. He already had stated distrust of totalitarianism and betrayed revolutions in Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm. Coming Up For Air, at points, celebrates the personal and political freedoms lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is built around a never-ending war involving the book’s three superstates, with two allied powers fighting against the third. But as Goldstein’s book explains, each superstate is so strong it cannot be defeated even when faced with the combined forces of the other two powers. The allied states occasionally split with each other and new alliances are formed. Each time this happens, history is rewritten to convince the people that the new alliances were always there, using the principles of doublethink. The war itself never takes place in the territories of the three powers; the actual fighting is conducted in the disputed zone stretching from Morocco to Australia, and in the unpopulated Arctic wastes. Throughout the first half of the novel, Oceania is allied with Eastasia, and Oceania’s forces are combating Eurasia’s troops in northern Africa.
Midway through the book, the alliance breaks apart and Oceania, newly allied with Eurasia, begins a campaign against Eastasian forces
In reality our reporters are either imbedded on the war front, unable and unwilling to investigate the real foxhole or imbedded in a dogmatic battle based on their agenda or the schema of their employers. The increasingly obsequies press simply regurgitates the compendium of every scurrility babbled out by the same chosen think tanks. They invite each other to their talk shows, echo each other’s opinions, quote each other’s banality, and critique each other’s exegesis, fallaciously creating a counterfeit sense of consensus and a ersatz consonance of view.
The populace of Oceania, belonging to three classes-Inner Party members, Outer Party members and members of a lower-class proletariat (“the Proles“)-is subordinate to ruthless government control. This is accomplished and regulated by a “Ministry of Truth” in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, works as an Outer Party member. Smith spends his days constantly rewriting and altering history to satisfy the government (which includes destroying all evidence of how history has actually happened)-amending newspaper articles of the past so to remove all reference to predictions that didn’t come true, and individuals whom the state has identified as “unpersons” (people who the state declares as having never existed).
A typical Two Minutes Hate is depicted in the novel, during which citizens ridicule and shout at a video of … as he releases a litany of attacks upon Oceanic governance on a background of enemy soldiers Iin the book’s portrayal of the Two Minutes they are Eurasian, but after the switch to the war with Eastasia, it is expected that the background changes to Eastasian soldiers..
book hints that, in fact, there may not actually be a war. The only view of the outside world presented in the novel is through Oceania’s media, which has an obvious tendency to exaggerate and even fabricate “facts”, and the rocket bombs ostensibly fired by the enemy. Goldstein’s book suggests that the three superpowers may not actually be warring, and as Oceania’s media provide completely unbelievable news reports on impossibly long military campaigns and victories (including a ridiculously large campaign in the Sahara desert), it can be suggested that the war is a lie. Julia even goes so far as to suggest that the rocket bombs that land on London are launched by the Party from other parts of Oceania.
Even Eurasia and Eastasia themselves may only be a fabrication by the government of Oceania, with Oceania the sole undisputed dominator of the world. On the other hand, Oceania might as well actually control only a rather small part of the world and still brainwash its citizens into believing that Oceania dominates the whole Earth or – as in the novel – that they are battling/allying with (a fabricated) Eurasia/Eastasia. (Source and excerpts of 1984 from Wikipedia.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four)
In spite of a cornucopia of cogent evidence the press’ pedantic twaddle assiduously fails to illuminate the confusing deluge of eerily inept and amorphous counter-intuitive claptrap masquerading as fact in the clumsily stage-managed “global war on terror” environment.
“A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped”. Norman Mailer
It seems as if one is reading from Pravda or Izvestia of yesteryear. This has been called the “dumbing down of America” and the denouement of our First Amendment rights. The fiascos in Iraq and the blowback from Afghanistan are a few examples on how wrong they were. It has cost us more than a trillion Dollars and counting.
Perpetual Warfare:
Some analysts, such as Noam Chomsky, posit that a state of perpetual war is an aid to (and is promoted by) the powerful members of dominant political and economic classes, helping maintain their positions of economic and political superiority.
Some have also suggested that entering a state of perpetual war becomes progressively easier in a modern democratic republic such as the United States due to the continuing development of interlocking relationships between those who benefit directly from war and the large and powerful companies that indirectly benefit and shape the presentation of the effects and consequences of war (i.e., the formation of a military-industrial complex).
here has been some criticism from anti-war activists and Bush critics, for example, that the Bush administration’s ties to Halliburton influenced the decision to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. These claims have been pointedly rejected by the George W. Bush White House.
However, the concept of a military-industrial complex was first suggested by President Eisenhower and the idea that military action can be seen as a form of market-creation goes at least as far back as the publication of War Is a Racket. The economic make-up of the 5th century BC Athens-led Delian League also bears resemblance to the economic ramifications of preparing for perpetual war (such as that seen in North Korea, with satellite states to contribute resources).
9/11 was blowback from the 80s. The failed foreign policies in South and Central Asia are our seeds that will crate future blowback. Selective amnesia cannot deny the verity that DNA tests have proven the pedig ree of the anti-USSR Taliban and political parentage of anti-Soviet “Usa-ma.”-it is American. Denying patrimony, running away from child-support, and forcing foster parentage to others of failed American policies in South Asia does not eliminate the root cause of the problems, impinges on our credibility and makes us the laughing stock of the world. The last Afghan war of the last century mothballed the USSR. The first Afghan war of this century resurrected a powerfully potent Russia along with the powerful Shanghai Cooperation Organization which now includes China and maybe Iran and Pakistan.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together President of the United States (and former General of the Army) Dwight D. Eisenhower later used the term in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961: r
The American public at home is increasingly fed a crass media diet of Kiplingesque heroic deeds of derring-do by “our boys” on the front line in Global War on Terror (GWOT). One dimensional unsophisticated carping judgment perpetuate stereotypical urban myths– the presentation of simplistic dichotomy between good (anyone without a beard —who is with us) and evil (anyone with a beard-is against us).
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child. Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden, 1899
“America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.” Norman Mailer
The indiscriminate launch of parlous petards at loyal allies, nauseating fixation upon the irrelevant, and paranoid conspiratorial delusions about Pakistanis, are a fatuously ignominious and transparent attempt to justify the murderous rampage, carnage and barbarism inflicted upon the innocent. This type of galling horrible hubris evinces images of “the ugly American” megalomaniac, and generates self fulfilling prophecies which may be very detrimental to our interests.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek anoth er’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
”No, we will rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of our leadership. And now that the ardor of victory has begun to cool, some will see how it is flawed. For we are victim once again of all those advertising sciences that depend on mendacity and manipulation. We have been gulled about the real reasons for this war, tweaked and poked by some of the best button-pushers around to believe that we won a noble and necessary contest when, in fact, the opponent was a hollowed-out palooka whose monstrosities were ebbing into old age.” Norman Mailer “White Man Unburdened”
Pakistan has deployed 100,000 troops in our tribal areas alone – and in Afghanistan, the area which is 20 times larger than the tribal area, there are 40,000 NATO troops. The NATO troops are overwhelmed in a sea of hashish and IEDs. This new war in Afghanistan reminds them of other predations, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the WMDs in Iraq. Are we resurrecting the desiccated and mummified plans of yesteryear’s morass, the plans that bombed Vietnam’s neighbors, Laos and Cambodia.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Pakistanis are right when they say “we are doing much more than any body.” More than 1000 Pakistanis have died fighting the so called “war on terror”, and Pakistan has been a US ally since 1947. Pakistanis wanted “Friends not Masters“. Now they are saying “we don’t want your favors or your hate“.
Reel’d from the sabre stroke
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
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Copied from Poems of Alfred Tennyson, J. E. Tilton and Company, Boston, 1870, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Exeunt: lightning and thunder, shock and awe. Dust, ash, fog, fire, smoke, sand, blood, and a good deal of waste now move to the wings. The stage, however, remains occupied. The question posed at curtain-rise has not been answered. Why did we go to war? Norman Mailer “White Man Unburdener”
Today the Orwellian 1984 is spreading beyond the incubator cocoon of the Patriot’s Act. Many countries around the world are mimicking the Patriots Act. Freedom is being diminished.
If you liked this article you may also enjoy this one:
http://moinansari.wordpress.com/2007/12/08/insight-here%e2%80%99s-a-cue-on-aq-%e2%80%94ejaz-haider/
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