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Days later and the USA media still flagellates the 9/11 pony. I didnât want to abet this distasteful circle jerk of maudlin propaganda. But now even the CBC is participating; it got my goat.
The chatterers are waxing nostalgic about the âunityâ of the 9/11 era. They contrast the supposedly happy fuzzy puppy pile of yore with the bitter contentiousness of today. In that vein they enjoin us to share our memories. Very well. To wit.
I recall with horror the totalitarian bloodlust prevalent in the States right after 9/11. I look back to remember persecutions of anyone who didnât lockstep by jingo. To be sure, dissent was immediate. Yet that dissent was fiercely suppressed by the political elites and corporate state social engineering organs. People lost jobs. People were secretly imprisoned. Alternatively, show trials of manifest innocents were held. Religious or dissenting institutions were harassed and suppressed. Freedom of association was suspended. Indefinite, extrajudicial detention was made the explicit law of the land. Torture to murder was celebrated by media and authorized will-he-nil-he by elites across agencies, a menacing harpy still sitting on all our shoulders. Authoritarian slogans paraded on Big Character Banners: âYouâre either with us or against usâ, âMy country, right or wrongâ, âIf you see something, say somethingâ, âBalance liberty with securityâ, âSupport the troopsâ, âGod bless Americaâ. Less obliquely, some dared to say what was the implicit intent of such propaganda: âTurn the desert into glassâ, âBombs Over Baghdadâ. The tail more than wagged the dog. The tail thrashed and consumed the dog.
The result of all this was barely stifled, grumbling resentment and widespread, cold suspicion. Some resented the regime and suspected its operatives. Some otherwise resented and suspected those deemed unpatriotic, non-compliant, or seditious. Such spiritual poisons are emphatically diagnostic of totalitarian regimes.
That happy fuzzy post-9/11 era never ended. It merely became more candid. Those social pressures engaged as the American Empire descended into puerile catharsis directly manifested into the raging factionalism of today. To pimp an historical metaphor, the 6th of January was the love child of the AUF with the PATRIOT Act. If elites didnât want to hasten the social decay of the body politic, they would have used a dram of intelligence to prioritize commonweal above the lusts of moneyed psychotics.
Yes⊠Some sort of Afghanistan intervention no doubt was understandably a political imperative. But a 20 year quagmire propping up a vacuous and corrupt puppet state belies willful stupidity, given the lessons immediately at hand from Indochina. As the incontestable axiom has it, âNever get involved in a land war in Asia.â Added to the murderous Mesopotamian debacles, not to mention the widespread peonage inaugurated by neoliberalism, how could the political classes have suspected this would end in anything other than an alienated, atomized populace lashing out? Permissiveness in imperial violence heartily entices the Everyman to participate in the empireâs orgy of cruelty. Moral chickens come home to roost one way or another.
I also remember the 1-2 million dead Iraqis who died so that âMuricans and their beta buddies at Westminster could hurt âthemâ, whoever âtheyâ were. (Americans especially were not too particular.) These extra dead people are seldom mentioned in the Anglo-American imperial core, never mind receive pandering memorials each year.
Itâs understandable why that amnesia is so. The âunityâ of the 9/11 days was predicated on the infantile outlash of the empire toward a nebulous Other. Cynical power elites, whether explicitly Neocon or not, funneled the faux outrage of Americans into mass murder of the manifestly innocent. But the ânationâ of the unified in feeling participated in the slaughter with glee. Millions died or were terrorized by empire so a few oligarchs could rake in a mess of pottage. God bless Halliburton.
Withal, the historical principle revealed is that America will never be âgreatâ until it has the philosophical balls to commemorate all murder with equal mourning.
But this is likely impossible. Empires uniformly survive on yoking tribalism to the corporate stateâs projects of exploitation. As empires are inherently anonymous, grinding bodies and souls as the grist for exploitation, all such tribal feeling is bogus. The resultant social diseases are insoluble: totalitarian anomie, barely sublimated aggression, and ideological doublethink. Identity is not community. For tribal feeling to have any moral pith, it must be predicated solely on organic communities. Families or bands. Dunbar numbers.
When blocs of facile identities stand in for actual tribes, all resultant moral outrage is psychospiritual hogwash. Mere jingoism is hence the inevitable outcome of the identitarian impetus. And you can safely bet the farm that someone is getting paid to keep the game going. Natural human limits to community are why patriotism is forever the recourse of scoundrels, why nationalism rings hollow even as it strongly tends toward totalitarian kitsch.
Put more plainly: if you didnât know someone who died on 9/11, then you have no business mourning them any more than the dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, or a hundred other outcomes of ideological terrorism, no matter the causus.
So much for sentiment.
My current question is stimulated by something I once read in a polisci journal or such: that a survey of American political history supports the thesis that elites encourage partisan strife to control underlying internecine tensions. Shiny, shiny distraction. The relevant axiom is that the state is a field of power struggle between elites. Given that as of a few years ago, the largest political bloc in the USA were the âindependentsâ, at about 44%, and that DemoPublicans came in at a meagre 22% each, it begs the question. How much of the current factionalisms are stimulated by cynical elitesâ social engineering?
I donât mean to propose the omniscience of elites as is standard in conspiracy theories. The Afghanistan affair is proof enough that at least the political elites are strategic idiots. And yet as political elites are manifestly cyphers for private power (oligarchs), one must wonder to what degree these partisan divides are mere shadow play, especially when they spring out into spectacles of violence.
My current feeling is that power elites are all trying to ride the bronco. Various power factions feed different violent beasts on the street just enough to serve their interest, hopefully not so much they become unmanageable. They bet their Quatlus on which gang will beat up the other. As all gamblers, they must be mixed in feeling both laughter and dread.
Most independent reports agree that the financial oligarchs are uniformly pessimistic about near term global survival. They arenât preparing for us and they donât care if the planet burns. True to their overwhelmingly psychotic predispositions, they are going about securing what they consider their myopic advantage. Galtâs Gulch again, whether on Aotearoa or Mars.
Yet they probably canât agree how the end game should play out. Their gentlemanâs agreements are apparently breaking down, save in the imperative to keep the masses distracted from their vampiric culpability.
The resultant metastasis of jejune fanaticism spreads across the empire in the form of street thug identarian proxies. The truth is that humans love to eat each other long before they are starving.
Whatever whispers be in the rarified halls of Davos and the cabins of the Bohemian Club, the result is a feckless mess. All of this betrays the total illegitimacy of our rulers. The oligarchs are cowardly, supine, amoral reptiles.
As far as how this concerns 9/11 nostalgia:
The political class like to think they run things. This even as they bow to those who truly rule them. Their mutterings about âunityâ and how nice and fuzzy the empire was after 9/11 are ridiculously callow. But that is how these people indeed operate, how they characteristically justify themselves to themselves. There are chunks of the political class who are no doubt on the lookout for the next spectacle of death. When properly contextualized, such spectacle will enforce the tribalistic groupthink needful for a renewed period of American cathartic violence on behalf of empire. âRemember the Maineâ is an evergreen formula for iniquitous unanimity.
Perhaps the most difficult question facing the political managers is where might they now get the cash for such projects. With posterity in the imperial core now mortgaged to peonage, and unsympathetic second tier empires in ascendancy, the only pockets left are the oligarchsâ own. But if they have indeed abandoned long term global strategy for an apocalyptic hoarding instinct, they may also be unwilling to encourage adventures. This leaves the political managers in a bit of a paradox. With conflicting or ambivalent orders from above, they are stuck in a holding pattern if they are not actively tearing the house down. Or so I surmise.
One thing is certain. The USA is too centripetal a polity to survive without âforever warâ. It really has no other coherence, save perhaps the petty lineaments of individualistic enthusiasms. As the consistent trend is toward the surveillance and security state mediating the whole through gradually more totalitarian controls, a necessary corollary is more war.
The old fashioned word for an imperial presidency so enfoeffed by elites to prosecute permanent war is âemperorâ. Emperors are dangerous nexes of power which corrode mutual accountability as they centralize. The elites try to solve this through rendering even more power unto Caesar. This unvirtuous spiral holds an internal logic, but one at odds with systemic need. The more authority is given, the more nimble they are made, the more the emperors embroil the empire in muddled aims and unapparised ends. The outcome is irresponsibility, as the emperors save their faces and kick the can 20 years or more.
The irresponsibility of emperors is infectious, a trickledown miasma upon all society. Some of the political class may know this. But their functions chain them to the necessity of imperial policies, to which require nimble emperors to tactically attend as the empire shreds. When the populace so engineered to depend on imperium finds essential systems fail, they further burden the emperor with panicked expectations.
QED.
This political blither was written with solar power. Said solar power system was fashioned as homebrew as tenable. DIY is a joy in and of itself, a primary justification, a spiritual dignity.
But Iâm also glad of being off grid when considering the shredding and/or realignment of the current imperial regimes. Craft is resilience. Resilience is comfort.
The empire is a wondrous house of cards, all the marvellous toys delivered âJust In Timeâ. JIT logistics are profoundly brittle. And after decades of neoliberalism, that is the only device global elites have left to feed us. There is simply no fat on the calf to survive the winter. Whether the difficulties of the Covid era prefigure a long neofeudalism or global demise, it behooves us to finally implement preparedness strategy as a âdaily driverâ in this era, preparedness systems both personal and communitarian. Quite probably, posterity will depend upon it.
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