Chazzsongs World Threats

Godfather Government: A Way of Life! Not a Scandel!

Godfather Government:
A Way of Life! Not a Scandel!

By Carolyn Baker - March 19, 2007

[This article was originally titled "GodfatherGovernment:The Sopranos Aren't Leaving" and was published at From The Wilderness in 2006. The current posting has been updated and revised.--CB]

Don't you get the idea I'm one of those goddamn radicals.Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system. - Al Capone

Behind every great fortune, there is a crime. - Lucky Luciano

Historians study not only the past but using their analysis of the past, speculate about how the future might unfold. However, historians are not psychics; we can’t predict the exact occurrence of events with specificity, but we can analyze past and current events and conjecture likely future scenarios based on those events. In 1937, during the German Third Reich, historian Robert Brady wrote The Spirit And Structure Of German Fascism, one of the most incisive books of the twentieth century, now out of print and deemed “irrelevant” to contemporary events by most traditional historians. In his last chapter, “The Looming Shadow Of Fascism Over The World,” Brady hypothesized that corporatist influences would ultimately come to dominate many of the governments of the modern world, including and especially, the United States.

Certainly, America’s triumphant emergence from World War II and the subsequent institutionalization of the military-industrial complex established significant components of incipient fascism, as throughout the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency fomented anti-Communist hysteria and right-wing coups d’etat around the world. Meanwhile, at home, McCarthyism gave way to consumerism on steroids and the triumph of the American corporation on all fronts—a feat that had its roots in an obscure Supreme Court technicality in the decision, Santa Clara vs.Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, which declared that corporations were “persons” who had the same “civil rights” guaranteed freed slaves under the Fourteenth Amendment.

While most presidential administrations of the twentieth century gave lip service to government regulation of corporations, a new era dawned in the eighties with Reagan’s “war on government.” It was the beginning of the dismantling of government regulation of industry in America, and it was further exacerbated by a momentous Executive Order signed by Reagan. Executive Order 12615 required departments and agencies to “establish full and ambitious privatization goals.” It also created the Office of Privatization within the Office of Management And Budget to oversee the program and established an independent Commission on Privatization to study and recommend opportunities for privatization within the federal government.

According to Chapter 17 of Webster Tarpley’s The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, Sr. and the research of Catherine Austin Fitts, Reagan’s Executive Order meant that private corporate contractors would no longer have to be accountable for the work they did nor how they used the money allocated to them. As a result, an opportunity for a black budget was created in which government money would be spent without the oversight of Congress and the American people. Clearly, this was a disastrous recipe for fraud and corruption to become standard operating procedure in the federal government.

Concurrently, the CIA was secretly financing the illegal Contra War in Nicaragua with cocaine trafficking, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was operating, a member of Senator Kit Bond’s staff told Catherine Austin Fitts, as a criminal enterprise. More recently art has imitated life in a "Sopranos" episode which mirrored HUD’s corrupt activities in South Central Los Angeles—the illumination of which by Fitts, and later From The Wilderness, precipitated the dirty tricks unleashed against her long before the "Sopranos" became an HBO series.

Enter the Democratic Clinton Administration which gave us NAFTA and made U.S. corporations sovereign domestically and internationally as globalism was born and its proponents championed the demise of nations and the supremacy of corporations. It was during that administration, not a Republican one, that the criminal enterprise we call the federal government came down on Fitts and nearly destroyed her.

Can anyone find a more stellar symbol of corporate dominance than that infamous glass skyscraper in Houston, formerly occupied by the Enron Corporation? Catherine Austin Fitts has superbly connected the dots between the egregious criminality of Enron, the Harvard Endowment, and one of the federal government’s principal contractors, CSC-DynCorp. Last year, with the conviction of former Enron golden boys, Jeff Skillings and Ken Lay--Lay’s death, not withstanding, investigative journalist, Greg Palast,unleashed a scathing expose of Enron throughout alternative media. With the convictions of Lay and Skillings, Palastseized the opportunity to muckrake enough dirt on Enron to fill its former Houston headquarters from basement to rooftop. So too have Peter Elkind and Bethany Mc Lean in their fabulous 2006 documentary, “The Smartest Guys In The Room”; however, what Palast and the filmmakers both failed to address and what Mike Ruppert covered judiciously in Crossing The Rubicon, was Enron’s involvement in moving and laundering massive quantities of drug money through its Enron Online trading company. From the research of Palast, Elkind, and Mc Lean, it is obvious that Enron cooked its books and used the smoke and mirrors of “Mark To Market” accounting to book profits out of thin air, but none of them can explain where Enron acquired the money to actually run its corporation while selling worthless stock and paving the way to financial oblivion for its investors and employees. The missing link in the Enron story is drug profits, but Mike Ruppert caught that link, as did Catherine Austin Fitts in her many articles revealing the Enron-Harvard-Citibank-DynCorp connection.

Palast nailed Choice Point, an enormous data-gathering empire which helped rig the 2000 election and has more recently been deeply involved in assisting the National Security Agency in spying on innocent American citizens. Calling Choice Point a “private KGB”, Palast writes: By ‘private KGB,’ I mean ChoicePoint, Inc., the Atlanta company that keeps over 16 billion records on Americans which it sells to the FBI, Homeland Security and, through a bit of a slip-up, identity thieves. They are watching you because George and Dick don't have time to track everyone in America (and that would be illegal, to boot), so Choice Point does it. Then turns over the electronic you -- cross-matched profiles of voting registration, your DNA info and who knows what else -- for a price.”

When one thoroughly digests the machinations of corporations like CSC-DynCorp, Enron, Halliburton, and Choice Point, it is axiomatic that whatever we have come to call “the government” is now virtually indistinguishable from private corporations—entities which are in themselves criminal syndicates. As Fitts for years has taken great pains to point out, when local communities of individuals do not control government databases, mind boggling corruption and exploitation of innocent citizens is inevitable simply because there is no fiduciary transparency. This is one of the principal arguments for local, not national, solutions; the more centralized systems become, the greater the potential for abuse. Conversely, the more de-centralized systems are, the more illumined and amenable to local monitoring they are likely to be.

From hindsight we now know that 9-11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government not only for the purpose of capturing the last remaining recoverable drops of oil on earth, but also as a pretext for sanctioning a pandemic of corruption within the federal government and corporations in the name of “national security” as well as the gradual but unprecedentedl shredding of the Constitution and the civil liberties it ensures. Subsequently, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq corporatized those countries to such an extent that it would be more appropriate for them to fly the flags of Halliburton and Bechtel than the colors of their respective nations. Add to this the Bush Administration’s admission that billions of dollars designated for the Iraq War cannot be accounted for. Why are we not surprised?

At home in the U.S. the Bush regime muscled through Congress its Medicare Reform Bill and firmly placed American healthcare in the hands of its cronies and lobbyist friends from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, spiking the costs of prescription medications and health insurance. At the same time, millions of working and middle class individuals who have no health insurance and who are being squeezed to death by the costs of mortgage payments, childcare, and simply putting food on the table in their households, find themselves decimated by medical bills, losing their jobs, or simply getting in over their heads financially with the credit cards they frantically use to “rob Peter and pay Paul.” But the Godfather Government saw this coming and found the “losses” incurred by Citibank, Chase, and other cronies of the banking industry intolerable, thereby making certain that the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 would sail through Congress with only a whisper of opposition.

The consequences of this legislation is now savaging the lives of countless middle and working class Americans. In fact, we must now ask a logical question: Will the grinding albatross of personal debt engender a massive pool of slave laborers in America who see no alternative to “working off their debt”? Economist Paul Krugman articulated a similar perspective in his New York Times 2005 article, "Debt Peonage". In any event, the gargantuan amounts of personal and collective debt in the United States will be a pivotal ingredient in the evisceration of the nation’s economy—a phenomenon impeccably documented by Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy: The Peril And Politics Of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money In The Twenty-First Century. The progression of the demise is likely to be protracted rather than cataclysmic, with periodic crises, such as the housing bubble and a resultant credit bubble, heating up the subtle but yet very perceptible trial by fire.

In 2005, Business Week Online reported George W. Bush’s signature of the May 5 memo entitled “Assignment Of Function Relating To Granting Of Authority For Issuance Of Certain Directives: Memorandum For The Director Of National Intelligence.” In the document, Bush assigned intelligence czar, John Negroponte, the task of waiving Securities and Exchange Commission rules, established in 1934, pertaining to accounting disclosures by publicly-traded companies. As a result of no longer needing to reveal financial information in the name of national security, the cloning of Enron, having been in process for several years, was sealed. Instead of being required to disclose valid accounting ledgers, U.S. corporations have now been given carte blanche to maintain fiduciary legerdemain. Therefore, I must ask: How can any sane human being persist in believing that a legitimate government exists in the United States?

But we have a Congress, you may argue—and a Democratically-controlled one at that.Yes,and they have spent the past two months arguing about how to manage a war that the nation was lied into, rather than confronting the lies and turning off both the faucet of fundingincessantly requested by theemperorand thedeluge of profits flowing to military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.If the so-called progressive Democrats continue to perform as they have in the face of Bush’s most recent escalation of the war, they will confirm what any observer with two brain cells to rub together already knows: That the Democrats ARE the problem because of their insipid enabling of the fascist regime in the White House.

How many times has Congress cratered since September 11, 2001? Many more times than I have hours in the day to spend documenting them. In the past six years, we’ve all asked why. Post-9-11, we attributed Congressional loss of spine to the fear of the administration and political pressure to placate it. What is now being revealed almost daily, however, is the extent to which the tentacles of mobsters like Jack Abramoff and the K Street crowd reach into the halls of Congress. Kit Bond’s staffer was wrong only about one thing when he said that HUD was being run as a criminal enterprise: What is left of the entire former government of the United Statesis now more than ever being run as a criminal enterprise.

Perhaps even after all I have written here, you still believe you have a government. Whether you do or not, I’m fairly certain that when you read Catherine Austin Fitts’ exhaustive exposé on government-corporate corruption, you will no longer entertain the delusion that your so-called government is anything but institutionalized organized crime disguised as a government, or rather, empire, now teetering on the precipice of collapse.

In a shorter butsuccinct analysis of Godfather Government entitled "The American Tapeworm", Fitts provides a lucid but thorough explanation of the nuts and bolts of the criminal enterprise, not only within the United States, but how it is playing itself out globally, and specifically in Iraq.

Whether or not it has become clear to economists looking through rose-colored glasses, it is painfully obvious to the American consumer that the nation has entered a recession that promises to be long, deep, and most likely, global. While images of 1929 may haunt us, the gathering economic storm clouds are not likely to result in a sudden cataclysm, but rather a long, protracted, painful impoverishment on myriad levels. "This state of affairs," says Fitts, "can go on as long as it can be financed. Hence, as long as America can continue to export dollars, export Treasury bills and mortgage backed and other federally supported credit, and lead in global organized crime and warfare, a negative return economy can continue."

If you think your “government” is going to do anything to protect and support its citizens in the wake of endless imperial conquest, a housing market that is now toast, worsening global warming, global pandemics, natural disasters, massive food shortages, unprecedented outbreaks of violence and unrest, rates of unemployment that will dwarf those of the Great Depression, debt peonage, rapidly diminishing water supplies and a rotting infrastructure, as well as trainloads of worthless U.S. dollars, then the price you will pay for yourgullibility and denial will be horrific. If you want to see what your “government” thinks of you and will do for you, think Katrina. Think the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s in this country when tens of thousands of human beings died while your government stood by and did nothing—and still is.

The only thing the members of your government care about is the colossal transfer of wealth—the financial coup d’ état that is in progress that will devastate you and your family economically and produce unparalleled profits for the gangsters you vote for. Absurdly, mainstream and even progressive media refer to eruptions of pervasive criminality in the federal government as ”scandals” revealing their inability to grasp the systemic disintegration of the rule of law in America and the reality that names like Abramoff, Libby, Gonzales, Walter Reed Hospital, are not scandals but symptoms of a disintegrating, rotting empire .Like AIDS victims suffering from incessant episodes of pneumonia, anemia, skin lesions, and other horrible ailments,none of which are their diagnosis but rather symptoms of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, epidemic criminality in high places is systemic and inherent in a fascist empire in the throes of collapse. To address the symptom as the disease merelyfacilitates the disease's progression and exacerbates the resultant suffering.

The driving force of fascism, and indeed all empires, isamoral sociopathy about which I wrote in my recent article " The Science Of Evil And Its Use For Political Purposes". Like AIDS or any other virulent syndrome, its symptoms manifest relentlessly but are systemic and therefore cannot effectively be addressed on the level of the symptom--the principal reason why political action, itself contaminated by the syndrome, provides bandaids and chicken soup, but is incapable of extricating itself from the syndrome.

To understand this isto stop referring to the criminal syndicate posing as the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches as “government” at all. Tograsp this is to stop responding with naive, jaw-dropping surprise in the face of systemic corruption and to relinquish all hope that some other party or some more innovative politician will make it all better. There IS no government of the United States, but only corporations and centralized financial systems.

Therefore, it is now time to ponder how you will take care of yourself and your loved ones in the face of deepening, brutal, merciless, collapse (whethersudden or protracted),in an economy hollowed out and stripped bare, attended as corroding empires always are, by totalitarian management of the unruly and impoverished masses.

In 1937 Robert Brady called the corporate world view “organized piracy” and asked:

Is there any fundamental difference in appreciation of human values or in general outlook on life between a stockbroker and a pirate?…What on the open seas is thought of as an outlaw and ‘piratical’ raid of group on group is in another setting played as a legitimate game in which each man is pitted against every other man for all he can ‘get by with’ short of a snarl with criminal law.

This is fascism, and your “government” is already there. The wildly popular “Sopranos” HBO series has gone the way of all mini-series, now appearing several times a week in re-run status. Its greatest contribution to the culture, in my opinion, was its mirror image of thechicanery of empire, reminding us thatthe"Sopranos" of government have never gone away; in fact, they’re just getting warmed up. Tony, Silvio Dante, Johnny Sack, Uncle Junior, Christopher Moltisanti, Paulie Walnuts, and Dr. Melfi—a cast of thugs and enablers such as these, is the only government you have now or ever will have in the United States of America.

Or as Don Henley might say, "Offer up your best defense, this is the end of the innocence."

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Disclaimer

Thailand insurgency may have links to the broader world of radical Islam

The Associated Press - Published: March 10, 2007

THANNAM THIP, Thailand: A shallow river, deep jungles and an old 20-kilometer (12-mile) wall mark the divide not just between Thailand and Malaysia but between Southeast Asia's Muslim and Buddhist worlds.

This ragged stretch of border is being viewed by some as a potential front in the Muslim insurgency wracking southern Thailand, mysterious in its goals and undeterred either by government crackdowns or by peace overtures.

People on both sides of the border share ethnicity, language and religion — Islam. Muslim-run soup restaurants on the Malaysian side are suspected of being funding sources for the rebels, and this has become an irritant in relations between two countries that are mainstays of the Southeast Asian alliance.

Analysts are divided over whether Thai insurgents are plugging into a broader Islamic movement or would rather confine their fight to winning some degree of autonomy. But an Associated Press investigation indicates the separatist rebellion, which has already taken the lives of more than 2,000 people, is making outside connections:

Young Thai Muslims — thousands, by Thai government estimate — are being educated in neighboring Muslim countries and the Middle East, with an unknown number returning as recruiters or actual participants in the insurgency. Some may be receiving military training while abroad.

Reports persist that some Indonesians or other foreigners are training and fighting with the rebels, though none has been captured and the reports are unconfirmed.

Islamic radicals around the world are increasingly setting their sights on the insurgency. An Arab Web site appeared in January, dedicated exclusively to southern Thailand and believed the first of its kind. Couched in Islamic rhetoric, the site backs independence for southern Thais.

Malaysia denies providing any support, mindful that the insurgency could infect its own predominantly Muslim population. But the Thai government is worried enough to be proposing a longer wall than the barrier the Malaysians built in Cold War times to stop smugglers and communist guerrillas.

"We know when some of them cross the border and report it to our Foreign Ministry and the Malaysian military, but nobody ever gets caught," said Lt. Chatchai Kitkhunthot in this frontier village. He was one of several Thai army officers and local officials who pinpointed infiltration and escape routes across the border on maps and the ground.

"Basically the southern Thailand conflict is becoming more regionalized. But we are at the very early stage of it," says Rohan Gunaratna, who heads the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore and wrote "Inside al-Qaida: Global Network of Terror." Islamic militancy is spreading in Southeast Asia, he says, and "What is happening in Thailand will not be an exception."

Others disagree, likening the insurgency to the Muslim uprising in Indonesia's Aceh province, which shunned foreign help and was resolved with U.N. mediation.

"They are fighting for a separate state so they don't want one which is going to be run by outsiders," says a Western official in Bangkok who is knowledgeable about anti-terrorism efforts and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The insurgents, according to the Thai military, number 3,000 to 5,000, with some 10,000 to 12,000 sympathizers out of a Muslim population of 3 million in the southernmost provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani which border Malaysia. They are secretive, brutal, effective. "We don't know when or where they will attack next," says Col. Wichai Thongdaeng, an army spokesman in the south.

An independent sultanate until it was merged into Thailand a century ago, the southern provinces have seen rebellions come and go. In the latest, which began in early 2004, the rebels have torched schools, bombed banks, beheaded some 25 people and shot teachers, policemen, government officials and just ordinary citizens. More than half the victims have been Muslims suspected of collaborating with authorities — teachers, civil servants, policemen.

In one recent incident, says army Lt. Jenkila Somboon, three Muslim rubber tappers were shot to death because their village was getting too friendly with the soldiers.

Little is known about the insurgents, or "juwae" — the local word for fighters. They have revealed no program, leadership roster or even a name. Their only public forms of communication are threatening leaflets. But Thai intelligence officers who have interrogated defectors or captured insurgents say that at least some of the groups are fighting for an independent, Islamic state.

"If you go to work, we will kill you cruelly. We will wait for you 24 hours a day, follow you wherever you go," said one recent leaflet obtained by The AP, ordering Buddhists in one area to leave within three days. It's not known whether they left, but the insurgency has already displaced hundreds of villagers.

International Risk, a Hong Kong-based consultancy, calls the insurgency the world's "new terrorism front line," but its shadowy nature accounts in part for the differing assessments of outside involvement.

Thai leaders and intelligence officials say that loose, personal ties but no formal links currently exist between the domestic militants and networks such as al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiyah, Southeast Asia's foremost terrorist organization.

The main conduits for militancy, they say, are Thai Muslims who study in Muslim countries ranging from Malaysia to Libya, then come back and spread their knowledge in religious schools. These form the breeding grounds of the insurgency, which Thai officials believe also attract funding from the Middle East that is partly channeled into the rebels' hands.

Former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra alleged that Malaysia harbored military training camps for the Thais, and some Western intelligence experts maintain that promising youths are systematically culled for training abroad, including the Middle East, and farmed out to key cells on their return.

Then there's an Indonesian connection going back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Thai and Indonesian militants trained together in Afghan-run camps on the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Between 1999 and 2003, Thai students held regular paramilitary sessions in Bandung, Indonesia, with the top "one or two" then sent to Mindanao in the southern Philippines, another region wracked by Islamic rebellion, for more combat training, said Col. Wichai Chucherd, defense attaché at the Thai embassy in Indonesia.

An Indonesian military intelligence report seen by The AP on the Bandung training says the presence of Thai separatists on Indonesian soil is worrying "because they could form links with Jemaah Islamiyah members who are now in Indonesia."

Thai insurgents provided support for frequent visits by Jemaah Islamiyah's alleged operations chief Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali, who was captured in Thailand in 2003 and is now in U.S. custody.

But no foreign fighters have been captured or killed in southern Thailand, although Thai army officers say a small number are believed to be around.

Col. Pornthep Kalamphasut, deputy commander of the army's "hearts and minds" operation in the south, said some communication intercepts among the rebels have been in the Indonesian language. Col. Saksri Ngoypatphan, who commands units in two volatile districts, said defectors talk of tall non-Thais, often hooded, being involved in training.

But of greater concern among the Thai military is the winding 647-kilometer (402-mile) border with Malaysia.

Crossing the frontier is easy, using such corridors as the Hala Bala Wildlife Sanctuary, an area of deep jungle, said Phuchit Saechan, the headman of Thannam Thip. His village abuts the wall that Thailand wants to replace with a 27-kilometer (16-mile) barrier.

"The border doesn't mean much. We are the same people on both sides," said Mohammad Nor Ali, a restaurant owner near the lightly policed immigration checkpoint in Rantau Panjang, on the Malaysian side of the frontier in Kelantan state.

He acknowledged being sympathetic to the Thai Muslims' fight "because they are our brothers."

Gunaratna, the Singapore-based analyst, says despite official Malaysian denials, northern Malaysia "remains an active intellectual and material support base for the insurgent groups active in southern Thailand."

As financing goes, it is the ubiquitous soup restaurants run by Thai Muslims in Malaysia which have lately become the issue, after Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont claimed many of them were a significant source of funding and recruitment of separatists.

Malaysian authorities took offense and issued indignant denials.

Malaysia's government is aware that the insurgency could embolden its own radicals. "We must not allow any breeding ground for terrorism to exist or to be nurtured," says Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar.

But Malaysia must also tread a fine line, curbing extremism without alienating its own people. Despite Thai pleas with its Muslim neighbor states for more cooperation, there have been no joint operations or even a common intelligence database.

Thailand's military regime, which overthrew Thaksin's elected government, says it has adopted a "hearts and minds" strategy rather than brute force to end the insurgency.

"We want to de-couple the south from international Islamic terrorism," said Foreign Minister Nitya Pibulsonggram in an interview. "Cooperation with Malaysia is really the key."

Denis Gray reported from the Thai side of the border and Vijay Joshi from the Malaysian side. Rungrawee C. Pinyorat and Sutin Wannabovorn in Bangkok, Chris Brummit in Indonesia and Jim Gomez in Manila contributed to this report.

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Propaganda and the Politics of Perception

by Michael Carmichael

Global Research, March 12, 2007

A version of this text was presented to the Kuala Lumpur Conference on War Crimes, Perdana Global Peace Organization, 5-7 February 2007.

War propaganda glorifies military indoctrination as the highest form of patriotism while simultaneously demonizing the enemies of the state.

Adolf Hitler realized the power of propaganda to mould and shape public opinion. Hitler wrote a highly informed essay on the powers of propaganda in his political autobiography, Mein Kampf.

Modern governments employ propaganda to incite public outcries for war in order to advance their agendas in foreign policy.

War propaganda is nothing new. The dynastic Egyptians created monumental sculptures that glorified Pharaoh as a conqueror who personally executed – frequently by fracturing their sculls with a mace - hundreds of the enemies of his state. Thus, the public glorification of war and its most heinous crimes has been with us for thousands of years.

War propaganda is abundantly evident in the fabric of our culture, and it presents no symptoms of weakness or dissipation. Quite the opposite is true. The latest film by Clint Eastwood, Flags of our Fathers, is little more than war propaganda that glorifies American military achievements in the context of a racial enemy – the Japanese. Sadly, Clint Eastwood has a long history of manufacturing films that are nothing more than pulpish propaganda: Where Eagles Dare; Heartbreak Ridge, Firefox and many other glorifications of violence and the principle, “Might makes right.”

While the primary purpose of war propaganda is to manufacture public commitment to wars and their inevitable crimes, in George Bush’s America psychological warfare aimed directly at the American public is designed to manufacture the political platform to launch a perpetual state of war that will produce a totalitarian regime headed by a Commander-in-Chief who is nothing more than a military dictator.

“Perception management” is another term used to describe the process of transforming public opinion to conform to a premeditated political agenda. Perception management establishes underlying trends and tendencies that drive the public perception of events in the direction of war. During war, perception management manipulates public opinion to accept the horrific nature of war crimes as merely nothing more than collateral damage, friendly fire and accidental mishaps that are inevitable consequences of the fog of war.

Psychological warfare training in George Bush’s America has reached historic proportions. Social influence, perception management and a full range of persuasion techniques have permeated the American government and are now deeply embedded into the fabric of official culture – especially the US military. The purpose of psychological warfare is to manufacture public support for Bush’s wars and for future wars as well as strengthening the powers of the state while demonizing the enemies of the Bush-Cheney regime. Concomitant with these assignments, psychological warfare camouflages the most horrific war crimes and makes them seem to be acts of virtue and valour that are absolutely essential for military, “Victory.”

Language lies at the heart of propaganda. The language of propaganda, psychological warfare and perception management is grounded in ancient principles that have been well known to leading sages, philosophers and intellectuals for thousands of years. Confucius believed that the disintegration of Chinese society in his time was directly attributable to a general deterioration of the language.

Confucius (551 - 479 BCE)

Confucius sought to improve language in order to improve the society and culture. He wrote,

“The correct use of language leads to the correct behavior of people”

In the Mediaeval Era of Latin Europe, Dante realized the power of language to order society. Dante launched his quest for the perfect language to communicate the highest levels of understanding to the broadest number of people.

Dante Alighera (1265 - 1321)

Dante taught that the development of a common language could lead to the political unification of Italy, and he proposed the establishment of a world government predicated on smooth, fluent and deeply integrated communications through a more perfect language.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 - 1527)

In the Renaissance, Niccolo Machiavelli adapted his own theories on the political use of language to the high ideals of Confucius and Dante. Machiavelli wrote,

“Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word.”

In order to give a vivid example of a prince who used language as craft, or spin or propaganda, Dante described the political machinations of Pope Alexander VI. He wrote,

“One recent example I cannot pass over in silence. Pope Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men, nor ever thought of doing otherwise, and he always found victims; for there never was a man who had greater power in asserting, or who with greater oaths would affirm a thing, yet would observe it less; nevertheless his deceits always succeeded according to his wishes, because he well understood this side of humanity.”

In the twentieth century, George Orwell emerged as one of the leading philosophers of the Machaivellian abuse of political language. Orwell wrote his classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he introduced his theories of Doublethink and Newspeak. Orwell defined Doublethink as,

“… the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them”

Orwell realized that the totalitarian state would redefine the purposes of language. The purpose of Newspeak, is to wage psychological warfare to manage the political perceptions of the populace. He wrote,

“The purpose of Newspeak was to eliminate the possibility of thoughtcrime . . .to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted . . . a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

For Orwell, the Machiavellian political abuse of language had distorted society into an increasingly malevolent form of tyranny. He wrote,

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

In Orwell’s future, Newspeak and Doublethink would eradicate the possibility of protest, sedition, insurgency and rebellion against the state.

George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Doublethink became the hallmark of the Bush Era. George Bush, Dick Cheney and their minions in Washington adopted Doublethink and Newspeak to coerce and impel political acceptance of their outrageous policies of perpetual war promulgated by a reactionary totalitarian government that is indistinguishable from the fascism and Nazism of the early twentieth century.

The core doctrine of the Bush Era is pre-emptive war. When Bush argues for the right to wage war to prevent war, he invokes Orwellian Doublethink by holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously while believing both of them: that war is undesirable while a war to prevent war is desirable.

The contradiction activating the Bush Doctrine is invisible to Bush, Cheney and their minions in Washington and elsewhere for they are the victims of Doublethink. In academic discourse, the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war has been equated with the idea of committing suicide because of the fear of dying.

In the Bush Era, the American public are bombarded by a continuous stream of propaganda designed to elicit their political support for perpetual war and war crimes as well as for a strong, centralized government headed by a President who is little more than his ceremonial title indicates, a Unitary Executive functioning as Commander-in-Chief who is indistinguishable from a military dictator.

US military class at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in social influence, perception management and propaganda.

Manufacturing consent for perpetual war is the primary enterprise of the Bush-Cheney government. Not only are citizens heavily taxed to support the increasingly undemocratic policies of the Bush-Cheney government, they are subjected to a constant barrage of propaganda beseeching them to provide political support for policies that undermine their constitutional rights to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizure, habeas corpus and the freedom of speech. Many Americans are alarmed that the USA is now rated 53rd on the World Press Freedom Index where it is tied for that dubious distinction with the states of Tonga and Croatia.

Bush’s propaganda engines of perpetual war are driven by: xenophobia; the demonisation of immigrants; fears of foreign cultures – especially Muslims – and the persistent application of fear and terror to the body politic.

The Bush White House governs by public relations. Tony Snow – a former news presenter for the right-wing Fox News Network – has become the official spokesman for the Bush-Cheney White House revealing the priority of propaganda to the political objectives of the Bush regime.

Confucius wrote,

“The correct use of language must begin at the very top of government.”

In contrast to Confucius, the blatant perception management and propaganda of the totalitarian regime is abundant, clear and constant. For example, Dick Cheney adopted the Hitlerian technique of the big lie to launch the Iraq War, when he promised the American people,

“I’m confident that our troops will be successful, and I think it’ll go relatively quickly . . . Weeks rather than months.”

Swiftly after the horrific tragedy of 9/11, Bush defined the thoughtcrime of today by stating,

“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

The modern state demonizes its opponents in order to manufacture public consent for war. In the Bush Era, the demonization of Muslims has been constant. Long a central them in the fire and brimstone culture of American evangelical Christianity, the demonization of Muslims has exploded into the mainstream of western civilization. In order to understand this phenomenon more clearly, we must examine a particularly revealing aspect of this shameful legacy of American religious traditions to focus briefly on the theological work of an ancestor of the current president, George W. Bush.

The Reverend George Bush was a cousin of President George W. Bush’s grandfather. Reverend Bush’s theological writings are well known to the Bush family, but propaganda officials of the Bush government have used their powerful offices to suppress and camouflage this revealing relationship in the American media – as well as shielding it almost entirely from the global media. In April, 2005, a propaganda official named Todd Leventhal of the Office of Countermisinformation confirmed that Reverend George Bush was, indeed, a relative of President George W. Bush and his father, former President George H. W. Bush.

Reverend George Bush (1796 - 1859)

In 1837, the Reverend George Bush wrote a book titled, The Life of Mohammed: Founder of the Religion of Islam, and the Empire of the Saracens. It should be needless to state that the Reverend George Bush has little complimentary to say about the founder of one of the world’s great religions. Worse. Reverend George Bush launched what should be considered a deliberate attack on Mohammed, his teaching and the religious tradition that he founded, Islam. The Reverend Bush constantly referred to Mohammed as an, “impostor.” He wrote,

“(Mohammed’s) whole history makes it evident, that fanaticism, ambition, and lust were his master passions . . . An enthusiast by nature, he became a hypocrite by policy; and as the violence of his corrupt propensities increased, he scrupled not to gratify them at the expense of truth, justice, friendship and humanity.”

From the theological writings of his ancestor, it cannot be disputed that the family of President George Bush has been incubating Islamophobia for at least four generations.

In the current generation of the Bush family, the George Bushes have surrounded themselves with a fawning coterie of Islamophobic evangelical Christian Zionists. For example, Franklin Graham is a family friend of the Bushes. Franklin Graham controls a vast and influential religious network called the Billy Graham Evangelical Association that has an annual income of more than $100,000,000 – most of which is tax exempt. Even today, although the vast majority of the American people oppose Bush’s wars, Franklin Graham’s followers zealously support Bush’s wars and his deeply unpopular neoconservative presidency.

Franklin Graham has made explicit statements articulating his peculiar Islamophobic theology. He stated,

“The God of Islam is not the same God of the Christian or the Judeo-Christian faith. It is a different God, and I believe a very evil and a very wicked religion.”

This statement reveals that Franklin Graham is poorly informed in the field of comparative religions, a tragic intellectual disability for a professional evangelist.

Franklin Graham and Biilly Graham, firm friends and political supporters of the Bush family.

The demonization of Muslims in popular American culture is overt, in-your-face and taken as a matter of course. In the massively popular television series 24, a Muslim villain named “Marwan,” held the American hero, Jack Bauer, hostage. Muslims frequently provide the villains in 24 in a process of demonization that will reverberate for generations.

Confucius taught,

“The ruler must correct his own behavior for the people to follow his leadership.”

In Bush’s America, the President and his retinue frequently demonize whole nations and peoples. For example, the “Axis of Evil” statement by President Bush demonized two Muslim nations as well as one Asian nation fostering a climate of fear, terror, Islamophobia and a generalized dread of all racial minorities.

In his State of the Union address in 2002, George Bush stated,

“North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens — leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections — then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil,”

Unfortunately, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Prime Minister Tony Blair are not the only leaders who contribute to the climate of terror and fear through the media.

Many religious leaders in America frequently demonize Islam and condemn Muslims. In Europe, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI made some insensitive remarks that many Muslims believe were hostile to Islam – because they contribute to the growing climate of Islamophobia.

At a high-profile address in Regensberg, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI quoted Emperor Manuel II Paleologus,

“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The process of demonizing Muslims and manufacturing Islamophobia is now a global phenomenon. An example is the Disney film, Aladdin, that was released in the early 1990s. Many of the American soldiers now serving in Iraq saw Aladdin during their childhoods when they were vulnerable to psychological programming and the demonization of foreign cultures portrayed as inimical to core American values. In Aladdin, the villains are all depicted as Arabs speaking with Arabic accents, while Aladdin is portrayed as an American youth with an American accent. This tactic is nothing less than the transparent demonization of Arabs – ie. Arabophobia.

Aladdin as an American defeats the evil vizier, Jafar, an Arab.

The propaganda of Islamophobia infiltrates society through the propaganda pronouncements of government and religious leaders that lead to the contamination of the mainstream media. The headlines of newspapers in the Occupied Territories proclaiming, “Vigilantes take up arms, vow to expel, ‘Muslim Filth’” incite cultural hatred, ie. Islamophobia. These headlines expose attitudes that are the products of cultural prejudices compounded by the global media campaign designed to propagate Islamophobia as the primary strategy to promote perpetual war.

“HELL, THE MUSICAL COMES TO THE VATICAN” read the headline on the BBC News coverage of the announcement that the Vatican has recently authorized a new popular opera based on Dante’s Divine Comedy – one of the greatest works of Christian literature. But, is there a hidden agenda behind the launch of this major new artwork? The BBC reported,

“(Marco Frisina), a Vatican composer is to stage an opera based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, with visions of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. . .Organisers have asked permission for the premiere to be held at the Vatican in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI.” BBC

While this story seems innocuous enough, we should turn to The Divine Comedy to examine its potential for promoting the demonization of Muslims and Islamophobia.

In Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, Dante wrote his description of the torments of Hell. In the Inferno: Canto XXVIII, Dante places ‘Mahomet,’ ie. Mohammad, in one of the most terrible, tortuous and tormenting tableaus in Hell.

Undergoing an infinite series of traumatic mutilations, Dante’s ‘Mahomet’ is tormented by a Satanic torturer armed with a massive sword called a “falchion.” The sword-wielding demon slashes, lacerates and mutilates ‘Mahomet’ repeatedly in an eternal cycle of Satanic vengeance. After each one of these horrific woundings, ‘Mahomet’ wanders along a circuitous path whereupon his mortal wounds heal only to be confronted again by the same sword-wielding demon who slashes him - again and again and again in an unending cycle of Hellish torture, mutilation and punishment. When Dante witnesses this dreadful scene, ‘Mahomet’ turns to him, opens the gaping wound in his chest and says,

“See now how I rend me;How mutilated, see, is Mahomet;In front of me doth Ali weeping go,Cleft in the face from forelock unto chin;And all the others whom thou here beholdest,Disseminators of scandal and of schismWhile living were, and therefore are cleft thus.A devil is behind here, who doth cleave usThus cruelly, unto the falchion’s edgePutting again each one of all this ream…

In 1869, the Christian artist, Gustave Dore illustrated Dante’s Inferno. Dore’s illustration of ‘Mahomet’ did not create global pandemonium at the time. In the twentieth century, Salvador Dali produced some of the most outstanding Christian works of art including: Christ of St John of the Cross and The Madonna of Port Lligat. One of his lesser-known works is his ‘Mahomet,’ whom he depicts as slashed and lacerated following the model in Dante’s Inferno.

Dali’s mutilated Mahomet 1959

Given the course of events in the first years of the twentieth century from the language and wars of the Bush-Cheney government and the statements of Pope Benedict XVI in Regensberg, it is only prudent to ask the following question. Will the forthcoming Vatican opera contain any Islamophobic elements that might enflame international tensions and foment wars against Muslim nations?

Confucius taught that the ruler must govern via his moral authority. He wrote, “The moral character of the ruler is the wind, the moral character of those beneath him is the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends.”

We have seen how the rulers, presidents, vice-presidents, religious leaders and the Pope have contributed to the demonization of Muslims and the fomentation of Islamophobic wars.

The death toll for the wars of the Bush Era is a secret number. Highly qualified scientists at Johns Hopkins University calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died in the first three years of the war. It is now one year later. We do not know the number of the deaths, dismemberments, disabilities, disfugurations, ravages, rapine and capricious slashings, shootings, woundings, burnings, explosions and anarchic homicides of the Bush Era, but we do know that secret number is still ascending.

For his leading role in manufacturing wars and the infinity of war crimes that are boiling out of the cauldrons of war, George Bush is an indictable war criminal. Last year, the European press reported that Bush had negotiated the purchase of a vast rancho in remote parts of Paraguay, a nation that refuses to extradite war criminals.

Driven by despair and disgusted with the treachery of their leaders who have cooperated with the warmongers, the people of the planet are mobilizing like never before in human history.

Empowered by their common sense of decency, their desire for justice and their love of peace the people of our planet are revolted by their disastrous leadership. There is a growing sense of urgency.

The pace of change is gaining momentum. The people are seizing the moment to make an impact on their political institutions to bring war criminals to justice.

The future is in the hands of ordinary people – like those who are reading these words.

References

Accuracy in the Media: Misinformation, Mistakes, and Misleading in American and Other Media / Todd Leventhal, Chief of the Counter-Information Team, U.S. Department of State; Dante Chinni, Senior Associate, Project for Excellence in Journalism

PDF: The Life of Mohammed by the Rev. George Bush, AM

Hell the musical comes to Vatican