If “the medium is the message” — a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan — existentialism could be the means of delivering grist to the psychic mill in order to contextualise sovereign identity. To embed or implant acceptance of myths that have the power to embed and implant compliance is where it all starts. The Founding Fathers of the American constitution struggled mightily with the gremlins in the system, but some of their warnings ‘foretold’ might have to be revisited — observe how the Fat Cats of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex have grown ever more obese on a diet of propaganda and deception, while the 99% existentially wilt.
As an octogenarian I can attest to the fact of having lived through a time when warfare became the defining zeitgeist of an epoch. Dissimulation has often been the mask of choice for established media and for bureaucracies, whose purpose it was to propagate the recognisability of the status quo in terms of myth, race, culture and historic inevitability to the masses. Between what we could do, or allowed to do, were matters usually controlled by church or state. The methods used to shape narratives that sought to control public discourse were of a predictable type; developed ever newer techniques to entice believers (consumers) into accepting the proselytising unction of the architects of social order.
For instance, observe how the ubiquity of aggression is evidenced in our experience of reality. After decades of aggression involving the USA and Israel in regime change throughout the Middle East, we were surprised and caught off guard when blow-back occurred. The new threat is from the resistance fighter and he might not even wear a uniform. Muslims in general, their countries and sovereignty in particular, were held in contempt, in spite of the fact that aggression was something we, The West, took to them. Permanent war became the new normal in response to permanent resistance by the inhabitants of these countries; emotionally driven cri de coeur served up as Homeland Security pap now envelopes us all in surveillance at the behest of the propaganda mandarins, revving up the propaganda-machine ever more for the purpose of vilifying the ethnicity of the OTHER.
Corporate America and Zionist Israel propagate blatant falsehoods in the pursuit of their interests, inventing existential threats to justify their incursions as justifiable modus operandi along faux security lines. America, in donning the mantle of Colonial Master, had no compunction as to the means and ends it would adopt when creating its theatres of war. Intoxicated by its own ‘exceptionality’, it launched its myopic war-machine of mass destruction upon the Middle East and elsewhere in the name of democracy. The oil reserves in the Muslim nations, in particular, were of singular importance to their strategic interests. The practice of foraging for resources elsewhere in the world goes on unabated, creating the need for ever newer kinds of security-hype to disguise the nature of the heists they are engaged in.
Nahum Sokolow, Jewish journalist and Zionist leader, and prominent pioneer of Zionist literature, (and writing) speaking in the early part of the 20th century, while pretending that political Zionism was the sinned-against party, told his listeners: “It has been said and is still being obstinately repeated by anti-Zionists again and again, that Zionism aims at the creation of an independent Jewish State. But that is wholly fallacious. The Jewish State was never a part of the Zionist programme” — which leaves one to wonder if the genius of the existential tribe is its ability to cut a deal while speaking in tongues.
The deal that disappeared Palestine was heavy on myth –“A Land Without a People” fantasy becoming myth de jour once the occupation of that country was condoned by the Military-Industrial consortium of money and might that was America, the ‘honest’ broker. A deal that unleashed the terror of the Nakba upon the Palestinian population, driving them across borders and into statelessness; thus did ethnic cleansing clear a space for the myth of “A Land Without a People, for a People without a Land” — and was widely propagated by some within the Zionist movement’s leading thinkers and writers, such as Herzl, Bialik and Mandelstamm. So it came to pass, the consortium of fixers who cut the deal for the Palestine heist, went on to destroy much of the Middle East in the most bloodthirsty way imaginable.
Soon it became second nature to apply brute force to foreign domains by simply assuming that non-whites were inferior. Adopting the ontological arrogance of historic European colonial practices, America, with the help of arsenals in need of casus belli, set forth to render whole nations defunct in the name of regime change. ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ became the catch cry. Their arrogant dominance would surely have given Democritus nightmares — and with the connivance of their Zionist lackey, who did so masterful a job of regime change in Palestine, went on to defecate on the Middle East in no small order.
Whilst sharing the same asshole, these partners in crime continue to shit mindlessly on anyone resisting their aggression. Permanent war as the new normal now permeates the consciousness of the public. Media becoming rife with ideological tropes that propagate prejudice and hate; we became adept at identifying what the propagandized press wanted us to recognize in terms of who was friend or who was foe. Physical appearance acquired the status of a medium, confirming our need to be assured of what we should accept as normal. Culture was in the eye of the beholder, and media was the medium used to toll-gate cultural legitimacy. Muammar Gaddafi wore exotic headgear and was often shown loosely robed; Saddam Hussein wore military gear and sometimes the keffiyeh; Benjamin Netanyahu wore suit and tie and always appeared as though he had just exited a stylish Manhattan hair salon.
The cultural divide was in the hands and the eye of the media. In a climate where simplistic acceptance of propaganda was the hallmark of the time –1960/70/80s America — a Zionist vaccination against the truth of who the aggressor was in the conflict in Palestine was administered so successfully, that the American public swallowed the whole deal lock, stock, and barrel. Even disputing the veracity of the official gospel came to be equated with possessing some form of anti-Semitic bile. Needless to say, the Palestinian perspective was banished, Nakba style, to the wilderness, leaving propaganda to do what it does best…slur the case for justice.
In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it was not uncommon to discover in the media of that time, random pictures of Jewish immigrants embarking from European airports with violin-cases tucked under their arms. The form of the medium embedded in the message here was encrypted-classicism of the European variety defining ilk and civil intent. Never mind that they were going to Palestine to live out a socialist ideal on a kibbutz under the auspices of the Pentagon, that mighty military protector –never mind that media and message often have their wires crossed — it’s what we’re indoctrinated to recognize that’s important — at every level they were the apparatchiks of a mythology that sought to reap the rewards of the Faustian deal and we were meant to wish them bon voyage. These opportunists, leaving old Europe for greener pastures…or in this case settlers setting out to claim “a Land Without a People, for a People Without a Land”, were part of a grooming process stage-managed by imperial propaganda and dutifully carried by the media. The Book of Job and violins notwithstanding, the existential narrative that accompanied the ‘deal’ had all the hallmarks of a colonial cultural mindset.
Technological man, in association with war-culture, has a penchant for weapons of mass destruction; they fit neatly into the business of ethnic cleansing and the destruction of civilian populations. It was American dollars that enabled the Israeli Air Force to slaughter the citizens of Gaza willy-nilly, with AIPAC twisting — and not too subtly either — the arm of the paymaster (the American taxpayer) for ever more patronage and dollars. Shock and awe etymology, which accompanied large scale aggression against civilian populations, quickly spread its monochromatic focus into every quarter of Western society, brokering blood sports in the entertainment industries to boot, to keep the masses in a state of comatose stupidity.
Television and Hollywood having pioneered and built up our tolerance for pyrotechnics that shred brown and yellow bodies, while presenting air-power, the atom bomb, ballistic missiles, depleted uranium, napalm, drones, agent orange, white phosphorous as appropriate ‘agents’ to be used against the OTHER — non-white people citizens — thus did epochal slaughter become the name of much of the entertainment GAME, with media supporting Made-in America-Soft-Power, because it was considered ‘cool’ to support junk-patriotism.
Entertainment as expressed in video games came to define the epochal times we find ourselves in. Games that drip-feed action scenarios to the public are often imbued with racial aggression. Action for action sake negates any understanding of experience as having any innate human value; faux experience becoming the alienating force that destroys the ability to think and recognize auguries in the real world.
Auguries that can identify the value of time as foretold by William Blake — “To see a World in a Grain of Sand? And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour” — are a far cry from the experience of gladiatorial combat in the arena of fighting combatants. Recordings of graffiti revealed from Roman times suggest that gladiators were quite popular with the women — “Crestens, the net fighter, holds the hearts of all the girls”, and Caladus, The Traecian, makes all the girls sigh” — so will future archaeologists find evidence (lost memos perhaps?) confirming Hillary Clinton’s penchant for gladiatorial combat in a area of the world, long since reduced to rubble and gore, known as the Middle East?
Will future archaeologists have images of the great killing machines let loose on civilians across the global arena as referred to by Madeleine Albright, “What’s the point of having this superb military if you can’t use it?” Will rediscovered graffiti in some burnt out Washington with Hillary Clinton’s ebullient words as uttered upon hearing of the death of Muammar Gaddafi, former Prime Minister of Libya, have any meaning, “We Came, We Saw, He died”?
But the problem with America’s pursuit of regime change is that its foreign policy has become tainted, if not engulfed, by obsessive compulsive disorder in obedience to the deals hatched in the oligopolistic marketplace. Deals to remove some ‘HE’ or other for the purpose of expropriating territory or resources abroad are recognised as the transactions of the credibility-lite elites, elites ‘hooked’ on violence. Here the relationship between cause and effect, medium and message, disappears into the nether regions of shady deals done in the name of shady business practices…capitalism recognizing no borders.
Hillary’s “WE CAME”, says it all and the world has come to recognize the actors in the oligopoly and how they dispatch the forces that “COME” to take and destroy. The etymology used to disguise aggression vis-à-vis propaganda has become predictable and threadbare. The deals done by the Military-Industrial-Complex, Wall Street, The Media, are done for no other purpose than to increase the power of these latter-day mammoths. The deal done to destabilize Brazil and Ukraine, demonize Russia, sell-out Palestine, demolish Libya and Iraq, are all done by dealers who share a common interest in lucre, and always with palms open to receive the thirty pieces of silver, and guess what? There are plenty more of them in the wings; some of them are fronting up as presidential wannabes in this election year in the land-of-the-free.
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