Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
— Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello
This country is going so far to the right you won’t recognize it…
— John Mitchell (1969) Spoken to New York Times reporter and mentioned in his obit (1988)
Manliness and mastery required regeneration through violence, and by the 1890s, { Theodore} Roosevelt was spoiling for a fight: “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one,” he wrote. Any opponent would do, but “the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages”.
— Jackson Lears, How the US Began Its Empire, NYRB 2018
Every notion of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad.
— Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, February 8, 1994
The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.)
A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.)
Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.)
— Nick Turse, Chronicles Magazine, July 2018
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.
It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda.
What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten.
— Charles Bowden
And the land, hitherto a common possession like the light of the sun and the breezes, the careful surveyor now marked out with long-drawn boundary lines. Not only were corn and needful foods demanded of the rich soil, but men bored into the bowels of the earth, and the wealth she had hidden and covered with Stygian darkness was dug up, an incentive to evil. And now noxious iron and gold more noxious still were produced: and these produced war – for wars are fought with both – and rattling weapons were hurled by bloodstained hands.
Aki Cederberg is a writer, traveler, musician, and filmmaker who gives talks and lectures on esoteric subjects. He has written for several publications including The Fenris Wolf book series. He is the author of Journeys in the Kali Yuga: A Pilgrimage from Esoteric India to Pagan Europe. Aki is a member of several Finnish musical groups and is a contributor to the Radio Wyrd podcast. He lives in Helsinki, Finland.
A video version of this interview is available here.
Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight.
