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by Manuel Valenzuela
Part One can be viewed here.
An Absence of Will
Under constant manipulations, lies and propaganda, a nation of courage has become a nation of cowards. A nation that once questioned its leaders now falls lockstep behind them, blindly following criminality and corruption. A nation that once stood for protests, strikes, marches, sit-ins, challenging the government and seeking accountability now prefers sitting comfortably on couches or chairs, watching the world pass by through television sets or laptops, some becoming arm-chair activists, most simply rotting away their lives, preferring the life of a couch potato, passively ignoring the destruction of rights and freedoms, silently acquiescing to myriad number of crimes against humanity, and obediently shopping, purchasing and consuming according to the dictates of the corporatist world, their new god the Almighty Dollar commanding them to congregate at the Cathedrals of Consumerism, the Malls of Materialism, told to do their job and be good consumers, spending what little they have, even consuming with money that they do not have, and must therefore borrow.
What dreaded dark skinned bogeymen could never achieve Bush, the Congress and the mainstream media have succeeded marvelously at implementing. Under the constant threat of terror, we have failed to see the fusion of government and corporations, now more than ever, as well as the mutation of government into the instrument of profit, revenue and the bottom line. We have failed to see who, in fact, the true terrorist entities are, what the true threat to our way of life, our liberties and our rights is. We have become blinded to the political duopoly, the two-headed hydra, working in synergy and collusion, not in the interests of the people, but for the corporate world.
We fail to see that there is no choice, that elections are predetermined, and oftentimes orchestrated by the Ministry of Truth, that an opposition party is but a façade, that only the Corporatist Party exists, its two hands simply performing a juggling act, each taking its turn running the three ring circus we know as government. In our delusions of grandeur and exceptionalism we have become blinded to the reality that democracy is a sham, that real democracy is a threat to the corporatist element, that America has done more to destroy real democracy around the world than any nation on Earth.
“Democracy,” it turns out, is a synonym for American imperialism, a
disguise to ram neoliberal devastation down the throats of billions, a
method of controlling populations through puppets disguised as leaders.
It is only democracy if our corporatist elite approve of its victors,
only if they pledge allegiance to the Empire, at the expense of their
populations. Hypocritically, the nation that espouses freedoms, rights
and democracy tolerates and supports dictatorship and tyranny if it
protects our interests, but libels and slanders real democracy if it
audaciously protects the interests of the people. Thus, in the halls of
smoke and mirrors only illusions do we see. In the desert of delusion
only mirages can be reached.
The dark recesses of fear have made us forget that the Constitution is
not just a piece of paper, that its principles are the foundation of
the nation, that in its words and meanings are the cornerstones of what
and who we are as a people, and what we as a species aspire to reach.
Its contents are the eternal spring that secures our liberties and
rights and freedoms, yet we have forgotten that it exists, and thus,
have allowed its meanings and principles to be castrated. Today, the
Constitution gathers dust in the annals of history, now a forgotten
remnant of humankind’s past, becoming a relic reserved for a museum,
its words no longer read, or understood, or defended against the agents
of tyranny who have always tried to destroy what it stands for. Sadly,
the Constitution has been disappeared, both in practice and in the
imagination of the very people it was designed to protect and inspire.
Unfortunately, in our euphoria of comfort, mass consumption and
materialism, in our concern for security and protection, in our myopia
of short term happiness at the expense of long term vitality, in our
hatred of those different than ourselves, in our haste to seek revenge
and deliver wrath on those scapegoated for our suffering and emotional
train wreck, in our complete abdication as informed citizens and
knowledgeable human beings, and in our demonstrated cowardice and
silent acceptance as American-style wickedness is delivered to millions
of innocent human beings, we have forgotten who and what we are as a
people.
We have allowed ourselves to fall hypnotized for the myth of
egoist-induced exceptionalism, basking in our perceived greatness,
claiming ourselves the greatest country on the planet, as if it is true
just because heavenly deities make it so, even with our complete
ignorance of the world outside our borders. We have used our
unchallenged, unrivaled power, which we have simply chosen to abuse and
mismanage, to arrogantly destroy our standing in the world, in the
process eroding international relations, international law as well as
the sisterhood of nations.
Our unquenchable hunger for imperialist expansion, which the masses
nonchalantly approve of through our indifference, is conveniently
excused by our historical call from the heavens above to a manifest
destiny seemingly promised us by humankind’s gods. If we ever looked
deep into the mirror, we would see that America suffers from
narcissistic personality disorder, bordering on megalomania, becoming
an insecure, paranoid, schizophrenic nation that must resort to
allocating military budgets that annually exceed all those of the
entire world combined. In our reality, might makes right, peace is
secured through perpetual war, we are made safer by creating enemies,
not alleviating their grievances, and talking to your enemies is seen
as cowardice. In no other country on the planet are the teachings of
Jesus Christ so hypocritically preached, but never practiced.
In our view, happiness is secured, not through living life, but by
consuming and producing in ever-increasing and unsustainable levels. In
our reality, slavery equals freedom and work will make you free. We are
so happy, in fact, that we consume the most psychotropic pharmaceutical
drugs in the world. Depression, stress and feeling unfulfilled, it
seems, are keys to nirvana and heavenly bliss.
We continuously fall for the lies and the propaganda, the manipulations
and deceit, believing ourselves blessed by unseen deities, living in a
city atop a hill, showing ourselves off as a beacon of light upon the
world to behold, and aspire to become. We have been blinded by a false
patriotism that condemns those questioning the state while celebrating
those sheepishly following its every command. We have been entrapped by
jingoism and xenophobia laced in blatant bigotry and racism, thinking
ourselves superior to all other people on Earth, even when we are
comprised of representatives from all peoples of Earth. We are sheep,
lemmings and followers, always mesmerized by talking heads, pundits and
the so-called “experts”, never thinking on our own, always doing what
media propagandists spit out.
We have done nothing to stop aggressive wars, the ultimate crime
against humanity, resulting in the death of well over one million
innocent souls, all of which we could care nothing for. Only American
dead, of course, need to be mourned, counted and considered human. Only
we are worthy of life, and death, and recognition. The suffering we
have allowed our government to inflict is not of our concern. We have
shamed ourselves in our passive acquiescence to torture, executions,
gulags, extraordinary rendition, untold levels of suffering and the
disappearance of thousands. We bask in indifference at the war crimes
and crimes against humanity committed in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram
and at countless other secret prisons worldwide.
We did nothing in the abandoning and discarding of the Geneva
Convention, the Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, international law and in the trampling of the Bill of Rights.
Yet the very nature of what we have chosen to ignore, to erase from our
beautiful minds, is rapidly coming to our own land. We ignore what our
nation has done to the majority of the world at our own peril. For the
tyranny so pronounced, today and in recorded history, where America has
vital interests to protect will soon reach us. We have taken the bait,
almost continuously swallowing the hook cast by the corporatist world
of profit and state, falling for each dirty trick reeled our way,
assiduously falling for the propaganda of the corporatist media. We
have allowed corporatism to run rampant, allowed ignorance to prevail
and America to be altered, forever. Perhaps, then, we deserve what we
get.
The New Normal
As we followed the tunes of the Pied Piper straight into the river of
megalomania, as we slept through violence and destruction, as we
sleepwalked the Constitution to the incinerator, as we dreamed the
impossible dream, as we basked in the vices of greed and the Almighty
Dollar, as we dined on denial and delusion and deception, our nation
has been stolen from under our feet, transformed into a nation that has
clandestinely spawned a growing police state, with a burgeoning
surveillance society, becoming an authoritarian enclave, reared by
indifference, nurtured by ignorance, protected by jingoism and
xenophobia.
America is slowly, yet inevitably, becoming a country of repression,
suppression, oppression and persecution; of perpetual fear and
perpetual war; of growing militarism and fascism, of the entangled
fusion of state and profit; of an absence of rights, freedoms and
liberties; of so-called democracy that is today but a sham, a
concoction of snake oil and farce where choice is but a fleeting
illusion, where candidates are selected through the manipulations and
illusions presented by the Ministry of Truth, where elections are but a
mechanism of control, and of deception, where decisions are made not by
those who cast the votes, but by those who count them; and so-called
representation of the people a mirage to hide the selling of government
to the highest bidder by a two-headed hydra whose dual purposes of
expanding power to corporations and unleashing further imperialism for
the empire, both at the expense of the people, have furthered the
steady decline of the nation into the grips of corporatism.
The corporatist war against the American people thus continues
unabated, its slow, yet assured, manifestations and reverberations
crisscrossing the country like an invisible tsunami. With giant
clandestine waves crashing ashore, the tsunami of the last seven years
has eroded, with reckless abandon, the foundations of the Constitution
and of the nation itself. All that is needed for authoritarians and
corporatists to complete their project, all that is needed for America
to descend fully into the depths of Big Brother and complete
surveillance and a thriving police state and martial law and tyranny
and a final shredding of the Constitution, and thus our freedoms,
rights and liberties, is another shock to our senses, whether it be
economic or societal collapse, whether a depression or through another
false flag operation or yet one more preemptive war in the Middle East.
All that is needed for this evil to triumph is for good men and women
to do nothing, just as has been done for the past seven years, just as
has been done for the last several decades.
For without so much as a protest or a whimper, the blood of liberty and
freedom is hemorrhaging from the soul of every American. Paralyzed by
corporatist-induced fear and ignorance, catatonic to the clear signals
of an approaching cyclone of American style-fascism, hypnotized by the
warmth and comfort that consumerism and materialism provide, the
American people have become blind to the war being waged against our
interests, and our lives. Yes, the crusade by corporatists, neocons,
neoliberals and natural born authoritarians against the citizens of the
nation has gone largely unnoticed, albeit with a few clusters of
informed patriots desperately trying to sound the alarm of the coming
storm.
The infrastructure of tyranny has meticulously been built, deeply
embedded within the system itself, under the radar from the majority of
the people, in complete collusion by the political duopoly and all
three branches, its foundations created by the decimation of the Bill
of Rights, the destruction of civil liberties, the construction of
draconian laws and regulations – sometimes birthed in secret or in full
openness – ,the insertion of precedence or opinions validating
criminality and tyranny, and by the conditioning of the populace, in
order to insert the “new normal” into the consciousness, of propaganda
meant to indoctrinate us into accepting all levels of wrongdoing and
criminality both by the state and the corporate world acting in unison,
from torture to executions to mass murder to the need for constant
surveillance of our streets, of our communications and our daily lives,
and to the refusal to prosecute mercenaries guilty of crimes against
humanity.
The new normal has penetrated our nation, and our psyches, since that
dreadful day in September 2001, making sure that the political pendulum
shifted further to the right, further to the tendencies of
authoritarianism, making the Democratic Party a reincarnation of
yesterday’s Republicans and mutating the Republican Party towards a
full embrace of the tendencies of fascism and authoritarianism. Gone,
perhaps forever, is a valid progressive ideal in politics, a left of
center belief that was once evolving and leaning towards the social
democracies of Europe, with an emphasis on doing what was best for the
whole, not just the individual.
Shifted, too, are the political leanings of tens of millions of
Americans, away from the values of progressiveness, and hence those of
Jesus Christ, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., turning instead
towards the comforts of security and protection, albeit false comforts,
finding solace in extremist and predatory theology, in the scapegoating
of the different and the unknown, in the groupthink emotions of
nationalism and tribalism, in the ignition of flames inherent in
jingoism and xenophobia, in voluntarily placing blind, loyal faith in
media and the state, in embracing Big Brother security, in welcoming
authoritarian false promises, and in freely, and gladly, giving up
freedoms and rights in exchange for protection by the state.
Indeed, sacrificing an entire nation’s freedoms and rights, both in the
present and future, in exchange for a false sense of security — born
and bred by corporate and state propaganda, of an enemy concocted and
over-exaggerated – and purposefully looking the other way as the
country becomes more and more corporatist, in essence abandoning our
citizen role in preserving to our progeny what we inherited, will
forever denigrate our generation’s legacy. In history’s future volumes,
today’s American generation will be forever recorded as having
fulfilled a complete and utter collapse in the face of cowardice,
ignorance, indifference, fear and materialistic comfort, becoming
incapable of preserving and fighting for the foundation of the nation,
namely, the principles embodied in the Constitution.
For the generation that so easily gave away the rights, liberties and
freedoms that had been preserved for centuries, fought in blood, sweat
and tears, in bravery and courage, in wars and battles, and instead
allowed itself the pleasure of getting raped by American corporatism,
only negative connotations will be recorded. America, sadly, has
devolved from the Greatest Generation to the Coward Generation, – or
the Failure Generation – in only a few short decades, in only a few
mutations of the gene pool, in the span of nothingness in the realm of
history’s vast plethora of sad stories.
With the arrival of the next shock to the system, the next catalyzing
and transformative event, the next preemptive act of aggression, the
next Gulf of Tonkin-like staged event, the next false flag act of
terror to scar our psyches, or the next economic strangulation designed
to pillage ever more wealth from the working and middle classes, the
elaborate and carefully implanted infrastructure of authoritarian rule
will be allowed to awaken.
All the laws that have been put in place validating martial law and a
surveillance society and Big Brother and warrantless wiretapping and
intrusive invasions of privacy and domestic spying and dissident
arrests and torture and a police state, as well as those laws that have
destroyed habeas corpus and due process and the Bill of Rights and the
Constitution and all freedoms, rights and liberties we used to hold
dear will emerge like a malignant virus that has laid dormant inside a
body for years, cautiously hiding and buying its time until that day
when chaos reigns supreme, when fear induces stress, suddenly springing
to life with the onset of a weak immune system, launching an onslaught
against antibodies made impotent to fight off its orchestrated and
calibrated assault by years of conditioning, brainwashing, gluttony and
fear.
All that separates America from Amerika is one shock, one event, one
opportunity for those whose enemies are freedom and democracy to
orchestrate the Amerika of their sinister dreams. Most do not know the
seriousness of the threat, nor the perilous danger roaming among us,
nor the sinister ideology of our so-called leaders, nor how imminently
close we are to a vastly different America. For this cabal, this
domestic enemy, the people are the obstacle, the real, and true, enemy.
It is this group that is our greatest threat, our real enemy.
Until we realize that we have been led to believe for the last seven
years is but a charade, that the “war on terror” is but yet one more
method of control, that our pursuit of terror has led us in the wrong
direction, that the real terrorist entity is domestic, not foreign,
that we have been unleashing hell on Earth on the wrong, and innocent,
people, and that it is this internal threat that hates us for our way
of life, we will never stop the hemorrhaging of our freedoms, rights
and liberties.
One day we will awaken to a nation we will not recognize, a nightmare
on a hill, a beacon of tyranny, a land of the meek, a home of the
slave. Every day that passes is a day corporatism advances, and we
retreat, a day it grows in power, and we lose strength. Every day that
is allowed to transpire in favor of the corporatist element is a day
the People’s chains of bondage grow stronger. Every day we let pass is
a day we slide further down the corporatist black hole, allowing our
minds to become more ignorant, our reality to be created by the
Ministry of Truth, our lives to be further shackled to the invisible
dungeon of Amerika’s tomorrow.
One day, in the not too distant future, we will awaken and open our
eyes only to see that what we once took for granted no longer exists,
what we assumed would always exist has been made extinct, what we
forgot even existed has been washed away, what we failed to study and
understand has been revised, and what we failed to cherish and defend
has been destroyed, forever.
We will finally realize what our fathers and mothers and grandparents
and great-grandparents found out only through the spilling of blood,
sweat and tears, experienced through many years of activism, bravery
and the uncompromising power of the people united. We will realize,
after it is all too late, that those in power give nothing and, if
given the chance, take away everything; that everything the people at
present have, that every freedom, right and liberty embedded in the
foundations of America have been sought, demanded, struggled, fought
for, defended and protected.
It is only because of generations of Americans past that we enjoy our
privileges, with each successive generation safeguarding what was once
gained, and fighting for what needed to be attained. This
trans-generational wall of solidarity built the accumulated freedoms
and rights we had at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Sadly,
if we fail to act, if we fail to wake to the sounds of alarm, the wall
will come undone, eroded by what we have become as a people, the
unbreakable brick and mortar, constructed over 200 years of struggle,
crumbling and succumbing to the powerful tsunami of corporatism and
authoritarianism fast approaching our shores.
The Year of Living Dangerously is upon us. The sorrows of empire have
arrived. In this struggle, America entire is Ground Zero. The clock is
ticking, the time is wasting. Would we rather live in tyranny, or fight
for freedom? Live in our America, or the corporatist Amerika? In this
fight for our way of life, which citizenry will show up: yesterday’s
version of the People, or today’s? The choice, as always, is ours.

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