he said she said, tail wagging the dog, suspension of disbelief, plausible deniability, brinksmanship, crisis, war on..., let me be perfectly clear..., proud, unequivocal, threat, cost of..., unknown unknowns, known unknowns, known knowns

Hmmm. That's the fourth time this week one of my posts has disappeared. Here it is again:

From the last paragraph of the full article:

“Garcia Marquez once said that he owed his style, which combines fantastic scenarios with painstaking detail, as much to Kafka as to his grandmother who would tell the most improbable stories in perfect deadpan. The same style also obtains in the world of think tankery today - an apparent rigour of method obscuring a fanciful underlying reality.”

I’ve been thinking for some years about the motivational force against all this carnage and torture, the disturbing fact that those killed in the Mideast are routinely labeled insurgents, or Taliban, or al-Qaeda unless proven otherwise through their prominence. Yes, we can talk about poppies, oil, minerals, and geostrategy, but I’m afraid I’ve concluded that the life force that is driving this is a return to Crusade thinking, very literally, and quite as preposterous as Marquez’s grandmother’s stories, yet quite as informing and pervasive as those stories are in Marquez’s great work. When I talk to veterans about their experiences and mention how Christianity works in the military, I usually get an earful of ranting about how these Christians have invaded the military psyche and are radically and enthusiasticall anti-Muslim, to the point of calling for the obliteration of Islam. I hear the same from my born-again students and family. As I’ve written here before, students have openly and proudly affirmed that killing Iraqis is a noble, Christian, and/or at least fun thing to do in front of a classroom. Increasingly, this has become an acceptable stance.

It occurs to me that Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s review of the near-automatic labeling of Iraqis as somehow the enemy, no matter the lack of evidence, might be more chilling than a minimizing of the horror for the sake of a largely uninformed public. These military officials might be quite sincere. Islam, in all its forms, is the ultimate enemy for many, and for many Christians, both the working class here and top brass over there, are driven by a religious fervor that seeks to eradicate Islam.

Russ Baker’s site whowhatwhy.com and Salon published an article on Seymour Hersch’s reporting on the military/CIA influence of the Knights of Malta and subsequent attacks on his “paranoia,” written by Mathew Phelan. http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/02/23/pulitzer-prize-winner-seymour-hersh-and-the-men-who-want-him-committed/ (I’m giving you the whowhatwhy.com link because Baker’s site is very interesting and those who haven’t happened upon it might want to check it out)

Jill, here on CD, linked us to a really creepy article written back in 2003 in Harper’s called “Jesus Plus Nothing,” by Jeff Sharlet which looks at “The Family,” a very strange and frightening take of Christian covenants likened, approvingly, to Hitler’s organization by its hero, Doug Coe. “The Family’s members are quite prominent in Congress and big business concerns. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525

Xe is a “Christian” organization. Can’t you tell?

We see it all around us, this Holy War tinge to our invasions, but tend to discount it as paranoid delusion, one more of those conspiracy stories. I have always been of the mind that humans are in essence religious animals, if only insofar as we subscribe to ideas such as infinity and perfection. Of the latter, to those who say we do not, consider what the underappreciated Kenneth Burke wrote about the religious impulse: that the divine is none other than the sense of the best, the best of the best, the title of titles—or as Plato’s Socrates would have it, the Forms of all things, all of which coalescing into an ultimate Form, which he called God. It is ingrained and pervasive in our sense of judgment, and is the root of religiosity, which can manifest itself in anything from scientism to Christian Science. One could cynically say that we’ve been stuck on reality as a Ponzi scheme from the writing of Plato’s Republic. And as in Plato’s example, a reliance on rational thinking does not make the religious impulse go poof. Perhaps here it is most dangerous, as evidenced by the cloaked religiosity of believing that a morally unfettered science can solve all our problems. And here we are.

To me, there were two particularly troubling and challenging visuals in Scott Noble's grim but compelling documentary "Lifting the Veil"*

One was being "forced" to watch clip after clip of the appallingly mendacious and hypocritical Obama, from his ascendancy as "rock-star" candidate Bonnie Prince Obama to his reign as monarchical Unitary Executive upon the Oval Office Throne.

The other was the poignant and horrific scenes of infants and children killed in Amerikan predator drone strikes-- Afghan and Pakistani children, I believe, although I'm sure the Amerikan Imperium has precipitated this particularly heart-rending kind of collateral damage elsewhere.

Although some of the little victims bore visible wounds and bruises, they mostly looked as if they were serenely and peacefully asleep, lying in the ruins and rubble wrought by the Amerikan government, or carried by grief-stricken parents.

These images seemed a world apart, but one brief interlude tied them together: Obama at a podium at the Beltway debauch called the "White House Correspondents Dinner", joking that the "Jonas Brothers" boy band was apparently in the audience, and that Obama's daughters were infatuated with them.

Obama's comic premise was a self-deprecating reference to himself as an overprotective father. Let's go to the transcript**:

"The Jonas Brothers are here. (Applause.) They're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But, boys, don't get any ideas. (Laughter.) I have two words for you -- predator drones. (Laughter.) You will never see it coming. (Laughter.) You think I'm joking. (Laughter.)"

As noted in the transcript, the sycophantic crowd went wild.

I presume that Obama's wisecracks weren't tested with Afghan or Pakistani focus groups. They weren't invited to the dinner, after all.

"Lifting the Veil"'s skillful juxtaposition says it all; see it if you haven't already.

And in case it needs to be noted explicitly, the unmitigated evil of "predator drones" isn't just that they persistently kill babies, the quintessential "innocent bystanders".

It's that, as Ahmad suggests, this type of depersonalized long-distance homicide is predicated on the reprehensible magical, fictitious thinking that it's an effective and efficient means of eliminating what brutally simple-minded government and miltary parlance calls "bad guys", or "the enemy".

Only delusional imperialist sociopaths, idiots, and fools believe that such high-tech methods of MAKING enemies are sound methods for "eliminating" enemies and threats.
__________________

* http://metanoia-films.org/compilations.php

** http://projects.washingtonpost.com/obama-speeches/speech/240/

500,000 Iraqi children dead as the result of USA policies and the official statement was "...we think the deaths were worth it". WORTH IT TO WHOM!!! ( Halliburton, Raytheon, GE, Lockheed-Martin, Blackwater...)

When fascism came, it was not at the point of a gun, it was not brought by the government troops, it was not even imposed by the Corporate CEO or the Hedge Fund manager. Fascism quietly came in the guise of a misinformed teacher, a celebrity celebrating assassination, and a bespectacled librarian banning books.

Hellfire missiles from drones take the nobility, bravery, righteousness and soldiering out of war and put it into video games played by chickenhawk oligarchs.

Many people have been resurected from the dead only to be killed again and again.

I'm thinking of Saddam Hussein and his two sons, Chemical Ali, Al Zaquari, and, of course, Osama bin Ladin.

I also remember when they once killed KSM, and then promptly revived him so they could torture him into confessing everything but the Lincoln assasination.

It all goes down the memory hole.

I think this was the point of the article: Killing the same person over and over again.