Empire Of Amnesia

[indigobusiness]

Empire Of Amnesia, 2004
by John Steppling

December 13, 2004


(Swans - December 13, 2004) When the looting in Baghdad began, and was encouraged by US forces, an Arab professor here in Krakow said, simply, "they want to destroy our history, and our cultural identity." This seems a year in which the erasure of history has found total traction and solidified into the raison d'être of the hegemonic ruling class. Iraq, like Afghanistan before it, is simply being leveled, contaminated and erased from memory. At The Hague too, history is being refashioned to please the Empire. Milosevic must be silenced, and so an imposed counsel is appointed (and if this doesn't quite work, well, let's just "shit can" the whole trial, as John Bolton would have it). Now in the Ukraine a US orchestrated takeover is underway, labeled as a democratic uprising. During the debates Dick Cheney speaks of the US bringing democracy to El Salvador (uh...like Oscar Romero's murder?). Bush still speaks of bringing democracy to Iraq, and of how things are getting better (and Allawi now chokes out how violence is on the wane). Israel speaks as if it is a victim, while executing "terrorists" outside any due process (not to mention over five hundred children). Unreality. Re-writing history. America never murdered those millions of Native Americans. History begins where we say it begins, and it ends where we say it ends. Mission Accomplished. The history of some six hundred tribes is of little consequence, but George Washington, well, that's where things really start. Ronald Reagan, a great American...a nation mourns...unreality.

The year of amnesia was also the year of the Anyone But Bush mantra, a discussion which tended to distract attention from the more obvious crises that dot our terminal planet, now looms as a year where the media-induced narcosis of the American populace reached fail safe. Decades of erosion in public education and a general de-culturing of the populace combined with a post 9-11 focus for the pre-existing hysteria of the powerless have created a society, however split in details, that has reached a level of vindictiveness and blood-lust difficult to imagine. But then that's what happens when you have no memory of your own culture or history. That's what happens when you have only video games and TV to guide the average adolescent through his or her period of individuation. The contradictions of marketing can only be reconciled by forgetting them. The bad theatre of electoral politics brought us Governor Schwarzenegger and President Bush, two men of so little cranial capacity that one would be hard pressed to find a better casting for Dumb and Dumber (though which is which I leave to you). Does the empty parodic masculine posturing of these buffoons suggest something of a crisis in American male identity? When a society selects a groping bullying side show freak as leader of the world's fifth largest economy, something is being forgotten. When a semi-literate smirking brain-damaged frat boy is re-elected (sort of) by the most powerful country in the world, then a willful memory loss is taking place. It is a society of appearances.

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What remains of leftist opposition was largely swallowed up in the near inexplicable support for (yeah, we know he's not perfect) Kerry. Chomsky continues to justify his lame call to vote for Imperialism.....and has dropped the baton of moral authority like the US sprint relay team, (though only to be picked up by the likes of Arundhati Roy, Stan Goff, and Gary Leupp). What Ed Herman called the Cruise Missile Left have congealed into a pathetic chorus of apologists for colonialism...willfully ignoring evidence about the truths of Rwanda, Kosovo, and the Sudan. Kristoff, Garton Ash, Power, Marlise Simons, and Ignatieff...all sit back in comfort, their power books open, sipping free trade cappuccinos and pondering the "responsibility of the West"...and we end the year with the melancholy spectacle of the Ukraine elections. These same liberals find it "encouraging" that people are protesting the gangster government of Kuchma...while not seeming to mind that their new golden boy (Yanukovich...err, Viktor Yushchenko*) is a former member of that same government...the only thing that separates him is a desire to accept Western capital and military bases...oh, and NATO. Both sides are reactionary and corrupt and from the wealthy elite of that long-suffering nation. This is not even to mention the obvious state department covert PR campaign and funding (NED, Freedom House, etc.) -- which means a support for this so-called orange revolution is simply support for more global domination by the U.S. Western capital won't be building new health care centers or libraries in Kiev, but they might be starting up some Starbucks and most certainly will be selling off natural resources. One wonders how the U.S. would react if Russia were building military bases in Monterey, Mexico and the lower Antilles.

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This is the year of the term "values." I take this buzz word to be the latest and most extreme example of the sexual hysteria of our culture, this time masquerading under its new branding. Sex-negative rhetoric on the far right is almost comical, except that millions believe it. They also believe the Rapture is coming...oh...like next week. On the left, the rigid hysteria and foaming paranoia of conspiracy theorists and bullying militants of various sects is only the flip side of this phenomenon. Compassion is reserved for those who agree with you, for those victims deemed worthy, by "you." From Western "concern" for black kids in refugee camps (created by US foreign policy) to the paternalistic approval of US-led opposition in Ukraine, the attitude is the same. The overweight, underpaid check-out girl at Wal*Mart barely registers on the compassion radar. The Christian right prefers thousands of dead foreigners to one gay marriage. All is marketed, all is spin and PR. Alienated work is a slow death. The U.S. wants quicker death, either from anonymous DU-tipped bombs, or from lethal injection in the many US prison death houses, but will accept any death it can get. Kill, kill, kill, just don't fuck. If you're the president, a blow job can get you impeached...if a movie star, you have to publicly apologize...if an athlete, you get a trial in some cracker court house and a media circus...and yeah, you have to apologize. Nothing worse than sex...except that it sells. Can't wait for the next Victoria's Secret fashion show. The society of necrophilia and repression and Puritanism...again, on all sides. The masturbatory culture must forget how to fornicate. The Pope doesn't even want you to masturbate...but then he lives in the tenth century along with Mullah Omar, John Ashcroft, and the Israeli settlers.


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