Who Needs Weapons of Mass Destruction?
By Sean Fenley
25 May, 2010
Countercurrents.org
As Emma Goldman put it, “Ignorance is the most violent element in society.” But when you conjoin ignorance with a population willing to go to war at a pin drop, you’ve got violence to the nth degree squared. Combine a massively overinflated military budget, with a salesman in a flight jacket, and you’ve got a more than successful war making machine.
The uninformed and dis-informed American public, equals a weapon of mass destruction. If the United States didn’t have these virulent munitions; the U.S. government could still pursue all manner of sordid acts and deeds. It’s the ‘brilliance’ of keeping so many millions of people, so hunkered down, and so deeply in the dark. You don’t need thought police, when you’ve essentially got a moribund, and asleep at the wheel press.
And once you’ve achieved a radically dis-informed populace, you can say just about anything, and it doesn’t have to be assiduously backed up with facts. Literally, you can say just about anything about any non-nuclear nation’s existence as a threat, you can say all manner of things about foreign leaders who don’t go along with neoliberal one-size-fits-all economic programs, and you can even sell a Republican health plan to a public ostensibly thirsty for change; beyond a shadow of a doubt, you can do just about anything that you’d like — from a laundry list of items that you’ve set aside for a rainy day. What a power trip it must be? Eh? To be at the helm of such a voluminous vessel, headed off a cliff!
It’s probably exciting to campaign though; wouldn’t ya think? More exciting than making sound policy anyway, and surely more exciting than stewarding the public treasury like a hawk, and looking out for those groups that don’t fill your campaign coffers. It’s a pay to play system, that’s just the long and the short of it, though, and no matter how many platitudes are aired about Main Street; they’re getting buried when compared to so many other treasured groups.
The key is mobilizing people to support something, and then to get them to sign ‘X’ on the bottom, before they’re overcome by feelings of dread, caution, and/or buyer’s regret. Since, the economic system, in the first place, is predatory capitalism; why shouldn’t the political system be one and the same? The two systems are really kissing cousins, thick as thieves; they go well together, in fact, hand in glove.
When ‘reforms’ are made — they are piecemeal at best — they never go to the root of the problem, because that sort of thing is for the radical few. Pragmatists, can do people; that is, always put a press release out there, and actually pursue only a smidgen of whatever the propaganda states. That way, more credit can be taken, than what the people are going to get in actual, quantifiable returns. But whatever the returns are, anyway, that’s inconsequential; nonetheless, the point of the matter, is that a particular problem was given a diminutive try.
More so even than diminutive, the effort needs to be bipartisan — better still post-partisan — even though no one really knows exactly what that means. And don’t even think about the fact that one party needs to straitjacketed, and the other seems to think that their party’s base is the other’s too. At the end of the day, they’ll be some jolly good handshaking, kicking back a few cold ones together, and patting one another on the back!
Another good day has flipped over on the calendar, for the political animals of Washington. And never mind the New Deal, or the Square Deal for that matter — any deal’s been done — it’s another moment in the sun, for the diurnal creatures of the United States Capitol! What a wicked and unscrupulous, cage of gnashing vipers indeed!
Who needs weapons of mass destruction in this sort of a milieu? You hardly need to firebomb anyone, when virtually anything that the powers that be want to accomplish, is a cinch to perpetrate. Who needs the neutron bomb, in this sort of a climate; of a nearly wholly disengaged citizenry, combined with omnipotent, ruling ‘upper crust’?
All the bloodletting and the strong arm tactics have all already been done — long ago — many times over, to reach this point of a ‘free’, ‘participatory’, ‘unparalleled’, and ‘democratic’ organization of our culture. Soft violence of this magnitude, and of this ‘illustrious’ stature; is certainly unprecedented in the tomes and tapestries of the vast human annals. Not only that, but ignorance is begetting violence, in a whole new way, than probably any of us could have ever — sickeningly — dreamt it. And it’s all the more grotesque and putrid; than could have been depicted, by any B-list, two-bit Hollywood slasher flick!
Sean Fenley is an independent progressive who would like to see some sanity brought to the creation and implementation of current, and future U.S. military, economic, foreign and domestic policies. He has been published by a number of websites, and publications throughout the alternative media. [email protected]
