New Reign Of Terror
By David Sparenberg
25 May, 2009
Countercurrents.org
The bullet from the terrorist gun, manufactured anywhere in the industrial world, has your name on it. Sometime during your life time, it may end your life. End you without warning. When the bullet rips into your flesh, it will already be stained with the blood of others murdered before you. But this is Russian roulette. At some point, your number is up.
The terrorist's car bomb, aggressively thirsting for the blood of your children, will again explode. At detonation, the razors of shrapnel, flying like butcher's knives through the viscid sweetness of honey, through soft tissue of butter, will bear, with flaming metals of hatred's heroes, the DNA of other kids, dismembered before your own. Perhaps of those on the second school bus? The bus that went the detour and reached the intersection at the moment of settling a score.
Research scientists have gathered evidence that at some time in the immensely distant prehistoric past the human species was reduced to no more than some 2,000 members, this due to cataclysmic planetary changes. These ancestral survivals of draught, famine and climate change scattered into small bands. And only gradually, over many generations, did their descendants begin coming together into larger and more organized collectives.
This process continues until this day when our species swarms over the Earth and has grown, beyond threat and trauma, to an astronomical 6.6 billion.
If the scientific evidence is correct then we are truly all related, not only biologically, but familiarly as well. And as extended family, we breathe, eat, sleep, play in sexual intercourse and fantasies, defecate, aspire to ecstasy, descend into sadism, narcissism and hatred, wound, bleed, cry, scream, kill and die.
There can be no doubt that humanity is a family in crisis. Earth is in crisis too. There can be no doubt that hatred is spreading faster than love, fueled by the black liquid apostles of reptilian memories. Will we go down as victims of the dinosaurs' revenge? We will go down despite the tenacity of forgotten, common ancestors? There can be no doubt that we are going down.
But what the hell! What the hell, I say. Other generations have suffered through boils and bouts of plaguing madness. Yet we continue to appeal to something outside of ourselves. As if there were some public conscience after the individual witness has been dismissed. Is this because we prefer casting blame elsewhere and would remain addicted to our moral adolescence? Or might it be, even on the rarest occasion, due to a shadowy and midnight haunting of a philosophy of inquiry—a radical dedication to lacerating questions and resistance to the politics of satisfying answers?
Civilization is about covering and it covers two realities: the cruelties of its own barbarism and the asking of subversive questions.
Thus the Death Squads of state terrorism are always out hunting. Worse than a pack of marauding wolves, they are constantly on the lookout for a fresh kill. For someone to rip and tear and sink their sharp teeth into. If they have not yet reached you, don't feel secure, don't relax; don't think that you are forgotten. Believe me, you are not forgotten. In an hour before dawn, you can hear then (listen!) pounding on the door of a stranger, on one street over from your own, somewhere at a distance, in the country of oppression, in the land of occupation. Where bodies are routinely dumped like sacks of garbage. When they reach your house—because who dares to call any place the safety of a home?—they will drag your family from sleeping beds. Some will be shot then, while other wait and are forced to watch. This is not time to be a woman, with that hollow jewelry tucked between the thighs. Certainly this is no time to be a child, unless a child is born blind.
When the Satan's fire devouring the sky; and yes, the sky if falling and yes, there is a progressive, unfolding apocalypse in pandemic, cumulative motion—such and such an hour in Iraq, such and such a time of death in Darfur; when the hell fire and brimstone tick-tock down like decimating excrement from a screaming fighter jet, marked with the insignia of a terrorist nation, don't pretend that you are waiting for a late arriving starship to whisk you away to another galaxy. Don't start making excuses. That falling fire is planning a barbeque and you too are invited. Even should you refuse your invitation, your refusal will not be accepted. Do you really believe that when death burns down from heaven the arsonist cares who is on the ground? But tell me, since you are likely fond enough of animals roasted, how do you think human flesh smells through the chimneys of history, or when grilled on a highway stretching half way across a radioactive desert? What is the odor of burnt offering? Of holocaust of civilians—in military jargon—collateral damage?
There can be no doubt that what the political bosses tell us about terror, terrorism and terrorists--that they have no conscience, no boundaries or borders and can and will strike anywhere from anywhere, day or night—that all of this true. And that the truth is damning. Does this then mean that a truth seeking is a terrorist? Or whoever joins the game loses by the exacting nature of the game? Does this condition render the odd man out, the peacemaker, no better than a daydreaming fool?
Go and make peace with yourself, if you believe in the power of confession! When there was something you could have done, you did nothing. When it still did not touch you, skin for skin, as the adversary sneeringly says.
You know, even a democracy, turned to empire, with its head screwed backward and regurgitating the propaganda of possession, can excuse the terrorist tactics of torture and mass murder. And you know too (or do I really need to remind you?) that the one thing that all victims have in common is silence. Terrorists fornicate with the whore of silence, birthing Legion and genocide into the world. And there can be no doubt that this is a time of cursing, an age of violence, a new reign of terror, when catastrophe compounds catastrophe. And the death count is broadcast in the daily news.
But what the hell! What the hell, I say. Other generations have suffered and survived their nightmares of psychosis. And since the messiah has already come and gone, leaving us instead with cadres and battalions of heavily armed men, who is there to turn to, to drive the devils out?
If the defining choice of complicity has not yet reached you—to join one camp or another, or to continue as a designated target of any and all—wait, your choosing will not forsake you. It is coming around. Darkness is descending. How hard everywhere is the fall; how harrowing the grisly howl! Terror stretches out in every direction. It hunkers down in the unknown and drinks the cold sweat of fear.
There can be no doubt that we are all in the valley of the shadow and evil is no stranger to us. Only we are without a psalm. Our eyes are wild with anxiety. Our hearts beating so hard they are about to explode.
