Cognitive Dissonance Fuzzing
I am getting all this cognitive dissonance fuzzing up my brain. All I see are these sanctimonious old men (and some women) demanding an “end to terror” and the need to “eliminate these madmen” and to “make the world safe”. At least before the enormous postmodern apparatus of propoganda and anaesthetized populations, kingdoms and empires were bluntly obvious about why they did what they did. But in the US people get cuddled a lot into believeing they are always fighting for “liberty”. The Victorians were more honest. They knew their genocidal and expansionist policies engendered hatred as a backlash, and they were willing to accept the consequences and shoulder the burden of mercantilist expansion. Well, until World War One killed off a generation.
But the mendacity of the US leaders in following similar policies while lulling their populations into somnolence is staggering, and unproductive. Of course, a scarier proposition is that many of these selfsame leaders have forgotton the parameters of their “big lie” and are honest in their self-righteousness. The wrath of the US is terrible and massive — it’s still the only country to have used atomic weapons in anger against a civilian population. Imagine what a magnificent force for good this anger, this energy could be if it wasn’t diverted into so many quesionable acts of callousness by its politicians and military. An infantilized population is not a good foundation for a war economy and is liable to react with horror instead of steadfastness when confronted with hundreds or thousands of body bags of its teenagers and college kids coming back from now-incomprehensible foreign adventures. This violence just breeds violence and I just don’t think the US can possibly survive a tit-for-tat escalation of atrocities in a latter-day Crusade against 1.2 billion Moslems. Or maybe it could survive, but not as a Republic.
‘A conservative number for those who have been
killed by U.S. terror and military action since World War II is 8,000,000 people.’
Martin Luther King, Jr. stated in 1967, during the Vietnam War, “My government is the world’s leading purveyor of violence.”
‘states often engage
in “wholesale” terror, while those whom governments
define as “terrorist” engage is “retail”
terrorism.’ Article