WAR OF THE WORLDS
(Mark Bruzonsky, September 17, 2001)
"This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while. We will rid the world of the evil-doers." George W. Bush, 16 Sept 2001
The United States of America will surely prevail in the new war of our worlds -- in the short term.
That is the case not because of any gods out there taking sides and not because of good or evil – metaphysical concepts both of the mismatched combatants constantly insist on invoking each within their own rich historical paradigms. The sheer military might and technological superiority of the Americans, now fully engaged in the wake of the surreal events of 11 September 2001, is simply beyond the capabilities of anyone else on the planet to successfully resist -- in the short term.
In the case of America's new war, the full might of the USA is being mobilized not against the armies of other nation states, but against the fanatical descendants of a puritanical militant Islam whose calling has become relentless opposition to American hegemony and passionate assertion of their own quaintly medieval religious constructs.
This is hardly the next war that most anticipated since the Great Wars that decimated so much of Europe and Asia in the last century. But radical as it may sound to many this is the war many in the American military-industrial establishment have been waiting to engage.
And certainly this is not a war that actually began on 11 September 2001. Rather it is a war that has been alternatively erupting and smoldering around the globe for some time now with engagements already fought in many locales with a human toll already in the millions. From the "genocide" perpetrated on the people of Iraq (the chosen word of none other than a former Attorney General of the United States as well as a resigned-in-moral-disgust Assistant Secretary of General of the United Nations); to the teeming refugee camps of Lebanon and occupied Palestine; to the now rekindled war in Afghanistan; to the bloodbaths which have in recent years savaged places like Algeria, Kashmir, Chechnya and the former Yugoslavia.
Not even consciously aware of where and how the early battles of this new war have already been fought, nor of the immense number of casualties others have already endured, the American people are now embarking on a crusade to cleanse the world of their enemies. All who oppose them are branded with the broad-brush label "terrorists" to be hunted down and destroyed; all who refuse to comply with the new order of things are to be considered complicitous and targeted.
And yet, there is an ominous nevousness at least within American intellectual circles as this massive reassertion of the "New World Order" begins to unfold. Whatever the upcoming fate of America’s enemies, there will also be a huge cost the Americans will bear at least in economic and psychological ways if not in a basic undermining of the very pillars of their empire both at home and abroad.
New World Order Revisited
Like the term "Star Wars" before it, "New World Order" was understood by the powers that be to represent too many negative associations to be carried over into the 21st Century. But a fading of terminology only masked the underlying depths of both policy and perspective. It took President George W. only a few days to evoke the refrain "This Will Not Stand", just as his father did a decade ago. Never abandoned, the "New World Order" is now being resurrected in far more massive form even though this time heavily masked under tons of rhetoric about "the war against international terrorism". The fact that the American President has himself publicly used the very terminology of “crusade” shows just how insensitive the Americans still remain to Arab and Islamic history.
Like most serious wars, underneath all the saber rattling and patriotic slogans are imperial goals. The U.S at this historical moment is the only "superpower"; but others, most especially the Chinese, are rising up determined to assert their own interests and visions of the future. As for the Arab and Muslim countries, they remain essentially carved up and de facto occupied, the lingering result of the end of World War I when the dominant European powers of that day brought about at the Paris Conference the "Peace To End All Peace" -- leading to the bloodiest era in history to date.
Who Will Be Left Standing?
Like the huge Trade Towers which to everyone's amazement crashed down in just a few moments, the real questions about the future of our world are, when the winds of war subside this time, which regimes will be left fully standing; which will be so weakened they will have to dismantled and rebuilt; and what political, military and economic structures will emerge anew to replace the dead, the dying, and the disfigured.
The recent events already now behind us and sure to reverberate for foreseeable history on planet earth are historical blowback for so much that has happened around the world in recent history. Future blowback because of what is happening now is inevitable, but not really predictable.
This new War of the Worlds is not likely to end soon or cleanly. Even should some new unstable point be reached by overwhelming force of arms the whole host of terrible world tensions from before will remain – from the new space arms race; to the potentially cataclysmic conflicts in Palestine and in Kashmir; to the proliferation of deadly weapons of mass destruction; to the contradictions and inequities inherent in another of those American paradigms, “globalization”. And when it comes to this new War of the Worlds exploding in front of our eyes, it needs to be appreciated that a whole new generation of destitute, desperate, and outraged Osamas has already been born.
The “New World Order” was originally a construct attempting to explain and to organize the post-Cold War world according to multi-faceted Western interests, overwhelming American power, and considerable American public innocence. Like “Star Wars” before it, the “New World Order” was abandoned rhetorically in order to further disguise it’s actuality. Now both are reborn with a second President Bush as Commander-in-Chief leading America on a crusade it doesn’t really understand, one that has very little to do with the previous world of Pearl Harbor, and one which will surely not end with a clear-cut surrender on the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Mark Bruzonsky
Washington, DC - 9/17/01
Email: MAB@MiddleEast.Org
202 362-5266
posted by Lorenzo 4:36 PM
A New World is Coming
(Whitley Strieber, September 1, 2004)
It's such an eerie time right now. The weather is changing radically before our eyes, with sixteen typhoons in the Pacific this year and powerful hurricanes still forming, with extraordinary environmental changes that suggest that the planet's natural system is in the process of a profound breakdown, and far faster than anybody imagine. And now with SETI having discovered a repeating signal that may not be natural in origin, and the growing realization among astronomers that many stars have small, stony planets like earth orbiting them, and the detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere, meaning that life processes are going on there right now—it's just a very eerie and wonderous-and dangerous-time. . . . I feel like we as a species have come to an edge, and we know it, each one of us, but we can't quite speak aloud what we know, not just yet. We're reacting in many different ways. Some of us have retreated into religions and beliefs that enable us to pretend that change isn’t happening. I see the two great fundamentalisms that are presently sweeping the world as being like cicadas screaming at the end of summer. Their strident voices tell us what they know to be true about themselves: their great gods are about to join the army of immortals that are lost in human memory. The mind of man is changing, becoming more focused, more in touch with what is true, and is, once again, at the point of leaving old gods behind. . . . What is happening now is not only that our physical environment is shaking apart-something is shaking apart inside us. It is deeply personal, it is profoundly important and it is going to change the world by changing the mind of man. This, in part, is the message of 2012. I'm not saying that it isn't also a message of physical apocalypse. But don't expect it in a day. . . . For the past few weeks, I have observed a series of natural events that tell me that the leaves of our world are falling fast. While we concentrate on our wars and our elections and our various clever engines of denial, nature is adding up the account. Sure, politicians will try to tell us that two and two don't equal four, and religious leaders will seduce us into believing that it's all up to their false gods and we can't do anything, but the truth howls at the human soul like a wild winter wind: the times are changing and it's not good and it's now. And there is another voice, as well: we CAN do something. We can do a lot. But it has nothing to do with ordinary leaders, ordinary actions and ordinary life. We, mankind, you, me and all of us, can become something new. . . . The ugly irony is that all the lies are uttered not because anybody really believes the hollow ideologies or twisted religions in whose names they are proclaimed, but on behalf of lunatic corporate masters who care only about how much they might manage to profit over the next few months, in a world in which money, ironically, will have little meaning. . . . Recently, satellites in the southern hemisphere were damaged by solar radiation, because something is going wrong with our magnetic field, and it thinned as a solar storm that shouldn't have been there passed by. . . . Homing pigeons in Sweden lost their way because of the field's increasing derangement. And why is this happening? Not because of anything we've done. It's happening because it's time, because, by the laws of nature, it must. . . . So here we are, six billion of us on a planet groaning with our weight, each one a little spark in a vast fire. And the fire has reached its peak. We're at the top of a very clear bell curve of growth. The next step is the same one that every other species takes when it grows too numerous for the planet to sustain it. The fire is about to burn itself out for lack of fuel: We are going to experience population decline. . . . We will surrender our conscious mind to that which is great within us. Some of us are doing it now, have been doing it for years. The more we feel the stresses of nature, the more of us do it. This is the hidden meaning of Aquarius, the pouring out of the water of life. The little fish, Pisces, who lived so comfortably in the enclosed world of the water jar, now finds himself thrown out on the ground. . . . Suffocate or evolve. . . . The human species has never known a time in which extinction was not under way. In fact, our mind is a response to the pressure that this extinction event, with its chaotic climate, has put us under. . . . There have been eleven ice ages in the past three million years, and each one has brought with it the same sort of changes that we are seeing now. Each one has also brought to harvest another crop of species. . . . Will this one harvest us. Yes, say the corporate masters, yes say the death-wish preachers. But the crop circles say no and the aliens with their probes say no, and the heavy-bellied women and their children, and the believers in dreams and those who are willing to inherit the earth, they say no. I say no.
posted by Lorenzo 10:52 AM
