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Friday, Oct. 12, 2001.
Page VIII
Global Eye -- Mind Games
By Chris Floyd
"Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral
ground." -- George W. Bush, Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001.
"These events have divided the world into two
camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidel." -- Osama
bin Laden, Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001.
They say that great
minds think alike -- and not-so-great ones do, too, apparently. Thus here
we are: two spoiled rich boys made by their fathers' money and connections
have now divided the world up between them, and are basically proposing to
kill everyone who doesn't agree with them.
Ah yes, welcome
to the 21st century!
"Tweedleedum and
Tweedledee/They're throwing knives into the tree/Living in the Land of Nod/Trusting
their fate to the hands of God." -- Bob Dylan, from "Love and Theft,"
released Sept. 11.
Both Bush and bin
Laden spent sybarite youths, indulging idly and amply in the pleasures of
the flesh -- on someone else's dime -- before embracing a fundamentalist religious
faith that provides divine sanction for a narrow set of self-selected cultural
norms while consigning all unbelievers to eternal damnation. Bush, for example,
is on record as saying that all Jews are going to hell; a belief no doubt
shared by his semblable, bin Laden. True, Bush later weasel-worded the issue,
but his literalist faith, which he publicly affirms at every possible opportunity,
is crystal-clear on this point.
Now both of these
zealous believers have shimmied up the greasy pole of power -- without the
nuisance of actually being elected by popular vote -- from whence they can
rain death on their enemies, secure in the knowledge that they are fulfilling
the will of God.
Or rather, the will
of an Iron Age deity cobbled together out of the noblest aspirations, deepest
fears and foulest hatreds of myriads of different tribes; a will derived
from ancient grab-bags of diverse texts and fragments -- accretions of mangled
history, confused traditions, inspired poetry, mystical ecstasy, mass murder,
chaos and longing.
Their own limited
understanding of these makeshift compendiums is the ultimate authority by
which the two unchosen ones send out men to kill and die.
Plainly, this is
madness. But this is the world we all must live in now. "There is no neutral
ground." If we oppose or question the policies of the U.S. government, then
we are supporting terrorism and "must pay the price." If we oppose the cold-blooded
slaughter of innocent people by stateless renegades, then we are "infidels,"
marked for death.
That "choice" is
the limit of our freedom in this glorious new age: trapped between two Tweedles.
But if we must choose, then of course we will go with Bush.
After all, of the two, he is the greatest hypocrite, and therefore there's
a little more room for maneuver under his dread edict. For he doesn't really
mean it when he says he will attack and punish all those who "harbor and
succor terrorism." He's certainly not going to bomb, say, Saudi Arabia, which
has bankrolled the deadly Hamas terrorist network for years, and spent billions
during the 1980s on Saddam Hussein's efforts to build a nuclear bomb -- an
attempt at terror on a global scale, which the U.S. knew about and tacitly
approved as part of its years-long succor of the bloodthirsty autocrat.
And certainly, Bush is not going to bomb the U.S. government,
which has provided major succor to state and private terrorism over the years,
in Indonesia, Guatemala, Iraq, Iran, the Congo (remember George Senior's
good buddy, Mobutu?), Angola, Chile, Lebanon, Cambodia (remember U.S. support
for the genocidal Pol Pot when he was fighting the Vietnamese infidels?),
El Salvador, Colombia, and that first bold step toward empire, the Philippines,
where more than 200,000 natives died as U.S. forces set out to, in President
McKinley's words, "Christianize" the country. The Filipinos were already
Catholics, but McKinley obviously shared Bush's self-selected fundamentalist
Protestant cultural norms.
And Bush is surely not going to send cruise missiles into
the George Bush Center for Intelligence, headquarters of the CIA, which trained,
harbored, and succored the living daylights out of the same rabid Islamic
extremists who've lately been practicing the agency's "covert ops" techniques
to such deadly effect in New York and Washington. Nor will he direct the
forces of "Operation Enduring Freedom" to overthrow the enduring despotisms
of his good friends and allies in Saudi Arabia (whose draconian brand of
Islam was the Taliban's model) or Pakistan (the military dictatorship that
succored the Taliban and now harbors terrorists rampaging in Kashmir) or
the Afghan Northern Alliance (that collection of warlords whose depredations,
which include tying miscreants to two separate tanks and tearing them in
half, are scarcely less heinous than those of the Taliban).
No, George is true-blue for God, but he also has a soft spot
for Mammon; and an even softer spot for Dick Cheney, who spent much of the
last decade scheming with his fellow oil barons to get a pipeline from the
virgin fields of the Caspian Sea -- where $4 trillion in profits are waiting
for them -- through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. Cheney's
business interests in oil and arms, temporarily divested while he helps direct
American policy in energy and defense, rival those of the Bushes and bin
Ladens. Or as the Chicago Tribune noted last year: "War is big business,
and Dick Cheney is right in the middle of it."
And now we're all "right in the middle of it." But the all-too-human
greed of Pious George and Deadeye Dick will no doubt trump the apocalyptic
implications of Bush's political theology -- a welcome hypocrisy in the face
of bin Laden's homicidal sincerity. The hypocrites will triumph, as they
usually do, thank God, and their depredations will be lighter, more bearable
(unless you happen to live in Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Congo, etc.). But the
price will be high: a "free world" less free, less tolerant, more brutalized;
a world passed into the shadows.
Royal Mess
The New Yorker
The West's New Friends
Sydney Morning Herald
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