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Just a thought...
The US and coalition continue to insist that this is not a war against Islam.
Eager to oppose them in everything, their enemies cry 'yes! this is a war against Islam!'
This is tremendously effective in obscuring the motive forces behind the current war as analysed on Barbelith. We've talked about government funding for terrorists, we've talked about puppet regimes, black magic both financial and lizardly, and we've talked about the oil companies... little if anything has been said about this concept of a war on Islam. I think that on balance it isn't. But I think that Western insistence that it isn't possibly serves give stronger voice to religiously inspired anti-Americanism, and it seems to me that an avowedly secular power will always have a communication problem with an avowedly religious one.
There is a very very unstable dynamic in the information war because of this: just as with the WTC attacks, America's information war is fought primarily with assurances and statements of policy. In contrast, the Bad People Out There have events as their munitions. Everything that happens that is percieved as significant is theirs for the taking. They can if they wish be behind the WTC attacks, whether they were responsible or not: they can be the anthrax mailers, the nuclear threat: they can have ten thousand sleeper agents, ready to throttle America in its sleep, or a hundred thousand. While they have that semantic power they have the power to squeeze out all rational argument and bury the truth in a flurry of headlines. Meanwhile, the daisy cutters are falling and cluster bombs plant seeds of latent death, new species in the flourishing Afhgan mechosytem of malevolent abandoned munitions.
The world has a very urgent need for truth right now, even if it's unpleasant. Because we can't collectively solve our problems unless we know what they really are. I'm spending a lot of time questioning the hell out of everything and wondering if I am getting any nearer to understanding what the fuck is going on and how the fuck I can explain or somehow transmit that information to other people if indeed I can be sure I've got a clue.
What can we do to change things? There's so much that needs to be fixed. Where the hell do we start? We talk about it, and we demonstrate, but how do we know our leaders are listening? Is there any way we can take effective direct action to fix this situation and untangle the causes?
Our wars fought by proxy have created a generation of young men in Afghanistan who know nothing but war. They're born to it. An entire generation of people who have never known peace. They've never had any of the luxuries that we enjoy, like the freedom to access all the information that we sling around the whole time. These people don't know what they're fighting for but they know that they're fighting and that's how life is. And they exist on both sides of the conflict. Between them the superpowers gave them a hell of a lot of ammo in the 80s and 90s and now they turned up to resupply them all over again.
The US economy is due for another boom. Think about it in terms of wealth creation. You buy the raw materials for a bomb. You put it together. You sell it to another country and then you tell them where you want them to drop it. They pay you a nice chunk of their tax revenue and kill your enemies, who are sometimes their countrymen. It's a win-win situation.
I'm not a paranoid individual. I don't insist that any of this is truth. Specifically, I'm not insisting that any of this was intended to turn out like this. I'm not implying that there's some shadowy power stalking corridors of power and all that crap. I think that it's just a godawful mess and heap of catastrophe, and I'm angry as hell that I can't see a way into fixing it right now.
Does anyone have any ideas for practical Stuff to do?
What I am, though, is angry, and frustrated that it seems that I'm powerless to do much about any of this. |
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