 
Understanding the U.S. War State
John McMurtry
Prepared for Presentation to Science for Peace
Teach-In
Toronto City Hall
March 23, 2003
“It is easy. All you have
to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the
peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to
danger.”
- Herman Goering
Genocide used to be a
crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the
concept was not introduced into international language until after
World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other
peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as
“progress” and “spreading civilization”.
I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam Chomsky say
that genocide was America’s “defining political tradition”.
Then I realized that the United States (like Canada to a much lesser
extent) was based on destroying the lives and cultures of the 25
million or so first peoples who had lived in America for millennia.
In the case of the U.S., the story continued with the forcible
seizure of Texas in 1845 from Mexican farmers and indigenous
peoples, and Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, California and other state
territories shortly afterward in 1849. U.S. troops under the
slave-owning General Zachary Taylor unilaterally invaded its
southern neighbor under the false pretext of avenging “American
blood”, and General Taylor soon vaulted into the White House as a
presidential “war hero” - even though a young Congressman,
Abraham Lincoln, exposed the pretext, and connected it to a
Anglo-British business strategy to impose “free trade” on the
regions by financing the prior president, James Palk, into the White
House as General Taylor’s commander.
In 1898, once again under the false pretext of “self-defence”
(when the U.S.S. Maine sank from an internal explosion), the
Philippines, Guam, Cuba in part, and Puerto Rico were seized from
their peoples by another unilaterally provoked war. This war of
aggression and occupation, like so many U.S. interventions since,
was preceded by a media campaign of whipping up public hysteria and
war fever. Media baron Randolf Hearst made the famous remark, “You
furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war”- not unlike the U.S.
cable and network media daily drum-beat in recent months for war on
Iraq. War is a major violence entertainment, and in close
partnership with the Pentagon it can go on for months to divert the
masses.
The tradition of misleading the American people by false pretexts
for aggressive wars is an old one in U.S. history, but since the
fascist interregnum war criminal invasions of other countries have
not been accepted by public opinion. The U.S. under the control of
the corporate war party now seeks to reverse this trend. By dint of
the permitted 9-11 plane attacks on the World Trade Centre, an open
presidential blank-cheque has been granted by Congress for attacking
third- world countries so as to occupy their countries and control
their resources. The now known blueprint of Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others written in September of 2001 as
the “Project for the New American Century” is clear on the plan
to “shape the international security order in line with American
principles and interests”. Armed domination of the Gulf region
“transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein”.
Oil looms large in this plan to rule the world for American
interests. According to a report sponsored by oil corporations from
the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies, oil
is “no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the
confines of the traditional supply and demand balances”, but a
“determinant” of “national security and international
power”.
The U.S. state military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in under
two years are expressions of this new supra-market policy. Before we
pass over the pattern of facts at work as merely “realpolitik”,
we should note that this armed-state project resembles fascism: not
only in war criminal attacks on other countries in violation of
international law, but in repudiating market relations to seize
others’ valuable goods by armed force.
Facing Facts
As demagogic glorification of genocidal invasion once again escapes
naming by a flood of falsehoods and projections onto the latest U.S.
Enemy, we need to remind ourselves of facts that no mass medium once
discussed from October of 2002 to March of 2003. As we lay bare the
ruling deceptions here, we should keep in mind their unifying
principle which is not seen. U.S. state justifications always
project onto the designated Enemy what the U.S. security state is
doing itself. If it loudly condemns another weaker state’s
“weapons of mass destruction”, “chemical and biological
weapons”, “violation of international laws”, or “attempts to
impose its will on the world by terror”, then we can deduce that
this is exactly what the U.S. is planning more of, but is diverting
attention from by accusing others. Test this underlying principle
with every international accusation the U.S. makes next, and you
will find that it is invariable confirmed.
The tactic works wonderfully with a lapdog press and political class
who are excited into a kind of collective delirium by choral
denunciations of the foreign demon who is the designated Enemy of
the day. (I will explain why in my analysis ahead of the “ruling
group-mind”.) So exactly does the U.S. security state project its
own violent policies onto others that one can tell what vicious
policy it is about to escalate next by the intensity with which the
Other is accused of the crime. This is how we can best understand
the endless accusation of the Soviet Union of a “plot to rule the
world” before 1991, and how we can best make sense of the official
U.S. fixation on “global terrorism” today. Both predications
disclose the inner logic of the U.S. war state’s own pattern of behavior.
I sometimes wonder whether this is a deliberate strategic tactic of
diversion, or a structure of paranoid delusion built into the
mind-set of U.S. culture.
Let us in this light examine the principal claims and concealments
of the Bush Jr. administration in its pursuit of Iraq:
&Mac183; The Bush administration has tirelessly claimed to be
“upholding international law” in its pressuring of the Security
Council into action regarding Iraq’s violation of U.N. resolutions
and international law. In fact, since its entry into office the Bush
Jr. administration has sabotaged laws, covenants and monitoring
protocols to protect individuals and peoples against nuclear
weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, landmines, small
arms, international ballistic missiles, torture, racism,
discrimination against women, arbitrary seizure and imprisonment,
mistreatment of prisoners, crimes against humanity and war crimes,
military weather distortions, biodiversity loss, and international
climate destabilization. Its latest overriding of international law
and due process has been the forcible usurpation of the Security
Council inspections of Iraq. No rogue state in modern history has
remotely matched this continuous and systematic violation of
international law and procedures to implement international law
&Mac183; The Bush administration’s preparation and threat of
military invasion against a country thousands of miles from its
borders is unequivocally a war crime under international law,
including Principles 1, 2 and 6(a)1of the Nuremberg Charter and
Article 54 of the Geneva Convention. The fact that this war crime of
preparing for and planning an invasion of Iraq by U.S.-led armed
forces “whatever the UN decides” has never been openly discussed
promoted the very aggression which the U.N. is constituted to
prevent.
It is not as if there were any doubt about the Bush
administration’s clear intention to put itself above the law as it
incessantly accused Iraq of doing so. It declared from the beginning
that it would “go it alone” with whoever was “willing”, and
yet not a word of this declared threat to international peace and
security issued from any U.N. ambassador, including Canada’s Bill
Graham, that this was a lawless intention and plan.
&Mac183; The effect on Iraqi citizens of the long-planned U.S.
war of aggression against Iraq is said to be their liberation. The
targeted victims since the first war on Iraq have, however, been
most of all infants and children. The Bush administration’s
planned “Operation Shock and Awe” is a self-imagery of Godlike
power which is more blind in hubris than in 1991 when the U.S’s
military assault caused mass infectious disease, child dysentery and
birth mutilation by deliberate bombing of civilian electricity
sources, sewage and water treatment facilities and by the deployment
of nuclear waste in shells and weapons. Over 500,000 children in
Iraq have already died as a consequence of the last war according to
UNICEF - a figure predicted in 1991 by the New England Journal of
Medicine, and substantiated in 1999 by the leading British medical
research, Lancet.
&Mac183; Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” about which
the Bush regime has most pervasively trumpeted its concern were sold
to Saddam at great profit by the U.S., Britain and other Security
Council members. This is why Bush officials took the original Iraq
report to the U.N. from the Council chair (then the military client
state, Colombia), and deleted all the pages documenting these
military sales before distributing the text to non-permanent
members. Secretary Rumsfeld, meanwhile, has refused to work with the
relevant Senate committees to expose and ensure against continued
military sales to Iraq or its middlemen by U.S. armament
manufacturers.
&Mac183; U.S. demands for Iraq’s “compliance with U.N.
resolutions” are not and have not been its true concern since far
more U.N. resolutions over far more years have been ignored by the
U.S’s military partner, Israel. Thus continuing war crimes and
crimes against humanity by Israeli administrations are still
perpetrated with impunity in the illegally occupied territories of
Palestine - for example, by land and property seizures and
continuous enlargement of the illegal occupation, collective
punishments of the population, increasing assassinations, and
destruction of civilian infrastructure and homes. Twelve to eighteen
UN resolutions prior to the inspections were said to have been
violated by Iraq during its years of living with militarily enforced
destruction of its society. Israel before, and since, has violated
64 UN resolutions with impunity. No double standard of international
law has been so long-term, blatant and systematic, except by the
U.S. itself.
&Mac183; The “regime change” all along demanded by the Bush
administration cannot benefit the Iraqi people as promised because
the projected U.S. military occupation has not been about getting
rid of Saddam (who the U.S. armed and supported into power), but has
ever more directly been the forced takeover of Iraq’s publicly
owned and controlled oil reserves. These reserves since the 1950's
have (despite Saddam’s U.S.-supported coup d’etat) financed the
most advanced social infrastructure in the Arab world, free
education, and universal health care. During the demonization of
Iraq over the last 6 months, its public oil revenues have enabled a
government program of guaranteed food for all citizens by a publicly
run distribution system which the U.N. World Food Program described
as “the most efficient in the world”. With oil as with all else,
the greatest enemy to this empire is the civil commons of publicly
owned resources which obstructs corporate market control. That the Iraqi
government has, moreover, put a run on the U.S. dollar by converting
its oil revenues into Euros instead of dollars is another
unspeakable fact which is blocked out of all corporate media
reports.
Watching the War Crime Unfold
The ultimate target of the U.S. war party has long been the greatest
and most accessible high-quality oil reserves on the planet. The
Bush oil party has long coveted it, and U.S. military invasion has
been the favored blitzkrieg method for getting it over years of
planning - with no response by the Security Council. But world
public opinion has not covered its eyes like governments and the
corporate media. Turkey’s people were 96% against invasion of
against Iraq as its government considered large bribes, and
Spain’s people were over 90% opposed as its Falangist prime
minister joined Tony the War Poodle in barking for the invasion.
Over 30 million citizens from across the world demonstrated against
a U.S.-led invasion in one weekend, an historically unprecedented
event.
The U.S. president’s response to all this has been revealing. He
has told the world throughout that the U.N. itself is on trial, with
him as God’s judge. The Security Council has been told for months
that it either agrees to a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, or it is
“irrelevant”. If it “fails”, the Bush administration will
take the law into its own hands and invade distant and weak Iraq as
America’s “sovereign right”. Try to remember when you heard
this kind of demagoguery and defiance of international law before.
The difference has been most clearly in the use of the U.N.
Pervasive aerial and ground inspections of Iraq’s territory,
soften-up bombings of defenses in the North and South, and
successful commands to destroy short-range missiles which together
had largely stripped Iraq’s meagre defenses by mid-March. During
this process, U.S. and allied demands merely escalated from
“immediate abolition of weapons of mass destruction” to -
without any media noticing - demands for “total disarmament”.
Best to have a helpless victim. Has history ever witnessed such a
corruptly one-sided scheme to destroy and loot a defenseless
country?
The Ruling Group-Mind
As I watched the Security Council Meeting on March 19 after military
inspections of Iraq were forcibly terminated by the Bush Jr.
administration’s decision to take the law into its own hands, I
was struck by the intimidation of the Council members. They were in
thrall to a ceremony of avoidance. The hard fact that the U.S.
administration had just stopped the U.N.’s due process by its
decision for lawless armed attack of Iraq was blocked out of view as
if it had not been decided. That this massive armed military
invasion was a grave violation of international law, the “supreme
international crime” under the Nuremberg Charter, was never
mentioned. The ritual of sacrifice prevailed instead as if in
collective submission to the implacable ordinance of Fate.
Formal pieties and aversion of the facts ruled. The
Secretary-General was congratulated for removing the inspection
teams on the instruction of the U.S. administration so that they
would not be harmed by its illegal invasion. The inspectors were
again and again praised for inspecting Iraq’s military possessions
before the full-scale illegal invasion forcibly prevented the
completion of their work. Much angst was displayed for the
“humanitarian catastrophe” about to unfold, with none mentioning
that the lawless usurpation of U.N. process by the blitzkrieg
invasion of a suffering poor country would cause the mass terror.
The long genocide was diplomatically sanitized by abstractions. In
the case of the U.S., Britain and Spain, Saddam Hussein was held
“solely responsible”.
Repeated ritual mantras of concern for “international peace and
security”, alleged Iraq government violations not substantiated by
the inspectors, official regrets, collective self- blaming, and much
talk of “rebuilding” the society about to be destroyed were
limned in a sleepwalk of official euphemisms. The theme that bound
them all was the silence on the U.S.’s planned war-criminal attack
in violation of the will and the legal process of the U.N. Security
Council itself. Kofi Annan almost spoke out when he advised that a
“belligerent” country is responsible under law for the costs of
occupation. But the U.N. and Canada were soon ready to pay for
picking up the pieces of another mass destruction of a poor society
by U.S.-led forces.
I remembered all the history and accounts I had read of the Third
Reich and the cowardice of official appeasement that enabled every
step. The appeasement now was on the level of the mind itself.
No-one dared to say what was happening. Threats and bribes by the
U.S. had for months saturated the proceedings of the Council’s judgment,
but there were to their great credit few takers of the blood money.
The Security Council had repudiated the U.S.-led war by an
overwhelming rejection of any motion for it. For the U.S. now to
still lead an invasion was self-evidently against the Security
Council’s will and decision, and thus wholly illegal. Yet there
was a strange refusal to name the crime, “the supreme
international crime” of a war of aggression against another state.
One listened in vain for one explicit reference to the violation of
the U.N. Charter, of the Nuremberg Charter, of international
criminal law, of the Secretary-General’s own previous statement
that a U.S. attack without Security Council support would be
illegal, and of the usurpation of the will and process of the U.N.
Security Council itself.
On the contrary, Iraq was being held accountable to obey the
Council’s every demand to strip its meagre defenses as huge U.S.
and British armed forces formed on its borders. Ever louder U.S.
threats of armed invasion outside the law and against Security
Council vote was left to proceed as if it was a natural event.
Everywhere in the media, the “inevitable war” was bowed before
as an ordinance of destiny. It was only now a question of viewers
watching U.S. forces destroy a society at will and with impunity, an
ideal mass market site for the entertainment of lawless power.
No-one thought to notice from within the Security Council Chamber
and official global culture that every step of the mass terror
against an essentially defenseless people was planned, chosen and
executed in defiance of all international law by a sitting member
state.
The monstrous construction had no author. Responsibility fell only
on the victim. The U.S. became another onlooker at the inevitable
war. Once it invaded, it became magnanimous in assigning the costs
to others to pay for its mass destruction. It was now ready to
“co-operate with its international partners in the rebuilding”
of the country that it destroyed. No-one inside official society
outside thought to hold the U.S. accountable for what it did.
“There is no alternative” took another meaning. Now the
no-alternative world the U.S. rules means criminal war invasion as
an act of God.
The New Fundamentalism:
America is God
As you observe the criminal war invasion of Iraq, the
round-the-clock commentary and pictures, and the aftermath, watch
for a silent general fact. There will no end of detailed discussion
of the military operations of attack and occupation of a country
rendered defenseless by Security Council demands, with much
admiration and vicarious self-congratulation at the new weapons and
strategic moves of “the American Superpower”. There will be no
end of experts and commentators communicating adoringly to audiences
about the high-tech assault instruments which are being tested on a
third-world people to see how they work. “It’s a little like a
high-school science experiment”, advised the Pentagon Joint Chief
of Staff to the militarily embedded CNN medium of public news.
The fact at the centre of the whole conflict and long in dispute
will, however, soon be put down the memory whole with no-one
noticing. No-one in the media or government will point out that the
biological and chemical weapons that Iraq was declared to be hiding
are not used, and did not in fact exist. No-one will think to notice
that this, the main justification of the war, “the weapons of mass
destruction in the hands of Saddam”, was from start to finish a
vast and criminal big lie. No-one will wonder at their own cowardly
complicity in the long train of destructive deceit and war crime
even as the invading armies sweep across the country and the 3000
sorties of bombs fall with no hint of a chemical or biological
weapon or nuclear device. Least of all will servelings of the ruling
group-mind connect back to the Third Reich’s prototype of
aggressive war. It is the Formula. Blame “terrorists” as the
cause of the country’s police state measures. Accuse every country
attacked of being an imminent threat to it to justify the invasion.
Denounce all resistance as unpatriotic. Attack and occupy the weak
country with total weaponry. The formula repeats as long as it is
not called out.
The group-mind cannot compute what does not fit its fixed
presuppositions. So predictable outcomes follow as if prescribed by
the laws of nature. “The inevitable war” occurs like el Nino.
Only the terrible infliction of damages are thought worth perceiving
or talking about. The moral debate is silenced, left to the
world’s peoples in the streets where only passing painted signs
can speak. The co-ordinates of international law and the rogue war
party in control of the White House are blocked of every discussion
as if they did not exist. There will, in particular, be no
discussion of this administration’s illegal presidency, its ever
more ruinous failure to govern effectively at any level of the U.S.
economy, the environmental meltdown which it leads, or the
unprecedentedly pervasive corruption of its lead corporate gang -
from all of which the latest orchestrated “war” is the ongoing
system of violent diversion. The distraction and attack rhythm of
one war after another will, if it is not seen through, continue to
succeed with the Formula until the world is subjugated across its civilizations.
As long as the self-evident can be denied, there is nothing to stop
it. Discharges of condemnation of Saddam Hussein can occupy the mind
instead, until the next Enemy is wheeled into the war theatre to
extend the U.S. war state’s rule.
In Canada, the CBC and its retinue of U.S. explainers and apologists
will report the world to us so we cannot see the meaning of what is
happening. The local academy will occasionally provide the choral
affirmation on cue. Thus Janice Stein of the University of
Toronto’s Munk Centre will reassure us on CBC News coverage on
March 20, the day that the U.S. crime against peace began, that
“We are targeting Iraq’s leadership and not its civilians”.
All are one in America’s view of the world as itself. What cannot
be discussed is the U.S. war crime itself, even to deny it. It is
unspeakable - so long as the ruling group-mind remains the invisible
prison of our collective life.
The moral syntax of the American group-mind is the inner logic of
the problem. In this era, the group-mind is American. All its
principles are presupposed as the way that God is presupposed by the
religious fundamentalist - an all-powerful, all-knowing and jealous
ruler of the world, which none may doubt without social opprobrium
and attack. U.S. witch-hunts of those who oppose the religion of
America is the creed’s fanatical mode. But the creed is not
confined to expression within America’s church of self-adoration.
It is on a crusade across the world’s continents, with ruinous
destabilization or armed attack of those who do not submit to its
will for “freedom”.
The God of America is primitive. It worships itself. But there are a
set of silently regulating principles at work through all the
phenomena of its rule which together constitute “the ruling group-mind" which
has imprisoned global culture within its premises since 9-11 .
Presupposition 1 of this ruling group-mind is that the U.S. national
security state is America.
This assertion is never directly stated because that would reveal
the absurdity of the equation. But the assumption nevertheless
underlies every statement that has proceeded from U.S. government
offices since 9-11. This preconscious equation explains, for
example, why even the U.S. government’s official opposition, the
Democratic Party, has abdicated from political responsibility in its
fear of appearing to oppose unjustified wars against essentially defenseless
third-world societies in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are incarcerated
within the ruling structure of mind, more paralyzed than 1930
Germans in their dread of being named as “unpatriotic”. This is
a fear that can only be explained by the equation of the state
military command and its apparatus with “America”. Beneath the
surface phenomena of party politics rules the instituted group-mind
in terms of which perception itself is constructed.
Thus the equation of America to its armed state apparatus is never
publicly challenged in the official culture of the West because the
equation is assumed a priori across the official leaderships of
American allies. No-one who houses the false equation can tell them
apart. They cannot see the demonstrable falsehoods of the war state,
the overthrow of the Republic’s democratic traditions, and least
of all the safety of millions of innocent civilians in other
countries: because they assume America and its national security
apparatus are one and the same. Since they love America, and America
is it, they cannot distinguish their beloved country from the
criminal gang institutions of the National Security Council, the
Pentagon and the CIA. As these rogue secret societies rule across
the world by the force of armed terror, mass disinformation, secret
narco-links and political bribery and coercion at every level,
lovers of America are obliged to defend this criminal global
domination as America. This absurd equation obliges them to be, in
short, blind dupes. It then further misleads them into supposing
that anyone who opposes a gangster state rule of the world is
“anti-American”. One absurdity builds onto another. The disorder
ends as a paranoid mass cult characterized as “patriotism”, just
as in the 1930's with the world’s most powerful industrial state.
It is in this false equation at the baseline of the group-mind that
we find the kernel of the world’s problem - America’s self-
definition as absolutist armed force unbound by fact or
international law.
Presupposition 2 is that America is the ultimate source and moving
line of the world’s freedom and goodness, God’s material
embodiment on earth.
This assumption too is presupposed as true by definition, the prime
article of faith of a fanatic religion. “Full-spectrum
dominance” and “pre-emptive attack of threats before they
appear” are not merely clinically paranoid delusions of power and
persecution. They follow from the underlying and increasingly
absolute assumption that America is God, the source of all Freedom
and Goodness on the planet. The expressions of this deranged
presupposition are evident in every speech of the former alcohol and
cocaine addict occupying the White House, and there is no evident
opposition from the parishioners of U.S. official culture.
Any indirect questioning or challenge of this first moral premise of
the group-mind is attacked as a betrayal of the country and what it
holds dear. “American freedom” comes to mean, then, only what
establishes and maximizes the absolute right of the U.S. to command
the world - specifically, to command as inevitable that all
societies adopt an American-style market, American values and
culture, and American military dominance in all areas of the globe
as its “vital interests”. How do we test the rule of this
fanatic basis of thought? It is expressed in Bush Doctrine policy
documents throughout. But we can more easily discover its ruling
principle at work by asking whether there is any limit placed
anywhere on what the U.S. and vassal corporate states have the right
to demand of other peoples and societies - including unconditional
support of full-scale war against destitute societies over ten
thousand miles from American borders. .
Anything may go in the way of attack-dog journalism, but one hint of
question of this ruling assumption that America is the moving line
of the world’s freedom is heresy. The assumption is thus internalized
prior to censorship. Self-censorship is this regime’s centre of
gravity, and holds the group-mind in its prison. Those who oppose it
“hate freedom”. Loyalty to this ultimate premise of social and
political thought is what regulates the mind at a preconscious level
prior to statement. It is the identity structure of the mob-mind
across the world.
Principle 3 follows as a logical consequent from Principle 2.
America is always and necessarily right in all conflicts with other
nations or peoples or social forces.
This is not a truth which facts can disprove, because it is true by
definition in the ruling group-mind. Disproving facts are irrelevant
or of no consequence, even if by some chance they make it through
the gates of the corporate media. This third regulating assumption
explains why even the hardest facts soon disappear from sight if
they throw doubt on America’s infallible moral superiority in
cases of international conflict - for example the U.S.’s
conviction by the International Court for its war criminal actions
against Nicaragua, along with the $13.2 billion damages which were
never paid.
Beneath the selection and exclusion of facts and perspectives which
regulate editorial offices and policies, this third principle of the
ruling group-mind too regulates perception and conversation beneath
direct control. Before an exposing word is spoken, it is ruled out
from within. It is an intersubjective operation, like the
thought-field of playing a game. Any fact or argument which calls
into question America’s moral superiority to any adversary is
known to be hostile to freedom and the good in advance of
consideration.
Principles 4 and 5 follow suit as ultimate moral imperatives for all
Americans and their allies.
Any people or nation or social force which does not side with or
opposes the U.S. government is evil (Principle 4), and so must, as
an Enemy of world freedom and justice, be attacked by all means
available - including pre-emptive armed force before the Enemy
presents a threat (Principle 5).
Principles 4 and 5 have sharpened into patriotic absolutes with the
Bush Jr. regime. Not even fabricated evidence - like the Gulf of
Tonkin attack off Vietnam or the electricity cut-off of infant
incubators in Iraq in 1991 - are thought any longer essential
necessary to justify a military attack on another people’s
territory and society. As George Bush Jr. said to a West Point
audience this year: “If we wait for threats to materialize, we
will have waited too long”. There is, therefore, no need for the
threat to be real. Threats only need to be declared. That is why the
attack on Iraq by U.S. and British armed forces did not require
anyone else to confirm that there was, in fact, a threat from
Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction being used by terrorists
against America”. The evil is known, as with witchcraft, by the
accusation itself. Once accused, the Enemy becomes such by
definition - because materialization by fact is too late. Those who
question the designation side with the Enemy. “You are with us, or
for the terrorists”. Bush’s rage against France’s opposition
to the war of aggression against Iraq thus follows necessarily. The
logic of the ruling group-mind prescribes reality prior to its
construction.
A self-evident baseline of entitlement is thus instituted for the
rest of the world which is not spoken. “America” can go to war
against accused enemies as it chooses on the basis of the
self-propelling operations of its ruling group-mind alone. All one
has to do is trigger the known stimuli which activate its value-set
and its attendant emotions of rage. Since 9-11, majority opinion
support for “America’s New War” in any form follows from this
lockstep of the group-mind. It is predictable so long as it remains
unexposed to view.
There is no outer perimeter to the certitude of this program to
those who bear it. Whoever is targeted next can be pursued with the
righteous fury of a Salem witch-hunt with the mob-mind structured to
bay for blood. Any criticism is suspect, and accused too to keep the
threat of evil at bay. Few dare to stand against the closed program.
It is the basis of acceptable self-definition. George Bush Jr.
himself exemplifies the group-mind as its creature and primary
expression. That is the secret of his popularity. He expresses the
ruling syntax of the unstated American religion. It is triumphally
true and right a priori. It is what we are. “God has given America
our freedom”, and so it can do no wrong. The fearful are silent
lest they appear to be taking sides against their country. The
group-mind in this way is internalized as the first requirement of
normality. Its hold is everywhere it is not seen through. That is
why most of the Globe or Post’s columnists house it too as their
own.
Principle 6 of the American group-mind completes the closed circle.
The President of the United States (or those under his command)
cannot commit a crime abroad whatever crime they in fact commit.
Thus the U.S. refuses to be bound by the rule of law outside of its
borders. It blocks at every turn the application of international
law to its chief executive and line of command. It refuses to recognize
the International Criminal Court, even as the U.S. demands that the
Court try and convict those the U.S. directs it to. The President of
the United States is placed above the law, and takes the law into
his own hands as a right to rule that is assumed as sacred. The
presidential incumbent may be attacked for domestic misbehaviors.
But once he leads America abroad, he stands for freedom and justice
in the world by definition - even if he achieved office by violation
of election law. His war command cannot commit war crimes or crimes
against humanity on the international plane, even if the evidence
overwhelmingly entails his criminal guilt. It thus follows from the
group-mind’s hold that when George W. Bush led the war criminal
attack on Iraq in defiance of international law and Security Council
vote, not media or official voice in the U.S. recognized the fact.
Simultaneously, U.S. Senators unanimously blessed the armed forces
sent to enforce the criminal fait accompli. One can predict these
outcomes from the group-mind’s program. It is structured not to
see what is going on.
As the lawless forces rolled over U.N. fences on the border and
began the terror bombing of the capital city, the New York Times
decreed that “everyone hopes for success”. As the illegal attack
morphed from “Operation Shock and Awe” to “Exemplary
Destruction” to “Operation Freedom Iraq”, all of official
society gazed in thrall, mute at the trampling of international law,
millions of citizens protesting in the streets, and the saturation
bombing of a poor people’s city with only men waving rifles to
defend them. No “weapons of mass destruction” fought back. The
ceremony of denial went on.
If the military, corporate and financial axes the President stands
for across the world interfere in elections, train death squads to
kill democrats, melt down entire economies by coercive
prescriptions, and bomb civilian infrastructures to ruin, the
connected causal structure is blocked out by the ruling group-mind
as non-existent. The title to bribery and threats of UN Security
Council members to coerce their vote for war is also presupposed as
a given right, not to be questioned even by the UN itself. In this
way, an instituted mind-lock of the world’s “sole Superpower”
regulates beneath consciousness much as medieval belief in the
divine right of Kings once ruled. Only now the group-mind is set to
rule as God across the globe.
“Ground zero” abolishes the mind that can think beyond it. Since
opposition to the U.S. gangster state is opposition to the Free
World, its entitlement to any act of aggression is necessarily
liberating prior to fact. Merely project the “threat to
international peace and security” onto the designated Evil Other
that stands in the way of liberty, and no limit can be placed on the
enormity of the attack and theft that is thus justified. This cruel
game goes on as long as the public does not see through it. It may
target Canada’s water for the gift of America’s freedom if we do
not.
Choosing Out of the Group-Mind
At the first level, release from the ruling group-mind is by the
shared recognition of its assumptions which only hold the mind so
far as they are not seen. The ruling group-mind goes deeper than the
economics of the situation, because the economy itself is regulated
by it.
Conversely, the economy’s ruling money sequences require our
collaboration with them to convert any priced commodity into the
profit of sale. This may seem an academic point until we recognize
that the U.S. corporate economy cannot reproduce itself if people
choose in ever larger numbers to not pay one cent for any U.S.
product or service until its war state reforms.
That may seem too small a movement in our circumstances, until one
realizes the transformation of daily life such an undertaking
entails. Every choice and moment of daily life is restructured by
its regulating purpose. Outgrowing the ruling group-mind to which we
have become enslaved begins with refusing to expose oneself any
further to its conditioning. No more American television or media
except to expose their lies. No more American junk food or drink
inside any free home, and no more fast fat- food and beverages
outside it. No more American autos. No more American appliances. No
more American or vassal-British gas. No more violence entertainment,
and no more American drugs. No American financial services or stocks
at any level. No more U.S. dollars or travel until the regime change
comes.
These choice paths of life add up. You cannot go down them all
without transfiguring mind as well as body, and all the economic
relations you enter into. All are revivified by the transformation.
Local life economies are reinvested in. Addictions are dropped.
Poisons are blocked. Dumb-down is reversed at every level. It is
unlikely that you can do it all without the joining with others in
the task of designing a life economy stich one step at a time.
Nothing could have enabled such a choice across borders except what
has now happened - a war state aggression with no pretext, a
gangster state defiance of world public opinion which seeks genocide
of its victim, an undeniable and monstrous crime of mass destruction
in a world where all can see the murderous tyranny in plain sight.
Boycott is not new, but what is new is the transformative focus -
the repudiation at every step of the U.S. war state and all of its
foundations. It has taken the pedagogy of this administration’s
systemic crimes to bring the world to a hard recognition. There is
no health in this ruling system. 90% of the world has rejected its
war. 90% of the world can more reject the foundations of it in their
everyday lives.
Citizens everywhere are at the all-important end of U.S. money
sequences which must always convert corporate product into cash
before they can profit and go on expanding. If a lot of people from
across the world stop their money votes for all U.S. products and
services (including the U.S. dollar itself), this is a market revolt
which strikes to all the money arteries of the American corporate
empire. It cannot be withstood even at the level of 5%. Yet it is a
revolt which cannot be put down. It multiplies in volumes and
velocities as the group-mind breaks, word spreads and people act
across their lives. As the effects everywhere yield a better life
for everyone who chooses out of the death economy, the new world is
built stitch by stitch through the life economy of everyday choice.
This is the one strike against the American war state that it cannot
sustain.
The strike starts with U.S. oil and gas products across the world.
Every Exxon Mobil, Texaco Chevron, and BPAmolco brand pump is
boycotted as the war state’s prime sponsors. Every American media
and its Canadian imitators are switched out of. Every fat-and-cancer
food and drugged beverage is refused. This structure of choice does
not just stop the fuel of the war machine and its conditions. It
releases the lives of all those who choose it and their communities
into new life and well-being.
But the life mind need not stop with consumer behavior. It confronts
the death machine and its propagandists at every step. The lawful
word and act of speech can reverse the meaning of any milieu with
its demand for truth. Every open node of the circulation of ideas
inside the classroom, the workplace, the windows of the home, the
bumper of the car and bike, the church, the street and the store are
its sites. The functionaries and vehicles of the death-economy and
its war state are always ignorant of life facts. Behind the flood of
slogans and invective, their minds are cliches which cannot think
through. Only the armor of the group-mind sustains them. What has
been most lacking in public discourse is the courage of life
intelligence in the face of the onslaught of unchallenged slogans.
Once the group-mind is exposed, it cannot stand. It reels in
confusion when others do not acquiesce in its rituals of
presumption. For its bearers are ultimately afraid. I have counted
the word “fear” four times in a single paragraph of a Blair or
Powell speech. It is the currency of all the justification for
aggression. It can only reproduce in the silence of consent. But now
the peoples of the world, as never before, do not acquiesce. This
squalidly vicious empire is unraveling beneath the cannon and
propaganda in the very ties of legitimacy upon which all society
depends.
John McMurtry PhD is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Guelph and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His latest book
is Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy published
by Pluto Press.
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