Cirque Minime Depeche #69 [June 2003]
[In the Summer of 2003, the situation in the Middle East, the wars in Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the growing unreality of the media presentations of them, were bringing contradictions within the ICDSM to critical mass. The Milosevic defense would not be fucked with--the hijackers would be neutralized!]
cirque minime
dépêche #69
by
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
15 June 2003
Experience is losing traction. It’s becoming harder and harder to get a grip on what’s going down.
The dialectical tension between the Revealed and the Revelatory, between the Whole and each of its constituent parts (as Hegel described Historical Truth), has been supplanted by the surface tension of that scummy veneer that clouds the Public gaze. The Obvious has become so occulted by media contortions and recontortions that the public can now crash headlong into it without noticing it, and just move on to the next fabulous explication. One can no longer speak seriously of fresh government lies being uncovered, because these childish excuses for mass murder—Iraqi WMDs threatening the US; the secular Saddam in league with Islamic terrorists led by a crazed Saudi nobleman headquartered in an Afghani cave and capable of attacking and destroying the very sources of their existence—these sorry fronts aren’t even as strong or cunning as Nixon’s Watergate hustle or Reagan/Bush’s Iran/Contra scam or Rumsfeld’s Boeing-dissolving-into-the-Pentagon-on-its-60th birthday conjuration. Now it is more a matter of new blood vessels bursting in that single soupy and sightless orb that suppurates in the forehead of the Other Super Power: the Cyclopticon Public Dickhead.
Case in point: The controversy over the reclassification of evidence in the less than spectacular—hell, the too-cornball-even-for K investigation of 9/11—evidence that has been in the public domain since immediately after the attacks. (e.g., Evidence of misinterpreted warnings or bungled defense strategies that implies, at best, criminal negligence on the part of the intelligence community, and, at worst, treasonous complicity with the terrorists—‘sleeping with the enemy’—like Cheney and Haliburton dealing oil gear to a sanctioned Saddam—on the part of the entire government.)
And what’s so genius about the government’s trying to hide what we already know? Nothing. Unless, by so doing, they circumscribe the political discussion to certain acceptable, relatively harmless phenomena, and effectively exclude inquiry into the root causes of the real events of that day, and what their projected effects (their benefits to the dominant interests) were meant to be. (e.g., Photographic evidence of the absence of an American Airlines Boeing 757 at the Pentagon—I can hear Rummy now: ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!’—and photographic evidence of the very real presence of what could only have been some sort of explosive flying engine—a missile—burrowing a hundred-meter tunnel through three rings, that’s six stone walls, of the seat of US National Defense, are best left outside the main tent of serious discussion and in the lunatics’ side-show of crackpot conspiracy freaks and Holocaust deniers.) ( —A friend of mine, a well known public intellectual of the Left, became so irate at learning that the Pentagon, along with having five sides, was also made up of five concentric rings, three of which were thoroughly pierced by what ever infernal beast attacked that monument to administered reality, that he refused to acknowledge any significant difference between Rumsfeld’s airliner and Meyssan’s missile striking the Pentagon. Now THIS is leftwing denial.)
And then again: All the stink being raised over forged intelligence and false information about the threats posed by Saddam’s ABCWMDs and his ties to the international terrorist network, al Qaeda. What? Henry Waxman is suggesting the Bush people lied to the Hill people about Why the ‘Shock and Awe’ people needed to be turned loose? Gosh, Hank, it’s good to hear your interns are doing something besides lining up to blow you. But what this really does is give undeserved credence to the very idea that the latest onslaught on Iraq wanted or needed a pretext to kick it off. With the US military/industrial complex the only functioning organ in an otherwise dead and stinking national economy; with 300,000 heavily armed troops surrounding Iraq; with Iraq’s entire defense capacity and most of its civilian communications, water and power infrastructures either destroyed by the 1991 Gulf War or rendered null and void by more’n a decade of sanctions so tight that Iraqi women couldn’t get tampons into the country because they might be used as Scud fuses—much less any kind of weapons grade substances like antibiotics or hair spray; and with a reparations regime that would have had generations of Iraqis in deep hock well into the 22nd century:
But as soon as the main debt is paid, Iraq will be required
to pay interest, at a rate still to be decided, for the
delays in compensation since 1990. Even at a very
modest rate of 3% a year, interest charges could
amount to a further $320bn - in which case Iraq
would still be paying for the invasion of Kuwait in
the year 2125.
[Gulf War Reparations May Take Iraq More Than a Century to Pay,
Guardian, 16 June '00- Brian Whitaker]
With the destruction of everything in Iraq but its oil—and its geostrategic position in the network of oil transfer—a locked-on, cinch-domino, slam-dunk of a foregone conclusion—a historical inevitability!—Nothing substantial was served by all these efforts to convince the Public one way or another as to why Iraq should be attacked. For the feckless public had long since been removed from the equation.
So how do these guys—and dolls--come by the balls to foist such lame cover-ups and chickenshit hoaxes on the ever-drowsier Public Giant? Anybody’s guess. But it sure seems to be working for them. Bob Sheer has The Big Bad Wolfie on the record explaining it all in terms of the lucky-enough-to-shit-in-a-swinging-jug theory of History:
For Wolfowitz and friends, the 9/11 attacks were almost a gift, an
opportunity to play God. "If you had to pick the 10 most important
foreign policy things for the United States over the last 100 years,
[Sept. 11] would surely rank in the top 10 if not No. 1," he told Vanity
Fair.
[How Their Big Lie Came to Be—by Robert Scheer—
The Los Angeles Times—Tuesday 03 June 2003]
Huh? ‘. . . the ten most important foreign policy THINGS!?’ What, he couldn’t think of ‘boondoggles’ or ‘jug-fucks’ or ‘hand jobs’; or is this yet another example of the Bush family’s own Jargon of Reification? But then nobody really expects the Public to make it past page two—much less book two—of any truly cogent criticism. For instance: when was the last time you heard that fasco-commie anti-Semitic pedophile Thierry Meyssan’s second book, Pentagate, discussed?
But how can you talk about ‘lies’ and ‘hypocrisy’ when there is no longer any standard of Truth by which to gauge these concepts?
How can you believe that March 2003 was the critical moment
to strike, when this particular assault on the Iraqi people was being
planned long before 9/11?—at such a time as the military stock
overhang was becoming overly oppressive.
How can you believe in the studly prowess of the US war machine,
when the Republican Guard was paid to roll over in front of Tommy
Franks’ tanks?
And when will we ever know why Gen Joe Dowdy refused to send
his men into battle, and was jerked off his command for it?
Or why the Russians were fired on as they fled Baghdad after
being one of the only effective intelligence sources coming out of
that war?
And who’s going in the box for the cold blooded murders of two
reporters at the Palestine Hotel? Or the other victims over at
Al Jazeera? Or at RTV and the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade,
1999?
And was Jessica Lynch really sodomised—not by her Iraqi
captors—those vicious doctors and nurses who transfused their
own blood to save her and tried to return her to her lines—but by
US Military Intelligence for the purposes of an Army porno film—
to be directed, according to Friday Variety, by the great American
patriot, and Canadian-bacon-head, Lionel Chetwin, defrocked
maitre d’ at the Hanoi Hilton, and to be shown at the next Tailhook
Party? [I guess the guy who directed the Toppling Saddam’s Statue
Show’s just not going to get another shot!—Somebody get me
Chuckie Barris on my private line!]
Does all this mean Everybody was bullshitting about the Iraqi threat?! Whoa! Like they were about the Soviet threat, the Vietnamese threat, the Cuban threat, the Sandanista threat, the Serbian threat, the Chinese and North Korean threats, and the brown acid at Woodstock? Why would they play us like that? And how could the pro scribblers get so worked up about busting such chump, threadbare and careless lies. Nicky Kristol sees it comme ça:
Intelligence analysts often speak of "humint" for human intelligence
(spies) and "sigint" for signals intelligence (wiretaps). They refer
contemptuously to recent work as "rumint," or rumor intelligence.
[Save Our Spooks--by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF--NY Times—
Saturday 31 May 2003]
All these rumors posing as pseudo criticism of phoney intelligence in pursuit of bogus analysis from a badly stage-managed rhetorical melodrama! Has the Public’s discernment diminished along with its buying power? Why have American political leaders become more cretinous and unspeakable with each rigged election? [Next: Touch Screen Computer-Voting—NO MORE PAPER TRAIL! Yikes!] Here’s Paul Krugman’s take:
For the time being, the public doesn't seem to care — or even want to
know. A new poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes finds
that 41 percent of Americans either believe that W.M.D.'s have been
found, or aren't sure. The program's director suggests that "some
Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive
dissonance." And three-quarters of the public thinks that President
Bush showed strong leadership on Iraq.
[Waggy Dog Stories—by Paul Krugman—New York Times | Opinion—
Friday 30 May 2003]
So whether it’s Bill Clinton spunking up Monica’s hair in the Oval Office, or W Village Peopling it up in his Boss flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier*, the image the world holds of the US today continues to be that of a garish, cum-drunk whore, hell-bent on spreading his deadly strain of wasting clap to every corner of our ravaged planet. Yet everyone, from every color of the political spectrum, with a stomach for swallowing unlimited quantities of toxic secretions, is absolutely deep-throat slarving as much American-made dode as it takes to keep from being kicked out of this Circus of the Grotesque—while waiting nervously for that check from USAID or the Endowment for Democracy or the Open Society Foundation or the Screen Actors Guild to turn up in the mail so they can make their medical co-payments.
(*Can you believe this weenie, Maréchal Bush? Many political leaders have favored military drag: like Ike, Mao, Fidel, Stalin, Tito. But they were discrete enough to sport formal dress, lots of medals and braid. This chickenshit deserter from a Country Club Reserve Unit of beer-headed weekend warriors actually wears combat gear! Like he would even know what to do in battle—AFTER he shit in his pants.)
Today we hear critical voices from inside the tent, some from ‘embedded’ Left intellectuals, breathlessly cooing the discovery of great and heinous moral falsehoods. Now, some of what I’ve got to say here is extra tricky—talking about these impacted thinkers without naming them—because a lot of them are friends and have worked very long and hard and well in the service of Historical Truth, Justice, and the achievement of a decent world. And since I feel it is important to maintain solidarity on the Left, I’m going to give some of them a pass. Some of them.
But there can be NO EXCUSE for people like Sontag, Chomsky and Zinn signing the Landy petition that betrays the Cuban people and their Revolution to the neo-con ‘cabal’ that has sworn to destroy them.
Nor for anti-Orientalists like Eddie Said and Robt Fisk who, in companion essays in the August 1999 Le Monde Diplomatique, relativized the ruthless and bloodthirsty expulsions of all non-KLA-approved minorities from Kosovo (esp Serbs and Roma, but including recalcitrant Albanians), at the end of the 78-day NATO terror-bombing and with the KFOR occupation of that southern province of the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia, likening them to the alleged genocides of the Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and even the farther-fetched ethnic cleansing unto genocide of Kosovo Albanians imputed to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and the Serb Special Police by the BND (German intelligence) fantasy of an ‘Operation Horseshoe’ at the onset of the bombing. Le Monde Diplomatique itself has not stopped apologizing for NATO’s destruction of all social order in the Balkans and the Caucasus by its support of Islamic terrorist organizations linked to Al Qaeda in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya—three regions, oddly enough, where the alleged genocides were committed against majority populations that held—and continue to hold—state power and receive full moral, military and financial support for their own terrorist acts from the West. Very strange behaviour, indeed, from a Left journal!
Nor for just about any critics of the US govt’s line on 9/11 (including Michael Ruppert, John Kaminski and Jared Israel, whose sole raisons de critique seem to be vulgar self-promotion). Critics who content themselves with a lickspittle’s assertions of criminal negligence or occasionally dare to suggest that the US govt might have stood down its defenses, but never step outside the bounds of the dominant discussion of Arab terrorism’s great victory, serve only to obfuscate the real causes and effects of the 9/11 mass-murders. Only Michel Chossudovsky, in his War and Globalization: The Truth Behind Sept 11 (Global Outlook, 2002), suggests that since ‘the international terrorist network’, aka al Qaeda or the Mujahadeen, is a joint venture of the ISI [Pakistani Intelligence] and US Intelligence, so then was 9/11. And Michel doesn’t even broach the mystery of the Pentagon attack and cover-up and Israel’s role in ‘The missiles of Sept’, which en-soi cinches America’s full culpability in this self-slaughter!
But what are the origins of this Circus of non-critical thinking contorted to appear like intelligence, of false witnesses juggling sham history to make it appear true, and of the ham-fisted media legerdemain which makes all these illusions, even delusions, seem like the Real Deal? And how did this bi-partisan Big Top come to contain so many sniveling historical revisionists and craven police state apologists—so much compressed Elephant and Donkey shit, in compound with an alcohol and Prozac solution, that it’s a wonder the whole fucking tent hasn’t blown straight up like McVeigh’s van?
How did Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag and her little boy, David Reiff, the hearsay choir boys David Rohde and Roy Gutman, Liberal historian Eric Hobsbawm and his favorite Balkan hand-puppets, Michael Ignatieff and Bernie Kouchner, the French Nouveaux Philosophes like Bernard Henri-Levi and Glucksman and Finklekraut and an endless list of GAP-clad, paid-off, straight from the barricades to the corner-office, soixante-retard academics, like the whole Humanities faculty at Columbia, Nat Hentoff (on Zimbabwe), Tony Judt (on French anti-Americanism), Elie Wiesel (on the Judeophilic Croatians and Bosnian Muslims—talk about a Holocaust denier! Hey, Elie, visit Jasenovac lately?) and Saul Bellow (on being Saul Bellow): How did all these brave Leftist lions wind up dancing the Black Samba (all night long!) to the lash of the same lion tamer: Reflexive Anti-Communism?
Free choice had an important part, but the Libertarian catalogue is thin. Only the obedient are paid. The gold watch is given for faithful service not critical inquiry—and certainly not for whistle blowing. Even though non-critical love is doomed to betrayal, the price for staying inside the tent is unflinching, unquestioning loyalty to the interests of that Great White Cancer: Accumulated Surplus Value. Ask the wrong question (or the right question?) and you’re back giving enemas to elephants.
So the whole Sisyphian rock’n’roll business has become more’n more impossible to pull off—it’s like the mountain has been turned into cream cheese. But some folks just keep digging their toes in and pushing their rock, straight and hard and true. These are my heroes. Guys—and Dolls—like Diana Johnstone and Tiphaine Dickson, Chris Black and Vlada Krsljanin, Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro, Joe Goodrich and my homeboy Steppling and my daughter Yana: each of them using his or her natural privilege, their considerable intelligence—in the face of an enormous, self-validating, viciously and aggressively stupid reaction—to do the next right thing, the next decent thing. Their style of heroism may not be out of Euripides, but their commitment to telling the truth—no matter what the personal cost—is a damn site more hope-giving than all the moral effluvium coming out of Hollywood in pictures like Basic and Matrix and Anger Management: stories that seem to be prepping us for that DNC where we learn the good news that all that’s happened, all the lies and murders and mayhem, all the chaos and misery, were secretly planned and executed for our own protection and greater good by our dear friends and minders at the NED. After all, without Sept 11th we would never have been able to . . . what? . . . reap the myriad benefits of having our fellow-citizens involved in the daily maintenance of chaos and death and destruction in every corner of the world, a new-style, world-wide imperialism based not on stealing the natural (incl. human) wealth of nations, but on laying waste to the entire planet.
But my main man, the last of the old hope fiends, is the only actor I know playing a heroic role on a world stage—and it’s not, by any means, a main stage, but a little black box space, way outta town, in The Netherlands. Everyday Slobodan Milosevic faces another of the terrified and turned or just badly rehearsed and bought-off false-witnesses—former or current warlords and mafiosi and quivering snitches and broke-dick political assassins—that NATO and its jihadist crime partners pass before the Tribunal at The Hague. While hack reviewers—completely unable to hide the shame at their betrayal of every principle they once held dear—aimless non-thinkers like Joe Lewellyn at The New Yorker or Paul Bass at Foreign Affairs or Francis Boyle on CounterPunch or Anthony Borden at The Nation—keep calling M’s performances overwrought and even arrogant because he has consistently refused to genuflect before this Lewis Carrollian court’s non-existent legitimacy. And without yet even having presented his defense, but by the sheer dint of his cross examinations and his personal command of the history under discussion, President Milosevic has turned the Prosecution’s case into a spectacular cataloguing of the monstrous crimes committed by the West in the name of Globalization. Now here lies what little hope is left for the Historical Truth.
Of course, all TV coverage—of this ‘the most important war crimes trial since Nuremberg’—was stopped after the first week with its sometimes graphically illustrated opening statements. Too much gore? You might ask. Pas de tout. The plug was pulled right after President Milosevic cued up the Thomas Diechmann video showing how Penny Marshall, of Britain’s Independent Television News, found the poster boy, Fikret Alic, for her Bosnian Serb Death Camps piece by placing her camera inside a barbed wire enclosure in a displaced persons camp. This potted image circled the globe and became the icon for the 'New Serbian Fascism'—a concept so without basis in History as to have become the sole grounding for the arguments of moral nitwits and jibbering war junkies. So too much Balkan truth proved too embarrassing for even the shameless Christian Amanpour and CNN and EuroNews, and they all just slouched out of the Low Countries like diseased rodents, leaving Slobodan Milosevic to play out his heroic role as the last honest and angry politician in black. Beckett would’ve loved it.
But then, you can understand why the Magicians who so delight us with their tricks don’t want us to know how they do it. That’s probably why they keep blowing all that chicken shit in our eyes.
cirque minime
dépêche #69
by
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
15 June 2003
Experience is losing traction. It’s becoming harder and harder to get a grip on what’s going down.
The dialectical tension between the Revealed and the Revelatory, between the Whole and each of its constituent parts (as Hegel described Historical Truth), has been supplanted by the surface tension of that scummy veneer that clouds the Public gaze. The Obvious has become so occulted by media contortions and recontortions that the public can now crash headlong into it without noticing it, and just move on to the next fabulous explication. One can no longer speak seriously of fresh government lies being uncovered, because these childish excuses for mass murder—Iraqi WMDs threatening the US; the secular Saddam in league with Islamic terrorists led by a crazed Saudi nobleman headquartered in an Afghani cave and capable of attacking and destroying the very sources of their existence—these sorry fronts aren’t even as strong or cunning as Nixon’s Watergate hustle or Reagan/Bush’s Iran/Contra scam or Rumsfeld’s Boeing-dissolving-into-the-Pentagon-on-its-60th birthday conjuration. Now it is more a matter of new blood vessels bursting in that single soupy and sightless orb that suppurates in the forehead of the Other Super Power: the Cyclopticon Public Dickhead.
Case in point: The controversy over the reclassification of evidence in the less than spectacular—hell, the too-cornball-even-for K investigation of 9/11—evidence that has been in the public domain since immediately after the attacks. (e.g., Evidence of misinterpreted warnings or bungled defense strategies that implies, at best, criminal negligence on the part of the intelligence community, and, at worst, treasonous complicity with the terrorists—‘sleeping with the enemy’—like Cheney and Haliburton dealing oil gear to a sanctioned Saddam—on the part of the entire government.)
And what’s so genius about the government’s trying to hide what we already know? Nothing. Unless, by so doing, they circumscribe the political discussion to certain acceptable, relatively harmless phenomena, and effectively exclude inquiry into the root causes of the real events of that day, and what their projected effects (their benefits to the dominant interests) were meant to be. (e.g., Photographic evidence of the absence of an American Airlines Boeing 757 at the Pentagon—I can hear Rummy now: ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!’—and photographic evidence of the very real presence of what could only have been some sort of explosive flying engine—a missile—burrowing a hundred-meter tunnel through three rings, that’s six stone walls, of the seat of US National Defense, are best left outside the main tent of serious discussion and in the lunatics’ side-show of crackpot conspiracy freaks and Holocaust deniers.) ( —A friend of mine, a well known public intellectual of the Left, became so irate at learning that the Pentagon, along with having five sides, was also made up of five concentric rings, three of which were thoroughly pierced by what ever infernal beast attacked that monument to administered reality, that he refused to acknowledge any significant difference between Rumsfeld’s airliner and Meyssan’s missile striking the Pentagon. Now THIS is leftwing denial.)
And then again: All the stink being raised over forged intelligence and false information about the threats posed by Saddam’s ABCWMDs and his ties to the international terrorist network, al Qaeda. What? Henry Waxman is suggesting the Bush people lied to the Hill people about Why the ‘Shock and Awe’ people needed to be turned loose? Gosh, Hank, it’s good to hear your interns are doing something besides lining up to blow you. But what this really does is give undeserved credence to the very idea that the latest onslaught on Iraq wanted or needed a pretext to kick it off. With the US military/industrial complex the only functioning organ in an otherwise dead and stinking national economy; with 300,000 heavily armed troops surrounding Iraq; with Iraq’s entire defense capacity and most of its civilian communications, water and power infrastructures either destroyed by the 1991 Gulf War or rendered null and void by more’n a decade of sanctions so tight that Iraqi women couldn’t get tampons into the country because they might be used as Scud fuses—much less any kind of weapons grade substances like antibiotics or hair spray; and with a reparations regime that would have had generations of Iraqis in deep hock well into the 22nd century:
But as soon as the main debt is paid, Iraq will be required
to pay interest, at a rate still to be decided, for the
delays in compensation since 1990. Even at a very
modest rate of 3% a year, interest charges could
amount to a further $320bn - in which case Iraq
would still be paying for the invasion of Kuwait in
the year 2125.
[Gulf War Reparations May Take Iraq More Than a Century to Pay,
Guardian, 16 June '00- Brian Whitaker]
With the destruction of everything in Iraq but its oil—and its geostrategic position in the network of oil transfer—a locked-on, cinch-domino, slam-dunk of a foregone conclusion—a historical inevitability!—Nothing substantial was served by all these efforts to convince the Public one way or another as to why Iraq should be attacked. For the feckless public had long since been removed from the equation.
So how do these guys—and dolls--come by the balls to foist such lame cover-ups and chickenshit hoaxes on the ever-drowsier Public Giant? Anybody’s guess. But it sure seems to be working for them. Bob Sheer has The Big Bad Wolfie on the record explaining it all in terms of the lucky-enough-to-shit-in-a-swinging-jug theory of History:
For Wolfowitz and friends, the 9/11 attacks were almost a gift, an
opportunity to play God. "If you had to pick the 10 most important
foreign policy things for the United States over the last 100 years,
[Sept. 11] would surely rank in the top 10 if not No. 1," he told Vanity
Fair.
[How Their Big Lie Came to Be—by Robert Scheer—
The Los Angeles Times—Tuesday 03 June 2003]
Huh? ‘. . . the ten most important foreign policy THINGS!?’ What, he couldn’t think of ‘boondoggles’ or ‘jug-fucks’ or ‘hand jobs’; or is this yet another example of the Bush family’s own Jargon of Reification? But then nobody really expects the Public to make it past page two—much less book two—of any truly cogent criticism. For instance: when was the last time you heard that fasco-commie anti-Semitic pedophile Thierry Meyssan’s second book, Pentagate, discussed?
But how can you talk about ‘lies’ and ‘hypocrisy’ when there is no longer any standard of Truth by which to gauge these concepts?
How can you believe that March 2003 was the critical moment
to strike, when this particular assault on the Iraqi people was being
planned long before 9/11?—at such a time as the military stock
overhang was becoming overly oppressive.
How can you believe in the studly prowess of the US war machine,
when the Republican Guard was paid to roll over in front of Tommy
Franks’ tanks?
And when will we ever know why Gen Joe Dowdy refused to send
his men into battle, and was jerked off his command for it?
Or why the Russians were fired on as they fled Baghdad after
being one of the only effective intelligence sources coming out of
that war?
And who’s going in the box for the cold blooded murders of two
reporters at the Palestine Hotel? Or the other victims over at
Al Jazeera? Or at RTV and the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade,
1999?
And was Jessica Lynch really sodomised—not by her Iraqi
captors—those vicious doctors and nurses who transfused their
own blood to save her and tried to return her to her lines—but by
US Military Intelligence for the purposes of an Army porno film—
to be directed, according to Friday Variety, by the great American
patriot, and Canadian-bacon-head, Lionel Chetwin, defrocked
maitre d’ at the Hanoi Hilton, and to be shown at the next Tailhook
Party? [I guess the guy who directed the Toppling Saddam’s Statue
Show’s just not going to get another shot!—Somebody get me
Chuckie Barris on my private line!]
Does all this mean Everybody was bullshitting about the Iraqi threat?! Whoa! Like they were about the Soviet threat, the Vietnamese threat, the Cuban threat, the Sandanista threat, the Serbian threat, the Chinese and North Korean threats, and the brown acid at Woodstock? Why would they play us like that? And how could the pro scribblers get so worked up about busting such chump, threadbare and careless lies. Nicky Kristol sees it comme ça:
Intelligence analysts often speak of "humint" for human intelligence
(spies) and "sigint" for signals intelligence (wiretaps). They refer
contemptuously to recent work as "rumint," or rumor intelligence.
[Save Our Spooks--by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF--NY Times—
Saturday 31 May 2003]
All these rumors posing as pseudo criticism of phoney intelligence in pursuit of bogus analysis from a badly stage-managed rhetorical melodrama! Has the Public’s discernment diminished along with its buying power? Why have American political leaders become more cretinous and unspeakable with each rigged election? [Next: Touch Screen Computer-Voting—NO MORE PAPER TRAIL! Yikes!] Here’s Paul Krugman’s take:
For the time being, the public doesn't seem to care — or even want to
know. A new poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes finds
that 41 percent of Americans either believe that W.M.D.'s have been
found, or aren't sure. The program's director suggests that "some
Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive
dissonance." And three-quarters of the public thinks that President
Bush showed strong leadership on Iraq.
[Waggy Dog Stories—by Paul Krugman—New York Times | Opinion—
Friday 30 May 2003]
So whether it’s Bill Clinton spunking up Monica’s hair in the Oval Office, or W Village Peopling it up in his Boss flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier*, the image the world holds of the US today continues to be that of a garish, cum-drunk whore, hell-bent on spreading his deadly strain of wasting clap to every corner of our ravaged planet. Yet everyone, from every color of the political spectrum, with a stomach for swallowing unlimited quantities of toxic secretions, is absolutely deep-throat slarving as much American-made dode as it takes to keep from being kicked out of this Circus of the Grotesque—while waiting nervously for that check from USAID or the Endowment for Democracy or the Open Society Foundation or the Screen Actors Guild to turn up in the mail so they can make their medical co-payments.
(*Can you believe this weenie, Maréchal Bush? Many political leaders have favored military drag: like Ike, Mao, Fidel, Stalin, Tito. But they were discrete enough to sport formal dress, lots of medals and braid. This chickenshit deserter from a Country Club Reserve Unit of beer-headed weekend warriors actually wears combat gear! Like he would even know what to do in battle—AFTER he shit in his pants.)
Today we hear critical voices from inside the tent, some from ‘embedded’ Left intellectuals, breathlessly cooing the discovery of great and heinous moral falsehoods. Now, some of what I’ve got to say here is extra tricky—talking about these impacted thinkers without naming them—because a lot of them are friends and have worked very long and hard and well in the service of Historical Truth, Justice, and the achievement of a decent world. And since I feel it is important to maintain solidarity on the Left, I’m going to give some of them a pass. Some of them.
But there can be NO EXCUSE for people like Sontag, Chomsky and Zinn signing the Landy petition that betrays the Cuban people and their Revolution to the neo-con ‘cabal’ that has sworn to destroy them.
Nor for anti-Orientalists like Eddie Said and Robt Fisk who, in companion essays in the August 1999 Le Monde Diplomatique, relativized the ruthless and bloodthirsty expulsions of all non-KLA-approved minorities from Kosovo (esp Serbs and Roma, but including recalcitrant Albanians), at the end of the 78-day NATO terror-bombing and with the KFOR occupation of that southern province of the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia, likening them to the alleged genocides of the Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and even the farther-fetched ethnic cleansing unto genocide of Kosovo Albanians imputed to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and the Serb Special Police by the BND (German intelligence) fantasy of an ‘Operation Horseshoe’ at the onset of the bombing. Le Monde Diplomatique itself has not stopped apologizing for NATO’s destruction of all social order in the Balkans and the Caucasus by its support of Islamic terrorist organizations linked to Al Qaeda in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya—three regions, oddly enough, where the alleged genocides were committed against majority populations that held—and continue to hold—state power and receive full moral, military and financial support for their own terrorist acts from the West. Very strange behaviour, indeed, from a Left journal!
Nor for just about any critics of the US govt’s line on 9/11 (including Michael Ruppert, John Kaminski and Jared Israel, whose sole raisons de critique seem to be vulgar self-promotion). Critics who content themselves with a lickspittle’s assertions of criminal negligence or occasionally dare to suggest that the US govt might have stood down its defenses, but never step outside the bounds of the dominant discussion of Arab terrorism’s great victory, serve only to obfuscate the real causes and effects of the 9/11 mass-murders. Only Michel Chossudovsky, in his War and Globalization: The Truth Behind Sept 11 (Global Outlook, 2002), suggests that since ‘the international terrorist network’, aka al Qaeda or the Mujahadeen, is a joint venture of the ISI [Pakistani Intelligence] and US Intelligence, so then was 9/11. And Michel doesn’t even broach the mystery of the Pentagon attack and cover-up and Israel’s role in ‘The missiles of Sept’, which en-soi cinches America’s full culpability in this self-slaughter!
But what are the origins of this Circus of non-critical thinking contorted to appear like intelligence, of false witnesses juggling sham history to make it appear true, and of the ham-fisted media legerdemain which makes all these illusions, even delusions, seem like the Real Deal? And how did this bi-partisan Big Top come to contain so many sniveling historical revisionists and craven police state apologists—so much compressed Elephant and Donkey shit, in compound with an alcohol and Prozac solution, that it’s a wonder the whole fucking tent hasn’t blown straight up like McVeigh’s van?
How did Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag and her little boy, David Reiff, the hearsay choir boys David Rohde and Roy Gutman, Liberal historian Eric Hobsbawm and his favorite Balkan hand-puppets, Michael Ignatieff and Bernie Kouchner, the French Nouveaux Philosophes like Bernard Henri-Levi and Glucksman and Finklekraut and an endless list of GAP-clad, paid-off, straight from the barricades to the corner-office, soixante-retard academics, like the whole Humanities faculty at Columbia, Nat Hentoff (on Zimbabwe), Tony Judt (on French anti-Americanism), Elie Wiesel (on the Judeophilic Croatians and Bosnian Muslims—talk about a Holocaust denier! Hey, Elie, visit Jasenovac lately?) and Saul Bellow (on being Saul Bellow): How did all these brave Leftist lions wind up dancing the Black Samba (all night long!) to the lash of the same lion tamer: Reflexive Anti-Communism?
Free choice had an important part, but the Libertarian catalogue is thin. Only the obedient are paid. The gold watch is given for faithful service not critical inquiry—and certainly not for whistle blowing. Even though non-critical love is doomed to betrayal, the price for staying inside the tent is unflinching, unquestioning loyalty to the interests of that Great White Cancer: Accumulated Surplus Value. Ask the wrong question (or the right question?) and you’re back giving enemas to elephants.
So the whole Sisyphian rock’n’roll business has become more’n more impossible to pull off—it’s like the mountain has been turned into cream cheese. But some folks just keep digging their toes in and pushing their rock, straight and hard and true. These are my heroes. Guys—and Dolls—like Diana Johnstone and Tiphaine Dickson, Chris Black and Vlada Krsljanin, Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro, Joe Goodrich and my homeboy Steppling and my daughter Yana: each of them using his or her natural privilege, their considerable intelligence—in the face of an enormous, self-validating, viciously and aggressively stupid reaction—to do the next right thing, the next decent thing. Their style of heroism may not be out of Euripides, but their commitment to telling the truth—no matter what the personal cost—is a damn site more hope-giving than all the moral effluvium coming out of Hollywood in pictures like Basic and Matrix and Anger Management: stories that seem to be prepping us for that DNC where we learn the good news that all that’s happened, all the lies and murders and mayhem, all the chaos and misery, were secretly planned and executed for our own protection and greater good by our dear friends and minders at the NED. After all, without Sept 11th we would never have been able to . . . what? . . . reap the myriad benefits of having our fellow-citizens involved in the daily maintenance of chaos and death and destruction in every corner of the world, a new-style, world-wide imperialism based not on stealing the natural (incl. human) wealth of nations, but on laying waste to the entire planet.
But my main man, the last of the old hope fiends, is the only actor I know playing a heroic role on a world stage—and it’s not, by any means, a main stage, but a little black box space, way outta town, in The Netherlands. Everyday Slobodan Milosevic faces another of the terrified and turned or just badly rehearsed and bought-off false-witnesses—former or current warlords and mafiosi and quivering snitches and broke-dick political assassins—that NATO and its jihadist crime partners pass before the Tribunal at The Hague. While hack reviewers—completely unable to hide the shame at their betrayal of every principle they once held dear—aimless non-thinkers like Joe Lewellyn at The New Yorker or Paul Bass at Foreign Affairs or Francis Boyle on CounterPunch or Anthony Borden at The Nation—keep calling M’s performances overwrought and even arrogant because he has consistently refused to genuflect before this Lewis Carrollian court’s non-existent legitimacy. And without yet even having presented his defense, but by the sheer dint of his cross examinations and his personal command of the history under discussion, President Milosevic has turned the Prosecution’s case into a spectacular cataloguing of the monstrous crimes committed by the West in the name of Globalization. Now here lies what little hope is left for the Historical Truth.
Of course, all TV coverage—of this ‘the most important war crimes trial since Nuremberg’—was stopped after the first week with its sometimes graphically illustrated opening statements. Too much gore? You might ask. Pas de tout. The plug was pulled right after President Milosevic cued up the Thomas Diechmann video showing how Penny Marshall, of Britain’s Independent Television News, found the poster boy, Fikret Alic, for her Bosnian Serb Death Camps piece by placing her camera inside a barbed wire enclosure in a displaced persons camp. This potted image circled the globe and became the icon for the 'New Serbian Fascism'—a concept so without basis in History as to have become the sole grounding for the arguments of moral nitwits and jibbering war junkies. So too much Balkan truth proved too embarrassing for even the shameless Christian Amanpour and CNN and EuroNews, and they all just slouched out of the Low Countries like diseased rodents, leaving Slobodan Milosevic to play out his heroic role as the last honest and angry politician in black. Beckett would’ve loved it.
But then, you can understand why the Magicians who so delight us with their tricks don’t want us to know how they do it. That’s probably why they keep blowing all that chicken shit in our eyes.
posted by CirqueMinime/Paris at 7:03 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home