Source: Boiling Frogs Post
Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald
As the U.S. becomes more and more the kind of country it has
traditionally opposed, the answer to where we are headed may lie more
in the arcane traditions of a dim past than in a bright future.
"‘We’re the dark matter. We’re the
force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,’ a strapping Navy
SEAL, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit."
If anyone (correctly) thought that
the war on terror and Washington’s response to it had taken on a
fantastical otherworldly quality, this recent quote on the front page of the Washington Post seemed to confirm it.
Following 9/11, the elected government
of the United States of America delivered the country to a whole
department (of Homeland Security) dedicated to expanding the
government’s fear of darkness into everybody’s life (remember the 2003 duct tape and plastic sheeting craze?)
Now we also have a top secret military operation known as the Joint
Special Operations Command (JSOC) that thinks it is the dark.
Begun as a modest hostage rescue
team, JSOC has morphed into a veritable heart of darkness, with the
power to murder at will and with immunity from American legal
jurisdiction (which apparently still maintains that such assassinations are illegal).
Even within the military, JSOC
operates as a “Stovepipe,” operation, meaning that it operates
completely in the black, reports to no one and continues to employ rogue
ex-CIA professionals such as indicted Iran Contra operative Dewey Clarridge.
The Navy Seal Team that took out Osama bin Laden operated under JSOC.
Retired military personnel refer to JSOC as “Murder, Incorporated” and
the “most dangerous people on the face of the earth.”
But if JSOC’s reputation for secrecy,
vengeance and death from above can’t be explained from within the
context of traditional U.S. military operations or U.S. law, then what
set of rules is it operating from? Or is it simply that
the traditions of rationalism and law that most Americans took for
granted about the United States are subject to deeper, religious, or
perhaps even mystical rules, whose anachronistic logic has found a
renewed acceptance in an irrational world of personal, private and holy
war?
No one less than the legendary Cold
Warrior, Time Magazine’s Henry Luce understood that his passion for
defeating Communism constituted “a declaration of private war,” which,
in citing the example of the privateer Sir Francis Drake made it not only “unlawful,” but “probably mad.” As
the child of American missionaries, Luce was committed to the militant
spread of Christian Capitalism while viewing its ultimate triumph over
the world as an inevitable consequence of God’s will.
Known to its 19th century advocates as mystical imperialism, the term can be traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19th
century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and
Christian zeal. The competition came to a dead stop in Afghanistan with
the end of the Great Game in 1907. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917
complicated matters by infusing a heavy dose of socialist realism. But
with the advent of the Cold War and the mysterious and intoxicating
god-like qualities inherent in nuclear weapons, a new iteration of
mystical imperialism came into being.
America’s mystical Cold War warriors were far removed technologically from their 19th
century counterparts whose Christian elite believed they were bringing
rational western thinking to the “darker regions of the earth.”
The sole purpose of America’s mid 20th century defense
intellectuals was to rationalize nuclear war scientifically. Their
failure over time ultimately dragged an entire stratum of American
scientific and political thought back into the irrational realm of
medieval mysticism. A 1960s London Times Literary Supplement marveled at the new priesthood who moved as freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department as the Jesuits once had through
the courts of Madrid and Vienna, centuries before. Tasked with
defeating Communism they invented their own reality, accelerated the
nuclear arms race, created the domino theory of Communist expansion and then escalated the war in Vietnam to counter it.
President Kennedy’s science advisor
Jerome Wiesner eventually came to realize that the so called “missile
gap” and the massive buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal in response to
it was only a “mirror image” of America’s own intentions towards
the Soviet Union and not the other way around. Yet instead of
addressing the error, the U.S. slipped deeper into the Cold War mirror
until its own identity began to take on the image of its “Other.”
By 1973 these thermonuclear Jesuits
and their CIA counterparts were using the U.S., NATO, China, Iran and
Saudi Arabia to shake the Soviet Union’s domination over Central Asia
through a Christian/Islamic holy war in Afghanistan. In a rational world
it might be assumed that this war was supposed to stop with the defeat
of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. But instead of
ending, America’s full blown splurge into personal and private holy war
had caused the U.S. to slip into a crisis of identity.
Forced after seventy five years of
anti-communism to finally define itself based on what it stood for and
not what it stood against, the United States entered a house of mirrors
in which it continues to wander. Stricken by the results of decades of
economic and military excess, it finds its mission confused and its
underlying philosophical grounding threatened.
What is America on the eve of 2012?
Who are these Americans who revel in their dark powers? What have we
become and how did we get that way?
Join us as we explore the
little-analyzed facts and mystical covert agendas that the United States continues to press on with into the 21st century and what
those agendas may mean to America’s new role as the dark force that
orders the universe in the run up to the 2012 presidential elections.
“Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . Visit their website here.
