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Journal of a Futurist - 15 November 2004
The Future of Fascism
Could this be true? That the majority of those who voted for George Bush and John Howard are driven by greed, stupidity and a bloody minded, misplaced patriotism. On top of this, maybe they don’t get what’s really happening on Earth. Like the chained prisoners in Plato’s cave, these voters mistake the distorted flickering in front of them for reality.
In the ancient metaphor, shadows emanate from the comings and goings of those who pass between the campfire and the entrance of the cave. For those chained within, the wall is the world.
Actually, we are all prisoners of illusions. Today the cave is our suburban castle, where deceptive images pulsate from plasma screens into our consciousness. Plato’s prisoners could not turn their heads to find a fresh perspective. We can; but don’t. This is the mystery of our age.
Sometimes it is obvious we are staring at shadows, as in the assault on Falluja, where reporters are under the thumb of the conquerors. A click of the mouse can widen the view (For a range of reports on Iraq and related issues check the HOTLINKS on the right of this page).
WEAK SIGNALS FROM THE MADHOUSE
Falluja is America’s Guernica – worse than Guernica, because we are killing the people we claim to be liberating. How strange that back in 2002, on the day Colin Powell weaved his infamous web of mass deception for the UN, to justify the pre-planned invasion of Iraq, the US insisted the tapestry of Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, be hidden from view. In futurist lingo, this is act can be tagged a “weak signal”, an omen of things to come.
Not even Plato could solve the riddle of human truth avoidance, and he was misguided about the situation outside the cave: a world of “unchanging perfection”. More like a big oozy mess.
Anyway, in case you’re wondering why the West’s war mongering neo-con xenophobes are so ill informed about the state of the world, as well as being oblivious their role in its decline, here are five possible explanations. Think of these people as the Flat Earthers of the third millennium.
1. Flat Earth Neocons (FENS) suffer an exaggerated reverence for authority and the trappings of office. They are drawn to uniforms, power and guns. FENS tend to accept (and project) the official version of reality, however unlikely. When this version turns out to be false, as often happens, it is explained away as an “honest mistake”, even if thousands pay for it with their blood, as in the rape of Falluja. Let’s to root out Musab al-Zarqawi … even though he isn’t there.
MEDIA CONVERGENCE? BRING IT ON!
It was not the “inaccuracies” of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 that pricked the ire of FENS, mostly indifferent to notions of truth, but the director’s anti authoritarian sweep. The jokes, the satire, the impudence.
2. FENS seek self worth through achieving high office, excessive wealth and a bloated conception of patriotism (latest brainwave; forcing Australian schools to fly the flag). Their worship of authority spills into corporate boardrooms and onto the laps of media magnates. FENS politicians do not stray from conventional sources of news and opinion, which serve them well, just as they in turn serve the interests of the moguls. Media convergence? Bring it on! A sleepwalking web surfer could spot the outbreak torture by the US military long before the revelations at Abu Ghraib, due to the reports by Amnesty International and other online rumblings. Ignorance is political. Our rulers are voluntary prisoners in Plato’s cave, glued to Murdochian illusions, and able to pretend that systemic sadism was …. A Big Surprise.
The complexities of cultural convergence make it difficult to stick to the fierce dualities beloved by FENS: right/wrong, good/evil, us/them; and so they choose the path of Not Knowing. George Bush boasts he “doesn’t do nuance” and declines to read. In Canberra, unpleasant news is stopped from reaching the top with the phrase, “the Minister wouldn’t like to hear this”. After the absence of Iraq’s WMD’s was finally conceded, the next question became, Who Faked the Evidence? But no-one is asking. One clue: it wasn’t the peaceniks.
Plato’s mentor, Socrates, held that “there are no Gods higher than truth”, a view no longer accepted by today’s power brokers, who rate truth below getting a neat haircut.
WHEN THE KANGAROOS GO MISSING
At the end of last year, both George Bush and Condoleeza Rice said, "Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers." A month later, Donald Rumsfeld remarked: "And there is, I am certain, among the Iraqi people a respect for the care and the precision that went into the bombing campaign." Need I go on? The clincher is the claim by Rupert Murdoch, a phrase he tried to patent, that his media output is “fair and balanced”.
Hit by the air strike on Falluja, Nov 6, which also killed his father.
This pathological flight from truth provides a cover for dark deeds in the dead of night. And even by daylight. Last Thursday’s footage from Falluja screened on ABC’s Lateline revealed an “insurgent” – probably an Iraqi citizen – being finished off as he lay wounded. This is against the laws of war. Who cares? The Bush nomination for the next Attorney General is Alberto Gonzalez, the Enron funded White House lawyer who dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and let the torturers run amok.
3. Flat Earth Neo-cons distrust people smarter than themselves; (except if such people are also smart about money). That the world’s most powerful human being has a kangaroo missing from his upper paddock is an electoral bonus; never mind the Middle East in flames. John Howard is cunning, but he’s not a knowledge seeker. Howard utilises his capacity to bore to great advantage, wearing his numbing dullness like shining armour, stupefying all interrogators. Howard and Bush share a savage streak of sadism, united in their view that might is right.
A DIRTY LITTLE PROPAGANDA MACHINE
FENS tends to treat academics as the enemy, because learning to see both sides of an argument could be lethal. A single shard of truth may sap the resolve of a world leader to do the wrong thing.
Those academics who do side with the far right, end up spouting gobbledygook. Here’s Hugh White, the Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (4/11/04): “George Bush is going to need to build up America’s army so that it has a better chance to impose peace on Iraq”. And on the rest of us. As if the $US700 billion spent annually to militarise the planet isn’t enough.
A Murdochian military analyst on Fox News, (“unfair & unbalanced”®), said that "one of the first targets" of the Falluja attack would be the headquarters of Al Jazeera TV (not for the first time). Presumably, this was in addition to the bombing of mosques and storming of hospitals (where the marines cuffed the doctors and patients and forced them face down onto the floor).
Doing the rounds on military blogs, this image recalls the nastiness of Nazi propaganda.
“Leaning over a large satellite image of the city”, reports Jeff Hook, “the analyst plotted the two-pronged attack for the national television audience. While pointing to a specific location on the map, the retired general described Aljazeera as a ‘dirty little propaganda machine for the insurgents’ and said, ‘Last time they showed pictures of civilian causalities; that's not going to happen this time.’ “
THE LAST LIVING FOSSILS LEFT ON EARTH
This is Orwellian truth elimination at its most ruthless. For FENS, there is no God higher than propaganda, except the God of the Old Testament, and he’s in their camp.
4. The rebirth of superstition. While most educated Westerners are customising their spirituality to achieve a sense of empathy with the rest of the world’s inhabitants, the FENS are retreating into a dark age of bigotry and evangelical hallucination. “The Bush administration and its supporters”, notes Rashid Khalidi, “are committed to a fact-free, faith-based approach to Middle East policymaking”.
Hard liners of all major religions are turning themselves into walking weapons of mass destruction, including Muslim fanatics who behead aid workers, the orthodox Jewish settlers shooting at children, the Marines purging Satan from Falluja. Rapture seekers can’t wait for the world to end, so everyone will die, except them. What’s going on? A flight from truth, a fear of the ever quickening pace of change, a search for certainty. That Western politicians are swept up in this loony revival does not bode well for the world.
Onward Christian soldiers
5. Another attribute of Flat Earth Neo-cons is a head in the sand approach to Global Warming. No point in rehashing the evidence here – if you don’t accept it now, you never will. So severe is the rollback of environmental initiatives in the US, that scientists are refused funding for research that mentions Climate Change. Who knows why? Maybe the only way oil barons can feel an inner glow is to pretend that carbon dioxide is good for the wildlife. Or maybe the myth of eternal material progress is so ingrained in the Western psyche that the Death of Nature seems a small price to pay to prop up the Dow Jones.
A leader with vision would launch the annual “Noble Green Energy” prize for the cleanest, cheapest ways to keep the world’s lights from dimming. Running away from Kyoto is running away from the truth, as well as running away from global engagement. Everyone knows this, apart from the last living fossils left on Earth, our rulers.
To sum up: what is happening in the post 9/11 landscape is the emergence of a global empire, the first in the history of the world. The nature of this empire is becoming clearer each day, and those who keep turning a blind eye, dreaming of Abraham Lincoln, are appeasing a monster. For over a week, every male between the age of 15 and 55 has been stopped from leaving Falluja. “Not so much a battle”, as James Cogan writes, but “a homicidal rampage by the US military against every Iraqi male trapped inside the city”. On the long, depressing journey from Guantanamo Bay to the razing of Falluja we have witnessed the violation of international laws and conventions, serial acts brutality, endless deception, theft of Iraqi assets, the killing of 100,000 civilians and the maiming of many more. When will it stop? Only when the rest of the world stands up to be counted, only when this bullying state gets the brand name it deserves, that of a fascist empire … in the making. Did you know that under Bremer’s Laws, Iraqi farmers have been banned from saving seeds? The Flat Earthers are now the Scorched Earthers, spruikers for Monsanto. Richard A Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Princeton, believes “The dangers of global fascism cannot be discounted as imaginary or alarmist”. (The Declining World Order, NY Routedge, 2040). Another academic, Julie A Mertus, an expert on US Foreign Policy, argues that America is “leading the world on human rights, but in the wrong direction”. The Government of Australia, meanwhile, cowards one and all, wants to follow in the bully’s footsteps.
The Secret Cave. Flashback, or weak signal?
On a personal note:
NOW WE ARE SIXTY
Yes, although I write like a 14 year old hysterical dopehead, the grim truth is that I’m older than I sound and younger than I look. One consolation is that many of my mates are following me into their sixth decade. Parties have been thrown; speeches given; joints passed. In a Leichhardt backyard, about 50 guests toasted the achievements of H G, the stylish birthday boy, a lifelong campaigner for social justice, a warm hearted companion and, according to his laconic partner, “a wonderful lover”. This endorsement triggered the time HG first caught my attention – in the early sixties, of course - when a student was spotted sauntering into a Sydney motel with Lolita. You heard me. Lolita, Lo, Lol, Loli , Loli-ta. A guy like that sticks in your mind.
Actually, HG’s companion was Sue Lyons, the girl who played Lolita in the Hollywood version of the Nabakov novel. In town on a promo tour. We shall cast a veil over the steamy details and segue forward to the sixtieth birthday, where one of the guests has unexpectedly mounted a soap box. The prevailing mood is one of celebration mingled with a furtive air of despondency, owing to a collective perception of a bad moon rising …. and rising. “The sixties was the greatest era in modern history”, came the voice of gravel, “it blew away the bullshit and opened the gates of freedom – that’s why the ruling class hates it so much ….” A few guests are embarrassed. No-one talks like this anymore, not even me. The voice grows louder; recalling the shock waves that stopped the suits in their tracks. He ends by urging guests to congratulate themselves on being a part of the most successful revolution of the 20th Century.
Revolutions rarely repeat themselves, thank goodness, so when the slaves start stirring again, it will be to a different tune.
Another birthday party. This one in an unmapped cave, recently discovered. A three hour drive from the city, a steep trudge through virgin bush, guided by a meandering skein of string, lugging a pack with Lilo, sweetmeats and a candelabra. I am suspicious of the venue, dreading the damp dirt.
Suddenly the flicker of flames; the aromas of an Indian feast. The cave is vast, like a cathedral, its high ceiling dotted with ferns. The ballroom sized floor is flat and dry, edged with three hundred tea light candles. Fifty shadowy figures of all ages are mucking about with food, adjusting their swags, tending a string of campfires. The eye-shaped entrance is as huge as a mansion. Trickling from the top left edge, a stream falls into a convenient pond. Children juggle, rock climbers test their skills; I tuck into the beer and the banquet; the mingling is easy.
By midnight this impromptu tribe is lounging on the floor, heads turned away from the shadows on the wall, looking through the cave’s eye across the gum trees into the twinkling skyscape, as the full moon rises. Is this the same moon that’s setting on Falluja? Is this the bad moon that’s inflaming the powerlust of those who have too much to lose and too little to give? Or is this a new moon, for a new era, with enough oomph to quell the polluted tide now lapping at gates of sanity? Let it be so. Otherwise we’re all just a bunch of prisoners in Plato’s cave, trapped between the moonbeams and the shadows, waiting for the gunships.
About 30 years ago, Robert Crumb depicted these possible futures. Where will we be by 2030?
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Richard's writings
(image from The Guardian, 22 September 04)
Excerpts from Soundtrack to War - George Gittoes
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