“FBI Believes It Has Identified ISIS Hostage Executioner
The U.S. believes it has identified the British-accented masked man in the video depicting the beheading of two American journalists and a British aid worker, The FBI director says.”
A telling message percolating from top to bottom into the passive receptors of the mesmerised multitude? Yes, dear multitude, potato yourselves on your couches, get comfortable, stay uncritical and listen to big brother identify the goodies from the baddies for you. It’s them or us.
For starters, we the media of your choice, will regale you with some images of bearded young men in the Middle East who appear to be hell-crusade-bent on ascending into martyrdom in the name of embracing a higher nature while defending the realm.
How strange all of this appears to us…especially Westerners who have come to believe in the semi-divine mission of acquiring assets of one kind or another as a ready-made and desirable end in itself. We have never let a bunch of indigenous people get in the way of a good business opportunity. Over time we have become habituated in a mind-numbing process that impacts badly on mother earth and her children. We Westerners are still up to our old tricks. With more fist than finesse, we rampage across the globe leaving much of mother nature’s mellifluous esprit languishing in shock-doctrine aftermath burnout.
To add insult to injury, we of the Western colonial proboscis-ilk, in our eagerness to possess other nations’ assets…oil, precious metals, etc…have created a tripartite partnership consisting of government, media and the mesmerised multitude, in order to project a narrative that served the interests of international capitalism in its quest for ever more profit.
Over time, much of the media has become the playbook of the establishment, being told what to say and how to say it by the PR machine. Big brother de jour, fingers on the puppet strings… shark fins observed swimming in the echelons of the pool. For the masses, it is de rigueur to sit back in lethargic detachment and watch the unfolding Hollywood style spectacle of our-munitions-are-bigger-than-your-munitions diet of skin-deep pap reportage.
The task of keeping the official mask in place has become the raison d’etre of the established media. President Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who gave a speech at the U.N. on September 24, on matters concerning his war on ISIL, was ‘mask’ of the day. The man who had promised to close Guantanamo Bay prison, the man who brought our attention to the intolerable situation facing Palestinians while calling for a stop to Israeli settlements five years ago, still believes that America is a light unto the world. Obama, it seems, has developed a persona to fit any talk-fest occasion while doing nothing.
Obama, the composite man, is part Martin Luther King Jr.-part Sammy Davis Jr. with a touch of Bishop Desmond Tutu thrown in for good measure…shaken, not stirred, of course… and comes across as a President hell-bent on using his considerable rhetorical talents to keep something (anything) together. The Obama message always comes across as a paean of praise for American leadership in the world…will he be remembered as the President who droned his tenure away?
The masks that are George Bush, Tony Blair, Bibi Netanyahu, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama. David Cameron, etc., are kept firmly in the background while our attention is drawn to the task of identifying a British-accented masked man (with knife in hand) in the video, depicting death by decapitation in the Middle East. The notion that a bearded Arab with knife in hand is somehow less civilised than our war for profit mob could be construed as hilarious if it weren’t so tragically absurd. Never mind what we do…they deserve it because they’re not us. We have bombed the hell out of their countries, but they deserved it because they resisted us.
From our couches, we silently acknowledge the revolving door syndrome whereby Presidents, past, present and future, exonerate each other from all culpability associated with the we-do-regime-change in countries with oil as a means of projecting American foreign policy. The Pentagon, since World War II, has imitated a Hollywood script-speak to project its image as the great defender of the realm busily bringing order to the world. But the truth lies elsewhere, behind the epidermis of the military uniform lies another mask, a narrative in thrall to vested interest.
So what is happening…if anything…in the national womb? At what point does our mesmerism collapse in upon itself under the sheer weight of déjà vu creep… the feeling that we are caught in a loop that endlessly drones on and on about self-right? At what point might the yeast of courage and conscionability rise in the national womb to craft a peace movement poste-haste, in order to reclaim the dignity of America-The-Brave?
Meanwhile the ghosts of wars past continue to prowl the corridors of the State Department. Criminals like Dick Cheney, who lied the country into war on Iraq, still drool over the possibility of going to war for yet another barrel of oil. The puppet masters of yesteryear have immunity from prosecution because the system itself is corrupt to the core and the media is not there to whistle-blow the game.
We have become past masters in living with self-deception. Never mind that Israel has used flechette shells and white phosphorus against the civilian population of Gaza…weapons described as illegal under ‘rules of humanitarian law’ and known to pose ‘a particularly high danger of harming innocent civilians’. Anyway, what do the lives of 2150 unwanted human beings matter to Zionist mythology? Besides, as Israel’s allies, we must help keep the mask of respectability in place by voting down any suggestion of evil.
And talking about evil done to others, an important report on Harvard’s University’s website discusses the fallout of depleted uranium contamination in Iraq and has recently come into the light of day. Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi, who authored the report after the Gulf War, wrote that; “Depleted Uranium (DU) weaponry has been used against Iraq for the first time in the history of recent wars”.
The following passage from Robert Koehler, a HuffPost blogger reads: “Thus last November, a group of British and Iraqi doctors petitioned the U.N. to investigate the alarming increase in birth defects at Fallujah’s hospitals. “Young women in Fallujah”, they wrote, “…are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no head, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.”
What we have lost by superficially applying ourselves to the task of understanding our environment is immense. It has resulted in us adopting a pseudo means of understanding our own natures. We forever tally the value of the material things we possess as though they are life giving, while ignoring the fact that America and other first world countries scorn the world with impunity.
As Westerners of the settler ilk, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, have become especially proud of the way they use the assets of indigenous peoples they have conquered to acquire capital to further their advantages. In time, virtue itself is measured by how much power has been amassed in the war on the other. Consider how America has turned the extraterritoriality of its legislation into a powerful instrument of domination. Applying the Torricelli and Helms-Burton Acts, Washington recently decided to sanction the BNP Paribas Bank with an $8.834 bl. fine for its participation in various transactions carried out by the governments of Cuba, Sudan and Iran.
And so onto the subject of alliances made in heaven, how cringeworthy is the action of settler ilk vassals like Tony Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia, in his lurid eagerness to please the sheriff of the posse, rushing to the head of the queue to offer his services, in the hope of being rewarded with a pat on the head for his willingness to ISIS bash. This obsequiousness from a Prime Minister who believes that Australia was unsettled before the Brits came to colonise Australia. Were the Australian aboriginals invisible because they didn’t eat with a knife in the right hand and a fork in the left hand, Tony?
The unholy compact that exists within the tripartite relationship we see existing between government, media and the mesmerised multitude can only lead to dysfunctionality. It is based on a status quo arrangement that requires the mesmerised multitude to remain passive. The mesmerised multitude is basically indolent, a monster asleep at its watch, incapable of making any decisions to act until its oxygen is reduced to a point where it could experience catatonia…at which point it could awaken and become a threat to the forces that cage it in.
Finally, to remain inactive when your country is reduced to being merely a cash cow for Wall Street hipsters is unacceptable. The worker’s role in the making of the American dream was hijacked when globalisation allowed the investor class to circumspect national demarcations. Better work practices that had contributed to the growing of the ‘economic-pizza’ within the USA in the second half of the last century were subtly negated when the investor class moved off-shore. The profits generated from within the American industrial nexus were cynically expropriated by the power elites and reinvested in places where labour was cheaper, thus causing the local labour force to be separated from the investment process.
The upshot of the recent coup, the privatization of everything…including the American dream… was to designate roles only to those who could painstakingly commit to the practice of extracting profit through entrepreneurial or speculative means. That the process went global was to be expected, capitalism after all, is for brains-without-borders. Communities on the other hand…and by necessity…are brains-within-borders. To imagine that it is possible to achieve a genuine rapport between community and international capitalism is mere whimsy. It is imperative to focus on the fact that international capitalism will always separate wealth from the demarcated space that defines community. The capitalist regime, in pursuit of profits in places where low hanging fruit is available, bodes exploitation.
Denis A. Conroy is a retired businessman and journalist, and a voracious follower of matters political outside of the mainstream arena. Read other articles by Denis A..
