copyleft February and June 2005 copyright

by Zbignew Zingh

I remember a conversation last year at an anti-Iraq War rally. I was talking with someone about the fictitious weapons of mass destruction and George Bush's lies.

During our discussion, my colleague said to me, “It's amazing, isn't it? Here we have invaded Iraq when it's North Korea that has the nuclear missiles aimed at America!”

Really?

North Korea, regardless whether it has one or two crude nuclear weapons or home-brewed short-range missiles capable of reaching the Aleutian Islands, is not and has never been a threat to the United States. It is absolutely inconceivable that North Korea, with its small population and devastated economy, would launch an attack against anyone, except in self-defense. What is most remarkable is that so many Americans have bought into the myth, hook, line and sinker, that North Korea actually presents a threat to the United States and not the other way around.

We are now two years into the Iraq War. It has become a military quagmire, a political tar baby and it has not produced anything near the quantities of precious oil that Cheney, Rumsfeld or their radical clique predicted. What they did succeed at, however, was demonizing the Arab world and all of Islam in the mainstream American psyche.

In his inaugural address, Mr. Bush made clear his administration's intention to liberate (oil) wherever it could be found in every dark corner of the globe. This probably means that, sooner or later, he intends to attack or subvert the governments of Iran and Venezuela.

It is clear that American bi-partisan foreign policy has two components. First, the United States intends to control, or even militarily seize all the existing petroleum from anyone, anywhere. Second, it intends to isolate, undermine and, if necessary, destroy any country that competes with the United States for that oil.

In a hydrocarbon world where oil production cannot satisfy demand, the Machiavellian mind must realize that if the United States cannot pump more oil out of the ground, then it still can have more of the petroleum for itself if it deprives any other competing nation from getting it. The natural drive of capitalism to monopolize all markets and crush the competition sees its mirror image in America's drive to monopolize all economic resources and, in so doing, crush its competition.

Every nation on earth now struggles to sustain its economy by endless expansion, an expansion that depends absolutely on oil. Capitalist economies that do not endlessly expand must shrivel and die. Worse, their societies' bigwigs lose power and their generals lose their raison d'etre. Worse still, in societies where the economy does not grow, it is difficult to keep the middle and lower classes content and, inevitably, they start to become “troublesome”.

The American economy is either growing slightly or contracting or stagnating, depending on which set of totally unreliable statistics you consult. This is significant for the power elite because if the economy does not grow, then the lesser classes will become edgy, and the whole power edifice will be at risk.

It is certain, however, that whatever the American economy is actually doing, the economies of India, and particularly China, are sprinting farther and faster ahead. We know this because the newspapers are literally clanging the alarm bells!

China's increasing consumption of oil is driving up the price of oil, the papers exclaim!

China is making world-wide deals to purchase oil from everyone, including from America's “enemies” like Venezuela and Iran, the “experts” shout!

China will soon surpass America as the world's biggest economy, the pundits warn!

The media and the opinion-makers are also cobbling together a new axis of evil by repeatedly linking the “leftist” and “undemocratic” Venezuela with the irreligious and economically “aggressive” China.

The message is clear: it's our oil , “excessive” Asian demand is pushing up the price we pay for gasoline at the pump, and none, especially not non-Westerners, are entitled to consume oil as profligately as we do!

Meanwhile, a not-so-subtle disinformation campaign has begun to seed fear and uncertainty throughout the land. This year, the United States accused certain Chinese 'army-owned' companies of helping Iran to develop ballistic missiles and the United States “retaliated” by slapping trade sanctions on these companies.

The “press” has also accused China of “religious intolerance” because it does not countenance a certain invidious religious sect nor encourage Christian proselytes to convert “the heathen” (like the Conquistadors' missionary shock troops in 18th Century Mexico and South America).

In January, the American media's opinion-makers suggested that China was “anti-democratic” as another anniversary of the widely mis-understood Tianamen Square uprising passed without the country falling into the hands of American supported and financed “reformers” (like happened in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine).

There is a whiff of racism in the air. There is the lingering nasty stink of the 18th Century when Black Africans were enslaved to produce America's agricultural wealth on land stolen from the Native Americans who were shoved onto wasteland reservations. There is a stench reminiscent of the 19th Century when cheap Chinese and Philippine laborers were imported to man the industrial revolution; or during the Second World War when Japanese Americans were stripped of their property, rounded up and put in concentration camps; or during the Korean and Vietnam Wars when America's chronic cultural anxiety was purposely stoked by illusory nightmares of invading Asiatic hordes.

As the peril is cultivated ever more intensively by America's leadership and media, the United States has quietly established a ring of military bases that encircle both the oil producing regions of the world and America's oil-consuming competitors for that oil. In many business and conservative media, they already talk about the coming “confrontation” with Venezuela and with China. India and Brazil are not far behind. It is no secret that the Pentagon has stepped up its military preparedness for war with China and several right-wing “thinkers” have begun laying the groundwork to soften up the public for a new cast of public enemies.

Meanwhile, the anti-Asian, and particularly anti-Chinese miasma has been encouraged by the not-so-long-ago trumped up charges of “espionage” against a Chinese-American scientist (Wen Ho Lee) and against a Dreyfus-like American officer at Guantanamo, Capt. James Yee. Recently, the media trumpeted a spurious story about a coordinated number of Chinese “terrorists” who had crossed the Mexican border en route to explode a nuclear “dirty bomb” in Boston. It was a “hoax”, of course, but the media imprint on the mass psychology was successful: gang of terrorists + nuclear threat + Chinese. As we know too well from the invasion of Iraq, the American public remembers only the original cries of alarm and not the subsequent recantation.

Are these test runs for the impending creation of America's new class of non-white villains? Is the United States stealthily mucking around in China's political backwaters angling to create an “uprising” of “freedom loving” Chinese who will speed the country along to another liberation-and-democracy-debacle like in Iraq? Since the Second World War, the United States has undermined or destroyed or fragmented, militarily or economically, every nation-state that could ever compete with the United States. If the masterminds of American foreign policy are presented with yet another curiously timely and spectacular “incident” that cries out for devastating military retribution, will America's citizens be sucked in once again like dust bunnies pulled into the vacuum cleaner?

America's economic might was built on the backs of African slaves. It was not so long ago that slavery was nominally abolished in America. Not long ago, we built concentration camps for Japanese Americans. During George's reign, we built concentration camps for Arab “terrorists” and sympathizers. One day, soon, when the “confrontation” becomes hot and bloody, might we build internment camps for Chinese Americans? For Venezuelans or Brazilians? For Bahais or for Hindus? And then, whose turn will it be after that? It is almost unthinkable. But the past teaches us that the unthinkable is possible.

Some years ago, in our still innocent days of the 20th Century, I spoke with an elderly German woman. As a teenager, she told me, she had been swept up like so many others in the tsunami of muscular, racist, dissent-intolerant über-nationalism that swamped the Weimar Republic. She said she had only the vaguest knowledge about prison camps and atrocities in the same vague way that so many middle Americans only vaguely acknowledge ours today. This woman had personally experienced the zealotry, the bigotry, the steamrollering of domestic German resistance; the political homogenization, the unswerving patriotic trust in their leaders and the blind support for their troops defending God, Culture and the German Homeland from threats foreign and domestic. She had believed in it all, she told me, while she was living, hallucinating, totally transfixed by the incessant propaganda and media barrage of imaginary peril.

She awoke from the hallucination when her world crashed and burned, and the realization of what her government had done in her name came home to haunt her. But, the old woman told me looking straight into my eyes, you don't understand how it happened. You just don't understand. It could happen anywhere, to anyone. You don't understand, she told me. She was pleading for me to comprehend. It could happen to you, she said again and again. It could happen in America. You just hear the party line over and over again. You think only one way and everyone thinks the same way. You know only what they want you to know. It could happen to any people and any nation. It could happen anywhere.

Years ago, when this conversation occurred, I did not believe it. I thought she was just trying to expiate her own personal and national guilt. I thought it could only have happened in Germany, elsewhere, somewhere else, but not in America, not in any western democracy.

Today, I know I was wrong. I remember the old German woman's face as she implored me to understand how a cultured, well educated, technologically advanced, highly rational society could so quickly go criminally insane. I am no longer blind to history; I am no longer smug. Can America resist the evil impulse that Germany, seventy years ago, could not resist?

It is imperative that we orient ourselves to a resistant mode of thinking. Everyone, whether at the left, middle or right side of the political spectrum is susceptible to the same pernicious viruses of social and political conditioning. One must develop a healthy skepticism about virtually everything. Internal resistance requires that we check ourselves now and again to make sure that we have not inadvertently fallen prey to the waves of mis-and-disinformation that wash over us incessantly.

In this age of induced mass hysteria, even the most enlightened must guard against being manipulated by cultured perils.