(Brechin, The Great Endarkenment - 2)
I'm going to skip over most of the next century, because those years are
largely about the perfection of propaganda — or, if you prefer, public
relations — as well as about the shift from coal to oil and natural gas
and nuclear energy, and how those new sources of energy have changed the
earth and have made the United States the superpower that it is. As I
wrote in Imperial San Francisco families with names such as
Rockefeller and Guggenheim (and I might have added Walker and Bush) made
New York the new Rome, and "like the Roman generals returning from Spain
with booty, such dynasties provide the plebes with a spectacle of immense
wealth brought home from distant lands, as well as suspicions of
transnational conspiracies necessary to get it. Yet the fountain of
wealth, power, and glamour that issues from the mine and the oil well has
also decisively shaped the way we perceive and treat our planet —not as a
farm, let alone as a garden, but as a mine head and a battlefield."
Don't take it from me. Here's Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 when we still had
presidents with brains:
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an
invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no
responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to
befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics
is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
The first task of this administration is to indissolubly wed
corrupt business and corrupt politics... and the dictionary definition of
that form of government is fascism.
In the three-plus years since a blatantly partisan Supreme Court turned
over government to the loser, and through him to the oil industry and a
sort of American Taliban foreseen by Margaret Atwood in her prophetic
novel The Handmaid's Tale, immense and possibly irreparable damage
has been done to Constitutional law in this country, as well as to
international law and to the terrestrial environment. This is anything but
a "conservative" administration; it's the most radical regime in
U.S. history, and its radical goals are there in the policy papers you
will hear about which call for Full Spectrum Dominance of Planet Earth, no
matter what the cost to you and me. It's all about securing more energy
for the United States and its eternally no-fault ally Israel, while
ignoring for as long as possible what the use of that energy is doing to
render the earth uninhabitable very soon. It's the story of the Fertile
Crescent on a planetary scale.
I am here, as I'm sure most of you are, to try to learn what actually
happened on the morning of September 11, 2001 because, up to now, we have
not been allowed to know, as the survivors' families have tried to point
out to the rest of us. I say this knowing that I will immediately lose my
credibility because we have been led to believe that here, everything is
out in the open, and that if you did not see it on CNN or Fox News or read
it in Time or the Times, then it didn't happen. Anyone who
suggests otherwise — for example, that the plane crash of a liberal
senator hated by the present administration, a tragic coincidence that
threw an evenly divided Congress decisively into the camp of the
illegitimate regime to preclude any chance of impeachment proceedings —
anyone who suggests that that might be anything other than an unfortunate
accident not worth much more than two days of news coverage, that person
must be a raving fruitcake. Conspiracies just don't happen in this country
— all evidence to the contrary. Like the inability of this country
to do any wrong, that idea has been implanted in the minds of millions of
Americans as armor plate defense against questions that should be asked
about what happened that fine morning in September.
All evidence to the contrary... There was a conspiracy
that should concern us here very much, for it was far more serious than
the previous known conspiracy of Watergate in its implications for
Constitutional rule. It's called Iran-Contra, and in its brief hour
squirming in the spotlight, it began to reveal some very ugly things about
how a small cabal of totalitarian-minded crooks, thugs, and low-lifes with
contempt for the Constitution took it upon themselves — or were ordered to
do so — to run a secret government out of the basement of the White House.
Among many other things, we learned through hearings that drugs were being
flown into this country with no need to worry about interception by the
DEA or anyone else. That had, apparently, been “taken care of” higher up.
But like a bad dream that evaporates quickly upon awakening, Iran-Contra
has faded into the distant past and is about as meaningful to most young
people as the Battle of Hastings. Called to testify, Ronald Reagan
couldn’t remember a thing — and who would want to press that affable old
uncle anyway about how he could possibly have been ignorant of the
sulfuric magma percolating just below his Oval Office? When Bush, Senior
became president, he pardoned the major participants such as Cap
Weinberger, making them “unindicted co-conspirators” — an odd term for a
nation in which there are no conspiracies — and Bush, Junior then sealed
the presidential and vice presidential records to historians, so that we
will probably never know what happened because I suspect that the present
regime is editing those records as they regularly do websites and
scientific reports that come to conclusions not contained in the Old
Testament. John Ashcroft instructed federal agencies that they need not
honor Freedom of Information requests.
Bush and Cheney then appointed most of those unindicted co-conspirators to
high positions in their administration. Why have a secret government
operating out of the basement when you can have one operating upstairs in
broad daylight since the Congress is almost entirely willing to abdicate
its responsibilities, and the mass media will not point this out except
when John Poindexter got a little too ga-ga and proposed total
surveillance of U.S. citizens and a betting pool in terrorism futures?
This is a government quite literally run by criminals who once before
subverted the Constitution in order to achieve their own imperial ends in
Latin America and elsewhere. They’re just doing it in the open now,
because they know that they can. And they understand far better than most
Americans just how essential energy is for Full Spectrum Domination.
This is by far the most secretive administration ever, probably
because it has so very much to hide, and the press has, for the most part,
been complicit in allowing it to get away with what it has been doing. Few
are aware that investigative journalism is a dying if not altogether dead
activity in this country. One of the few who carries it on is Bill Moyers,
but KQED shows how much it values his show called "Now" by scheduling it
for the Siberian time slot of 10 PM on Friday, and bumping it to later
whenever that educational TV station has the chance to broadcast four
hours of Suze Orman's "The Courage to Be Rich" or a retrospective of the
Bee-Gees.
I said that the United States was the product of the eighteenth century
Enlightenment. What we are seeing in the twenty-first century is The Great
Endarkenment. Let me end, then, by going back to Mesopotamia less than a
year ago as U.S. forces shocked and awed Iraqis with a massive bombardment
and moved into Baghdad. In less than a week, Baghdad's National Museum was
looted and trashed. You heard about that. But did you hear that Mosul's
museum was also trashed, and that Iraq's universities were sacked and
burned, and that its great archaeological sites continue to be looted?
Moreover, the Iraq National Library and the Koranic Library were looted
and burned while American soldiers were ordered to guard the records in
the Oil Ministry, as reported by Robert Fisk in the London Independent.
The San Francisco Chronicle didn't feel that this destruction merited an
article of its own.
And then we moved on to other things, like the President’s [sic] landing
on an aircraft carrier to announce the “Mission Accomplished” (I wondered
how they got Leni Riefenstahl out of retirement to choreograph that). We
moved on since we are a young nation ever fixed on the future and immune
to error — oblivious that we had just permitted the trashing of the
irreplaceable records of the very foundations of Civilization itself in
our would-be campaign to save Civilization... and we feel that the Iraqis
should just get over it, as we got over the coup d'etat of 2000, or
as I'm sure that we would get over the burning of the Library of Congress
and New York Public Library and Harvard Library and the Metropolitan
Museum and the National Gallery, and the Frick Gallery and the Chicago Art
Institute, all within four days.
But, then, we're closing our own public and school libraries here because
we can no longer afford to keep them open.
Are we just a little unclear on the concept of Civilization, perhaps?
There is a great deal that those who have taken over Washington do not
want you to know about what has been and is being done in your name, and
the great danger to which those actions are exposing us all in order to
get more energy, and to build yet greater fortunes for themselves and
their colleagues. That is why I call this period The Great Endarkenment,
and it is perhaps the greatest of all betrayals of the founding ideals of
this nation, and the monopolized mass media shares a great deal of
responsibility for propagating this giddy ignorance, and this justified
fear of what is to come.
Let us shine some light now into that darkness, while we still can.
