[Previous entry: "Chechens freeze as gas is cut off"] [Next entry: "Constant Conflict"]

01/29/2006:

"Things Fall Apart"

The EU has given the ‘Palestinian Authority’ $600 million in the last year. There are 135,000 Palestinians employed by the PA. Bush started the first US dollars given directly to Palestinians flowing 3 years ago. Predictably, one of the factors in the Hamas victory was ‘rampant corruption.’ Imagine the effect of pouring massive numbers of dollars (and weapons) into an enormous refugee camp where people have been living for 50 years under violent occupation and grinding generational poverty-- no need to imagine, actually. Turn on the television news. Scary papa Ariel Sharon may be mostly dead, but it’s hard not to imagine him smiling.

Mossad armed and funded Hamas in order to undermine Arafat, and years after the fact, their crude divide-and-conquer ploy has paid off: no need to even maintain the flimsy veneer of good-faith negotiations—let the bastards turn on one another.

Israel has apparently made state terrorism into an art form: one would wish the Israeli people would put two and two together and wrap their minds around the fact that their government has in effect been exploding its own people on the streets, on buses, in grocery stores, in restaurants, exploiting the rage engendered by occupation to create a suicidal army that, unbeknownst to itself, is serving the purposes of its sworn enemy.

But what could the people there do about it? What can any horrified people in any so-called Western-styled democracy do about the doomsday scenario unfolding in the Middle East?

The whole thing is like one of those bad Chuck Norris movies, with Iran’s president yanking everybody’s chain with his remarks about the Jewish holocaust, threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz, threatening to put Israel into a ‘permanent coma’, while the Western media has taken to referring to the ‘Iran nuclear crisis,’ stirring up a panic about non-existent nuclear weapons. Well, not all the nuclear weapons are non-existent: the ones the US is proposing to use are all too actual.

Because it is so difficult to imagine the sort of wickedness we’re talking about here, the perpetrators are able to act in broad daylight with impunity. Who could conceive that the architects of the Afghanistan disaster, the Iraq disaster, the Palestine disaster, the coming Syria and Iran disasters, are deliberately engendering a chaos which will allow them to do the unspeakable?

How could this be about oil-hegemony for the few remaining years of a misbegotten petroleum age? But what else could it be about? Is it about the cracked philosopher-king fantasy of the neo-cons who dream of Total Global Domination in a post-nuclear Mad Max world? Is it really possible that the corporate imperialists are so entrenched in their small-mammalian brain circuitry that they are unable to envision the consequences of their planetary pillaging-spree?

Just as Eduardo Galeano observed, we are living in the upside-down world. Democracy is suppressed and undermined in the name of democracy. The supposed victims of terror are the terrorists. The good guys are the bad guys, or, the bad guys and good guys are in bed together.

"Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned..."

There are clearly elements of the world power structure that are in love with the idea of endless war.