MICHAEL CARMICHAEL

archived: 10 - 16 Sep, 2006         Back                 Next

UPDATE:  September 12, 2006                       

                        TIME PASSES

Time washes over us.  Time brings changes.  For the past month, we have been inundated with an unrelenting cascade of information reminding us that we suffered a calamitous catastrophe five years ago and urging us to forget everything we have learned since that terrible time and its iconic date.

The global press and media have indulged our orgy of retroactive memory renewal, a form of mass-hypnosis wherein we are programmed to Pavlovian responses whenever we see or hear the terms:  9/11, WTC, Twin Towers, Bin Laden, Al Qaida, Jihad, Muslim, Islam or hijack.

Never mind that the number of genuine Islamic terrorists is an infinitesimal proportion of the world’s billion Muslims, a faction so tiny that they should be compared to that virtually invisible group of Americans who would seriously return us to British rule.

The miracles of technology permit us to witness past events as they unfold in real time dramatically re-enacted around a theme so obviously distorted by propaganda, prejudice and political persuasion as to be ludicrous.

In order to provide future generations with a politically convenient post-hypnotic suggestion, right-wing historian, Niall Ferguson published a science-fiction account of the history of 9/11 from the perspective of 2026, a monument to Orwellian mass-mind control, that proclaimed Bush to have been right and his critics wrong.

What do the majority of us make of these deliberate distortions of history? What impact does this artillery barrage of political propaganda have on us?

Very little, if the truth be known, but that is not really the purpose in an age so dominated by technological innovation that totalitarianism has become a button-push away from us at every tick of the clock.

This November, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and their minions will face the music in the form of midterm elections.  Their campaign has been composed and arranged by Karl Rove.  The ploy is perfectly obvious.  Fear will be driven through the ceiling by the terror quotient.  The American people will be driven to consider their impending nuclear annihilation at the hands of the fiendish Islamic terrorists pullulating out of the palaces, mosques, bazaars and public spaces of Tehran, Pyongyang, Damascus and Havana.

Dick Cheney has already predicted that the Republicans will confound the pollsters, yet again by winning majorities in both houses of Congress against all the odds of the bookmakers arrayed from Las Vegas to London.

Totalitarianism through the miracles of technology!  America is now the victim of its own success.  Elections can be rigged by tampering with voting machines in key Congressional districts.  Impeachment can be avoided by abandoning the voting rights of a few million American citizens.  With a few strokes of the keyboard, American elections can be manipulated. Control of congress can be manufactured via technology.

All this we know.  We must realize that the manipulation of the results of elections relies on a post-election analysis that the nation was actually moving in the direction of reaffirming the incompetence of the gang who couldn’t shoot straight enough to arrest, try and imprison Osama Bin Laden when they had him in their bombsights immediately after 9/11.

Remember, “My Pet Goat.”  Remember a wandering odyssey aboard Air Force One as it took off from Florida to meander around the Bermuda Triangle before coming back to ground in the deep South even though New York and the Pentagon had been struck devastating blows.  Remember a president who went immediately to ground, literally hiding in an underground bunker worthy of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, while his chief operative was in his own bunker at the East Wing of the White House or Mount Weather for months to come.  Remember the images of a frightened, cowardly president slinking out of Marine One on the West Lawn of the White House the following day, with eyes shifting from pillar to post and nervous glances over his shoulder engraved on the memory of the collective consciousness of a generation of Americans.

Those are the images of 9/11 that are important.  That is why they will be invisible amidst the propaganda blitz bombarding us with the rationale for the stealing of the next round of elections in the nation who is in the business of exporting democracy to the oil-rich precincts of our energy-addicted planet.

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NEXT - STEVEN JONAS

Last Update: 09/16/2006