The New Mentality by Jim Matus

It should be seen as a real war. There is another war taking place now,
a war for the possession of the future. Who will determine what kind of
planet our grandchildren inhabit and whether we will get a chance to have
grandchildren, is at stake now. The American Empire is set to cut off the
beautiful streaming life force that barely dangles on the edge of extinction
as it is. It is set to recreate the sad history of the Roman Empire in it¹s
dysfunctional and delusional ideals of manifest destiny and the rule of
force. Somehow, the U.S. population has let a Fascist dictatorship take
control of our country. While we cynically joked about it and watched
Saturday Night Live satirize it, the country was taken over in a illegal
coup by an ultra right wing Fascist regime with George Bush as its puppet
dictator. I¹ll say Fascist again: Fascist. We are living under a Fascist
dictatorship, a Plutocracy, a Totalitarian State of immense private power
completely removed from public opinion and public participation. A
wonderfully slick system for huge corporations who can buy policy and buy
government contracts. A facade propped up by a corporate media propaganda
system that would have been the wet dream of Stalin, Hitler and Mao. This
facade is our reality as Americans. Our ³morality² is a mask, a voodoo death
mask. Most of our people can¹t see beyond it, being too busy struggling to
survive to be able to dig past the multilayered fake out of pop culture.
³Hollywood stars side with Saddam² says the tabloid. - Steisand, Sheen and
Harelson are traitors in the supermarket of American hypnosis.
Malcomb X used to say to his black brothers and sisters ³You been took
by the white man, you been had². He was right, but the white man been took
by the white man too. Now the Arab man been took and his lawyer don¹t even
know where they took him. The Patriot Act has taken and trashed our civil
liberties and we should react in the appropriate patriotic way; Revolution.
For that matter we have taxation without representation too. We have more
reasons than the colonists did to revolt. This time we¹re not going to get a
bunch of guerillas together with guns, we¹re going to get a bunch of
grandmothers and children together banging on pots and pans in the street.
In South America, that¹s the way it¹s done, with sheer numbers. They have
much more experience fighting American Fascism than we do and they¹ve got it
down. Sheer numbers cannot be defeated, ever. No matter how corrupt our
Congress is, no matter how criminal our Executive branch, no matter how
stacked the deck is on the courts, all supported by a mercenary army of poor
jobless brainwashed soldiers, pots and pans win. Those kids with gas masks
and AK47s are not going to shoot their grandmother even if their commanding
officer has ordered it.
People say we can¹t afford this war. That¹s correct. WE cant¹ afford it.
THEY can because WE are paying for it. Even if it costs 200 Billion, the
addition of Iraq to the Empire will eventually pay off a hundred fold, pay
off the Oil companies who will get the contracts. So it¹s like Michael
Parenti says: ³your money is no object², they¹ll spend whatever it takes to
secure the oil fields and whatever it takes to pay off any country to
support it and whatever it takes to maintain an occupational army and
whatever it takes to fund the death squads to defend it from the people who
live there. 200 billion is a drop in the bucket when the you look at it from
their perspective. Having the strategic advantage of owning the 2nd largest
oil reserve in the world is worth 20 trillion. An Imperial army needs oil to
run the engines of death, The engines of death are what keep the subjects in
line and the Empire alive whether they are Iraqis or Americans.
I hope General Tommy Franks has good health insurance because by the
time he installs himself as the new Iraqi dictator the entire country will
be entirely saturated with depleted uranium. The U.S. has used this horrific
cancer causing weapon in the Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan and is once
again defying international law by planning to use a weapon that destroys
civilian populations. People in Iraq already live with an epidemic of
deformities and childhood leukemia. The country is kind of a big Chernobyl.
Don¹t the U.S. soldiers over there realize that they are no more than lab
rats? How is it possible for these poor Americans to have been so duped and
brainwashed? The information is out there, it¹s just that the American Way
is the way of ignorance and blindness. Don¹t the workers and contractors set
to rebuild Iraqi Oil fields and reap their pay backs know that this country
will be an environmental dead zone for the next 4 billion years. Who in
their right mind is going to want to live in this region after another
poison war. Forget about innocent lives, the wars for Empire are going to
murder an innocent planet.
Hilary Clinton was right. There is a right wing conspiracy. They were
chomping at the bit for the entire 8 years Clinton was President. Even
though Bill gave the corporate masters all they could dream of...NAFTA, WTO,
deregulation,
low wages, booming stock market, high Pentagon budgets, he was not quite
with the program these far right maniacs envisioned and insisted on at least
trying to keep the appearance of playing within the rules of International
law and keep the U.N., NATO, China and Russia as our friends. All that was
unnecessary in the eyes of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle and William
Kristol. These twisted visionaries had a plan and the money and connections
to back it up. The supreme court was properly stacked enough to back their
coup and the Media fully bought and paid for. Not unlike their rivals, the
radical Islamists, these guys have a black and white, us vs. them, good vs.
evil apocalyptic religious mission to establish an American Century. America
is to rule by decry, backed not by consensus or law but by raw force. They
are ready to use nuclear weapons on anyone who stands in their way and
establish orbiting satellites capable of striking anywhere any time their
profits are threatened.
I personally believe that 9/11 was either executed by them or at least
allowed to happen as an excuse to install martial law. Just as the military
was ordered to ³stand down² in Dallas in 1963, the Air force was ordered to
³stand down² again for a full hour after the first attack on the WTC -
absolutely amazing and more amazing... the media¹s complicity. 9/11 will be
the ³who killed JFK² of the 21st century. The war on terror is a pretext to
convince Americans that we are permanently at war and therefore must give up
all our civil liberties in order to be safe from ³the other², the evil that
is lurking around every third world corner which must be destroyed in order
to preserve our God given right to burn oil and consume as much as we want
whenever we want. Theirs is a mythical story as ludicrous as any
fundamentalist religious zealotry. They believe this is their mission and
nothing short of world revolution will stop them.
The tide is starting to turn. The shocked business leaders at this
year¹s World Economic Forum in Switzerland in their cloistered meeting
declared sadly that the power of the corporation has ³disappeared².
Simultaneously in South America you¹ve got people stepping well outside the
WTO box and rejecting the globalization process, electing Leftist
Presidents, growing their own food in backyards, bartering and beginning to
plan and build a post capitalist system, independent of Imperial America.
The genie is out of the bottle on all three sides of this battle and we all
must line up not as Bush wants us to; for him or the terrorists but with an
independent path outside of the global corporate system.
Lineup and sign up. A new mentality must be formed to deal with the
American century. The goal should be to stop America or there wont be any
century. We on the Left must stop Bush or the Terrorists in reaction will
stop everyone and unleash all Hell on us. They don¹t care.They believe their
reward is in the next world. I believe our reward is right here. This planet
is a paradise that has been taken over by the forces of ignorance and fear.
Can you imagine what would have happened if the American pioneers had
learned to live in harmony with the Indians and combined cutures, instead of
committing genocide, learning from the natives to live in harmony with
nature instead of dominating it as the Europeans believed they must -
dictated by their aberrant Christian dysfunctional belief system. ³Imagine
all the people, living life in peace². Imagine a much smaller number of
people, living life in peace. Whatever happened to the discussion of
overpopulation? Forget that. The Christian Coalition nipped that one in the
bud. We¹ve got to go forth, multiply and conquer by God¹s order.
Back to the new mentality. In the Soviet Union under the iron fist of
Communism, the people knew what the deal was. They were kept in line by
force and fed official lies by their rulers. They formed underground systems
and kept truth alive independent of the official Government system. They
just assumed that they were being told lies. They had no illusions that
they lived in a ³great country² with ³Soviet values² and a ³Russian moral
superiority². We must adapt a similar mentality. Growing up in the 60¹s, I
was raised to believe in an America that was democratic and that justice
would prevail within the ³system². That was the American BIG LIE. The truth
is that there were 2 Evil empires battling it out with mutually assured
destruction. Any Empire will be evil by definition.
The natural order is more chaos driven, anarchic, and based on a balance
of cooperation and competition with order emerging from the bottom up rather
than top down. Look at any successful primitive society and you¹ll see a
rare harmony and balance totally alien to our advanced society. These
societies were not perfect, but they did not threaten to exterminate all
planetary life and repress all natural joy either. They knew what plants
healed and what plants gave them ecstasy and enlightenment. They didn¹t
repress their sexuality and they didn¹t seek to hoard and accumulate wealth
and property.
We must form secret societies hidden from the total information
awareness and plot, scheme, and devise a new system within the system that
can grow and eventually superimpose itself on it¹s host. A benign parasite
that grows to become the host body itself. Walk out of your job with 50
other people and go down to the police station and give yourselves up as
terrorists. Create chaos and confusion. They won¹t know how to react. Put a
sign on your lawn saying: ³America, overthrow it or Leave it². Strive to
erase the delusion of our righteousness. It¹s OK that we live under a
Fascist dictatorship. It¹s normal. We¹ll live. Only when we fully comprehend
the true nightmare of our existence can we begin to change it. Just expect
that the country will always be run by an Oligarchy of filthy rich greedy
heartless and soulless oppressors as long as this current Government is
allowed to continue. Thomas Jefferson said that we should have a
Constitutional Convention every 30 years to be continually adjusting to the
changing world. Our Constitution was designed to give the power to the white
men who ³owned the country² as Madison envisaged and things have not
substantially changed since.
Most people are so far removed from reality, being forced to concentrate
so much energy on pure survival that their desperate and dangerous situation
is never fully understood. But, no matter how ignorant or brainwashed a man
might be, he will always be able to make the right choice if presented with
truth. The layers of lies painted on us by the corporate propaganda system
are easily dissolved when one turns off the TV and looks squarely at the
hard life before us. No more staring at a screen in an hypnotic stupor. No
more cheering for your team to win. No more listening to two idiots shouting
at each other from the center to the right and back. The Left has been left
out of the discussion for too long. The pendulum will swing back when it
hits the point where a stern gravity draws it once again toward Earth.