COME RIDE MY COLUMN
16
September 2001
FALL OF EMPIRE:
BOMBS AND MAGIC
Before rationality and common sense collapses into a bloody holocaust of
ill-considered retribution, some thoughts on recent events in NYC from a few
different perspectives.
THE MAGICAL PERSPECTIVE
It's been very strange these last few days to watch what I can only identify as the incoming
'Horus' current, ripping through our certainties and
complacencies
with the force of a twin-engined Rolls Royce jet. I'm almost sorry now I had the
pop avatar of this ancient Middle Eastern deity write
'FUCK YOU' across Manhattan in flaming letters this time last year.
Be careful with the hypersigils folks and go read the prophetic MARVEL BOY
trade again if you want to hear what our new baby god has to say about our
future.
Horus is the Lord of Force and Fire. He levels and destroys, in order to rebuild
anew. Horus, like all children, wants to play. He can't be fought - he's younger,
faster and stronger than all of us and always will be because he is a powerful, living archetype. He does not like restriction and if restricted will explode in
our faces. He is the Spirit of the Age and he likes to play with fire.
The twin towers of the World Trade Center represent the pylons of Tabu on
Tarot trump 18, also known as the Moon. The moon card is a signifier of illusion
and the twin towers represent the gates into the unconscious world.
Their destruction in this week's monstrous assault on thousands of unsuspecting
people, signals an end to America's illusions about itself, its
purpose and its boundaries. The isolationist image of a proud cowboy nation
using super technology to defend us all against Cold War evil empire nuclear
missile attacks is shattering along all its fault lines. Superman has just been exposed to Kryptonite. The American Century is very clearly over now as the
shift in global power moves away from hi-fi monolithic, 'individualistic' structures towards lo-fi, viral cell culture models.
THE ZEITGEIST PERSPECTIVE
'Lo-fi' is the new cool, in everything from comics to records. Anti-tech, folk, pastoral and home-made cultural artefacts are becoming increasingly
important as
sources of 'authenticity' in our super-mediated reality. Interesting that lo-fi
terrorism should also have such an impact at this time. Men armed with little
more than fashionable pocket knives struck at the moral economic and military
infrastructure of the world's last remaining super-dinosaur. These are methods
no hi-tech general would have dared consider.
The clash and the blending of lo-fi and hi-fi is the face of the immediate
future in all areas of our lives. Watch for manifestations everywhere. Lo-fi
terrorism is fast, viral, hard to detect. The bigger you are, the more
centralised your power and belief structures, the harder you will fall and the
harder it will be to get back up again.
THE PRO-NUKE PERSPECTIVE
So why not bomb the entire Middle East back to the Mesozoic ? It worked with
Japan, turning an aggressive 16th century mythic-feudal society into a model of
perfect 20th capitalist enterprise almost overnight.
THE MORALITY PERSPECTIVE
Despite the rhetoric of 'good' vs. 'evil' employed by President Bush, Mr. Blair and their allies, our leaders can claim NO moral high ground in this sad mess
and should not be allowed to.
I imagine the mourners in NYC feel today very much like the mourners in Kosovo
or Iraq, who watched American and British bombers level their bridges,
hospitals, schools, and orphanages, killing tens of thousands of
innocent men, women and children in the process.
Our leaders deplore violence and condemn its perpetrators only to use exactly the same methods themselves wherever and whenever they decide they don't
like
someone else's ideas.
Bush is typical of all bullies in that, now he's had his own nose bloodied for
the first time, we're all forced to endure his self-pitying whining and to
listen to his windy after-the-fact threats of extreme violence.
According to recent news reports, the United States government under George W. Bush has been SUPPORTING the
ultra-repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan for quite some time. As part of
the heavy-handed 'War on Drugs' initiative, the U.S. government has been PAYING
the Taliban to destroy the crops of subsistence farmers who need to grow opium
poppies in order to live. The Taliban are able to remain in power, able to
oppress women, able to shield murderous fanatics like Osama Bin Laden, because
their regime is in part financed by the USA. George W. Bush and the system he represents
must accept their share of responsiblity for what happened to those poor people
in Manhattan last week.
There can be no moral high ground here. No good. No evil. No biblical 'eye
for an eye' can be acceptable here unless we wish to deliberately blind
ourselves to the sick realities of global power politics.
Think of the hi-tech computer strike images from Baghdad during the Gulf War
or from the recent Balkan crisis; these images were peddled to viewers as
triumphs of Western precision battle technology but every one of those sci-fi simulations, every minute of grainy aerial footage showing Playstation
explosions way off in the distance, hid exactly the kind of monstrous human carnage we're seeing in NYC today.
After years of euphemistically talking about 'friendly fire' 'collateral damage',
etc. the United States has now had its face rubbed in the kind of shit, ruin and
splattered guts its leaders have been raining down on the innocents of other, much WEAKER nations for decades since the Second World War.
George W. Bush by stating 'you're either with us or against us' is trying to turn
us all into war criminals and make us complicit in genocide.
America spent much of the last century positioning itself as the world's self-appointed policeman/superhero and is now paying the awful
price for enthusiasm. There
are a great many American citizens, some of whom lack a basic understanding
of geography, let alone sophisticated foreign policy issues, who have generally failed to comprehend just how much people in other, poorer parts of the world
actively resent the misguided, insensitive interference of the United States in their lives. There's a failure to understand that not everyone WANTS or needs
Coca-Cola, MacDonald's and Arnold Schwarzennegger. Not EVERYONE thinks free-market capitalism and its attendant impact on the environment and upon
the
lives of people in the Third World is desirable. Not everyone dreams of the inalienable right to be L'il Abner.
Western Democracies despatch their armed forces to slaughter the innocent
whenever US oil interests are threatened, as in the Middle East, but turn a
blind eye to repressive and brutal regimes in Indonesia, Latin America and
other locations where the oil is thin on the ground (in many cases, the U.S.
government funds these repressive regimes while U.S. military and intelligence personnel train their torturers). Words like 'freedom' and 'democracy' are
always brought to the table when economic interests are threatened but they are
empty rhetoric and until we face up to the fact that there are NO white hats and
black hats in this world, we will be doomed to repeat the ignorant violence of
previous generations.
Islamic Fundamentalists will kill anyone and anything in the name of religious JIHAD.
Capitalist Fundamentalists will kill anyone and anything in the name of MONEY.
No difference AT ALL. Except that we in the developed, post-industrial west
should know better than to sacrifice lives to ideals. If we're really as
advanced as we like to pretend, if we really see ourselves as wonderful
exemplars of democracy and tolerance, shouldn't we be providing MORAL guidance
to undeveloped nations who haven't figured it out for themselves instead of
rampaging around, hurting innocent people ? If underdeveloped nations copy
our violent methods, we have only ourselves to blame. The 'enemies of
civilization' learned everything they know about murder and terrorism from
our experts in the civilized world.
It's absolutely essential that we stop our leaders from lying to us and to themselves about our own twisted involvement in world Terror.
THE CONSPIRACY PERSPECTIVE
Why are weird-eyed representatives of the U.S. and UK intelligence agencies
appearing on television to tell us that we will now, sadly, have to expect 'an
end to freedom and liberty...' as we've known it (Wednesday night's NEWSBOLLOCKS
with Trevor McDonald) ?
Although I tend not to subscribe to paranoid conspiracy myths, I can't help
but point out that David Icke and others of his ilk have been warning us all for
some years that this kind of grandly-engineered horror would inevitably occur around the turn of the century as part of 'problem-reaction-solution' method
the
'New World Order' uses to drive public opinion into the open arms of mass 24-hour surveillance and population control. Icke says we can expect travel
restrictions, identity chips and increasing gross limitations on our privacy and
freedom of movement. All in the guise of 'protecting' us.
Remember 'they' are the same people who fomented previous world wars and
global conflicts. Mass murder, large-scale property damage, instant accusations of blame followed by 'revenge' attacks abroad and diminished
civil liberties at home are the familiar tools of 'their' trade.
THE INTEGRAL PERSPECTIVE
The United States military machine has rarely experienced any success during
its previous attempts at waging conventional ground warfare and should think
very carefully before wiping out any more young American lives. The world's
leading technological superpower has suffered defeat several times in the past at the hands of numerous tribesmen barely out of the stone age: in Korea, in
Vietnam, in the Middle East where they failed to remove Saddam Hussein from power or in the Balkans where Slobodan Milosovic maintained his leadership
for
some time after U.N. attempts to remove him. What the U.S.
military is very good at sadly, much like Osama bin Laden himself, is terror:
wiping out civilian populations from a distance with weapons of mass destruction.
It must be understood that this conflict is not about race or religion or even ideology. It's a war between two centuries, a struggle between two
developmental
levels - between people living in 12th century pre-Renaissance
religious cultures and people living in 20th century global capital information societies with a dangerous undercurrent of old-style mythic imperial thinking.
America is gearing itself up to once more to assault a group of people who
have yet to experience an industrial revolution of their own, who never had
a scientific enlightenment of their own, let alone a 'green meme' information revolution like the one Western cultures are now experiencing. We are dealing
with a culture which has yet to throw up an Isaac Newton or a Nietzche to tell them categorically that ALLAH IS DEAD.
Our liberal democracies, while by no means perfect, at least give lip-service to
pluralism and diversity. We open our doors to other cultures and attempt to 'integrate'
with them, even when these cultures show no particular interest in integrating
with anyone.
But bombing Afghanistan won't work - two dead people don't make a live one.
Fundamentalism is a highly destructive type of primitive thinking which doesn't work well in the kind of wired, pluralist goldfish bowl the world is striving to
become. We can't suddenly drag tribal societies into a technological age and expect them to act like nice, developed post-industrial societies overnight,
especially when the best model we can give them is Uncle Sam-style Imperialism
backed by missile attacks. Tribal people with modern weaponry will use those
weapons in the service of tribal or religio-mythic ideals just as we use them in
the service of mythic-capitalist ideals. We shouldn't be trying to foist our own
postmodern attitudes onto countries still dealing with the impact of the
Agricultural Revolution. Remember the Prime Directive ?
And American presidents should really stop bullying and brutalising weaker
and more primitive nations. It doesn't look good on the CV.
THE OZ PERSPECTIVE
I don't believe America's leadership has the brains, the imagination or the
sheer guts to tackle Osama bin Laden's threat. I believe that many Americans and
Britons will endorse the inevitable carpet bombing of innocent men, women and
children and call it justice. I believe that bin Laden, the Taliban leadership and the Middle Eastern terrorist cell networks will be untouched and unharmed
by
these attacks, ready to attack the Western world again in retaliation for what will be seen and rightly so, as tit-for-tat atrocity attacks on Muslim
civilians. If the next hijacked aircraft is driven into the Houses of Parliament
or the United Nations building, it will be no more than we deserve should we
pursue the option of retaliatory airstrikes.
Did we bomb Boston to stop the Boston Strangler ? Did we level New York City
to get at Son of Sam ? No we did not. So why the fuck should we flatten Afghanistan just to get at a bunch of murderous bastards who have the
country's
people in a repressive death grip ?
So how about this for a better idea: I hear continual boasting about the prowess
of America's elite commando units. So far, there's been no evidence
of these special forces being capable of anything OTHER than boasting so
maybe now is the time to put them to the test. If we want to strike a blow
against terrorists, we must use their own lo-fi methods. Let's see Delta Force earn its budget and prove how 'elite' its soldiers really are; send in one of
those 'crack' teams we're always hearing about and make sure they don't come
back until they have Osama bin Laden with them. I realise that many of today's
tough commandos don't actually like to get down and dirty and fight real enemies
but maybe it's about time they stopped going on training exercises and did their
fucking job for once.
It may not be a walk in the park but penetrating Afghanistan, locating and kidnapping bin Laden is perfectly possible and it beats the hell out of firing
Cruise missiles into shopping centres in Kabul. I have numerous books on modern
warfare here on my shelves, all of which tell me how new technology makes it
possible for a single serviceman to bring down a country using computers and
knives. Let's see it. Let¹s see some this 21st century warfare we keep hearing
about. If primitive terror merchants can drive a plane through the side of the
Pentagon, why can't our sophisticated troops get into a country that's mostly
just dirt and rocks ? I mean, seriously!...
Delta Force! Put your money where your big mouth is before more kids have to
die.
Bring bin Laden back to the U.S. for trial, then stick him in a hardcore
American jail along with the lifers and the sex offenders and let them fuck the
ass off him until he turns protestant with shock. I'm sure there are a lot of
big, strapping, patriotic rapists who'd love to get their hands on the man who
bombed New York.
Wouldn't that be more satisfying than blowing up schools, hospitals and mosques
?
THE PLAYBOY PERSPECTIVE
Or...here's my favourite solution, which would actually be much more effective than any other but who's going to listen to a loony peacenik like me ?
We bring bin Laden back to the U.S. for trial and BEFORE locking him up, we
keep him in house arrest.... IN THE PLAYBOY MANSION!
Can you imagine how rapidly and thoroughly bin Laden's fanatical following
would collapse if they saw pictures of him sipping cocktails by the poolside,
surrounded by bikini-clad airheads ?
Can you imagine him trying to espouse his fundamentalist doctrines to a gigling
gaggle of sexy Playmates ?..
"You don't understand. This is jihad! Holy war against American
imperialist
hegemony."
Blank stares from six perfect pneumatic blondes.
"Wow! You're so cool! You're rilly, like, a famous terrorist ? That is
sooo cool! Would you like a blow job ?"
"ALLAH AKBAR!!!!" screams Osama as all his dreams come true in
a welter of
flying cum and breast enhancements.
Subject the brutal bastard to the very best that the capitalist, hedonist
western democracies have to offer. Give him endless offers of soapy tit fucks
and baby-oiled five-in-a-bed romps and believe me, after enough time, he WILL succumb. He WILL embrace the glory that is western democracy.
And when he succumbs, the pictures can be shown worldwide. Islamic fundamentalists need sex and drugs to loosen them up; Dropping bombs on
their friends only makes them angrier, harder, stronger and more determined.
They won't kill George Bush or Tony Blair but they will kill more innocent people like you and me in the next big terrorist assault.
If we turn this into a war, only the innocent will suffer.
If we absorb bin Laden into our sexy, decadent culture we can ruin him as a
figurehead and destroy the effectiveness of his cause.
For God's sake America! Let Hef take charge and SEND IN THE BIMBOS! Girls
with big breasts are much better at changing men's inflexible minds than men
with big guns are.
I¹m VERY serious about this.
Let us remember the words of the old Band of Hope hymn:
'Christ! Has eaten the Dehhh-vil!
He ate him like a plate of soup!
Christ! Has eaten the Dehhh-vil!
And now he'll do the same to you!'
And think about what they actually mean.
THE COMPASSION PERSPECTIVE
There are undoubtedly great forces at play behind the surface sheen and ghastly spectacle of these events but that shouldn't blind anyone to the fact
that most of the people who died this week had fuck all to do with ideological struggles. Most of the people who lost friends and relatives will not be
thinking about the big picture and why the hell should they at this moment in
time ?
Our deepest sympathies go out to everyone in New York City and Washington.
To the super-heroic firemen, paramedics and police officers who deserve our
highest praise and who demonstrate why we need to stop being so mean to
'stooges of the Establishment' and instead deal with the notions which inform 'the
Establishment' itself. To the passengers on the Pittsburgh flight, who bravely
fought back. To all the lost and the grieving.
Heartfelt blessings to all of you on the message boards - which transformed
overnight from backbiting bitchstorms into global information centres and
support groups. Best wishes to everyone over at the WEF and my deepest love
and gratitude to everyone on the BARBELITH site for demonstrating to me what the
internet CAN be in times of trouble.
'Nuff said.
Grant, 16th
September 2001
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