The Tangled Web

It started off as misinformation to initiate an ill-founded war; misinformation fed through a mainstream press. Then it became lies to further a larger agenda. Then more lies to cover the earlier lies; still with the compliance of the press, and uncontested by a partisan and cowed legislature until there was a tangled web of deception so thick and vast that it could be easily fed and maintained with obfuscating propaganda. And so, rather than having to defend themselves from charges of malfeasance, they were able through arrogance, fear and a contempt for nuance to defend the web itself. And, as in the old Soviet Union, inconvenient truth was subject to revision.

Thus was born the Forever War out of the War On Terror. Specific questions about the ultimate purpose of the war were unanswerable because it was a war that was never meant to be won. It wasn’t a war against a people or a place, but rather the defense of a morally bankrupt foreign policy and the insurance of power through the constant destabilization of society. Those who initiated it had no intention of ending it, those who supported it learned to live with the knowledge that they had worshiped false values and had sent American soldiers to die in vain in Iraq, Syria and Iran.

GW Bush, like Vladimir Lenin, was an opportunist who had ushered vicious and incompetent cronies to power and sought to institute a totalitarian police state at home while exporting and inciting terror abroad. He presided over a cabal of ideologues who were the enemies of truth and clarity, who preyed upon the ignorant and fearful, who catered to military-industrialists and religious zealots, and who so maniacally grasped at their illegitimate authority that they became wholly corrupt.

In early 2006, anti-American sentiments were found to have risen to alarming levels around the world. Even for those still listening to the party line this was attributed almost entirely to hostility derived from American policies, especially on Iraq after the release of previously suppressed images from Abu Gharib prison, and the adjournment in The Hague of a High Commission of the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes committed by the United States Army upon the city of Fallujah, including the targeting of medical facilities and the failure to protect civilians. The Bush Administration, with the backing of Congress, declared the opinions of Old Europe regarding American prosecution of the Forever War to be counterproductive if they hampered the war effort and of the “gravest concern if they condoned, justified or encouraged the Evildoers.”

Late in 2006, due to continued troop requirements in Iraq and the new offensive on the Western Front against Syria, a military draft was instituted requiring all civilians between the ages of 18 and 35 to register for service. Despite relentless media showcasing of ready compliance in a few areas like San Antonio and Cincinnati, protests began along the west coast and New England.

In the summer of 2007, anti-war demonstrations turned violent in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Seattle, Chicago, Ann Arbor and Salt Lake City. Simultaneously, a series of Force 4 and 5 Hurricanes devastated the Southern Atlantic and Gulf Coasts from Georgia to Texas, and millions of people were displaced and then stranded by gas shortages resulting in further outbreaks of violence across the south. President Bush declared martial law in those cities where demonstrations and civil disobedience were occurring, and sent available National Guard troops to control evacuee traffic on southern highways.

At the same time, H5N1 avian flu was diagnosed in poultry stock in several states across the country: in Rhode Island, Iowa, Texas, and California. In South East Asia a new viral strain, H5N2, had been spreading between people and several ill airline passengers were isolated upon arrival in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In August of 2007, all across the United States, small focal outbreaks of H5N2 began to be reported, and infected communities were immediately quarantined by federal troops. In the absence of a widely available vaccine to control this new viral strain, the military took control of the entire national highway system, requiring special permits for interstate travel. Overseas troop requirements on the new Eastern Front against Iran, and the plan to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act meant increasing reliance on private militarized contractors to enforce domestic policy.

In October of 2007, the Forever War was raging across the Mid East while the pandemic raged at home, and the country was put on a heightened state of alert due to “The Evil Within.” President Bush called for a nationwide prayer vigil. The subsequent declaration of a national state of emergency led to an indefinite suspension of presidential elections. Draft evaders, protesters, inciters and counter-crusaders were identified from surveillance videos, purchase histories and e-mail transcripts, rounded up by neoPatriot2 contractors, and sent to be held for extra-constitutional processing in the first of the permanent Free Speech Camps.

And so it began…the ending of the great experiment that was America. The beginning of the end was the unfolding of a flower of evil from the seed of its own troubled past. America had begun with the greatest contagion on indigenous peoples the world had ever seen while hypocritically denying the survivors their religious freedom, created a marvel of savage capitalism as the world’s largest slaveholder in thrall to the mass production of sugar, tobacco and cotton, then shook off its past for a brief shining moment and coalesced into the idea that liberated and inspired mankind, before bloating into an empire that sought to control the world by shock and awe, and finally reaching an apotheosis of malevolence and incompetence that couldn’t protect the most technologically advanced civilization in history from itself. Like all great empires, America collapsed from within. It collapsed from fear and zealotry and greed and the maniacs who exploited it in their insatiable lust for power. The great, steady beacon of freedom had become the constantly sweeping searchlight of fascism.

Dispatch 10/18/2010
Desert Canyon Outpost
Red Letter 23