"Autistic barriers are erected in order to avoid the pain linked to the traumatic awareness of the gap between self and object. They would appear to involve an overly-narcissistic relationship between the infant and one or other of the parents, a relationship based on the illusion of continuity."
-Prof. Didier Houzel
"The US military operation in Fallujah, largely justified on the claim that Zarqawi's militant forces had occupied the city, used white phosphorous, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate air strikes to pulverise 36,000 of Fallujah's 50,000 homes, killing nearly a thousand civilians, terrorising 300,000 inhabitants to flee, and culminating in a disproportionate increase in birth defects, cancer and infant mortality due to the devastating environmental consequences of the war.
To this day, Fallujah has suffered from being largely cut-off from wider Iraq, its infrastructure largely unworkable with water and sewage systems still in disrepair, and its citizens subject to sectarian discrimination and persecution by Iraqi government backed Shi'a militia and police. "Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies," observed The Guardian in 2005. Thus, did the US occupation plant the seeds from which Zarqawi's legacy would coalesce into the Frankenstein monster that calls itself "the Islamic State."
-Nafeez Ahmed
On this week of the anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. nine eleven that is, there remains the reflexive bathos of the official media for the state, meaning all corporate mainstream media. It is automatic and seems to almost intensify as Obama and the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs draw up plans for what is essentially a permanent state of war.
The average American, whatever that is, so lets say huge chunks of the U.S. citizenry, cannot begin to imagine what life is like for the average Iraqi. Imagine if instead of three thousand dead, there were several million dead. Over a third of New York City lets say. Imagine homes from Battery Park to Washington Heights, from Long Island City to Long Island itself in rubble, radioactive rubble. Imagine only limited electricity, and water. And imagine most of all an occupying army of foreigners. An army with a green zone in central park, taking up the entire park and serving Pizza Hut deep dish pizza and Starbuck frappacinos, and with a bowling alley and video games. And you, the average New Yorker, having no access to any of that but instead being subject to constant random searches and detention. Imagine your libraries and museums destroyed. The New York Public library gutted, and the Modern looted. That is life for the average Iraqi today.
In one sense, this resembles life for the very poorest communities in the U.S. already. The black and brown communities have a de-facto occupying army in the form of the domestic police force. A police now militarized and openly discriminatory. A police force who can do whatever they want. A police force of almost total impunity.
The U.S. empire however is one in which conquest means fragmentation. I keep using the word destablize, and that's because U.S. foreign policy intentionally looks to do exactly that. It works well for the eventual reconstruction projects of Halliburton, Carlyse, et al.
"Contemporary US intervention does not seek to secure and take over the existing military and civilian state apparatus; instead the invaders fragment the conquered state, decimate its cadres, professionals and experts at all levels, thus providing an entry for the most retrograde ethno-religious, regional, tribal and clan leaders to engage in intra-ethnic, sectarian wars against each other, in other words – chaos. Even the Nazis, in their expansion phase, chose to rule through local collaborator elites and maintained established administrative structures at all levels."
James Petras
The U.S. since Reagan, has intensified its saturation bombing, its shock and awe, and it's wholesale destruction. This is a campaign of creating failed states. Its not Empire building. It's control certainly, but it's a peculiar 21st century logic predicated on failure, on control of the global masses by way of control of limited resources. It is designed to build states of permanent scarcity.
The point being, for socialists and
others who do think about where the human race is in its evolutionary
process, is that powerful political and monetary interests have
slowly and surely captured not just physical control of the vast
majority but also their minds which leaves us with the task of
combatting coerced ignorance by continuously revealing the web of
connections and methods used by entrenched interests.
JS
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