Afghanistan

John McMurtry

I have been asked to speak on the topic “Why Is There A War in Afghanistan?” I could focus on the innumerable suspicious circumstances of this latest U.S. aerial war on a poverty-stricken country - its typical overriding of international law, its strategic fit with U.S. corporate designs for foreign oil resources, and the U.S. past strategic support of the very enemy said to be targeted - like Noriega, Saddam, and Milosevic in the past.¹

But instead I am going to situate this latest U.S.-led war on a third-world region within a much wider global process. I am going to consider “America’s New War” as the latest expression of a much deeper and wider terrorist campaign of an emergent totalitarian pattern of instituting world corporate rule with no limit of occupation or accountability beyond itself.

…… The gravest problem with corporate market fundamentalism is that it is decoupled from society's life conditions. It is, in fact, incapable of recognizing any value to anything except corporate “value adding” which, it is assumed, should regulate all peoples and conditions of life on earth for efficiency” and “maximum growth”.

The Unseen Terrorist Pattern

Since the commitments of a society to safeguard the lives of its members and to ensure they are able to express themselves as human is the measure of its civilization, this global corporate program is not merely uncivilized. It is, beneath recognition, terrorist in its meaning. For if we recognize the real meaning of “terrorism” - to instill in innocent people fear for their life security to coerce their compliance to an armed faction’s demands - we see its pattern increasingly at work across world life organization. Under the financial dictates of the corporate market backed by rising extremes of armed force, citizens everywhere are subjected to a low-intensity campaign of destabilization and fear that leaves no aspect of their lives secure.2

…..The pattern cannot be plausibly denied once it is exposed. There are two major forms of attack on peoples’ means of life to coerce them to conform to global financial and corporate demands. The first is to defund societies’ non-profit social infrastructures everywhere until peoples have no choice but to privatize their management for profit.

The second front of attack is more directly violent - to wage one financial and military war after another on the poorest peoples of the world to control their states and expropriate their regional resources. Both these wars on humanity are driven by a fanatic fundamentalism - to produce ever more money for those with most money, with no limit, regulation or higher goal permitted to “obstruct” these transnational money sequences.

The Shape of the Beast

The shape of this Beast’s ever grosser lines dwarfs the monster beheld by St. John of the Apocalypse, or the boundless greed of Duryodhana told by the Mahabharatta. We live under an increasingly global reign of terror, but our disconnection from the meaning is its triumph. Instead we are made to believe that the terror comes from pre-industrial fanatics in poor countries.

The world has been usurped by a pattern familiar in the microcosm, but not yet decoded at the macro level - a revolt against human society itself. The historical maturation of nations after the world’s greatest Depression and War was called “the Great Transformation” by Karl Polanyi, but the Great Reversal has not yet been publicly understood. Its meaning is primeval. It is the atavistic return of society to an unaccountable male gang seeking to dominate the world.

We see this pattern in the 9-11 War. Its public phase began when thousands of people of mixed nationalities, most American civilians, were killed by suicide bombers of a foreign male gang of Islamic fundamentalists.3

Each side then duly proclaimed the other the embodiment of evil, each repudiated the rule of law from start to finish, and both killed as many innocent people as got in the way of their war to rule other countries. While the gang leaders throughout stayed unscathed behind walls of armed protectors, both called each other “cowards”.

There is little difference in moral substance between these atavistic gangs, although a megalomaniac rhetoric of each side proclaims direct backing from God. Both sides are mass killers, and both systematically destroy civilians and their means of life with sanctimonious justification overriding all accountability to truth or due legal process. Both proclaim their mission as the working of divine Justice, and both destroy the lives and human conditions of innocent others with a pathological abandon that takes the breath away…..

…….But the primeval criminal-gang structure is not tracked for two reasons. The first is that saturating conditioning disconnects people from reality. “It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”5

These are Herman Goering’s words, and they transmit the code of this gang form of rule. Concealed under the most ludicrous lies, its coercion reigns supreme. Already university employees and a talk-show host have been unconstitutionally suspended in the U.S. for pointing out the most undeniable truths. The disorder goes to the heart of the ruling corporate psyche.

Images of Manliness
Decoding the Global Market as Corporate Gang Occupation

Consider the pattern. The adolescent group-mind plots in secret behind the closed doors of secluded forts for control of the rest of society to maximize the gang’s private take. Privately multiplied debt issuances are the currency of the global corporate gang’s control. Sex and violence are the ruling images of its kingdom of ever bigger deals and attacks on designated out-groups. The gang’s ethos of power and control pervades the larger society with a barbaric code of acquisitive stratagem, takeover of others’ territories, continuous extraction of gang tribute, and indiscriminate violence and armed force at will.

Throughout, group slogans and tough-talk re-enforce the bonds of male and servant-female bravado in the face of ever greater extremes of life-depredation, confiscation and fear. The universal insecurity the many feel is, as the resistance grows, played back to them as what the gang is protecting them from. The logic of rule by force is then openly declared. The U.S. President declares an ultimatum to the world - “You are either with us or for the terrorists”, and after starving Afghanistan is carpet-bombed, his administration proclaims, “Who will be next? ”.

Charles Krauthammer declares the mood in Time Magazine:

“America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms - - - How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will”.6

The extortion racket of the neighbourhood is, in a word, writ large as “the international war against terrorism” - a war in which those who monopolize terror are licensed to exempt themselves from its meaning……

…… Armed terror is not the essence, but the punctuation mark of the new totalitarianism’s meaning. The money-and-consumption command channel is the secret of the movement’s success because it avoids responsibility for its failures. Wall-Street prescribed market failures to provide for societies are, instead, always attributed to transcendental forces of “the invisible hand” punishing these societies for alleged sins against “market laws”. Thus as catastrophes increasingly befall the majority of the world, the victims are blamed for their new deprivation, misery and oppression.

This is a far more effective mode of rule than jackboot terror which is more overt, but it exposes the system to another form of resistance. For such a regime depends throughout on keeping knowledge silenced and repressed. This is its Achilles heel. As soon as people see through it and flag it to surrounding community, the collective trance which it depends on begins to come undone.

The new totalitarianism is, ultimately, an American corporate confidence game which rules the world by images and projections of power arcing over the globe’s surface, while limitlessly rapacious financial sequencings called “free flows of capital and commodities” strip world’s peoples and their life-ground underneath. The evidence is all around. The meta-pattern is most globally fatal with the planetary ecosystem, but has played out catastrophically on the social level in Russia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and South-East Asia since 1990. But never is the private and centralized financial control of these operations raised publicly as an issue, nor is the control of the money used by private investment banks and the financial divisions of corporations whose revenues are generated on the basis of creating over 95% of the world’s money-demand…..

Rule By Insecurity and Constructed Crises

To sustain acquiescence in the sacrifices it requires, a totalitarian movement must keep all its subjects off-balance by a nonstop succession of disruptive changes and demands. Private fear for one’s own security is a necessary condition across communicatively isolated citizens for their submission to such a regime. The violation of long-accepted norms presented as fait accompli’s, and the loss of life-bearings by permanent threat to secure livelihood are the psychological operations which are at work in any totalitarian movement. To keep the majority in a continual state of inner anxiety works because people are made too busy securing or competing for their own survival to co-operate in mounting an effective response.

In the past decade, the entire population of the globe has been kept permanently off-balance with one financial meltdown and transnational trade fiat after another emptying national coffers and overriding rights of domestic self-determination. Populations have been so overwhelmed by the moving juggernaut of economic and environmental crises that a rule of universal insecurity has rendered social majorities paralyzed by a low-intensity terror - the necessary condition for any totalitarian movement to continue its advance, for keeping its subjects perpetually off balance is its modus operandi. That is why in the Afghanistan case, the war no sooner seems over than the cry goes up, “Who is next?”

Again, the two system deciders in the new totalitarianism are financial and media selectors. Together they confront peoples with continuous uncertainty about their future, destabilizing threats from without, and images of dream-like omnipotence of success - the latter of great importance in a social field where grandiose images are all that exists to redeem the increasingly shabby lives of the majority . Orwell describes the phenomena of totalitarianism brilliantly as fiction, Hannah Arendt as reality in their great works of 1984 and The Origins of Totalitarianism respectively. But the mechanics of this ever-shifting world of primary fears and aggressions are not based in the new totalitarianism on what Orwell and Arendt’s descriptions feature - brutal shows of violence by the state…..

The Inner Logic of the Big Lie

The most notorious characteristic of totalitarianism is “the big lie” - a pervasive overriding of the distinction between fact and fiction by saturating mass media falsehoods. In the familiar forms of totalitarianism, “the big lie” occurs in a moving, ad hoc form - typically targeting an internal group for systematic attack by brutal persecution, and filling the news with false portrayals of an external enemy. The traditional form of the big lie targets a highly symbolic event (the Reichstag fire or the U.S. Trade Centre attack), or a claimed enemy of the populace (“communists” or “Islamic extremists”).

Global corporate totalitarianism, however, is not plausibly distinguishable as totalitarian in this way - although the targeting in the U.S. and its Latin American “backyard” of falsely alleged “Soviet-led communists” to justify the violent persecution of hundreds of thousands of people by death-squads and orchestrated military pogroms was certainly a lead-up to the present corporate system. What interests us here, however, is a more routine and pervasive form of “the big lie”. The big lie - in the sense of omni-pervasive lie - is disseminated by round-the-clock, centrally controlled multi-media which are watched, read or heard by people across the globe day and night without break in the occupation of public consciousness instead of national territories. Group-think, not soil, is the breeding ground of the new totalitarianism.

On the micro level, the omnipervasive lie operates through a total conditioning apparatus - not only through continuous television, newspaper, car-and-home radio, disc and film mass-programming across private and social life, but increasingly against the citizen’s will by unstoppable phone calls and messages, ad mail and corporate flyers occupying mailboxes and home entrances, and round-the-clock invasions of fields of sight and hearing by demands to buy corporate commodities - eventually compounded by corporate security-state systems to “put people in jail simply for participating in a political protest”.17 What is in common among all these saturating occupations of citizens’ sense-organs is that all their statements and images are false and misleading as a form of communication. Typically they are voluminously trivial with no meaning beyond their occurrence, or repetitions of mind-shackling misrepresentations in high-decibel certitudes.

Questions do not arise in such a total sign field. Indeed there is no ground of truth from which to raise them. For no criterion of truth or falsehood exists within this “knowledge economy” system. This is its quintessentially totalitarian feature. Across the increasingly invasive occupations of all attention fields by corporate ad-vehicles, including school classrooms and public policy meetings, the regulating standard overriding all others is more sales for more profits to dominant corporations. In the old totalitarian culture of the Big Lie, the truth is hidden.

In the new totalitarianism, there is no line between truth and falsehood. The truth is what people can be conditioned to believe.¹⁸ The dare is now out, and not for the first time -

“We can take anything, anywhere, and have the masses’ support by declaring that someone else is attacking them”.

Notes:

1.There is growing suspicion, which is officially unspeakable, that the Afghanistan War is “a set-up”, including September 11 itself. With any such hypothesis, one looks not only for the evidence confirming it, but more conscientiously, for the evidence disconfirming it. The evidence confirming U.S. and allied security awareness of and possible complicity in the 9/11 attack is considerable, but I have found no evidence disconfirming it. The principal reason against is the assumption that it is impossible that the U.S. national security apparatus would ever permit such a mass killing of Americans on U.S. soil, but this assumption itself is shaky given that Pearl Harbour itself was likely known about in advance, and non-defensive wars since have sacrificed tens of thousands of U.S. citizens (not to say millions of others) for so-called “foreign policy and national security objectives”. On September 12, I wrote a paragraph for publication that seems no less telling today. “The pervasive Echelon surveillance apparatus and the most sophisticated intelligence machinery ever built is unlikely not to have eavesdropped on some of the very complicated organisation and plans across states and boundaries for the multi-site hijacking of planes from major security structures across the U.S. - especially since the suicide pilots were trained as pilots in the U.S., and the World Trade Centre had already been bombed in 1993 by Afghan ex-allies of the CIA. Since the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, is himself an ex-CIA operative in Afghanistan, and his moves presumably under the intensest scrutiny for past successful terrorist attacks on two U.S. embassies in 1998, one has to reflect on the connections. To begin with, the forensic principle of “who most benefits from the crime?” clearly points in the direction of the Bush administration. One would be naive to think the Bush Jr. faction and its oil, military-industrial and Wall Street backers who had stolen an election with its man rated in office by the majority of Americans as poor on the economy (a Netscape Poll poll taken off the screen when the planes hit the towers), and more deplored by the rest of the world as a deep danger to the global environment and the international rule of law, do not benefit astronomically from this mass-kill explosion. If there was a wish-list, it is all granted by this numbing turn of events. Americans are diverted from a free-falling economy to attack another foreign Satan, while the Bush regime’s popularity climbs. The military, the CIA and every satellite armed security apparatus have more money and power than ever, and become as dominant as they can over civilians in ‘the whole new era’ already being declared by the White House. The anti-missile plan to rule the skies is now exonerated (if irrelevantly so), and Israel’s apartheid civil war is vindicated at the same time. Even the surgingly popular ‘anti world-trade’ movement is now associated with foreign terrorists blowing up the World Trade Centre. The more you review the connections and the sweeping lapse of security across so many co-ordinates, the more the lines point backwards” (published in The Record, September and Economic Reform, October 2001). As we will see ahead, these benefits of the 9/11 attack go still deeper than the payoffs enumerated here. Isolated reports by major newspapers across the world of pre-9/11 links between the CIA, the Pakistan ISI, and bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network have been usefully documented by Michael C. Ruppert <www.copvcia.com>.

2.The meaning of terrorism I remind us of here retains its linkage with “terror”, unlike the official definitions of terrorism, which have delinked its meaning from public experience, and redefined it as what obstructs official and corporate business. For example, Canada’s “Anti-Terrorist Bill” (Bills C-35 and C-36), defines as “terrorist” what is “intended to cause serious interference with or disruption of an essential service, facility or system” (Bill C-35 83.01 (1)(b)(ii)(E)). Much well-taken criticism has been directed at the sinisterly sweeping definition here, but none has recognized the deeper delinkage from meaning itself which is presupposed. No connection with terror remains. Only the emotive charge of the word remains - which is then linked to what corporate-led states are set to criminalise and impose right to arbitrary rule over, without normal protections of law. The disconnection from meaning escapes detection of even those who are opposed to the law. Thus eminent Professor of Law, Martin Friedland, properly objects to the “too broad” definition, but seeks to ameliorate it by substituting (like the U.K. law) “an electronic system” for “an essential service, facility or system” (Martin Friedland, “Police Powers in Bill C-36”, in (eds. R.J. Daniels et al) The Security of Freedom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 270). The Orwellian operation of expanding criminalizing concepts into unconnected meanings in the law itself is internalised without demurral - a sign of the totalitarian communications field analysed ahead.

3.The official number began as “almost 7000 Americans”. Unpublicised counts then disclosed, with no comment on the radical changes of facts, that there were a great number of non-Americans killed, and the official number was revised to 3900. AP News Service then counted the actual deaths, and reported a figure of 2772 persons killed, 40% of the number killed on the basis of which “America’s New War” was declared.

5.I am grateful to Connie Fogel and the Canadian Defence of Liberty Committee for this quotation in their November 18, 2001 newsletter.

6.Cited by Lewis Lapham, “The American Rome”, Harper’s Magazine, August 2001, pp. 32-3.

17.The words are those of the Canadian Bar Association in response to the Canadian government’s “anti-terror bill”, one of numerous police-state bills put into law after the constructed September 11 2001 “war” on the U.S. (Daniel LeBlanc, “Anti-Terror Bill Goes Too Far, Lawyers’ Group Says”, Globe and Mail, October 25, 2001, p. A 6).

18.165,000 corporate public relations professionals now outnumber the total number of journalists who work for all newspapers, radio and television stations, with 9000 P.R. firms the source of an estimated 50%-80% of the news presented (Jason Plouffe, “In Your Interest”, Ontario Public Interest Group, Guelph, Winter 2000, p.4).

This article has been excerpted with permission of John McMurtry from a talk he presented as the Opening Address at the Science for Peace Forum and Teach-in, University of Toronto, December 9, 2000. This address was also published in Transintelligence Magazine, issue 12, 2002.

John McMurtry, Ph.D. is a moral philosopher and ethicist who works at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He is a strong advocate of monetary reform and vocal in the anti-globalization movement. He may be the single most influential Canadian voice in that movement. He was named Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in June, 2001.

His writings include: Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System, and Understanding War: A Philosophical Inquiry.