Back in late 1989, only coincidental to the departure from office of George H.W. Bush, the United States struck Panama. Since “communism” was a flagging enterprise, the cover story was drug interdiction. During that attack an ordnance of some kind was released on a barrio in Panama City, and by their accounting, as many as 2,000 people were killed, after which ensued bulldozers and a mass grave.
We’ll never know, of course, as we were not the victims, and so there was no investigation. Interesting, however: there was no apparent tactical purpose for use of the bomb, which has led to speculation that the U.S. was merely experimenting with a new device of some sort, perhaps delivered by a then-new stealth bomber. If that is the case, it would have to be an anti-personnel weapon, and “personnel” would have to be people living in close quarters, or civilians. Military leaders are too smart to house soldiers in high concentrations in a few buildings, 1983 in Lebanon aside..
Since our own lives have beginnings, middles and ends, there is a tendency to attach far too much historical significance on events of our times. Americans have a maudlin sense of victimhood about 9/11, not even knowing it was self-inflicted. In the larger picture it is the events that followed, the attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Now Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iran (these are the military operations we know about*) that might warrant a paragraph in a history book.
In terms of impact on local populations, American attacks have inflicted a thousand 9/11’s. People of Panama City regard their own lives as no less important than ours. In Iraq hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have died. Just judging by that evidence, I think that it can be reasonably inferred that depopulation is part of the larger strategy. That country has suffered invasion, massive bombing, destruction of infrastructure, famine and rampant disease along nighttime raids on virtually every household. We did that to them. Those who could – the middle class professionals and their families – fled. Jordan and Syria are now enriched by the former civilian educated classes of Iraq. But remarkably, what is left of that country continues to resist American power. They, like the Vietnamese, are testimony to the human spirit to resist tyranny.
We exist on two levels. Above us is a psychopathic class, and I’ve been more than a little interested in how they function. I’m almost finished with Harvey Cleckley’s “The Mask of Sanity**,” a book first written in 1941 and revised in 1950 and 1955. His study is an early attempt to draw a profile of the sociopath, and is prescient for his ability to see through the veneer they present. They seem like us on the outside, but are only among us and not of us. We are experiencing normal lives, and so assume that all others do as well. We project our own humanity on all around us, and so cannot begin to imagine the capacity for evil that exists in those who know no such concept. As Cleckley observes, we find in them
…verbal and facial expressions, tones of voice, and all the other signs we have come to regard as impelling conviction and emotion and the normal experiencing of life as we know it ourselves and as we assume it to be in others.
We regard our leadership reaction to minor events like 9/11 as that of normal people in the face of a barbaric crime. They know that about us, and they know how we perceive them. In public they fulfill our expectations. The private activities of sociopaths are by necessity guarded, so that those of us who are on to them are called “conspiracy theorists.” Normal people are always at a disadvantage. Our humanity, our consciences, or emotions are in their eyes our fatal flaws. They can use us as they see fit in the larger game of conquest, capture of resources, or just war games for sport (and depopulation).
So we are experiencing life on two levels, our own, and that of the “pathocracy,” as Lobakcewski named it. And it has always been so. We’ll survive the current cataclysms, and more will follow. Millions upon untold millions will suffer and die at their hands. From a distance, say, Mars, it appears as though our species is comprised of a small class of deviates who influence our affairs in all matters of violence, and a mass of unknowing foot soldiers who carry out their grand designs.
There’s a manic kind of logic to this. War has purpose beyond mere lives and destruction. It hones our skills, forces new inventions. The whole of our infrastructure, from Internet to interstate highways to passenger aircraft to GPS and mobile phones and computers are the result of our war spending. Leo Strauss, granddaddy of the Neocons, believed that humans without conflict become soft and cease to progress. I don’t know that he was right about that. I do not know what humans living in peace are like. I do know that we’ll never find out. I do suspect that if our warmongers were required to fight in the wars, we’d suffer fewer warmongers and wars. One interesting aspect of the Neoncons – most don’t actually fight.
I wonder, since I don’t read enough fiction, if there are great works of literature that embody all of this. There must be, but I am so removed from fiction. There must be novels in which the characters represent the great divide among. The best I can come up with is a minor work, Watership Down, in which rabbits living in a warren that was supplied feed by humans every day were affected, lazy, absorbed in art and useless in the greater conflicts of life.
Machiavelli merely said it straight, describing the actions of the leadership classes with amoral prose. He’s often said to have embodied “evil.” But some great writer somewhere, sometime, has taken all that we know about our species and made it into a great work of fiction that describes reality better than the non-fiction that absorbs me. Please clue me in.
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*Mali, I confess, is a complete surprise to me, but does fit in the larger scheme of creation of the “Africom” – or African Command – by the Pentagon in 2007. Ever since, it’s been one war after another there, just as the little lamb followed Mary.
**I cannot find any non-retail non-Wiki links for this book. You’re on your own.
Piece of Mindful 