Nation of the Flies
by Edgar J. Steele
12th May, 2004
"Fancy
thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn't you?
I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go. Why things
are what they are."
--- The Lord of the Flies speaking in Lord of the Flies, a novel
by William Golding (1954)
Just when I think
that America's current Administration can't sink any lower, some new depravity
is unveiled to public view.
Now it turns out
that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pictures and videotapes detailing Iraqi
prisoner rape, sodomy, torture and even something that passes for necrophilia,
have been taken by troops armed with digital cameras, seemingly eager to
memorialize the depths of the depravity to which they have sunk. I am
just heartsick over what some of America's sons and daughters seem to have
become. I can't bear, even, to provide you hyperlinks to the pictures now
circulating. Google them up for yourself.
As evidence of
the depraved nature of these photographs and videos, many porn sites now are
carrying them. Some even go so far as to blame American Jewish
pornographers for the very occurrence of the depravities photographed (www.aztlan.net/rape_of_iraq.htm),
though even I find that to be a bit of a stretch.
Wayne Madsen,
Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, notes the "mounting
evidence that a shadowy group of former Israeli Defense Force and General
Security Service (Shin Bet) Arabic-speaking interrogators were hired by the
Pentagon under a classified "carve out" sub-contract to brutally
interrogate Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison." (The Israeli Torture
Template, Wayne Madsen, CounterPunch, May 10, 2004). Madsen
quotes an unnamed "political appointee within the Bush
administration" as stating that, "Many of the torture methods were
developed by the Israelis over many years of interrogating Arab prisoners on
the occupied West Bank and in Israel itself."
Yes, it may be
easy to blame this latest travesty on Israel, just as so many things properly
are attributed to that tail that wags the American dog, but this is the sort of
thing that simply cannot be laid off onto another by anybody in the chain of
command.
Always, I have
taken the position of supporting our troops, wherever they may be, so long as
they do not cross over the line into criminal activity. "Just
following orders" should be no excuse for those with an internal moral
compass. Problem is, so many Americans seem to have lost theirs,
especially those at the highest levels of government.
And make no
mistake - our troops have been following orders. American President
George ("the buck never stops here" ) Bush and Defense
Secretary Donald ("You want the truth? You can't handle the
truth!") Rumsfeld are
directly responsible. You see, for those who slept through 8th-grade
social studies, Bush gives orders to Rumsfeld, who then gives orders to everybody
at the Defense Department.
On orders from
the Defense Department, General Geoffrey Miller, the fellow in charge of
America's ex-officio prison terror gulag in Cuba, Guantanamo Bay ("Gitmo,"
to its intimates), went to Iraq last summer "to
find ways to improve the flow of intelligence from detainees."
General Miller formed up the central interrogation unit at the Abu Ghraib
prison, where the photographed atrocities took place under the direct orders of
US Military Intelligence. This is the same General Miller who last year
was outed by the The Washington Post for utilizing "interrogation
techniques" at Gitmo banned under the Hague Convention as constituting war
crimes (can you say "torture," boys and girls?).
Questioned about
this latest disclosure of torture and atrocities under his direction, and
before he started his current round of backpedaling and finger pointing,
General Miller was, in the words of yet another Washington Post reporter,
"unapologetic": "We're
here to enable the armed forces to win this fight that's ongoing,"
stated the General. Unapologetic? Hell, this guy's proud of his
work! When the movie is
made, Jack Nicholson will have to reprise his role as the crusty Marine Colonel
from A Few Good Men, simply to do justice to this man's
hubris.
If General George
Patton, the very picture of former American military greatness, were alive
today, he would drag Miller into the nearest hospital tent and slap him silly.
How like the
tribe of lost boys in the novel Lord of the Flies has become
America. William Golding's masterwork stands as the very symbol of herd
mentality, of the savagery that can be evoked from people when acting as a
group. America, Nation of the Flies. That's what we can call
the movie starring General Miller. That's what we have become, you
know.
Want to
understand America today? Get a copy of Golding's book and read it.
Pick up copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, too,
while you're at the bookstore. To round out your understanding of
America, you might add Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to the stack at
the checkout counter. To prove there is nothing new under the sun, all of
these books were written over fifty years ago. In my day, these were
required reading for college Freshman English. Today, they are viewed as
subversive and will be banned tomorrow, so you might as well also get a copy of
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the definitive work on book burning (the
title derives from the temperature at which paper burns), which also was
written fifty years ago.
Once you have
digested America as she is today, the more daring might then track down a copy
of The Turner Diaries,
by Dr. William Pierce, writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, for an alternate,
some say more heartening, view of tomorrow in America. Finally, for a
light dessert, I recommend The Fable of the
Ducks and the Hens.
The fundamental
message of William Golding's book, Lord of the Flies: without the
unifying themes of society to hold us together, we lose our values, morals,
ethics and everything else that separates us from the savagery found in the
animal world. American society has broken down, what with our
underlying European ethos having been systematically dismantled. Should
we be so surprised now to find ourselves engaged in a discussion concerning our
lost morality with a figurative severed head, impaled upon a stick (the Lord
of the Flies namesake)? Abu Ghraib prison is that severed head and we
surely are as lost as those boys, because it now is, and forever will be, a
part of us and our America. Thanks, George.
I have been
railing against the Bush Administration for so long that many actually think I
am a liberal. Some Democrats actually say nice things about me in their
on-line forums, much to my chagrin. My first calls for Bush's ouster, over a year ago,
resulted in a great many nasty emails from Bush supporters. A few months
later, I wrote IMPEACH BUSH
NOW, which produced measurably less hate mail. Today, I can say
anything I want with no backlash. Why, some of those former hate emailers
are starting to apologize and throw in with me.
What I still
don't understand is why the American public isn't rioting in the streets, en
masse. Oh, that's right, I forgot: pizza deliveries, beer in
the supermarkets, football on TV. The important stuff still is in
place.
Lessee now, where
is that remote control? I had it here a moment ago.
New
America. An idea whose time has come.
---------------------------------------------------
Thanks
to everyone who has downloaded my speech from the recent Sacramento Zundel
Revisionist Conference, sponsored by the IHR, and sent me their
compliments. It now is available at this web site. It runs a
little over an hour and is nearly 9mb in total size, but will stream on the
Real Audio link (Windows wave file also available). Do the exercise near
the end, right along with the audience, and let me know your resultant
thoughts.
-ed
"I didn't say it would be easy. I just said it would be the
truth."
- Morpheus
Copyright
©2004, Edgar J. Steele
Forward
as you wish. Permission is granted to circulate
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