In a post below, I opined that the lonelygirl series, silly as it may be, has interesting ramifications. Many took these videos seriously, despite the obvious indications of fraudulence -- for example, the episodes which venture out of Bree's room feature quite a few shots which leave you wondering: "Who's supposed to be holding the camera"?
This experiment in "vlogging" proves that a large-ish number of your fellow citizens will accept allegations of occult rites involving the Bush family and a 16 year old girl. Mull that over. Consider what that belief says about the nation as a whole.
And once that idea has sunk in, think about the Russo-Japanese war.
No, really. Hear me out.
(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)
In 1905, Russia lost to an enemy considered weaker. After the Czar suffered an unexpected, hard-to-fathom humiliation, many Russians went "a little funny in the head," and some bizarre pages entered the Russian history books. Look and see: The abortive revolution of 1905. The Beilis affair, during which Nicholas II affirmed his belief in Jewish ritual sacrifice. An upsurge in pogroms. The demonization of Witte. The spread of Marxism. The spread of the Protocols. The Revolution.
The average German went "a little funny in the head" after the loss of World War I -- a loss which shocked many in the Fatherland, since a controlled press had reported only positive news. Look and see: The rise of occult thought. The "Red" revolutions in Munich and elsewhere. The Thule society. The World Ice Theorists. The Friekorps. The assassinations. The far-right movements, of which the Nazis were but one.
France went slightly mad for a generation after the humiliating Prussian invasion of 1870. Look and see: The Communards. The Monarchists. The anti-clerical fanatics. French occultism. Leo Taxil and the great Freemasonry scare. The Panama scandal. Drumont. Dreyfus.
In all three cases, unexpected loss sent once-proud societies into the socio/political equivalents of nervous breakdowns. Interestingly, these outbreaks of mass political neurosis coincided with periods of vigor and experimentation in art.
America did better than one might have predicted after Vietnam, the first loss in our history. Conservatives took some consolation in the thought that we could have physically exterminated the foe, had extermination been the goal. Still, I would argue that the United States also went a little "funny in the head" after the debacle. Look and see: The rise of religious cults. Hedonism. Drugs. Needlessly combative left-wing identity politics. Reaganism. Fundamentalism. Neo-conservatism. Creationism. Hal Lindsey, top-selling author of his generation.
We may be witnessing another national breakdown.
When I began this blog, the "Bush bulge" meme was derided as an outlandish conspiracy theory. Now, most people presume the accusation to be true -- and nobody cares. These days, a mere two years later, a theory like that just ain't outlandish enough.
What has occurred during those two years? We have, for only the second time in our history, lost a war.
Bush lost it. He is still in the process of losing. This sad, sick finale will take a while, and we have no choice but to sit back and watch the disaster.
In truth, Bush lost the war the moment he began it. But for many of us, on the right and on the left, the fact of loss, the implications of loss, did not penetrate our craniums until after 2004. Like many Germans in World War I, the citizens of this country were mushroom people, kept in the dark and fed fertilizer. They have awakened to a nightmare.
Don't be surprised to see your fellow citizens go "a little funny in the head," as did their predecessors in other nations.
I see signs of this breakdown throughout the "internets." Xymphora was always an off-beat writer (to put the matter diplomatically), but whatever he or she printed back in 2004 cannot compare to his or her latest anti-Chomsky riff. "I think the best way to view Chomsky is as a one-man Zionist ‘sleeper cell.’" What utter madness!
And what common madness!
Even on "normal" lefty blogs -- gatekeeper blogs, as my hate brigade would phrase it -- one now routinely encounters commentators who postulate that Zionist fiends control all of the American media. Crude allegations of banking conspiracies have become daily fare. The Jews, we now learn, killed JFK, much to the surprise of those of us who blamed the MONGOOSE team.
On many anti-Bush political sites, it's all-CD-all-the-time, and agent-baiting rules the day. "Goody Proctor is a witch" has been translated into 21st century idiom. Some "progressives" now embrace the mad accusations made by the anti-Clinton crusaders of the 1990s: Satanism. Bilderbergers. The Bohemian Grove. Skull and Bones. Flying saucers have yet to stage a comeback, but give 'em time.
Creationism is now the majority belief. The Left Behind series commands a frightening popularity. Millions of your fellow citizens consider Hillary Clinton a Communist. Millions still believe that Democrats love Osama.
Step back. Survey the social/political scene the way Capablanca would survey the chess board. Don't consider just the current positions of the pieces; think ten moves ahead.
A generation raised on Rush, Rupert and Robertson must comprehend a lost war, a needless war initiated by a conservative God-That-Failed. The psychological price will exceed even the butcher's bill. How will the citizenry process this unthinkable thought? What will happen to this country?
If you think history has any predictive powers, you won't be surprised to see America's artists produce astonishing works during the next ten, twenty, thirty years. Everyone else may go stark raving bonkers.
I hate this war. I fear the post-war.
9 comments:
brilliant overview!
You might add some little known facts to help explain the rush to the madhouse that crowds of citizens now seen stampeding towards their awaiting padded cells
A still" top secret " cabal" of domestic fascists "arranged" a deal with Hitlers minions to secretly and illegally assimilate into our body politic, the worst of their black technologies, mind control expertise, (gleaned from their population of slaves in camps), highly skilled assasins, heroin trafficers, and devotees to the black arts. who have pretty much infected and poisened our bloodstream.
Whenever a bright and rightous leader pops up and starts making sense, they are quickly beheaded or blackmailed to do the bidding of that same cabal and its modern recruits.
Yes, martial madness is leading the charge of the dark brigade for now, but thanks to the internet we can organize the truth tellers into a rag tag revolutionary army again..Lord willing.
Yes, people in the U.S. are going a bit "funny in the head." Thank your government for that. Thank the masters of disinfo like Fox News who tell us lies to get us into war and yet stay on the public air waves. Thank the Air Force for creating the entire UFO hoax out of whole cloth and ramming it down Americans throats to misdirect people from getting too close to top secret aircraft projects. Thank the CIA for secretly coming up with things like MKULTRA and then lying about it to cover up the scary shit they do behind closed doors. Thank people like Lemnitzer for coming up with ideas to terrorize Americans into a war with Cuba. Thank organizations like the FBI for being riddled with shady informants that like to blow up buildings and then lying to us about what happened. Thank the OSS for doing business with the mafia in WWII and helping to make the mafia and crime part of mainstream life and entertainment(go GOTTI!) Thank your government for bringing over Nazi war criminals and using them in NASA and then lying about that.
If you want to blame someone for why America is falling apart. STOP blaming peope who have questions about what the hell is going on (like peopel who question CD theory) and blame the morons who put us in this position!
How the hell can anyone know the truth when we have a thousand spy agencies all muddying up the waters? WE CAN'T.
I understand how these organizations become like this, because they are trying to get their work done in a dirty business and therefore they get dirty. But at some point we have to hit the reset button and try to clean ourselves up before we as people and nation become so institutionnally corrupt we can't reverse it anymore.
Anonymouses, I think you pretty much demonstrate my point.
Does it help any to say we'll survive it? -- at least "we" in the collective sense.
Or that there have been a lot worse traumatic moments in the remote past, some of which left such deep scars in the communal psyche that they still haunt us, though generally projected into the future in the form of Armageddon or Gotterdammerung.
At least these days we're a lot less likely to resort to human sacrifice to ward off the anger of the gods.
But beyond that, the real question is what we can *do* about it -- and the answer I keep coming up with is that we need to inject the best stories we can into the information stream, to counter the bad stories, and to do it now, before things get really wacked.
Human beings have a strong inclination to operate on the basis on stories, especially when reason and traditional norms seem to be failing all around them. (Which may be one reason why art thrives in times of chaos.) Because of this, you can't counter a pernicious but really juicy story by trying to deconstruct it logically. You need to offer a equally engaging but saner story in its place. So be all means, let us get our stories together.
But an even stronger reason why art and occultism both flower during periods of social chaos is that those periods are marked by a breakdown in conventional categories and rote answers, which allows strange ideas and intuitive inspirations of all kinds to break through.
Unfortunately, in what follows you inevitably get the bad mixed with the good.
I'm reminded of the period 1500-1700 in Europe, when the modern world was being born, and when the originators of contemporary science existed side by side with alchemists and witch-hunters. Those things weren't separate trends, and they weren't even opposite forces in some form of combat between the new and the old. They grew out of exactly the same changes in thought and the same anxieties about the world.
The Salem witch-hunters, for example, were highly educated people, Harvard graduates for the most part, who let things get so out of hand partly because they shared the fears of the time and partly because they were determined to apply the latest, most empirical scientific standards to the resulting hysteria and rely strictly on *eyewitness testimony* instead of the old superstitious methods like trial by water.
But they got through it -- and even did their best to make amends to the dead when it was all over -- and in the end, it was probably the only way to have gotten from there to here. ("Here" being the modern, scientific world.) Human beings seem to need to go a little nuts from time to time to make major culture-wide changes. It's probably the equivalent of species needing to let down the usual genetic safeguards and allow a burst of not-necessarily-beneficial mutations through in order to make an evolutionary leap.
So the real issue is not to try to head off the periodic bouts of craziness -- or to chew your nails over them in advance -- but to work on taking the rough edges off so that everyone has fun and no one gets hurt.
And no, we're not there yet -- or even close -- but I see it as an ideal to hold in mind. It's what we as humans *should* be doing -- learning how to not only survive but evolve without killing one another off in the process.
"Anonymouses, I think you pretty much demonstrate my point."
Did we tell any lies? Or did we once again step beyond the *limits* of what we can discuss on this site?
:)
I wonder, starroute, if these are really aberrations, skewed narratives which gain too much velocity, rather than reflections of a nation which has irrevocably gone mad.
Vast numbers of Americans believe absurdities which would likely would have embarrassed the Salem witch hunters. You trust in progress but, apart from improved sanitation and technological advances, how much have we really evolved? Barbarity is committed by others means, at a distance.
You write that "At least these days we're a lot less likely to resort to human sacrifice to ward off the anger of the gods." I wonder. These days we kill for even worse reasons. At this very moment we're bombing and shelling Iraqis to flatter GWB's ego and nourish Dick Cheney's fantasy life. The difference is, we can talk about it calmly, because we don't have to do it or watch it, the gift of a mass-society.
The average species lasts about 100,000 years, and it could well be that we've reached critical mass, i.e., it's all downhill from here, at least for those of us stuck on earth. The Bushes no doubt have their exit tickets booked....
It's unclear what your standards are to distinguish the supposed irrational wild ravings of the hoi polloi compared to the sage ruminations of the skilled conspiracy researcher/scientist. It doesn't seem that it can be the truth behind them, because most of these theories remain speculative in the extreme, and/or are as well confirmed on one side as the other.
Frankly, a whole lot of the most extreme sounding theories of the '70s turned out to be true, so far as we know. Was our government training assassins for use worldwide, and killing leaders we disagreed with? Nuts, right? No, entirely true. LBJ said he found out 'we' (the US government) were running what he called a 'goddamned Murder Incorporated' down in the Carribean. Could it be that the president could order illegal bombing raids in huge quantity, involving thousands of sorties of B-52s over years time, and have the entire military apparatus lie and cover that up with false after action debriefings? What, are you crazy? Do you know how many people would have to keep that secret-- it couldn't happen, not at all. Idiocy to even mention the theory, but that was absolutely what was going on.
Every piece of overseas mail into this country was surreptitiously opened, examined, and photographed, for decades, in complete violation of federal law concerning the inviolability of the mail. These felony violations of federal law were known to the presidents and Post Masters General, and the cast of hundreds to thousands that were involved over the years, with nary a peep, I think until the Church committee discovered it and made it public.
Now, through the use of supercomputers, voice recognition software, key word flagging, etc., every telephone conversation, land phones included along with the wireless and cell phones, e-mail, and other forms of communication, are logged, collected, analyzed, and data mined, through the Echelon and other programs. Evidently, with our partners England and New Zealand and/or Australia, where it's illegal for ones own government to do so, they farm it out to the other partners and get the data that way.
We are well on our way to a neo-fascist society, and it is this generation's great commission to halt that advance on behalf of human freedom and liberty everywhere. Getting the US population to take this commission will inevitably involve radicalizing them, getting them paranoid, and seeing them adopt 'CT' styles of thinking, which will often be overblown, irrational, wrong or at least unsupported by much evidence, and etc.
Still, that brand of thinking is closer to right than its opposite, and the first and necessary step to wisdom. At least the broad brushes will be correct, if the finer details remain indeterminate.
Again, very frankly, we stand in peril of a vast and sweeping wave of anti-Semitism in this country, based on the correct apprehension of the body politic that this tragic and horrific Iraq debacle was pawned off on the US by a Zionist claque. The 12 to 18 people the NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote of in his Times column, without whom, he said, this war would have never taken place. The 'secret government' that Colin Powell called out, who even jokingly called themselves 'the cabal,' whom other mainstream media figures mused aloud (or in print) had 'performed a coup d'etat' on the government and its foreign policy.
While it is wholly unfair to tar the Jewish people as a whole with this issue, since they were a group of people who opposed this war more than the average non-Jewish population did, that is the risk that is being run. It is my understanding from media reports that the US military and intel agencies are excluding dual citizenship Jewish Americans from positions that require security clearances, and revoking the same from those who already have them if they but have family in Israel.
It was the Army College study whose report summary was published in the Washington Times on 9/11/01 (or maybe the day before), in a front page article, which laid out the order of battle, as it were, in the ME, should the US be tasked to help man a border security patrol at or around the old Green Line, separating the Israelis and Arabs.
In describing the Mossad, the assessment said 'cunning and ruthless, able to attack US forces and make it appear that the attack was by Arab or Palestinian actors.'
Was this some horrific anti-Semitism canard, put out by the US Army? Not so much that, but simply a recognition that it has happened in the past, and is somewhat of the modus operandi typical for them.
William Burroughs was reported to have said:
"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what's going on."
fallinglady
I find myself, when watching TV, having to tune out the "entertainment" shows and turn to the news because the shows are too sick and violent and mean. It used to be the other way...and the news has not changed for the better.
I'm sick of this country as it is. I don't like hardly anyone anymore. Those who are all about money and trappings that is. Rich and poor alike.
Miss P.
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