America as Sparta
(Highlights)
WHEN DID ATHENS become Sparta? When did America redefine itself so profoundly around war?
How did this happen? We’ve reinvented ourselves as the most belligerent people on Earth. Why?
The conventional answers are that the terror assaults of September required this response and that an evil axis poses a deadly threat. But a deeper answer, perhaps, is that the September blow to the American psyche set in motion a reaction of grief, anger, and fear never before felt so powerfully. The ”war on terrorism” can seem to purge such emotions. The savage face embodied in the new nuclear posture can seem a perfect expression of the wound we suffered, whether it makes future suffering less likely or more.
But the ease with which we have commissioned another generation of young people to wreak havoc in our defense, as we imagine it, and the blithe spirit with which we are now rolling the nuclear dice cry out for other explanations. What notes in the American character might account for this amazing shift? Here are four that occur to me.
American Time
Uniquely among nations, we define ourselves by the future, not the past. This is the source of our optimism, key to our greatness. But it also means we waste little effort on self-criticism, the lessons of history. Thus we are permanently innocent and quick to see those who oppose us as evil. If we behave with good intentions, it is enough. That our good intentions have often gone awry in the past is forgotten.
American Money
Valuing entrepreneurial creativity, we trust our companies, another key to our greatness. But companies have an unexamined bias toward war. Weapons manufacture has been an economic engine for half a century, a source of prosperity. Then, once weapons exist, pressure to use them is eventually irresistible, setting off a new round of development and manufacture. The only check on this cycle is politics, but now politicians are entirely subservient to the companies that pay them. The war economy, reeling after detente with Moscow, has just reinvigorated itself.
American Selfhood
We are never more ourselves than when going it alone, from the ”rugged individual” to the Texas Ranger. Despite the communal character of our best work (science, technology), our congenital skepticism toward international collectivity (e.g. the UN) undercuts the cross-border law enforcement (e.g. International Criminal Court) that alone can combat terrorism effectively. Unilateral warfare feels normal to us because we conduct it on our own terms, accountable to no one – like real Americans!
American Exemption
Because the September attacks were the first massive violence suffered in the continental United States since the Civil War, they left us uncertain and afraid. But elsewhere in the world, the devastations of war are all too common. To us they remain abstract. September memories, in fact, underscore how the horrors of modern warfare have never touched the cities of America. That is the only reason we can reorganize US force projection around robot strikes, strategic bombing, and even usable nuclear weapons. All of this represents a failure of the American imagination to grasp the real effect on real people of such assaults. We wage war without knowing war.
In each of these instances, the source of the greatness of the American character proves to have a dark side, and its forces are unleashed by overwhelming grief, anger, and fear. Darkness indeed. But the great insight of tragic literature – what Athens gave to the world – is that grief, anger, and fear can lead, in the mystery of human freedom, not to revenge, but to wisdom.
What is wisdom in our present circumstance except another way to think of war?
Reversing a longtime trend away from nuclear dependence, our government is projecting a US military strategy based on usable nukes, with unprecedented potential for first use against nonnuclear states, for development of new nuclear weapons, and even for a resumption of nuclear testing. This is a move from Mutual Assured Destruction, as The New York Times put it, to Unilateral Assured Destruction – our enemy’s. Washington has invited Dr. Strangelove back.
Beware the Ides of March? No. Beware the ”war on terrorism,” and the Nuclear Posture Review! We must urgently reconsider the course we have set out upon this year before it leads us into a dead end of our own making.
Then survivors will ask, When did America become Sparta? And the answer will come: It was now.
9/11 And The Evolution of The Western Spartan State
(Highlights)
The expansion of state emergency powers following the false flag 9/11 events was done for a purpose, and it isn’t to fight terrorism and stop Al-Qaeda, as people in the 9/11 truth community know full well. So far, these dangerous powers have not yet been used by Western governments against Western citizens with any sort of gusto, but their mild-mannered approach is going to change when the Western economy collapses and the United States and Israel attack Iran overtly.
The crackdown on Occupy Wall Street was mostly painless and civilized. But expect the police state to take off the gloves, especially when their joined by the military and martial law is declared by the President. The American Spartan State is not going to play nice with protesters, rioters, activists, persecuted minorities, Christian conservatives, libertarians, leftists, and the declining middle class.
The replacement of Western liberal democracies with Western Spartan States is happening in correspondence with the rise of an Islamic Caliphate in the Muslim world. The embryo of the Islamic Caliphate, the Islamic Republic of Iran, was created by the CIA and MI6 in cooperation with Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran’s power-hungry clerical establishment.
The Western Spartan civilization and the Islamic Caliphate that is forming in the East are both authoritarian and fascistic in nature. Hamas, which was created by Israel’s Mossad to counter-balance the power and popularity of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), has turned Gaza into a Spartan state and given the Israeli terrorist state further justification to continue its bloodletting policies towards the Palestinian people.
It is not an accident of history that the beneficiaries of Islamic tyranny in the East and corporate/banking tyranny in the West have increased their political power with the aid of the other. Both groups of tyrants have enslaved their subjects through deception and hunger for the “Clash of Civilizations” that has been engineered with mythic events like 9/11 and 7/7.
False Flags In London?
A false flag tragedy at the 2012 London Olympics would give the Western Spartan State further credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of the brainwashed Western public. Imagine the fireworks, and the public response. Remember what happened in the wake of 9/11. Americans went crazy. They told their government: Do what you have to do to make us safe. In the aftermath of a big false flag event in London, even bigger than 7/7, the same madness will overtake the minds of the British people and put the West further on edge.
In a lot of ways, we are already on edge. This is an emergency hour. We must approach reality with a 9-1-1 state of mind. England must be warned. If nothing happens, good. I want to watch the Games going off without a glitch. But if something does happen, then at least some people will have been saved from the ruthless state terrorists who are in power.
We should never lose our guard and refrain from the responsibility of warning people that new false flags may be coming down the pipeline.
The survival of freedom and the victory over Western totalitarianism depend on the distrust of government power. As the night watchmen of freedom, it is our job to be paranoid, so the public doesn’t have to be.
