Remember too: We are not trying to supplant a perfect system, we are not competing with justice, we are intervening in a gallingly unequal and corrupt system on the brink of Armageddon.
As Chomsky’s essay on enforced corporatization makes clear, the head of the serpent that must be severed is the United States as defined by the Monroe Doctrine and “Manifest Destiny.” You hear this phrase a lot, but unless you’re an American schoolchild or a potential immigrant undergoing rigorous exams, you’re unlikely to know what it means.
One of the myths that America built itself on—and perhaps any nation builds itself on—is the idea that it has sublime, even divine reason to exist. Otherwise, it looks like it’s just a hashed-together construct that serves the interest of elites. No one wants to belong to a nation that overtly and clinically states: “This land mass/concept having a pinnacle that is controlled by an elite is a convenient way of harvesting resources both material and human, so shut the fuck up and salute.” It’s not a very inspiring message. Better to tell people that God likes your land mass and mountain ranges and flag and the leaders are just interpreting his wishes.
In the opening scenes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Graham Chapman’s King Arthur addresses some serfs he encounters as his subordinates. The serf played by Michael Palin asserts that he doesn’t know that he’s a Briton, that no one has explained the concept of nation to him or his position in a hierarchy, and he believes himself to be a member of an anarcho-syndicalist democracy, much like the ones I’m advocating. The scene is well funny because it comedically demonstrates the absurdity of nation and feudalism, ideas that are so familiar to us that we don’t question their validity.
The only thing that makes Britain Britain is our consent; the only thing that makes money money is our consent.
My mate Gee told me—and I choose to believe him; I happen to be in a very research-dense part of the book and can’t be fucked to check this particular fact, especially as it works as a metaphor even if it ain’t true—that the Dutch used to dominate the global economy in colonial times, in part because of the value of tulips and they had the tulip market by the balls. Then one day, I like to think apropos of nothing, everyone went, “Fuck tulips, they’re bullshit,” and the whole caper fell apart.
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Manifest Destiny
MANIFEST DESTINY IS AN IDEOLOGICAL PILLAR OF EXPANSIONIST America that proposes they have a divine right—beyond right, a duty—to take over nameless land and impose American values on it. They had this idea midway through the nineteenth century, and a glance at your TV set will show you that they’re still into it. The people of Finland don’t just get into boats, sail to New Zealand, and tell them they’re making a pig’s ear of it, they just get on with their Finnish gear.
You could argue that the majority of people in New Zealand are only there as a result of Britannia and our bowler-hatted version of “we know best,” so if the Finnish did turn up and start, I dunno, insisting they eat blubber, it’d be little more than they deserve.
These are broadly agreed to be the tenets of Manifest Destiny:
1. The special virtues of the American people and their institutions.
This literally means they think they’re better, even though there was no such thing as American people a few hundred years ago. They think that by moving to a new bit of this tiny rock in infinite space they have acquired supremacy and a colonial imperative.
2. America’s mission to redeem and remake the West in the image of agrarian America.
America has a mission. “Mission” is a word that is connected with doing God’s work. Also, of course, missionary position, which is apparently so called because when Christian ministers went to tribal regions in newly colonized lands, the folk that lived there fucked in a variety of ways, like all people, but because the missionaries were basically vicars, they thought the whole spectacle to be a stomach-churning display.
Firstly, why were they watching people having it off in the first place? Seems a bit of a cheek to me, and how is it an ecumenical matter? How did they even broach the subject? “Chief Umbohkoo, I’d like to watch you mating with Mrs. Umbohkoo, if I may.”
“Why, Reverend?”
“Good question. Mostly it’s to offer tips.”
“I thought you were celibate.”
“You’re right, sorry, I’ve just been lonely since I left Surrey and would like to watch a bit of howsyerfather.”
“Well, I’d like to help, but it’s private.”
So America is on a mission to make the West in the image of agrarian America. Who else is it that makes things in “his image” that you can think of? It’s God, isn’t it? It’s one of his most cherished skills. America has an image of itself as a place run, apparently, by farmers, and it wants to impose that on other people. I suppose the farm bit is okay; I imagine that having control over your own food is important for a formerly colonized nation. What did we do to them? America is like an abused child that grows up to become an abuser.
3. An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty.
I like that one the best. It’s irresistible, this destiny—that wording really hammers home the idea that it isn’t an idea that’s convenient for the people who propose it; no, it’s an external magnetic force that, even if you disagree with it, will suck you in. To fulfill a duty and the duty is essential, the very basis of being, and at its deepest and most indivisible level. America invading Iraq is as unquestionable as gravity or carbon. Don’t think about it; it just is.
Manifest Destiny, whilst a uniquely American imperialist term, is derived from the colonial concepts and obviously from ideas that precede even that, like “Romantic Nationalism … the form of nationalism in which the state derives its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs.” Well we’re all guilty of that.
As I write, Brazil have just been thrashed out of the World Cup they are hosting, and they are now “a nation in mourning.”
Brazil is an agreement in the mind, football is an arbitrary, temporary, consensual structure, and today as a consequence of the result of a football match, hundreds of millions of people are feeling real emotions: grief, regret, humiliation. Emotions perhaps exacerbated by the destructive economic and social impact of staging the event—homes were demolished, money was squandered.
We are voluntarily subscribing to belief systems that are punishing us and enabling us to be exploited. Surely ultimately an external affiliation to place should be manageable? Is patriotism essentially any different, other than in scale, to me making a decision to consecrate the room I’m now typing in? To declare it superior to other rooms, to give it a crest, an anthem, an ideology? People might go, “Russell, you idiot, that’s just the spare bedroom; your only relationship with it is that you’re in it.”
“No,” I’ll reply, “God put me here. What’s more, he told me that this is better than other rooms and I have a duty, an essential duty, to go to other rooms and build them in the image of the spare room; God told me to.” God told me to! Isn’t that what every lunatic who ever murdered a woman working as a prostitute has declared as his excuse?
So Chomsky explains that America has always seen itself as a nation of capitalist Christian soldiers “marching as to war,” ostensibly to protect its divinely chosen populace (all of whom are immigrants, except for the poor bastards who were there in the first place or the people they kidnapped to do all the work) from “evil.” When evil in the form of Soviet communism evaporated, did America revise its military expansionist programs in Latin America or the Middle East? The answer is no. They became more aggressive and promoted the idea of new ideological opponents. I’m not saying 9/11 was an inside job. The mysterious, ignored “third tower, building 7,” the signs of “controlled demolition,” the nationality of all the terrorists, are all cause for question. What is irrefutable is that America has a long history of carrying out invasions to impose the will of its corporate clientel
e, there is documentation of a plan to invade Iraq prior to 9/11, and the reasons they said they were invading Iraq have all since been proved to be untrue.
Henry Kissinger regarded conflicting national identity as a virus that had to be subdued and inoculated against. When Chile elected a socialist leader, Salvador Allende, America deposed him and replaced him with one who fitted in with their thinking, that cuddly ol’ Thatcher chum, General Pinochet—although if you ask me he wasn’t that general; he was specifically a bit of a bastard. They also used Chile to pilot some of the financial ideologies that have recently been crashing down around us in our markets.
America’s support of Israel continues to destabilize the Middle East. Chomsky says they like it unstable. Also, he points out that Saudi Arabia, the most hard core of the Islamic nations, is America’s tightest Arab ally in the region and that the United States, like the UK, quite likes fundamentalist Muslim states, preferring them in fact to secular Arab societies, as I suppose oppressive regimes, regardless of aesthetics, are easier to do business with, as they don’t have to respond to an empowered electorate.
Chomsky concludes that “security in the conventional sense” plays very little part in the formation of policy. By which he means the security of the population. The security that they are interested in preserving is the security for state power.
America has a well dodgy bit of legislation known as the Netherlands Invasion Act, that means that should any American citizen ever be tried at the Hague, Netherlands, which is where they try war criminals—like George W. Bush—America can storm in with helicopters and motorbikes and whisk him out the dock to freedom. Although given their recent history with foreign wars, they’d probably end up bombing Anne Frank’s house, torching the Van Gogh Museum, and running over Tony Blair on the way out.
Chomsky, in his lifelong audition speech for assassination, continues that the security that is claimed to be “for the people” is actually security “from the people,” which is where me and ol’ Chompers (as I’ve just started calling him) align.
Like I said, “Top Secret” means in practice “Don’t let that lot find out what we’re up to; they’ll go nuts.” The military and police force are primarily there as insurance for when we do finally rise up. Chomskerooney uses a quote from the prominent liberal scholar and government adviser Samuel Huntington to make his—let’s say “our”—point: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight, it begins to evaporate.” Blimey, a bit heavy that, then Chomsky adds:
“State power has to be protected from its domestic enemy; in sharp contrast, the population is not secure from state power.”
We’re the domestic enemy! Us and our mums and our little dreams of freedom. What the blazes is going on? We can’t trust our leaders at all; they’re all at it. When Edward Snowden, the nerdy, techno hero, Milky Bar, Harry Potter, speccy Neo, exposed the NSA surveillance program—that we were all being secretly spied on to an incomprehensible degree—because it made him feel all sick in his gutty-wuts, how did Obama’s administration respond? What was their justification? “We’re doing it for your security,” plus “If you want privacy or freedom, it can only mean you’ve got something to hide and you’re probably a pedo.”
Fucking hell, that’s amazing—like we’re the ones who’ve done something wrong when they have broken the laws that we elect them to uphold. Of course, the Americans were quick to label Snowden a traitor. “You bloody traitor, informing hundreds of millions of people that their government was spying on them—we were only doing that to stop terrorists.” It’s like when you catch someone acting suspicious on their phone and lying and they go all pious and outraged and say, “Actually I was only trying to arrange a surprise party for YOU, and now YOU’VE spoiled it.” Actually, I think that’s a soap opera cliché, not real life, but you get the point. It’s also what Göring said to do in his how-to-be-a-Nazi formula.
True to form, as Professor Chomsky points out in his article that I’m basically nicking, when Snowden exposed these unthinkable violations on the privacy and freedom of its population, the officials responsible hit back with the classic anti-terror narrative, claiming that the NSA’s measures had prevented fifty-four acts of terrorism.
When pressed on the matter, they went, “Alright, twelve.” Then, when the suspicious inquisitor insisted on checking, it turned out that all that aggro and spying, the nonconsensual compilation of oceans of private data, had revealed, wait for it, one—yes, one—dubious transaction: Somebody had sent eight and a half grand to Somalia. That’s slim pickings. That’s like in Life of Brian when that Roman garrison searches the HQ of the People’s Front of Judea and turns up one spoon.
Chomsky explains that the trade agreements—which we’ve all seen are the administrative assurances that we’re all doomed so people can turn a profit flogging goods that will be reciprocally imported—are being replicated and expanded.
Trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic pacts are being negotiated in secret with the collusion of squads of corporate lawyers. These pacts, like the pacts contrived in the past, are not free trade agreements; they are investor rights agreements, insurance for corporations that the conditions being created will guarantee profit. Why does this need to be done in secret? Because the conditions that benefit them fuck us right over.
They spy on us, they lie to us, they control us with violence, they sell us shit food and annihilate the planet, and all for a little bit of money. I wish they were lizards; that would make more sense. Certainly they are manifesting a reality that comes from reptilian consciousness, in that selfishness and greed are short-sighted, survivalist impulses that are outmoded and must now be upgraded. This next bit of Chomskers is so wicked, I’m not even going to patronizingly translate it into colloquial prose, just mainline neat Noam, straight into your synapses. Here he just gives it to us straight:
“There is, in other words, ample evidence that securing state power from the domestic population and securing concentrated private power are driving forces in policy formation.”
What Chomsky has done has spelled out for us, like we’re children or layabouts or P. G. Wodehouse characters who’d sooner pootle about in our jalopies than stare the stark reality of our virtual slavery in the face, is that we’re being fed porkie pies by a bunch of hell-bent swine.
Chomsky demands that we accept our role as sentient adults, as citizens. With fearless, ruthless, mechanical dexterity, he exposes the absurdity and disingenuousness of the dominant narrative. In this next paragraph—another that I’m loath to meddle with—he very simply demonstrates that our authorities, those in power, those who set the agenda, are not acting out of the paternal benevolence that they claim guides them. Check it:
“Take two prominent current examples, global warming and nuclear weapons. As any literate person is doubtless aware, these are dire threats to the security of the population. Turning to state policy, we find that it is committed to accelerating each of those threats—in the interests of the primary concerns, protection of state power and of the concentrated private power that largely determines state policy.”
Global warming is totally real, it has been empirically proven, and the only people who tell you it’s not real are, yes, people who make money from creating the conditions that cause it.
We’re reaching the end of Professor Chomsky’s contribution. I was intrigued by his inclusion in his essay of this quote from General Lee Butler, the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, which was armed with nuclear weapons: “We have so far survived the nuclear age by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”
Whether you believe in God or not, it is interesting to hear a military general in charge of nuclear weapons ascribing our avoidance of Armageddon to a Higher Power. I do believe in God, as must surely be abundantly clear. The more I learn, the
more I experience, the more certain I become. Perhaps the persistent belief that there is “something else,” some force that supersedes and governs, is simply derived from our ghostly knowledge that behind our own being is a separate and autonomous system that digests our food and pumps our heart and converts oxygen. It seems that those that reach the higher echelons of our man-made structures, or delve deeply into science, become initiated into an awareness of a nameless beyond. Indeterminate human cells are suddenly and invisibly triggered into purpose—no one knows why. No one knows when the soul alights upon these cells. No one knows the formula for consciousness, no one knows why our destruction has as yet not been permitted, and even the men with their fingers on the button ascribe it to God.
Noam Chomsky is too fastidious, diligent, and brilliant a man to cry “Revolution” at this time in his life of peerless truth-telling. But this final paragraph, to me, suggests but one course of action:
“As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in human history. There are many problems that must be addressed, but two are overwhelming in their significance: environmental destruction and nuclear war. For the first time in history, we face the possibility of destroying the prospects for decent existence—and not in the distant future. For this reason alone, it is imperative to sweep away the ideological clouds and face honestly and realistically the question of how policy decisions are made, and what we can do to alter them before it is too late.”
Thanks, Noam, I’ll take it from here. So we’re fucked unless we organize and disobey. They’ve got this sewn up. They own both the teams that are competing, the stadium they play in, the grass they play on, and we’re the ball they’re kicking around. They have removed all possibility for reform or redirection within the system; the change must come from us. Our only hope of survival is to overthrow their structures and take our power back.
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