Monday, May 26, 2008

The empire never ended


As we slingshot into the 21st Century, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the governments and institutions that mold our minds have implemented a system from which we cannot escape. Are we really trapped in a prison with no doors or walls?
Consider the following from Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference, by Erik Davis:

In the excepts of the Exegesis reworked into the "Tractates Crytptica Scriptura" that close the novel VALIS, Dick expresses the MIT computer scientist Edward Fredkin's view that the universe is composed of information. The world we experience is a hologram, "a hypostasis of information" that we, as nodes in the true Mind, process. "We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of information. This is the language we have lost the ability to read." With this Adamic code scrambled, both ourselves and the world as we know it are "occluded," cut off from the brimming "Matrix" of cosmic information.

Instead, we are under the sway of the "Black Iron Prison," Dick's terms for the demiurgic worldly forces of political tyranny and oppressive social control. Rome is the eternal paragon of this "Empire," whose archetypal lineaments the feverish Dick recognized in the Nixon administration.

Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a "technology of power" was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, "The Empire never ended."

I would like to assert the possibility that the prison has always been under construction, and it gets closer to view as it nears completion.

"The Empire Never Ended"

Philip Dick was a master of capturing the paranoid sense of reality that pervaded American society during the Cold War. In Dick's universe, for any mystery that may be explained by multiple scenarios, it is always the most extreme, the most paranoiac possibility that's the actual one. This is part of what drives his creativity and makes his novels interesting.

There are many reasons why this site is named after Dick, and one is that the peculiarly American, paranoid sensibility Dick captured in his novels has not left us. The Cold War has been replaced with the War on Terror, and in a perpetual war in which our very existence is supposedly at stake and in which those in power may be said to have questionable motives, one gets the sense that all (and I mean all) possibilities are on the table.

Take, for example, conspiracy theories regarding 9/11. There are those who suspect that, at the very least, some in the Bush administration had foreknowledge of the attacks and did nothing to stop them. They saw them as instrumentally valuable for justifying a necessary military build-up in the Middle East -- the requisite "new Pearl Harbor" that the Project for a New American Century's report on "Rebuiliding America's Defenses" (pdf) conceived as necessary for initiating a swift transformation of the military in all its aspects (not only increased spending and improved technology, but also "forward basing" and "presence" beyond US borders; see p. 50-1 in the report).

Now I am not prone to conspiracy theories. I don't wear a tinfoil hat. I'm a philosopher -- a skeptic by training. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet, as a philosopher, I'm also trained to consider all possibilities, and to be conscious of what can and cannot be, strictly speaking, ruled out.

And it seems to me that we cannot rule out 9/11 conspiracy theories on the grounds that they are unthinkable -- i.e. that those in power would never do such a thing.

For there is already a solid precendent for the planning of terrorist operations against innocent Americans to win public support for war. It was called Operation Northwoods. From ABC News:

In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders [i.e. the Joint Chiefs of Staff] reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

[snip]

Even after [the Head of the Joint Chiefs] Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan "pretext" operations at least through 1963.

One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base -- an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

Like Dick's stories, this article shows that anything is possible.


George Washington envisioned a wooded area alongside the Potomac River as the new federal city. The highest hill in the area, Jenkins Heights, was then owned by Daniel Carroll. In 1663, the owner of this land had been Francis Pope. Pope's name for the high hill was "Rome", and he called the nearby waterway "the Tiber."

Ancient Rome was a mere city which conquered the world. Although it apparently declined and fell, some say it did not fall but changed its form into the Roman Catholic Church and still dominates the world. Echoing this idea, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick theorized an enormous false memory imposed upon all humanity in which the last 2000 years of "history" never happened. According to Dick, author of the VALIS trilogy, we have been brainwashed by the Roman empire to think we are living in what is really a totally false world.

Washington's new Rome was surveyed, planned, designed and built largely by members of the secret society of Freemasons. On October 13, 1792 the cornerstone was laid for the President's House (now known as the White House). This cornerstone ceremony was performed by "the Free Masons of George-town and its vicinity," Georgetown Lodge No. 9 of Maryland. A year later, in September of 1793, freemason George Washington and Georgetown Lodge No. 9 performed another cornerstone ceremony, this time for the future Capitol Building.


The Empire Never Ended

Henry Kissinger has been all over the news lately, waxing strangelovian in his field of expertise, inhuman global horror.

A lawsuit filed in United States District Court in DC suing Kissinger and the US government on Monday, September 10 has so far not been mentioned in his learned deliberations. The family of Rene Schneider, asking $3 million in damages, accuses the defendants of "summary execution, assault, and civil rights violations." Schneider was a general in the Chilean Defense Forces who, according to the suit, refused to go along with a US-backed coup against newly elected socialist president Salvador Allende. The US government directed elements of the Chilean military to overthrow Allende's government before he had even taken office. The suit, based on recently declassified documents from the Nixon Era, indicates that Kissinger was calling the shots.

Schneider was ambushed on his way to work on Oct. 22, 1970. The CIA reportedly provided the guns used in the assassination. The CIA says the guns that documents show it sent for the crime weren't the actual guns used in the killing. There was some sort of mix-up, and the would-be kidnappers had to rely on their own devices. The CIA is now using its own previous bungling to demonstrate its innocence in the actual crime. (That argument incidentally, is pretty much the cornerstone of civilization as we know it.) The modernized CIA is, however, reformed enough not to quibble with its own cable to the Chilean military dated October 15, 1970: "It is the continuing policy of the US government to foment a coup in Chile."

Schneider's killing was supposedly a botched kidnapping attempt. The plan, apparently, was to take him to Argentina, while accusing leftists and terrorists of the kidnapping. The domestic fear aroused against leftists was to be used to facilitate imposition of a military government. Allende, the democratically elected president, was to be preempted from ever taking office.

Schneider instead reportedly pulled out a gun to defend himself and was shot dead. The CIA's analysis had argued that the ground wasn't yet ripe for a military takeover, but was overruled by the Nixon White House. The coup failed ... until 1973, when the US-backed Pinochet overthrew Allende and instituted a reign of terror and summary assassination of union members, leftists and suspected sympathizers.

Fast forward: as if we weren't all terrified enough, Kissinger sits on something called the Pentagon Defense Policy Board. The board, chaired by neanderthal Richard Perle also boasts such "eminent," conservatives as Dan Quayle and Newt Gingrich. This board's advice is that, since any strikes on Afghanistan, either with bombers or special forces, are unlikely to eliminate Bin Laden, the US should follow up with an attack on Iraq. Otherwise, the board reasons, the US military will look stupid killing a bunch of innocent Afghans for no logical reason.


Anti-Manifesto

At the heart of oblivion is empire.

The empire never ended.

If empire is the Sun, the planets of the solar system are its progeny. Saturn is the Pax Americana. Jupiter is the Pax Romana. Mercury is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Pluto is the Master Race. All the houses of the Demiurge are scattered in between.

The Demiurge is God made in the image of man. God, on the other hand, is the conjunction of all the forces of existence meeting in a unique thought. When we think for ourselves, then do we know God.

The Demiurge is a projection of our paranoid ego image. The Demiurge is the idol we invest with all our own repressed, unrealised potential. The Demiurge is the voice of empire, and speaks to us as a paranoid hallucination. The Demiurge exists for one purpose—to crush us, to break our spirit and our will.

Empire is that which we mistake for our own memories, for our own identity, for our own life. Empire is a relationship, a representation and a state of mind. Empire is the matrix of anhedonic social control.

The root of empire is the codification of the irrational paranoid streak in human consciousness, brought about by the evolutionary glitch in the triune brain, into systems of ideological and religious control, manifest in the false dichotomy of Good and Evil.

From the dualism of Good and Evil comes the Known and the Other. Dualism forestalls free will through the polarisation of language and ideas and the imposition of moral absolutes. It encourages a fear of the Doppelgänger, our mirror image opposite, the incarnation of our unknown Self. The primary function of dualism is to prevent the experience of anamnesis, the loss of forgetting, by imposing a programme of Divide and Conquer—a habitual result of paranoid self-delusion. Gender and race are arbitrary and therefore false distinctions; we all demonstrate human intelligence, and thus human right, through the power of speech, whatever our gender, class or race. The one you are told to hate and fear and to treat as inferior is your sister and your brother. Anamnesis occurs as we transcend the false dichotomy of Good and Evil through a modification of our behaviour in daily life.

Empire is all around us, but is also hidden in plain sight. At one time or another we are aware of empire, but gradually lose our awareness of it. We lose the ability to see empire because we internalise the paranoid assumptions on which it is based. The more we internalise empire, the more we lose ourselves in it. It is not empire that changes, it is us. We allow ourselves to be broken in by empire, to be domesticated like animals. We allow ourselves to be consumed by the worst aspects of our own nature.

Empire is sleep. The colonised are Sleepwalkers.


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