Sunday 23 August 2009

EMPIRE BURLESQUE

Posted by Picasa
AN INQUIRY INTO POWER
PART ONE: THEN.

Where did they all come from, these crew-cut, imperial loonies, waddling, armoured, gum-chewing, coke-swigging, bellyaching around the world, kicking sand in everybody's face?

Although the United States of America will soon become a black-majority state, the roots of the American Empire lie in our own tribe, within we sorry-assed, white, anglo-saxon, protestant motherfuckers.


New Hampshire, New England, New York, Boston, Virginia, Carolina, Georgetown, the Founding Motherfuckers dressed the New World in the nomenclature of the Old, specifically of Old England and even though they have been augmented by Paddies and Spics and Hermans and po-faced Meinheers, by Chinks and Wops and Dagos and Polacks, it is a boot fashioned on an English last which stands on the world's throat; almost, as inadequates like Milliband might posit, a British empire by proxy. Two nations united by one ruling caste.

Funny how language so very easily masks intent. When Prime Minister Snot, for instance, talks of a moral compass we know that he describes the opposite - ruthless amorality harnessed to the pursuit of political opportunism, vanity, wanton deceit and wickedness at every turn, fair is foul and foul is fair - and yet he continues, is permitted to continue sermonising, skymadeupnewsandfilth reporting faithfully his every fraudulent word, it doesn't matter how scathing is Rupert's barrowboy philosopher, Jeff Randall, after the event; Mr Snot owns the highground of the headline, his words history, Randall's just white noise, just comment, like this. Bizarrely, despite all the evidence that we shouldn't, we permit Uncle Sam, too, up to his nostrils in debt, disease, larceny, blood, atrocity, racism and murder, to write the global catechism. Or some of us do.

I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT

When the so-called Pilgrim Fathers, like Pakistanis to Bradford, carried their own mad wee sects across the Atlantic their flight into the unknown was termed as though they were doing not their own will but God's. And so it has remained; the ethnic cleansing of an entire continent, the shackling of millions in slavery, in apartheid; the gang-raping and napalming of Otherness, all this is to God's purpose, America, the last great hope of Mankind; it has been so written and preached now for a couple of centuries at least, the Hollywood machine reinforcing it for one of those centuries. History according to Louis Meyer and John Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. Fuck me, God, we are in trouble.

The industrial-scale warfare of the the twentieth century and the military-industrial complex of today - War Is Prosperity - began in the nineteenth, at Gettysburg and Chickamauga and in the driving from the Plains of the native Americans, the Gatling and the Hotchkiss guns demonstrating the compassion felt by those carrying the White man's burden, the local, the indigenous made villain and slaughtered, the foundries and railroads working overtime; be it the Massacre At Wounded Knee Creek,

A LITTLE ETHNIC CLEANSING

or the Massacre at MyLai, the Torture at Abu Ghraib,

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS

the Gang-Raping of Fallujah, the Waterboarding at Guantanamo, if Uncle Sam decides that others are sub-human, communist, moslem or some other breed of non profit-making untermenschen then his Momma'sBoy psychobastards can just cut loose, for Democracy, God and Fuhrer.


They've been doing it ever since the nineteenth century, exporting mayhem all over the globe. They don't count Iraqi or Afghani dead, only good injun's a dead injun, Praise the Lord. And pass the ammunition. So far America's crimes have been against the wog, the spic, the nigger, the jap, the slope, the ay-rab, the mex, the cuban and he has not raised his fist or his boot against we white folks - apart from when we were all doing it to Hitler - against his co-religionists, we, from the Old Country; we, meantime, have been reluctant to chastise him, fearful he might smash the crockery, it's what you call a Special Relationship, our Uncle the bullier, we the bullied. We should tell him to fuck off. What's the worst he can do?

IF SOME OTHER FUCKER HAS THEM IT'S DANGEROUS. BUT NOT IF WE HAVE THEM. THEN IT'S REALLY COOL.

Posted by Picasa


ROCK OF AGES CLEFT FOR ME, LET ME HIDE MYSELF IN THEE
AND WHILE THE BOMBERS THUNDER PAST, SHELTER ME FROM BURN AND BLAST
AND THOUGH I KNOW ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS
LET THE FALLOUT FALL ON OTHERS.

a 1960s Armageddon anthem, anon.

The government of the United Rogue States of America has twice detonated nuclear weapons over civilian populations. Good job they were only Japs. Not proper humans. More like Apaches.


A SHITHOUSE NAMED DESIRE.

Holywood and its bastard spawn, Rock'n'Roll, have iconographised the Vietnam Dead Wall, sixty thousand grunts wasted in Indo-China, their names may liveth forevermore, even if they didn't make it past twenty. Yet in one US bombing spree, Operation Rolling Thunder, it is estimated that between sixty and a hundred and sixty thousand Vietnamese civilians died, the devastation and the ongoing deaths from associated toxicity make precise figures impossible; in the US assault of Indo-China, total Vietnamese deaths are estimated to be between three and four million souls, far more munitions rained down on this small country than in the whole of World War Two. And still Uncle Sam fled, hanging from a helicopter, hiding his head up his arse.

DRAFT DODGER SPUNKY BILL AT THE VIETNAM WALL.

MAH FELLOW MOTHERFUCKERS, AH FEEL YO' TITS. BUT LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, IF WE'D A HAD TO PUT UP A WALL FOR ALL THE GOOK SONSABITCHES WE OFFED, ONLY NOT ME, IT'D NEED TO BE FIFTY, SIXTY TIMES THE SIZE O THIS MOTHER, ALL THE WAY OUT THE PARK AND CLEAR ACROSS THE POTOMAC. AIN'T AMERICA WONDERFUL ? VOTE FOR HILLARY NEXT TIME. THAT BITCH'LL SHOW YOU WHAT WAR'S ALL ABOUT.

The entire US political and cultural machine, Infotainment, has somehow erased from history the millions dead, maimed and disfigured abroad and backlit the handful of ghosts at home; everyone from Oliver Stone to Bruce Springsteen, the American Billy Bragg, shifting product to a market of shameless, maudlin, tie-a-yellow-ribbon xenophobia; Oscars and Grammys all round. The maimed vets are still mistreated but Hey, haven't we got some good songs, some great movies, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket; I never knew Clint Eastwood fought in 'Nam but I'm not surprised, he's a really fit guy for his age; the angry heartbreak of David Morrel's First Blood turned to trash by Sylvester Franchise Stallone, wash away my sins in the blood of the Saviour, John Rambo. The recent past, like the present, made fiction, easier like that; it's the American way.

The Emperors no longer serve. Obama didn't serve, Clinton didn't serve - and his pretend Mrs famously didn't dodge any bullets, either; Bush junior didn't serve, Reagan didn't serve but My, how they do that hand-on-heart shit, I would have served but I was more important at home, being a lawyer, or some other kind of All-American crook.

And the whole obscene Vietnam decade melted into showbusiness and shit journalism, it's reality hi-jacked, here, by cretinous, effete junkies like John and Yoko, to the worthless layabout careers of such as Peter Hain and Tariq Ali and the unspeakable Germaine Greer and in the States to massed choruses of, God spare us, 'sixties protest singers. We Shall Overcome our way to the top of the album charts; Kissinger, McNamara and the rest honoured at home and abroad, only grubby old Nixon copping some shit, and that for burglary, not war crimes.


THE LONG NIGGER HOLOCAUST,


"They're selling postcards of the hanging" is the first line of Mr Bob Dylan's Desolation Row and refers to the factual, printed, celebration of the lynching of an entirely innocent negro fairground worker in Dylan's home town, Hibbing, Minnesota, way up North, on the Canadian border.

Alongside Vietnam, a hundred years after the Civil War and twenty years after Hitler's war ended, a large part of the United States ran its own, good ole boy reich, KKK stormtroopers castrating, tarring-and-feathering and lynching niggers, firebombing their churches, drowning civil rights activists and generally keeping the nigger in his place - or as the Pledge of Allegiance has it :



"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, .............


........indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.."

Gosh, if only Guido had been active then, those Imperial Wizards wouldna gone short of Pizza.

JFK was a windy, deceitful, golden boy; a vain, gobby, priapic jackanapes, propelled into the presidency by the money and connections of his father, Joe - a Nazi supporter when US Ambassador to the Court of King James in the late thirties - and seized-on by skymadeupnewsandfilth as politics made glamour-product. Whether JFK would have made good on his civil rights rhetoric is unknown but in these matters and most others he and Jacki O were as shallow and frothily insincere as their imitators, Tony and Imelda Blair, and it fell, post-Kennedy, to the apparent redneck, Lyndon Johnson, to ram home to the Deep South what Nuremberg had made clear to les collaborateurs and Quislings and Nazis and Popes in Europe.

The National Guard moved against the segregationists and policed the integration of universities, buses and washrooms; having reluctantly helped defeat fascism abroad, Uncle Sam had been institutionalising it at home , the federal government finally being forced by its wiser citizens to drag the Southern States into the twentieth century. Despite its continuing history of barbarism at home, the US has always felt able to moralise abroad, preaching from a gun barrel, grinding the unGodly beneath tank tracks.

Alone among so-called liberal democracies, Uncle Sam retains, glories in the death penalty, the madder, the sicker, the younger they are, the better. And in the home of God-fearing racism, the nigger tops the bill on Death Row, in mediaeval maximum security lockdown, in frame-ups; is per capita something like twelve times as likely as whitey to do time; despite chained and horsewhipped generations spent creating it, nigger owns an infinitesimal fraction of the national wealth, is far more likely to be unschooled, unemployed, addicted, murdered; never shoulda let them coons off the plantation. America has its own Trevor Phillipses, Keith Vazes, slimeballs, black people gone white, Mr President, suh, being one of them, Preacher Jesse Jackson another, doing very nicely, Uncle Tomming for a living, blethering, in their mansions, on their Tee-Vee shows, about the struggle. Husn now, children, Freedom's coming. Tomorrow. Or the day after. Once we done thrashed these niggers in Afghanistan. And give all yo' money to Wall Street. Jes' like always.

His gangster predecessor having set the Middle East ablaze, the Empire of Obama the First (Black Man To Be...whose DaddyWouldnaGotAJobMowingTheWhiteHouseLawn etc etc) focuses afresh on the wogs in Southern Asia, leading his lambs to the slaughter. Colonel Douglas MacGregor, US Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes the hopeless project in South Asia this way:

"Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."

Twenty years after the forces of the red army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, General Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. As in Vietnam, America is wasting lives and resources. The British tried for a hundred years to suppress these guys, threw the book at them, bombed them, in the thirties, Saddam-style, with nerve gas, the fuzzy-wuzzies are still there.

A belligerent, bankrupt, stupid empire, greedy, racist and xenophobic, half its citizens believing that God made the world in six days, the other half enslaved to pornography, many spraying one another with bullets, twenty per cent of them without health care, most of them dangerously obese, too many of them lawyers, four per cent of the world's population consuming twenty-six percent of the world's resources - and all because we wouldn't let them pray as they wanted to.

And now they venture into the caves of the world's best genetically-engineered guerilla fighters. When Ahmed isn't fighting a succession of foreign invaders, he's fighting Abdullah Abdullah, his cousin, it's what he does. Obama, the lawyer, thinking that his airy, Ivy League rhetoric and his firm-but-fair, fatuous Sunday School aphorisms will coax Ahmed from his cave is a fool, as well as a knave. Expecting his voters to believe his horseshit is one thing; expecting us to is downright rude of him.

In Part Two: Now. The Imperial Real Estate. How bankrupt America maintains eight hundred lawless military facilities, worldwide. And keeps a straight face.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

What is the worst that can happen? A worldwide bloodbath of the various Monotheistic Faithful? Global destruction that sets back 'Civilisation' a thousand, or ten thousand years? A planetary bonfire lit by the appallingly-certain Floggers of Faith and stoked by the equally-unwavering Producers of Products? No, that is not the worst that could happen.

Religion is a tool: a tool of oppression, a tool of destruction, a tool of justification. The worst that could happen is that the world could burn and bothing significant would change. Nothing, that is, that would make that most despicable tool forever useless.

Dick the Prick said...

Echellente Mr Ishmael. Whilst Blighty is, ya know, shit on many levels at least we're not that shit. I guess it's just the point in time that we find ourselves and your mention of cluster bombing anything that moved in the early 20th century shouldn't be forgotten, our 'invention' of concentration camps, our wholesale massacres in India or wherever the fuck Tuesday was - well, at least we're willing comrades in the sociocide that is Iraq and Afghanistan...hmm...I think i've just walked into a corner. What difference between us and them? 80 years? 70? Just 1 lifetime and a few million souls? Cheers again.

Anonymous said...

You forgot to mention how the slopes, ungrateful fuckers reacted to Agent Orange. Still making its mark now on stillbirths and deformities.

call me ishmael said...

Thanks Mr DTP. These corners are everywhere, a wilderness of corners, every time a man opens his mouth, a corner jumps in. I think it's just in the nature of Rebuke that much of it can be self-reproachful, also, but just because I am not without sin doesn't mean that I shouldn't cast a stone in Uncle Sam's direction.

It is hard to look at, say, Yorkminster or Chartres or even Stonehenge or hear the Messiah or Mozart's Requiem and remain entirely anti-religion; without its force what else would have harnessed such industry, inspired such art but the Idea of God, of Judgement, Repentance and Redemption? Ithink GBS said that Religion was a sop to Man's innermost fear of finity, by which we make sense and draw comfort from what would otherwise be totally incomprehensible - existence. Be that as it may, is there anything more benign and pragmatic, in personal and planetary terms, than the Sermon on The Mount?

It is very tricky, despising the corporate practice of Religions Inc, as they bless the bombers and rubberstamp Tommy's soul for God, whilst appreciating its Arts & Crafts divisiuon, wondering at its buildings and paintings, nodding at its scriptures, its proverbs, its psalms.

I think your worst is the likeliest, Mr Edgar. If you haven't, then google the Saga of Gordon The Ruiner, books one and two, by stanislav, a young Polish plumber, or go to The Daily Politics of Mr Swiss Bob, who has them stashed and illustrated, if you have the time. I do believe that thay say as much about the rituals of Faith as they do about Ruin.

call me ishmael said...

I didn't forget, mr anonymous I just omitted the name, hoping another might mention it. I did mention the associated ongoing toxicity of American aerial bombardment making it difficult to properly count the dead - the same sort of chemical warfare for which we publicly hanged the late Mr Saddam - and for which Secretary Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize - only much more intensive; EarthCrime, brought to you by GlobaCorp.

Caractacus said...

You paint a grim picture, Mr. Ishmael but I guess that if the full truth were known, it would be grimmer still. I suspect that there are, and have been for some time, and for want of a better term, dark forces at work on both sides of the Atlantic and these 'forces' are at the very core to 'our' - not yours or mine - special relationship with America. Hence the incomprehension to most sane minded people why we - a few chosen people 'in' Government and not you and me - are always so willing to go along with Uncle Sam regardless that it appears to go against our - yours and mine not theirs - national interest.

Anonymous said...

Thank you Mr Ishmael. I will look for the saga you mentioned.

As for what inspires great art and impressive architecture, I draw a distinction between a kind of spiritual imperative (that seems to drive many human beings) and religion. I think it is the former that is often responsible for the most awe-inspiring productions of the human mind. Religion, on the other hand, excels at generating hatred, bloodshed, and books - lots and lots of books.

mongoose said...

Mr Ishmael, Dick the Prick,

Power corrupts, Gentlemen. We will make a glass desert and call it Pax Americana. It's what empires do. Fortunately, the over-reaching, the hubris and the ever-increasing need to square everything with "the vision thing" means that they are all dust in the end. Squalid and spent, viciously shagging each other's everyone else, scratching the names of their enemies from the temple walls, desperately writing their own histories before it is too late and the Vandals are at the gate. And then, bang, it is all gone.

Eventually we learn to live sensibly - like the Greeks or the Romans do now - empires and power long-fled, quietly they rock their children to sleep, a siesta and a glass, a pretty girl passes an ancient arts-and-crafts symbol of political glories long-forgotten. And today becomes tomorrow.

And I would rather have Chartres or Stonhenge or the Acropolis than what? The Hannah Bleedin' Montana boxed set?

If the Tommies could only set down their bag of imperial rocks and understand that Hamburg or Dresden or the Highland Clearances or the invisible slaughter of the Autralian aboriginals or the potato famine or... Well, need we go on? Not as efficient and Mom-and-apple-pie-we-don't-have-to-even-bury-them clean as instantaneous vaporisation but no less deliberate. They are all at it. Be it in the name of God - "I was afraid to say this but now [blink] I am more afraid not to. [choke],[sob] God Bless America", the vicious old fraud - or at it in the name of Queen and Country. Or, and surely the saddest, in the name of some vile, deranged political construct - Communism, a fire'n'brimstone Catholicism for the twentieth century. Who cares? The mad bastards.

The Titanic sails at dawn and everybody is shouting "Which side are you on?".

Dick the Prick said...

It has to be the case that there is some kind of distinction between then & now. The search for knowledge is insatiable but this kit here - this kit that we type on that provides the best library at our fingertips is surely all we were searching for all along. Why now fight instead of purchase?

I guess when the British conquered before the airplane, wars were still assymetric but not beyond hideous. These days they can have a cup of tea in one hand and wipe out 1,000 people with the other and it doesn't make the news. If we've been in Iraq since 2003 and there's been a million deaths in total, well, lots of tea's been drunk. Soldiering can be noble. Calley is an evil man but at least he did it face to face - at least he smelt their death. What of the logistics chap? What of the guy who presses the button and destroys and then goes for a wank? I bet some of them do?

York Minster or St Pete's as locals call it is more than religion. It took over 100 years to build the current version and it burns down on regular occasions.

Dark Lochnagar said...

Quite a spiel Ishmael but very interesting. It must have taken you ages. I get bored around 200 words. I look forward to the next part.