The US – that powerful nation standing for peace, self-determination and liberty – as Charles Hugh Smith discusses, is a spectacle, an artifice, a lie. Smith refers to Guy Debord’s 1967 book, and Debord’s subsequent Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.
Debord seems to have completely anticipated my life as a child of the Cold War and adult participant in the rise of the executive warfare state. What’s more, he explained it:
The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalised secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.
The constructs in which we operate provide for endless intellectual challenges, often taking us down deep rabbit holes. But rabbit hole or not, all of us are living and producing within a simulated liberty, accompanied by – to paraphrase Debord and Smith – hyper-complex technological systems, unitary and ahistorical governments, and all-encompassing state and techno-narratives created to replace the humane and silence humanity.
We are fascinated by what we see on our screens – in Gaza, in Ukraine and now Venezuela, even in the Pacific. Yet, we must have been getting a snack when the plot twisted and the peace and America First campaign morphed into Tomahawks to Kiev, brutal US-assisted genocide in Gaza, the US Navy blowing up fishermen and other civilians in international waters at will, without consequence.
The media summary of the latest Gaza flotilla was pure Hunger Games-style pablum: “It was the first time since Israel imposed a naval blockade on Gaza’s waters in 2009 that an unauthorised humanitarian mission has reached closer than 70 nautical miles from the territory.” What is an ‘unauthorized’ humanitarian mission?” Apparently they’re quite common, as we saw with Bush 43 and Katrina, feeding the homeless, and even Peanut the Squirrel.
The current idiotic fiascos – NATO’s Ukraine and Israel’s expansionist murder spree – have been curiously unwinnable, and even more curiously, unstoppable. Trump complained he didn’t understand how difficult it would be to end these wars. The vast majority of countries represented in the United Nations probably agree with Trump on this point – why can’t the stupidity and inhumanity just be stopped (ideally by the US government simply ceasing to fund them)?
Hellbound and Down 