“Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization." - Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives; Pg. 35.A general consensus is emerging that in the quest for American hegemony America's plutocrats and warhawks staged a new pearl harbor (the September 11 attacks) on American soil to get the American people fired up once more about an external threat, and then manipulated their feelings of fear, patriotism, and revenge to launch a global war on terrorism, and military invasions of various countries in the Middle East.
"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." - Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard; Pg. 211.
"The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” - Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard; Pg. 24-25.
The need for a new pearl harbor to arouse the American people and give them a new historical mission was a key observation made in a report published in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative thinktank, called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century." The September 11, 2001 attacks fulfilled the necons' wish. In their minds they are benevolent authoritarians and heroes because they believe that they gave America a wake up call in the form of a grand act of violence and terrorism on the country's biggest stage. In reality, though, they acted as high-level rioters who incited the American people, and terrorized their psyche - and by spreading American state terrorism around the globe, they have also terrorized the world's psyche.
After setting America on fire on 9/11 the Bush administration and the neocons posed as the firemen with water hoses in hand, and as guardians of the country with a new grand vision and direction for America. Whether these traitors who planned, justified, and executed 9/11 have a split personality, and mental health problems, or if they're just delusional, greedy, and manipulative authoritarians is a question that many of us have asked ourselves, but it bears repeating and constant probing. They could be both arrogant and insane. Also, they could be mad geniuses who sincerely believe that they are good and noble. Richard Perle, a prominent neocon, was described as "mad" by journalist John Pilger in an article he wrote called "A New Pearl Harbor" in December 2002. Pilger wrote:
One of George W Bush’s “thinkers” is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about “total war”, I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America’s “war on terror”. “No stages,” he said. “This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”Perle's notion that "our children will sing great songs about us years from now," for waging a global war is so completely insane. Is he being truthful and sincere? Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush expressed the same idea when they said that America would be greeted as a liberator in Iraq. They're either perpetual liars who don't mean anything they say, or they're suffering from irrational delusions. It's a tough nut to crack. What motivates criminals and manipulative thinkers like the neocons is not easy to answer, but I hope psychologists are on the case. And why manipulative and deceptive people are able to rise in society, politics, and government is an even more important question.
C. Bradley Thompson, a Professor of Political Science at Clemson University, and co-author of the book "Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea," told Harper's Scott Horton what the neocons consider to be the greatest threat to American society, and why they love war so much. Thompson:
The single greatest threat to America, according to many neocons, is not communism or radical Islam but nihilism, and they see nihilism as the inevitable outcome of Enlightenment liberalism and America’s founding principles. The real problem with liberal-capitalist society for Strauss, Kristol, and Brooks is that individuals do not sacrifice themselves to anything higher than themselves and their petty self-interest. What America needs, therefore, is a two-step antidote for its cultural malaise: the inculcation of public virtue and the promotion of nationalism. The neocons seek to restore a public philosophy that promotes sacrifice as the great moral ideal and patriotism as the great political ideal.When people in power extol the virtues of sacrifice the results are always catastrophic and destructive. All self-serving rulers throughout history have manipulated the people's honest and good intentions. Hitler energized his soldiers by instilling in them the ideas that war is honorable and that sacrificing for the Nazi state is good. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So it is not at all surprising that neocons rationalize their reign of terror by saying that their goals are virtuous and good.The American people need something greater than themselves to live for. They need to learn the virtue of sacrifice, which means war. War–perpetual war–is the ultimate means by which the neocons can fight creeping nihilism and promote sacrifice and nationalistic patriotism. An aggressive, proactive foreign policy therefore serves a greater purpose–to raise ordinary Americans above their daily, selfish concerns. Nation building also provides neoconservative statesmen with a grand theatre on which to practice their statesmanlike virtues.
Eight months before three passenger jets slammed into the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, murdering several thousand innocent people, the neoconservative Michael Ledeen published a book extolling Machiavellian virtue and its relevance for today. Ledeen there projected his great hope for America: that it might “get lucky” and be awakened and renewed morally by a devastating attack similar to that of Pearl Harbor. Well, it would seem that America got “lucky” from Ledeen’s perspective. In the end, this is what neoconservatism is all about and it’s why we’ve written its obituary in the hopes of killing it.
Understanding the mentality of the neocons and others who control the U.S. National Security State is a matter of national survival for the American people. America's rulers rival the most despicable and loathsome rulers in history. They are the greatest enemies of America, the American people, and world peace. As we witnessed on 9/11, they are capable of killing innocent Americans, and blaming foreigners for their evil deeds.
We must resist and prosecute America's manipulative rulers before they start another war in the Middle East. The denial about 9/11 must end. Government terrorism will stay with us if we do not question it and expose it. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote a year ago in his article "The Road to Armageddon: The Insane Drive for American Hegemony Threatens Life on Earth": "For their own good and that of the wider world, Americans need to pay attention to the growing body of experts who are telling them that the government’s account of 9/11 fails their investigation."
