Signs of the Times - 2004-04-15

Yesterday's Signs page carried the following article:

Americans have not learnt the lessons of history

By Niall Ferguson
Telegraph.co.uk
10/04/2004

Around this time last year I had a conversation in Washington that summed up what was bound to go wrong for America in Iraq. I was talking to a mid-ranking official in the US Treasury about American plans for the post-war reconstruction of the Iraqi economy. She had just attended a meeting on precisely that subject. "So what kind of historical precedents have you been considering?" I asked. "The post-Communist economies of Eastern Europe," she replied. "We have quite a bit of experience we can draw on from the 1990s."

When I suggested that the problems of privatisation in Poland might not prove relevant on the banks of the Euphrates, she seemed surprised. And when I suggested that she and her colleagues ought at least to take a look at the last Anglophone occupation of Iraq, her surprise turned to incredulity. Not for the first time since crossing the Atlantic, I was confronted with the disturbing reality about the way Americans make policy. Theory looms surprisingly large. [...] The lessons of history come a poor second, and only recent history - preferably recent American history - gets considered.

There was amazement last year when I pointed out in the journal Foreign Affairs that in 1917 a British general had occupied Baghdad and proclaimed: "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." By the same token, scarcely any American outside university history departments is aware that within just a few months of the formal British takeover of Iraq, there was a full-scale anti-British revolt.

What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. [...]

Freedom can be defined in terms of the level of ability to interact in a real and meaningful way with life and the world around us. Freedom is nothing if it is not freedom to know and understand truth and reality. The closer we can get to an objective view of true reality the freer we are. Conversely, the further we are from a true understanding of reality, the less we are able to interact in a meaningful way with life, and the more enslaved we are.

Far from being a land of opportunity where persecuted peoples the world over could find refuge and realise their dream of creating the first truly free and egalitarian society, with hindsight it seems that modern America was designed, from the very beginning, to be a vast Petri dish for an experiment to create a nation of people that would willingly submit their will to the ruling elite to an extent never before seen in modern times, while at the same time believing themselves to be the living embodiment of personal freedom.

Of course, such a grand plan could not be accomplished overtly or by the use of force, since the key to success was in creating an environment where the people themselves would fight to maintain their own state of enslavement. The most obvious and natural way to achieve this was to make lies and illusion the foundation of modern American society and the yardstick by which the American people define themselves. The battle then was for control of the minds of the American people.

As infants we know nothing of reality, as we grow we undergo a process of socialisation, from which we obtain our sense of who we are, our values, our sense of morality and, perhaps most significantly, our education. All of these things are given to us at a stage in our lives when we have no ability to choose if we truly want them or not. By the time we are old enough to make "independent" choices about what to do with our lives we have already been so programmed to view the world in one specific way, that there is literally nothing independent about any choices we might make from then on. This process of socialisation then is crucial in defining our view and understanding of reality.

While morality, values and sense of self are all important for our development as conscious responsible human beings, we will not get far without at least a semi-objective understanding of the world in which we live. As a result of the dire level of education offered to the average American citizen, their understanding of the world outside the borders of their "great nation" is virtually nil, or distorted to such an extent that they would probably be better off if it were nil. Of course, such a state of affairs is without doubt deliberately contrived by those that set the educational curriculum. Humans by their nature have an inherent need to understand, yet we also tend towards egocentricity and fear of the unknown. This aspect of human nature has been used against Americans to great effect in securing their participation in their own enslavement.

By denying most Americans access to good quality education the ruling elite are able to play on this fear of the unknown and make Americans very susceptible to xenophobic propaganda and the idea that their country is the definition of freedom. Of course, when your have little or no awareness or appreciation of other cultures or peoples (at least none that is based in reality), it is much easier to allow yourself to be convinced that your country is the "greatest nation on earth" and that other nations and peoples are somehow lesser. The level of deception is so deep and the illusions so engrained that few Americans know or would be willing or able to accept that their "great nation" stands tall only because it stands on the corpses of 80 million native American Indians who had to be sacrificed to create the world's first "free and democratic nation." It seems that the ability of modern Americans to appreciate irony is another casualty of the grand American enslavement experiment.

While on one level it is true that America became a home for a diversity of racial types and cultures, any potential benefits of this eclecticism were subverted through the promotion of an internal xenophobia, and all original cultures were forced to give way to the hollow "benefits" of a homogenous yet soulless American "culture".

It is not hard to see how the ignorance and fear of other cultures and the ethnocentricity that is rife in American "culture" readily gives rise to indifference among Americans when their leaders are seen to carry out acts of cruelty and inhumanity against other peoples. Of course, there are US citizens who, even when made aware of the deception and lies that have lead them to support the atrocities carried out in their name by their leaders, will continue to support them.

The real tragedy is that there appears to be a large number of US citizens who, even at this late stage, remain unwitting victims of the insidious and incredibly pervasive mind programming that defines American society and culture. If given a chance, they might choose to stand up for truth, yet the fact that they have never known even simple truth, and never admitted that are being lied to, makes the task of recognising and accepting deeper truth all the more difficult, if not almost impossible. One wonders then why we would even try to convey these ideas to our American readers? The reason of course is that there is no other option. We have to hope that, even against odds that were not included in our expectations, the seed of love for the truth exists and will finally spring forth.

Nothing short of an intense and deliberate effort to SEE the truth of the perilous situation is required, if we are to hope that the bonds of mental (and soon to be physical) enslavement can be broken, and the chance to act for our own collective destinies secured.

As Gurdjieff commented:

"The white man knows, as it were, nothing about the ways of life which are not his own. The world-wide diffusion of western civilisation has protected him better than ever before from having to take seriously that of other peoples.The uniformity of behaviour and the general outlook which he sees are prevalent everywhere seem to him sufficiently convincing and he accepts without further ado the idea of a simple equivalence between human nature and his own cultural standards."

In Order to shake off the contemptuous ignorance and prejudices which still exist in contemporary man, a certain disorientation seems necessary at the outset. He needs to feel the full blast of a gale force wind and to submit to the shock of enquiry, which runs counter to all his habitual ways of thinking and his ethical beliefs. If his instinct for self preservation, or concern for his intellectual comfort do not hinder him too much, he has some chance of then discovering in himself and echo of these ways of thinking and of feeling which are so unfamiliar to him, and which will resound in him not as a menacing frustration but, the very opposite, as an enrichment, a broadening of his field of experience. - "In Search of a Living Culture" - Lecture by Henri Tracol, 1961, Aix en Provence, France

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Bush hails 'historic' Sharon plan

Wednesday, 14 April, 2004

US President George W Bush has hailed Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's plans to disengage from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
Mr Bush called Mr Sharon's proposals "historic and courageous".

He restated his commitment to a Palestinian state, but appeared to rule out one which included the whole West Bank, saying realities on the ground had changed.

But Yasser Arafat said US backing for the plan would wreck all peace hopes.

A statement from the Palestinian leader's office said American endorsement of Mr Sharon's settlement plans "will settle the issues that were up for negotiation in the final-status talks and will lead to the destruction of... the peace process". [...]

Comment: "Sharon is a 'war criminal' who ordered his troops to use methods of barbarism against the Palestinians... It is time to remind Sharon that the Star of David belongs to all Jews and not to his repulsive government. His actions are staining the Star of David with blood." -- Gerald Kaufman, veteran Labour MP and Britain's most prominent Jewish parliamentarian - London, April 17, 2002