Bush’s Tower of Babble
by William Bowles
 Talk about using loaded words! Israel is both literally and figuratively, loaded. The other of course is nuclear. Note however that in this instance, Bush talks not about Iran actually building nuclear weapons, now he’s talking about Iran gaining the knowledge to build one.
‘Iran’, ‘Israel’, ‘Destroy’, “Nuclear Weapon’, ‘WWIII’, ‘Knowledge’, ‘Prevention’ - Bush
The change may appear to be slight but it makes perfect sense given the trajectory of the propaganda war and its outcome, namely the failure by the US to utilise the UN in its nefarious plans and that the central plank of the Bush/Gordon assault, that somehow Iran is hiding its atomic ambitions, has failed notably to impress. Thus the retreat into ‘thought crimes’. However, ‘thought crimes’ are notoriously difficult to refute, who knows what anybody is thinking?
“[W]e got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to
destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in
avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in
preventing them from have [sic] the knowledge necessary to make a
nuclear weapon…â€
— president Bush in a White House press conference,
September 5, 2006
The knowledge of what it takes to build a nuclear weapon is freely
available in any public library or university anywhere in the world,
more difficult to acquire is the developed industrial base needed to
actually carry it out (which aside from any other considerations is the
main reason why so few countries actually possess them). (See for
example, ‘How to Build a Nuclear Bomb: And Other Weapons of Mass
Destruction’ by Frank Barnaby although a Google search yielded 157,000
hits using the phrase ‘How to build a nuclear weapon’, so the knowledge
is out there for anyone to find, and Barnaby ought to know, he was part
of the original team which built the UK’s first atomic weapons back in
the 1950s).
And in any case, how do you prevent someone or some
country from acquiring knowledge, any kind of knowledge, whether it’s
used or not? The answer of course is that the only way to prevent the
acquisition of knowledge is to eliminate the inquirer physically.
The
propaganda onslaught is nothing if not consistent, even if somewhat
repetitive but then that’s the entire point isn’t it, it varies only in
the focus. The current escalation of tensions by the Bush regime is the
culmination of a carefully timed sequence of both leaks and public
statements (about which I’ve written before), each pronouncement
designed first and foremost to create an atmosphere conducive to upping
the anté one more notch until the desired fever pitch is achieved, at
which point, anything is possible.
Without a compliant media, it
would be virtually impossible to carry out such a prolonged and
sophisticated propaganda campaign depending as it does on the media
‘distilling’ the essential power words (handed to them on a plate by
the army of ‘creative’ writers employed by the state).
It’s a
heady mixture that pushes every known button (evocations of the
Holocaust and Satan or the Anti-Christ, evil but not mad, bent on world
domination, all rehashes of the Cold War and unashamedly so, well it
worked the first time didn’t it?).
The role of Israel in all
this is patently obvious; it’s the venomous scorpion in your pants.
Armed to the teeth and aggressive with it (knowing that it has the
wholehearted backing and involvement of the US), it operates as a de
facto fifth column in the Middle East, an outpost of the West (why does
Israel play in the European Football Cup, it’s not in Europe? It’s
actually in what used to be called North Africa until Europe moved it
back in the 19th century).
It’s taken approximately two years to
reach this stage and it hasn’t been plain sailing (even Bush’s slavish
partner-in-crime, the British government has been torn over the US
approach, but with Brown’s ascendency to the throne, such quiblings
over tactics appear to be a thing of the past judging by Brown’s
statement made in Washington DC. If you thought Blair was bad, you
ain’t seen nothing yet) because the ruling elites of the US are deeply
divided over the tactics and even question the ability of Bush’s mad
dogs to achieve their aims what with threats of unleashing nuclear war
on the region (but not with the objectives — ‘regime change’ which
translated means the establishment of a regime in Iran friendly to US
strategic objectives in the region, mostly ‘containing’ China).
But
perhaps more than anything else, the inexorable meltdown of the ‘global
economy’ has made the situation more urgent, with ominous parallels
emerging with the situation in Europe in the 1930s and the need to burn
off all the surplus capital and labour with a good ol’ capitalist war
but on a much grander scale than that of the Iraq ‘skirmish’. No mean
feat to achieve, demonising Ahmadinejad is not easy, he’s an affable
kind of fellow but by the looks of it, not too sussed when it comes to
dealing with the pirates.
So on the side of the US we have the
UK, Australia, France, a tentative Germany and of course Israel, ranged
against China, Russia and India and pretty much the rest of the planet.
So general war is by no means inevitable but all depends on the ability
of our domestic populations to resist the clamour for conflagration,
which explains Bush’s comparison of Ahmadinejad with Hitler (Hitler,
the Jews, the Holocaust, geddit? Almost a word-for-word replay of the
Saddam demonisation routine, hey but it worked the first time didn’t
it). But will it work again?
This essay is archived at:
http://www.creative-i.info/?p=143 and http://williambowles.info/ini/2007/1107/ini-0513.html
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