With the process of globalization, many things change unseen. Whereas before, the USA was the world’s principal importer, China and India now require the commodities and strategic mineral resources of Africa, Russia, and South America. In order to lower cost margins, special interests from those two emerging Asian giants arrange savings on procurement, transportation, and distribution by means of special deals with governments and industries in the regions from which commodities are sourced. It was long ago discovered that African underdevelopment provides opportunities for exploitation through an array of techniques by means of which local political leaders could be bribed into making concessions that would rob their countries and peoples of deserved rewards that should accrue to them from the lucrative mining, marketing, and distribution of mineral wealth.
In that process the most potent weapon accessible to importers is the global mass media.
If the world could be fed a constant stream of invective on the alleged corruption, cruelty, and incompetence of the political leader of some poor African country blessed with fabulous deposits of strategic mineral resources, none will be any the wiser if those who create and direct media violence rifle the country’s mineral wealth while the target political leader squirms in the glare of the media before the world and before his own people. Moreover, the target political leader in such a situation is as a rule comprehensively muzzled by means of statutory legislation that has been modified in a covert process by which local agencies on the payroll of global importers have been manipulated to advantage their country’s national enemy. Thus an impression is created in the media of the targeted leader as a disingenuous liar, or at the very least a corrupt opportunist who is simply too obnoxious to defer to public opinion upon being caught with his hands in the proverbial cookie jar.
Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe is currently the most obvious example of such a leader. Highly respected throughout Africa and in many other parts of the world, Mr. Mugabe suffers from perhaps the worst media image endured by any leader since Saddam Hussein. Morgan Tshvangirai is retained in a harsh regime of inadequate information by global players and by the British owners of the region’s resources sector, who control the local media and large sections of the global media. Sinister elements among those owners of mineral resources collaborate with the African blood diamond cartels, which retain apparatchiki and concealed criminal syndicates on the ground for the purpose of conspiring to perpetually exacerbate African socio-economic conditions, and to perpetually postpone African economic development. Mr. Tshvangirai has bought lock, stock, and barrel into the media bandwagon by which president Mugabe is held up to the world as alternately the most despicable clown and the most fearsome monster alive.
Nor is the strategy through which global mass media are deployed as weapons in a war against the world by any means confined to underdeveloped African countries. The American presidential elections were targeted in the most comprehensive media agenda in world history – by agencies which must certainly represent the same constituency as does the secret organization coveting Zimbabwe’s truly fabulous mineral wealth – a process that has reduced Zimbabwe to the status of the world’s poorest country. But never in all eternity shall a word be breathed in the media to suggest any correspondence between those two historical phenomena.
The most extraordinary element of the strategy considered here is that political and socio-economic effects have been linked to the dynamics of the vernacular consumer society sustained by the mercantile system in its present form. The media play an absolutely fundamental role in the process. Advertising has been transformed into a covert dynamic of transactional management, whereby consumers are drawn into promotions to which hidden agendas have been attached in the form of covert protocols activated independently of the advertised product or service – or, more specifically, protocols are covertly activated to serve totalitarian social engineering programs calculated to bring about economic and political changes which could never be forced through any democratic parliament, since their effects exacerbate the processes of socio-economic decay by which Global Organized Crime generates its profits by exploiting the effects of ignorance, violence, poverty, and disease in distressed communities.
Soap opera formats, news bulletins, and sports broadcasts are subjected to the same dynamics of transactional management as those obtaining in advertising. Viewers are exhorted to respond to prompts by means of text messaging; through that action, particulars are supplied and transactions initiated. Memoranda are set into operation in a mode which proves in legal terms to be fully binding upon respondents – in accordance with provisions of a legislative regime prosecuted on the principle that silence denotes consent, and that all undertakings agreed to, however tentatively or informally, will be duly enforced. Contracts thus entered into facilitate easy purchase upon the sensibilities and consciences of unsophisticated market participants.
Many victims of pernicious schemata initiated by such means find themselves in debt or in other trouble soon after commencing, and, once purchase is obtained on their guilt, the process results in the recruitment of collaborators for the commitment of crime. Readiness on the parts of target victims to engage in criminal activity as a result of increasing covertly managed deprivation or other pressure, feeds the serious crime industry of armed robbery, which almost inevitably results in murder in each instance, and supplies an endless queue of collaborators to be shot dead by the police – a process through which the public is retained in fatuous complacency over action taken by safety and security personnel, while nothing whatsoever changes on the ground in exchange for the daily murder of young, capable, and in many cases noble, Africans – effectively with society’s official consent. Concealed, malign manipulators of human affairs through media violence and equivocation hourly micro-manage the middle management echelons of the South African Police Services – and extend the process throughout the world, having arranged that the International Police be stationed in South Africa for that precise purpose. Hence their temerity in attacking Commissioner Jackie Selebi with so much impunity. The criminal scheme ensures that the master minds and concealed elite leadership of the World Enemy remain perfectly concealed from view.
The covert global organization in control of the process exercises enormous influence upon heads of state and government officials, who may be subjected to any treatment suitable to the international Mafia’s agenda, in an assault directed at democracy, Christianity, and the market economy. However, the public remains unaware of any remotest possibility that it may be subjected to the effects of foul play, since amendments to essential legislation effectively proscribe the divulgence of that information in media interactions between democratic leaders and their constituencies. Indeed, the public responds to the media as it previously responded to the Church – it invests absolute trust in them – an inevitable corollary of sustained and insidious conditioning through interminably reiterated suggestions to the effect that the media represent a level of authority to which political leaders – even world leaders – might aspire, but may never attain.
Films such as American Gangster make it clear that the drug lords have long ago obtained control over processes by which the confederate projects of nation-states may be fundamentally compromised as parts of a continual presentation of public life – such as the smuggling of heroin in the coffins of deceased American soldiers during the Vietnam war. As is made equally clear in the film, the Mafia and international communism collude to deceive the simple victims of heroin addiction into rooting for those who profit from delivering their lives into the living Hell of a stranglehold from the most lethal substance in the world – the effects of which serve to entrap victims in a regime of horrific societal abuse, thus to enforce political and economic change in all countries of the world through the effects of which Global Organized Crime is alone advantaged. In perhaps the most repulsive scene from American Gangster, Frank Lucas’s eyes light up when he boasts: “Heroin has given me Harlem!” – clear proof that the formal market economy presents a lesser threat to the world than that presented by gangsterism.
As in South Africa, where those most likely to be hanged, should capital punishment be reinstated – since they represent the most vulnerable social group – are made to vociferously bay for the blood of those among them said by manipulators of the media to have committed heinous crimes against them, and are made to demand the reinstatement of the death sentence – so in the USA those who most cynically and brutishly profit from the suffering and deaths of black Americans are most uncritically adored by their victims as a result of media equivocation.
In view of the foregoing, what hope remains for those drawn into careers in the arts and humanities on the basis of false pretences by which the Mafia recruits the luckless mules who traverse the trade routes of its contraband smuggling operations, from airports and harbours to family homes and schools? Any attempt to answer that question would reveal the full horror of implications for the present balance of power in global affairs: liberal democracy has been usurped by a covert totalitarian regime colluding with global organized crime in a bid to gain control of all instruments of power, determinants of wealth, amenities of life, and attributes of cultural expression – and that the conservative constituency alone retains the capability to protect itself and others against the vagaries and atrocities of the concealed World Enemy.
It follows, therefore, that a sober, realistic approach to political life through an intelligent pursuit of economics offers far better prospects than would any romantic hankering after such mysteries of self-expression as are held up for emulation to the poorly informed proletariat by those who defraud the souls of its members in a pretence at offering political liberation.
That, precisely, is the political perspective most strenuously withheld from the global public. The central objective behind the efforts of those who control the mass media is to distract the international community with sensational interpretations of side-shows calculated to facilitate the perpetual covert enforcement of agendas that could never be made acceptable to thinking people. In pursuit of that agenda, the deep roots of human imagination and emotion are tapped, and promises are built up around desires of the body and conceits of the mind that could never offer feasible substitutes to the hard realities confronting those who assume responsibility for the world in which they live.
United States president-elect Barack Obama stands in the eye of a storm brewed on the basis of the international community’s ignorance of the nature of the mandate by which concealed, malign manipulators achieve their effects through media interests under their control.
The public believes that the media are mandated to protect that which is good and right. They are not. The media are not the Church; they are not the Law. The mandate in terms of which the media operate requires that they earn profits for their owners, and requires nothing whatsoever except only that. And that objective is best accomplished in terms of the tried and tested creed of journalism: “Never let the truth spoil a good story.” In other words, the media’s objective is to sell newspapers and television fare by means of lying and cheating – by means of the systematic and dedicated obfuscation, reversal, concealment, denial, and perversion of the truth. But the public is not permitted to know that, ostensibly because if it did, the security services and legal institutions would not be able to accomplish their effects in matters of national security and international diplomacy. As the inevitable result of the conspiracy of silence observed on those grounds, the public presumes that the law stands poised to protect it against any hint of foul play from the media – that since the law never swoops to do just that, it may be safely concluded that the media represents the highest authority to be found on Earth – and that, since the conscientious media never fail to warn of the despicable motives of politicians, democratic governments are comprised of the worst criminals in the world.
The philosophy spun from the elements of that dilemma – which was born of un-intended consequences of modern technology, namely the effects of human nature, with its criminal taint, on the politics of technology – serves the purposes of crime bosses as a glove suits a hand – for democratic governments offer by far the best known protection to the unsuspecting public, and if democratic governments can be knocked out of the equation without firing a shot, or even lifting a finger – with the energetic, not to say fanatic, assistance of the victims – well, you never know your luck if you can inculcate the virtues of an ability to obdurately keep a secret into as broad a public base as possible.
The beauty of it all, from the criminal point of view, is that governments are rendered corrupt in the process – no normal person would wish to indefinitely continue serving those who treat him like dirt.
The key to resolving all the problems listed here is to be found in adopting the philosophy of the market economy. That is the reason why the market economy is under siege in the most powerful assault upon it since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
Since supreme poetry concerns itself, not with appearances or pretences, but with the final truth only, it would be meet to turn to poetry for insight and instruction. And since the work of Robert Graves was introduced in the previous blog, it could be useful to examine two of his poems, which I chose for the glimpse that they provide on the range of mystery and violence characterising fundamental human relations – in this case, the romantic love between men and women.
CONFESS, MARPESSA
Confess Marpessa, who is your new lover?
Could he be, perhaps, that skillful rough sea-diver
Plunging deep in the waves, curving far under
Yet surfacing at last with controlled breath?
Confess, Marpessa, who is your new lover?
Is he some ghoul, with naked greed of plunder
Urging his steed across the gulf of death,
A brood of dragons tangled close beneath?
Or could he be the fabulous Salamander,
Courting you with soft flame and gentle ember?
Confess, Marpessa, who is your new lover?
DREAM RECALLED ON WAKING
The monstrous and three-headed cur
Rose hugely when she stroked his fur,
Using his metapontine tail
To lift her high across the pale.
Ranging those ridges far and near
Brought blushes to her cheeks, I fear,
Yet who but she, the last and first
Could dare what lions never durst?
Proud Queen, continue as you are,
More steadfast than the Polar Star,
Yet still pretend a child to be
Gathering sea-wrack by the sea.
Those beautiful, powerful works, on fire with the truth that animates them, represent some of the finer conceits of which the human mind has proved capable over the past three thousand years. They crystallise the essential human condition: in rendering the tyranny of sexuality palpable, they deepen, strengthen, and enrich the human store of shared experience. Warmly observed detail and memorable imagery, phrased with consummate clarity of utterance, capture the mystery of romantic love, and of the majesty of the indomitable human spirit, which is here celebrated by means of a deep compliment from the male gender to the female gender. The immediacy of lived experience is tempered by an impressively accomplished sense of civic decorum, which watches dispassionately where powers governing the realm of sensibility marshal terrifying potentialities, which are normally latent between the genders, but are vexed here to that abysmal fatefulness experienced by lesser mortals as ‘the battle of the sexes’ – a capability for royal thought that renders the vernacular mendacity of a consumer society steeped in the idiom of soap opera petty and vulgar by comparison.
Under conditions of a state of nature, ordinary human beings are no more rational than are sabre-toothed panthers or rattlesnakes.
The mechanism of the market economy – by which the power of violent persuasion is removed from at least the most fundamental categories of market interactions – is largely responsible for the success thus far achieved on the course of modernism. It owes its rational nature to the scientific method, which seeks to observe with as much intelligence, focus, and purpose as possible, which seeks to think clearly and neatly, to commit as large a part of accumulated knowledge to memory as is facilitated by methods for the representation of experience, to formulate useful hypotheses on the nature of the world and of live creatures, to subject those hypotheses to rigorous testing – and to formulate imaginative programs through which to put research findings to work for the expansion of freedoms and ideas in human societies.
The notion that the market economy is to blame for human failure is a very dangerous and destructive one.
The human being has for many centuries resolved to sacrifice things that may be rated as givens in terms of life in a state of nature, or at least to manage them such as to have them obtrude minimally upon matters now deemed more important, thus to be freed, for the moment, to concentrate on those important things. That program constitutes the backbone of progress. It is worth every effort to continue on the path embarked upon more than three thousand years ago, when the advent of recorded history signalled the intention to develop beyond the constraints of an unexamined life – of a life in the cage of an arrested society, which could revert to the level of life with the beasts in a state of nature.
The human race could resume its project, should it resolve to refrain from destroying itself through the dissemination of falsehoods.
In South Africa, ‘Mama Africa’, Myriam Makeba, has died. “Murder most foul!” is the instinctive response with which I greet such news – for my country is vulnerable to the whims of concealed, malign manipulators who pursue a sadistic hidden agenda by the effects of which brilliant Africans are routinely cut down in the prime of their lives – political assassinations alternately construed in the media as Acts of God or the effects of probability theory. Yet those who doggedly, maniacally, pursue their grizzly agenda – thus dutifully and with grim determination to produce at least one fatal ‘accident’ between a fully loaded taxi and a large truck per day – on every day of the year – are responsible for all the hype and rage of media equivocation by which the virtues of ‘human rights’ and a ‘constitutional democracy’ are extolled, amidst much execration of the leaders of democracies and of the Afrikaner nation, which had been blamed for the atrocities of Apartheid in the past.
But I know Afrikaners, for I am one. And I also know the Mafia, for I have lived with it throughout my life, although I realized it but comparatively recently. Therefore I know that the stereotyped obtuseness and brutishness by which the responses of Afrikaners are characterized in the mass media, where and when deferral to the humanitarian needs of Africans is required – is not an authentic response, but one imputed into the sensibilities of target individuals, by means of medical science and technology routinely applied by the security services and legal institutions in the bio-genetic execution of socio-economic effects needed in matters of national security and international diplomacy.
When Africans were offered the option of self-determination, they were given no choice but to comprehensively accept the security regime as it was. But, although Apartheid was deconstructed, a far more efficient totalitarian regime had already been treacherously put in place – in South Africa as in most other countries of the world – with the assistance of the global mass media.
The chief instrument in the process by which Africans are mowed down by those whom they most trust is communism.
Should communists be admired? They certainly think so. Yet, as the discussion featuring the two poems, above, has shown – no real merits attach to exercising the option of constraining society to a merely biological paradigm, in which the power of the spirit delimits the range of experience accessible to processes by which human affairs are conducted, as the case was for several million years in the past. Access to that primordial state of being would be useful only where scrupulous observation of the prerogatives of the free market, democracy, and the humanitarian spirit exemplified by Christianity, has constructed a supportive framework for a testing of the extremes of societal behaviour – offering the individual a way by which to perpetually return to the essential human condition as provided for in a basic economic paradigm best defined by the socio-political apparatus facilitated through value investing and morally intelligent forms of entrepreneurship: open-innovation technological development in a socially conscious and environmentally responsible paradigm.
The communist alternative offers nothing whatsoever save a subjection of the human individual to the mendacity of a large herd of cattle, in which cows look to the king bull for protection, and every individual seeking to challenge the status quo must meet his horns. The human race has developed beyond the constraints of that mendacity many thousands of years ago. But the pastoral invasions of the third millennium BC in Western Europe and the Mediterranean, although they provided impetus for the development of modernism, also set a large section of humanity back to the level of a bygone age of obsequiousness before the brutish.
Communism leaves no room for moral intelligence. Africans are moved to gather in huge crowds, to be hollered at by demagogues in a mode not necessarily more discerning than that obtaining in a swarm of locusts. The manic, febrile anxiety in which such crowds are depicted on television reveals that no freedom of speech is possible, although strenuous pretences by the media equate the glib verbosity of Blade Nzimande and the adamant, dogmatic assertions of Zwelenzima Vavi with the inarticulate, uncritical state of the dancing, singing, and jumping crowds, which delight in emulating circus animals by performing bodily gestures in solidarity with some article of faith, such as the contempt that they feel for Robert Mugabe. Under such conditions none would complain of being moved to stand in queues stretching to the horizon once in four years, to vote for the same man, decade in and decade out, never feeling any compunction for an alternative, however crushing the burdens of life may have become under his rule.
The terrible injustice presented by Global Organized Crime is that each one of its multitudinous victims deserve to be a self-actualizing personage, not a mere cipher to be forgotten, like a grain of sand on the sea-shore – but that the oppressive dynamics of communism prevent them from realizing it.
As could be appreciated by examining two brief love poems, it may be seen that all the sound and fury conjured by media appeals to imagination and emotion may likewise be subdued and interpreted. Those privileged to have acquired the requisite background to do that, know that communism presents the greatest possible threat to democracy, for in seeking one-party hegemony it forgets that there are two sides to every story – your side and my side. As in gender relations, so in class relations. As in racial relations, so in generational relations.
Thinking people, who reduce the appeal to sensationalism in media productions to the character and motivation of those who drive it, know that the mendacity of the cattle herd informs the deployment of the media as a weapon of war by a concealed organization which ruthlessly enforces a totalitarian regime upon human affairs, in order to obtain absolute power over all living for itself exclusively – for purposes too sinister to be revealed to the public.
A little poem adapted by Robert Graves from the Spanish culture of the Mediterranean island on which he lived might aptly conclude this essay on the significance of deception in matters of strategy, and might provide the answer to its tyrannous effects:
Bull-fight critics, ranked in rows,
Crowd the enormous plaza full.
But only one is there who knows –
And he is the man who kills the bull.
