The Flavor of the Summer is Fear

Be very, very afraid America, the greatest threat to western civilization has now manifested itself with the mysterious Islamist group ISIS officially declaring the establishment of that dreaded caliphate that the neocons have been wailing about for years and have now hit the jackpot with the ultimate bogeyman to wage their Middle Eastern wars. It was inevitable that Americans would be bludgeoned again with that fear club, a powerful weapon of great influence that worked to perfection under Bush and Cheney and now that the Republicans or Hillary Clinton because what is really the difference smell blood like the political piranhas that they are. The rise of ISIS as some sort of monstrous army of Allah worshipping flesh-eating zombies couldn't be better constructed to scare the living crap out of the bewildered herd on the great star-spangled lemming colony and the state-corporate media is flogging this horse as hard as possible. The neocons must not believe their luck in having been able to return from what should have been permanent political exile to rule the roost again.

Things are never going to change in America, not since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center served the political class as well as the Reichstag Fire did the Nazis for it has served to justify every offense against the Constitution such as the stripping away of civil liberties, the elimination for all intents and purposes of both Habeas Corpus and the Posse Comitatus Act as we were dragged with nary a whimper into a now fully bloomed fascist totalitarian state. The Reichstag Fire gave Hitler his Enabling Act and the 9/11 events gave the US power structure their USA PATRIOT Act - not that there is much difference between the two other than the latter was written in German. Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, neither one of these enormously costly and failed wars were in the national interest and the USA!, USA!, USA! has pretty much gotten an ass kicking in both. Sure there was the great "SURGE" of the glorious General David Petraeus but it was just a public relations gimmick, sold to the public by seasoned, bloodthristy whores of the Military Industrial Complex like Senators McCain and Graham. It all worked so well and if the narrative coming out of Iraq and Syria is to be believed (and why in the Hell should anything that this corrupt government and power structure says should be given credibility given their record since 9/11) then the US involvement in the region and the destabilizing effect had more to do with ISIS than anything else. I still think that this all bears more than a slight whiff of bullshit and a massive psyops campaign to reengage upon the PNAC path to eternal glory and the harder that the media pushes it, the stronger that smell becomes.

But I digress...

This weekend commencing with the start of Ramadan, the baddest motherfuckers on Earth - I actually heard some dipshit referring to them as the Muslim Khmer Rouge and some rampaging horde out of Game of Thrones which I can't recall - have announced their intent to form the Caliphate. I excerpt the following from The Guardian story entitled  "Isis announces Islamic caliphate in area straddling Iraq and Syria":

Islamist militants have declared an Islamic "caliphate" in an area straddling Iraq and Syria, trumpeting the declaration in several videos.

One slick video, mostly in English, features a bearded fighter with an AK-47 on his back, explaining the new caliphate.

"This is not the first border we will break, we will break other borders," a jihadist from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) warned in the video called End of Sykes-Picot, a reference to the agreement between France and Britain that divided up the Ottoman empire territories after the first world war.

Later the fighter pledges that jihadists will free Palestine. "We are not here to replace an Arab cahoot with a western cahoot. Rather our jihad is more lofty and higher. We are fighting to make the word of Allah the highest," the spokesman said.

He is filmed showing abandoned Iraqi army badges and vehicles left by fleeing soldiers. "There is no army in the world that can withstand the soldiers of Islam," he said.

The video features about a dozen men in a cell said to be captured troops and border police. A building, said to be a police station, is shown being blown up, as well as US-made Humvees captured from the border police. "Look how much America spends to fight Islam, and it ends up just being in our pockets," the spokesman taunted.

Isis, a breakaway group from al-Qaida, is notable for its hardline anti-Shia sectarianism, declaring Shia Muslims and other rivals as heretics that deserve death.

And that is only the "Shia Muslims", they would love nothing better than to come to America (or Europe) and launch their jihad to make western infidels bow as slaves (or rape their luscious white daughters)  to the glory of Allah under that Sharia Law that the anti-Muslim bigot fear pimps have been preaching about for years. Just the abundance of lurid tales that have been popping up lately reek of an intelligence operation of US and other allies. Just a few examples are: "200 Iraqis killed in mass executions by ISIS fighters, Human Rights Watch says", "ISIL crucifies eight rival fighters, says monitoring group" and with pictures guaranteed to send shivers down lilly-white adherents of chicken fried Christianity in The Homeland at libertarian blog Zero Hedge "ISIS Declares A Caliphate; Crucifies 9 Syrian Rebels For Being "Too Moderate". Then there is Obama chiming in to provide cover to feckless coward Democrats in an election year who will be vilified for being terrorist appeasers with "Obama sees 'serious threat' to the U.S. from trained terrorists", the European angle to keep the NATO satellites buying the wares of various and sundry US arms manufacturers  "With ISIS surging in Iraq, Europe fears rise in ‘jihadi-tourists’" and hits the sweet spot with "Syria Threat Could Prompt Changes at Airports" from which I excerpt:

For months the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and other agencies have been quietly debating whether to boost the U.S. security posture and encourage overseas partners to take action too. The agencies have also been debating whether to make a public announcement on potential new security measures at airports.

The back-and-forth has been based on intelligence showing that a particularly extreme "subset" of terrorist groups in Syria was working alongside operatives from al Qaeda's prolific offshoot in Yemen to produce "creative" new designs for bombs, as one source put it.

Somebody is going to hit the fucking jackpot over new airport screening and harassment measures, just look at how former DHS head Michael Chertoff cashed in off of the ridiculous Christmas "Underwear Bomber" plot when his lobbying firm, The Chertoff Group played the fear card to fleece the American taxpayers for those naked body scanners.

This is all just horseshit, we have seen this movie before - it stank - and we all got fleeced. The criminal political class always plays the fear card in order to justify their own existence and with the newly minted Islamic devil of ISIS taking the place of Al-Qaeda Americans are being played for the suckers that they are anew. The great line from the movie Blade Runner by Rutger Hauer's Roy Baty replicant character put it "Quite an experience to live in fear isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave".

The political class, especially in corrupt and collapsing morally bereft societies - like ours - have nothing else to offer other than their "we will protect you" from the evildoers confidence game  and it works. So with all of us about to be dragged back to the quivering, pissing in your pants days of the early post 9/11 era - AGAIN - just so the scum can continue to feed like the vampires that they are upon the cattle I would strongly recommend a 2006 BBC series by documentary master Adam Curtis entitled "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear". His brilliant and groundbreaking trilogy examines both the rise of radical Islamist groups like al Qaeda as well as the neoconservatives and their ideological master Leo Strauss and to my knowledge have never been aired in America. These are all the more relevant today than they were back in 2004. They can be found in a number of locations by a simple Google search but I have found that Internet Archive (https://archive.org) is the most reliable location. All three installments Part One: Baby It's Cold Outside, Part Two: The Phantom Victory and Part Three: The Shadows in the Cave are available for viewing or download in multiple formats here: The Power Of Nightmares. 

Quite an experience to live in fear isn't it? That is what it is to be an American. 

Could ISIS in Iraq Be a Hoax?

I have to admit that as the week has gone on, with the increasingly breathless media blather over the baddest bogeymen of all - ISIS - that I have been struck with the idea that this just doesn't smell right. The emergence of a jihadist force, so nasty that even al Qaeda doesn't want them seems to be a wet dream to a war machine that has spent the past year just itching for another military intervention. That the uprising occurred shortly after the recent electoral triumphs of both Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki and Syria's Bashar al-Assad makes it suspect of being a creation of the "regime changers" who can claim plausible deniability that it ISIS arose out of festering regional fanaticism hellbent at the establishment of that new caliphate long preached about by the neocon warmongers.

The unstoppable force of ISIS has provided the worst culprits of the Bush-Cheney regime, including the dark master himself with a new opportunity to revise history in favor of their ideology of global and regional conquest as put forth by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and they have been hitting the media circuit with a vigor. The emergence of ISIS has also allowed President Barack Obama to begin to reinsert the US military back into Iraq after the lying bastard had vowed not to do so. Thursday's announcement that 300 military "advisers" were headed to Iraq is the beginning of an escalation that will further deplete American resources and squander the lives of more US troops in an ultimately doomed crusade that in effect never really ended.

Writer Mike Whitney just put out an interesting piece that I strongly recommend that questions the frenzy, especially in the corrupt state-corporate media to sell the ISIS menace - a task that shouldn't be too difficult considering that most Americans live in a constant state of fear of their own shadows let alone head-chopping jihadists hellbent on imposing Sharia law upon besieged Christians. The Whitney piece is published at Counterpunch and is entitled "The ISIS Fiasco: It’s Really an Attack on Iran" from which I excerpt:

There’s something that doesn’t ring-true about the coverage of crisis in Iraq. Maybe it’s the way the media reiterates the same, tedious storyline over and over again with only the slightest changes in the narrative. For example, I was reading an article in the Financial Times by Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, where he says that Maliki’s military forces in Mosul “melted away”. Interestingly, the Haass op-ed was followed by a piece by David Gardener who used almost the very same language. He said the “army melts away.” So, I decided to thumb through the news a bit and see how many other journalists were stung by the “melted away” bug. And, as it happens, there were quite a few, including Politico, NBC News, News Sentinel, Global Post, the National Interest, ABC News etc. Now, the only way an unusual expression like that would pop up with such frequency would be if the authors were getting their talking points from a central authority. (which they probably do.) But the effect, of course, is the exact opposite than what the authors intend, that is, these cookie cutter stories leave readers scratching their heads and feeling like something fishy is going on.

And something fishy IS going on. The whole fable about 1,500 jihadis scaring the pants off 30,000 Iraqi security guards to the point where they threw away their rifles, changed their clothes and headed for the hills, is just not believable. I don’t know what happened in Mosul, but, I’ll tell you one thing, it wasn’t that. That story just doesn’t pass the smell test.

Whitney goes on to question the official media narrative - I went out and did a quick search and the term "melted away" in describing the Iraqi army indeed pops up in a number of different variations which is a giveaway what the story is centrally created. If any thinking American still has any faith whatsoever in the credibility of our corrupt and contemptible media then they are a sucker. After being lied to over the Bush regime's original hogwash fairy tales to attack and invade Iraq in the first place, the pack of whoppers and propaganda that inflated a massive stock market bubble to the benefit of a small amount of crony capitalists at the expense of millions after the 2008 economic collapse (remember Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's "Green Shoots"?), the attempts to use a bogus Sarin gas attack to justify the bombing of Syria and most recently the vilification of Vladimir Putin and coverup of a US backed coup in Ukraine that installed neo-Nazi backed fascists who can anyone believe anything that comes out of the media?

While Whitney makes a compelling case there is one just unveiled masterpiece of bullshit and spin that sealed the deal for me that the entire ISIS narrative is a serious and intricate psyops hoax and that was yesterday's amazing discovery of Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction by the miraculous ISIS. The tale followed the usual echo chamber routine, first appearing in The Telegraph and then being amplified by a network of right-wing neocon blogs and websites as well as operatives who appeared in chat rooms and message boards and ended up in the central neocon propaganda beacon The Washington Post this morning "Islamist militants bear down on Iraqi forces; seize former chemical weapons facility". Just wait until the Sunday morning "news" shows, if Senator Lindsey Graham was already shrieking about ISIS plotting another 9/11 from Iraq and Syria last week the man will need to be restrained or seriously medicated about 48 hours from now as I publish this on Friday morning. 

Whitney nailed it that the ISIS tale "doesn't pass the smell test" but I would disagree in that it smells like bullshit.