Posted on 5/11/2001

Buying Distraction
by Alan Marston

(photo shows radar image of US Military's HQ, The Pentagon)

Back in the 1970's businesses and states with global ambitions were in
serious trouble, after Viet Nam the perception of the western middle-class,
that most decisive political indice, was that governments were in league
with an inhuman economic system to take-over the world and enslave young
people, mind and body. A massive PR spin offensive by the
`military-industrial complex' (MIC, not my term, first used by US President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960) turned that around by the mid 1980's, the
central role of money in all thought, consumerism, greed, envy, fear, they
were all back in vogue.

2000, the political pendulum has swung back to the 60's. The middle class
are worried, losing confidence, young people are in revolt against `the
system', economics is going down. A spin offensive by global corps, WTO,
WB, IMF, UN is not working, the world is spun-out by advertising, branding,
marketing distractions of every shape and form. The MIC has turned to its
joker in the pack, war. Nothing unites dispirit elements like a common
easily identified enemy. War hysteria has worked since the beginning of
human history and its still working.

Gone from the media is economic down-turn and global insolvency, gone is
climate change, gone is nuclear war danger and star wars, gone is the
collapse of life-sustaining eco-systems on a global scale, gone is oil
supply geo-political machinations - all gone and replaced by one problem,
one incredibly simplistic and ultimately absurd concept, the Taliban are
the worlds main problem and the USA MIC is the solution. I contend it is
not absurd to think that the real source of the Sept 11 crime against
humanity was within the consciousness of the MIC for it is there that war
is the star, it is from there that the evil of war streams into the modern
world.

Buy into war and you've traded away life and humanity.