Reflections on a Few of the Latest Outrages

Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Haditha...And these are just the atrocities that have slipped passed the neo-fascist-compliant Fourth Estate's unrelenting cloud of censorship. The Pentagon promises to make it all better by giving the troops "core values" training. The Orwellian ring of that phrase is almost unbearable to me. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity ARE exhibiting the "core values" of occupying armies. Are we really expected to believe that soldiers are social workers? They are trained killers; apparently, some of them are going to work with real enthusiasm.

The Gang of Four, their co-conspirators and accomplices, are an international crime syndicate operating "under color of law" (how I love that phrase). They are responsible for the death of innocents, destruction, and mayhem that must be the envy of mass murderers the world over. If al-Qaeda were an institutional reality rather than a bad faith fictional projection of the Gang of Four's propaganda machine, its members would have no choice but to look to the Gang of Four, their co-conspirators and accomplices, as sources of inspiration.

"...and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids--a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber." Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, too, surrounded himself with the trophies of his brutality.

Are we really like Casablanca's Captain Renault, "Shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here?"

Dear Winston: Please tell O'Brien that 2 + 2 still equals 4...