The bright, shining lie

[bemildred]

By Jonathan Schell

And so the Americans and the Iraqis of Charlie Company, like the United States and Iraq in general today, are led, by choice on the one side and by bribery and compulsion on the other, to play roles in a script that has little or nothing to do with the situation they are actually in. In this situation, it is not necessary to form a whole sentence to tell a lie. Use of single words or phrases - "Iraqi sovereignty", "freedom", "election", "security", "democracy", "anti-Iraqi forces", even "courage" and "cowardice" - involve the speaker in deception, for they are the constitutive elements of a framework of thought and belief that is itself a fabrication.

The American occupation of Iraq is something new, but the fundamental error of the United States has a long pedigree. It is the imprisonment of the human mind in ideology backed by violence. The classic example is Joseph Stalin's Russia, under which decades of misrule were rationalized as a "stage" on the way to the radiant future of true communism. As for the miserable present, it was amusingly called "actually existing communism". The future, when it came, of course was not communism at all but the disintegration of the whole enterprise. All the "stages" turned out to lead nowhere.

Once the mind is in the grip of such a system, every "actually existing" horror can be seen as a mere imperfection in a beautiful larger picture, every defeat a stage on the way to the glorious future. The simpler and more coherent an ideology, the better it can withstand the assault of fact. So today in Iraq, every act of torture, every flattened city, every gushing sewer, every car-bombing and beheading, is presented as a bump on the road to "freedom" for Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the whole world, in which President George W Bush has promised an "end to tyranny". (It's apparently a rule of ideology that the more sordid the reality, the more grandiosely splendid the eventual goal must be.)

But a moment comes - perhaps it is a sudden defeat, or perhaps it is merely reading a story like Shadid and Fainaru's - when the fantasy dissolves, and then one is left face-to-face with the factual truth. All the "exceptions" turn out to be the rule. When that happens with respect to Iraq, America's grotesque misadventure there - born of lies, sustained by lies and productive of more lies every day it continues - will be brought to a close.

Asia Times

[glitch]

1. Excellent article, great writer. Thanks for posting. nt

[not systems]

2. A must read! n/t

[kevsand]

3. A friend of mine just emailed this article to me,

so of course I had to check to see if anyone had posted it here. This is just too chilling for words, and deserves to be seen by more people. Here's another link that also has the full text:

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0616-25.htm

:kick:

[sintax]

4. excellent article n/t