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World Focus: Global Eye: Blood Group
Posted on Friday, June 10 @ 22:04:26 UTC
Topic: crusader
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 By Chris Floyd, context.themoscowtimes.com
The history of politics is the history of factions jostling for power, by methods seldom peaceful and rarely, if ever, honest. War is by far the preferred means of obtaining and augmenting domination of the political landscape and the enrichment of the ruling clique.
Sometimes this means violent civil strife within the state itself. At other times, the political tool of war is directed outwards, at some demonized enemy who poses a "threat" -- which is almost always exaggerated or illusory -- to national survival. Without fail, the warmongering faction's political opponents are identified with the enemy, either as direct agents or, more often, as unpatriotic abettors whose criticism of the rulers gives "aid and comfort" to the foe.
Blood is an excellent sealant for factional unity. Once lives have been taken in pursuit of the faction's interests, which are invariably dressed up in the rhetoric of moral purpose, it becomes much harder for the faction's members to question or quit the cause. To do so means confessing not just to error but to complicity in murder. Few are those who can face such a stark unmasking. Self-deception is vital coin in the economy of factional partisanship.
Of course, some factions are more venal, more violent and more ambitious than others. Many factions are content with a mere piece of the action, a cut of the spoils. Although occasionally they might win through to the top rank of power, they don't seek to eliminate all their rivals and establish permanent rule. But history provides many examples of ruthless factions whose thirst for control is unlimited. They seek and will accept no less than a profound transformation of state and society into the image of the faction itself, using any method to achieve this goal. They will begin with peaceful means but will not balk at bloodshed if required. And of course, to impose a narrow partisan vision on an entire society inevitably requires mass bloodletting in the end.
By no means are such towering ambitions always unsuccessful. This is one of the great unspoken truths of history: In many different places and times, empires, caliphates, dynasties and other systems of factional dominion have been established through enormous evil -- and then persisted in power for centuries, lauded as honorable, legitimate governments. In time, their domination comes to be seen as a fact of nature, the way things are. There is no other way to think, to operate, to exist outside the parameters imposed by the ruling worldview.
Western civilization is founded upon this kind of enduring factional triumph. Octavian, the teenage adventurer adopted by his distant kinsman Julius Caesar, parlayed the chaos of Rome's partisan strife into supreme power, using corruption, deceit, betrayal, murder, civil war and foreign conquest as his political instruments. With a bloody single-mindedness and a scope that would not be seen in Europe again until the 20th century, he subsumed the entire state into his faction, merging and equating the two, leaving nothing outside the new reality created by his violent success.
There was no ideological, moral or even genuine political content at the heart of his faction. Its only goal was power, Octavian's personal power, from which his adherents hoped to obtain offices, land, loot and prestige -- or protection from the ravages of other factions. Only later, on the razed ground of total victory, was this remorseless, murderous game mythologized into a selfless crusade for national security, for order, liberty, prosperity and, yes, for "family values." Only then, when the dead lay rotting by the hundreds of thousands, was the young man accorded the lofty title that carried him into history as a beacon of civilization: Augustus. The system he established so brutally was maintained -- with equal brutality for all who opposed it -- for more than 1,400 years.
At first glance, it might seem absurd to compare this grand figure of world history to the gang of apish, third-rate poltroons now camped out along the Potomac. But although Octavian's faction contained a handful of remarkably able figures, for the most part it was a collection of schemers, time-servers, cynical money-men, stunted ideologues, bootlickers, propagandists and thugs. Through bribes, threats and the reflected glory of Caesar's name, Octavian was able to augment his tawdry crew with the fearsome military power of many legions. Armed might -- and the willingness to use it without remorse or moral compunction -- is always the decisive factor in politics.
The brutal system of torture, corruption, lawlessness and war established in Washington by the faction of President George W. Bush is now backed by the greatest military power in history, able to wipe whole nations from the face of the earth in minutes. With the illegal invasion of Iraq and the illegal imprisonment of thousands of people in its global gulag, this faction has shown its willingness to use military force without remorse or moral compunction in pursuit of its openly-stated totalitarian vision: "full-spectrum dominance" over geopolitical affairs coupled with a radical "transformation" of domestic government into a centralized, militarized "instrument of national power" that breaks down "the old, rigid divisions between war, peace, diplomacy, conflict and reconstruction," as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld outlined last month. This "instrument" is designed not for the people's benefit but to provide "maximum flexibility" for the commander-in-chief -- whose powers are not subject to U.S. or international law, says Bush's legal team.
Is such a faction, so steeped in blood and lies, so ravenous for domination, ever likely to resign its power voluntarily through free, unfixed elections? Or will it not seek to extend its rule, by any means necessary, into the years and centuries beyond?
Annotations
The Roman Revolution
Ronald Syme, Oxford University Press
Remarks by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia
U.S. Department of Defense, May 25, 2005
What Are You Going to Do With That?
TomDispatch, May 30, 2005
Dark Passage: The PNAC Blueprint for Empire
Empire Burlesque, September 20, 2002
Pentagon Prepped Torture Defense, Said President Not Bound By Law
CBS News, June 7, 2004
Memo Regarding Presidential Executive Order on Interrogations
Federal Bureau of Investigation, May 22, 2004
The Secret World of US Jails
The Observer, June 13, 2004
The Torture Memos: A Legal Narrative
CounterPunch, Feb. 2, 2005
Secret Way to War
TomDispatch/The New York Review of Books, May 15, 2005
From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68
H.H. Scullard, Routledge
Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland, Anchor Books
The Twelve Caesars
Suetonius/Robert Graves, Penguin Books
Reprinted from:
context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/06/10/120.html
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