Conspiracy – ILANA MERCER

Gadhafi A Gold Bug? Finally, A Believable Conspiracy

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 07:00:00 +0000

I don’t like conspiracy theories; they are the refuge of the weak-minded. Reality is bad enough; there is no need to explain the world using conjecture and fantasy. The facts suffice.

In particular, imputing garden variety government evils to conspiracies is based on the following faulty premise: Government generally does what is good for us (NOT). So whenever we think it is failing in a mission it fulfills so well (NOT), we should look beyond the facts for something more sinister (NOT).

As if the state’s natural quest for unlimited power were not enough to explain the events! Why, for example, would you need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless you honestly believed government would never prosecute such a war? History belies this delusion. Even when government prosecutes a just war, it finds ways to prolong it, as a protracted crisis helps in consolidating power.

The constituent elements of the behemoth continuously work to increase their sphere of influence. Thus grunts don’t benefit from war; the generals everybody reveres do. It is but natural for the soldier’s superiors to pursue war for war’s sake. Given its size, reach, and many usurpations, the US government is a destructive and warring entity—no matter which of the “big government party” factions is at the helm.

Clearly, conspiracy thinking is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the welfare of the individual and civil society, a position I hold. I would say simply that the state presides over the disintegration of civil society, but it does so reflexively, rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy.

This has been my general thinking, until now. I may have finally found a conspiracy I can consider.

Rather than wind down—as we were told it would—the US’s indirect invasion of Libya has gained momentum. Rather than continue to misfire their weapons, Libyan “rebels” have suddenly materialized as lean, mean, fighting machines that’ve stormed and taken the capital Tripoli. One minute the entities labeled “rebels” by an adoring American media were being repelled back to their Benghazi stronghold by a well-trained army of Libyan conscripts. Next you know, the same men had captured Colonel Gadhafi’s compound.

What you won’t see or hear if you watch Fox News, MSNBC and CNN—whose presstitutes don’t report, but root for whichever side in a conflict benefits their favored political party or ideology—you’ll get from Russia Today. As RT reports, the UK’s Secret Service has been “engaged in drilling Libyan rebels, helping them to establish a proper military plan for an assault on the capitol Tripoli.” The UK not only dispatched spies and former special ops to train militants, but had been “providing them with ammunition for the operation, including night-vision goggles, advanced communication equipment and no less than 1,000 sets of body armor.”

GlobalPost.com has confirmed that the North Atlantic military alliance has ramped-up its five-month old campaign of air strikes, insisting that the 4,000 targets NATO had leveled so far were all “legitimate military targets.” These sorties have brought the regime to its knees, a NATO spokesperson asserted.

Let’s rewind the newsreel. In 2009—in his capacity as head of the African Union—Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi had proposed that the economically crippled continent adopt the Gold Dinar. I do not know if Col. Gadhafi continued to agitate for ditching the dollar and adopting the Gold Dinar. Or if The Agitator from Chicago got wind of Gadhaf’s (uncharacteristic) sanity about things monetary.

This much I do know: America is crashing and burning. Monetary policy and media spin have obfuscated this inescapable reality. Most Americans are quite happy to remain suspended in a world of make-believe, where the US is still a superpower, despite the fact that, combined, American state and personal debt now approximates 65 trillion dollars.

My countrymen expect to continue cruising on credit and on the backs of the dwindling number of producers among them.

It turns out that any confidence America and its profligate European and English allies had placed in the sheer stupidity of African-Union leaders had paid-off. By GoldBuzzer.com’s telling, the Libyan leader had failed to convince the African Union to adopt a gold currency. The “Gold Dinar” was dismissed, and Gaddafi demoted.

Nor had Gadhafi made headway in persuading oil-rich Middle Eastern leaders to demand gold, rather than debased dollars, for their oil. Granted, at 144 tons, Libya’s gold reserves are relatively small (and probably getting smaller given the post-revolution looting that is likely underway): “only 5.6 percent of its total currency exchange reserves.”

Nevertheless, gold is both a haven—and an indicator of how moribund the dollar-driven global economy is. A modicum of monetary policy savvy will have sent the more capable individuals and countries scampering after gold, late in 2008, if not before.

Congress and the Department of Justice have sicced their attack dogs on Standard & Poor’s after that credit rating agency dared to declare the obvious: America’s credit is kaput.

Is it within the realm of conspiracy to posit that the same disorganized criminal enterprise could have tacitly agreed to take down a pesky, persistent Arab gold bug?

Had a gold revolution engulfed oil-rich African and Persian-Gulf states this would have spelt trouble for the debt-strapped West.

If only symbolically, a gold revolution across Arabia and Africa would have outweighed by far the significance of a democratic revolution.

Members of the media-monetary-congressional complex orbit in privileged circles; all benefit from the freshly counterfeited funny-money dispensed from D.C. On the other hand, the workers of the world are brothers in bondage.

Had Gadhafi sparked a gold-driven monetary revolution, he would have done well for his own people, and for the world at large.

A Gadhafi-driven gold revolution would have, however, imperiled the positions of central bankers and their political and media power-brokers. The former surreptitiously print away the fruits of the people’s labor; the latter scramble their brains so that they don’t know they are being robbed blind.

* Image courtesy Global Research

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PAT TILLMAN AND THE CULTURE OF DEATH

Ilana Mercer — Sat, 22 May 2004 00:00:00 +0000

A nation that values human life is obliged to reject the culture of death propagated by the neoconservative dogs of war. To be genuinely pro-life demands that we worry much more than we do about the pagan and promiscuous sacrifice of fabulous men like Pat Tillman ~ilana

The networks and other custodians of consensus sicced the dogs of war on anyone who dared question Pat Tillman’s post-Sept. 11 epiphany. Tillman, may he rest in peace, abandoned his NFL career and a $3.6-million contract to become an Army Ranger. As Len Pasquarelli of ESPN put it, “His conscience would not allow him to tackle opposition fullbacks where there is still a bigger enemy that needs to be stopped in its tracks.” Tillman was killed last month in a skirmish in Afghanistan.

Syndicated political cartoonist Ted Rall, very much outside the consensus, caught hell for his ridicule of Tillman’s apotheosis. MSNBC.com pulled Rall’s strip, and the cartoonist endured an avalanche of death threats. Rall’s cartoon was indeed unkind. He referred to Tillman as “a sap” and an “idiot” for naively buying into the administration’s rationale for war.

In one caption, the cartoonist scribbled that Tillman was a “cog in a low-rent occupation army that shot more innocent civilians than terrorists to prop up puppet rulers and exploit gas and oil resources.” Like so many justly discredited conspiracy theorists on the far left (and right), Rall managed to fudge the issues. One can certainly argue in favor of the first part of Rall’s characterization of the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Although our government refuses to clutter its databases with information about collateral damage, the number of innocents killed in Iraq has passed 10,000; in Afghanistan, the figures are fast approaching that.

Conversely, Rall’s gas-and-oil conspiracy is evidence of no more than an erosion of reason. This absurdity is of a piece with the claim that the casus belli for war was Israel. Be it in their allegation of a war for a “greater Zion” or a war for oil, too many execrable editorialists like Rall have not hesitated to substitute inference and innuendo for facts.

In another caption, Rall accused Tillman of “falsely believing that Bush’s war against Iraq and Afghanistan had something to do with 9-11.” Again, Rall’s self-serving ideological occlusions distort the truth. He conflates the legitimate cause for action in Afghanistan – Sept. 11 – with the misbegotten motives for war in Iraq, an error I took care to avoid in my recently published book: “While I don’t condone the lingering American presence in Afghanistan, and while I doubt the abilities of the U.S. military to contain al-Qaida there,” there can be no question that “The Taliban openly gave succor to [al-Qaida] … and its masterminding leadership.”

Rall’s comic strip was without a doubt in poor taste. Tillman admirably rejected the narcissistic pathology, and its attendant TV tell-all, the world has come to associate with America. Despite his celebrity, Tillman embarked on his lonely mission with not a camera in sight. Who can dispute that he was brave and motivated by a sense of duty – that he harbored a deep conviction about the nobility of his actions?

That Tillman was the antitype to the Ugly American that has emerged from the Abu Ghraib jail does not mean that his death was not a horrible and futile waste. To believe otherwise, one has to buy lock, stock and barrel our government’s claim that American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are defending Americans on U.S. soil. This is at best a stretch; at worst, an obscenity.

To believe that Tillman and the 900-plus other soldier victims did not die in vain one must have internalized the abstractions our politicians have force-fed to a torpid public. No one’s “freedoms” are more secure now that Pat Tillman is dead; good is no closer to obliterating bad, nor will it, certainly not by conquest and coercion. As for democracy, it is the tyranny of a slim majority that has brought us this far.

Peggy Noonan and Andrew Sullivan lauded Tillman for making the ultimate sacrifice for the alleged (and ever-illusive) common good, waffling in wonderment about the “pay cut of roughly $3.54 million dollars over three years” that he took.

Philosopher Adam Smith’s wisdom runs contrary to the neoconservative nonsense espoused by these Beltway lap dogs. Smith would have advised Tillman to act in enlightened self-interest, and reject the state’s definition of the common good, especially in the era of ideological wars. “By pursuing his own interest,” wrote Smith in “The Wealth of Nations,” “[man] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

Had he been guided by Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand,” Tillman would have truly benefited himself and many others, not least his wife. Instead of his ashes, she would still have his love, companionship and, quite possibly, his gorgeous offspring (Pat Tillman was a glorious specimen of a man). Tillman’s immense earning power, scorned by our collectivists, would truly have redounded to the public good. Instead of once-off work for the undertaker, Tillman would have generated jobs for years to come.

A nation that values human life is obliged to reject the culture of death propagated by the neoconservative dogs of war. To be genuinely pro-life demands that we worry much more than we do about the pagan and promiscuous sacrifice of fabulous men like Pat Tillman.

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