Legitimate government does not spring from a tyranny of corporate or royal patronage. Nor, does it arise from an ideology or a system that runs counter to the aims of life. Real self interest arises from the individual. But, today, in the United States of 'Amerika', corporations have more human rights than the humans at Guantanamo do.
In January 2010, the US Supreme Court abolished limits on corporate funding of candidate elections, citing the First Amendment . The decision overturned a century of precedent dating back to the Tillman Act of 1907 .
More to the point, in an age where people and nations are increasingly interdependent on one another for survival, Tocqueville's notion of 'self-interest rightly understood or an 'enlightened self-interest' become increasingly important as regards governing the commons : the air, water, food, patents on our genes, ideas, the very foundation of life itself.
Today disloyal, incompetent, special interests have usurped civic, civil and military power, spawning a host of threats to our liberty and to national security. Americans pay a hundred times more for the insecurity, we could have had for free. And Guantanamo, and its totalitarian witch hunts outside the bounds of law , are simply a manifestation of a system more similar to those of our former cold war enemies, than to the government our founders intended.
The only difference between the United States and China, it seems, is a question of scope or visibility of tyranny, and the ideology used to prop up and justify the system. What difference is there really between the economy of influence in Washington DC and a communist bureaucracy? Both are corrupt and inefficient institutions that spell tyranny. And, both create systems and societies that runs counter to the aims of life or the principles of our democratic republic.
Our Theater of Cruelty
Baudrillard maintains that the symbiotic relationship between the media and consumerism has generated a non-linear system or language of spectacles - micro-models or narratives - in which the discourse of society is conducted. The discourse of society in this language of spectacles or simulation has nothing to do with "a logic of facts and an order of reasons."
In this scenario, facts or events do not have meaning in themselves, since they only have meaning in the context of an interlocutor's narrative or model. Baudrillard maintains that "a single fact may even be engendered by all [interlocutor's] models [or narratives] at once" (Source: Simulacra and Simulation).
Therefore, all interpretations of facts or events are possible, even those which are most contradictory. As Baudrillard writes, "all [spectacles] are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable" within the context of society's discourse (Source: SS). Societal discourse, therefore, does not take the shape of a dialectical polarity between two interlocutors, instead societal discourse takes the shape of a non-linear system of models or narratives that intersect each other around particular facts or events.
This non-linear system or language of models or narratives, each surrounding, particular facts or events, lends itself to the theatricality of the spectacle, since the boundary between facts or events and the models or narratives which appropriate them is no longer clear. Equally less clear is the boundary between a real or imagined spectacles or simulations. For this reason Baudrillard maintains that the terrorist act is a spectacle unleashed within a realm he identifies as a 'Theater of Cruelty.'
Moreover, since "all [spectacles] are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable" (Source: SS), no determinate position is possible in this non-linear system of intersecting facts and narratives. For this reason, the arbitrary and insoluble nature of the spectacle unleashed by the terrorist event is what Baudrillard identifies as the "purest symbolic form of challenge" to the hegemony of the US political and historical model (Green Issue 109), which asserts a "conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable" and by which the regime's political credibility is maintained (Source; SS).
Everything in the terrorist event is "ambivalent and reversible: death, the media, violence and victory" (Source: Green Issue). As Baudrillard writes:
Death itself is undefinable: the death of the terrorists is equivalent to that of the hostages; they are substitutable. In spite of all efforts to set them into radical opposition, fascination allows no distinction to be made, and rightly so, for power finally does not make any either, but settles its accounts with everyone, and buries Baader and Schleyer, together at Stuttgart [or in the case of our War on Terror, I would add Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in a Libyan prison ] in its incapacity to unravel the deaths and rediscover the fine dividing line, the distinctive and valid oppositions which are the secret to law and order. Nor is it possible to reclaim a positive role for the media, or a transference of repression: the repressive act traverses the same unforeseeable spiral as the terrorist act; no one knows where it will stop, nor all the setbacks and reversals that will ensue. There is no distinction possible between the "crime" and the "repression." (Source: GI)
Since no distinction can be made and no interpretation of the terrorist event be named definitive, the US regime's claim to "principle of meaning as principle of truth" is ultimately subverted (Source: GI).
By participating in the 'simulation game' the US regime not only cancels out its claim to a privileged perspective on truth, since all determination evaporates in this "field unhinged by simulation" (Source: SS), but also cancels out its political credibility as a liberal democracy, since the regime is as fascist as it claims the terrorists are. In the final analysis, the ideology of democratic liberalism acts as a mask of the US regime in its own 'Theater of Cruelty,' a mask that covers up the general automatism of its hegemony on truth and the "general mobilization, dissuasion, pacification, and mental socialization" of its population by means of this automatism (Source: GI).
Post Script: Pres. Eisenhower's Warning About 'The Military Industrial Complex'
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