Moment Of Truth

Across thenation, America's newspapers announce the same headline, handed as is so oftenthe case to our media poodles by their masters in the White House: "Moment of Truth." 

It is a moment oftruth, a pivotal time, one of those fateful points where you have to decide - left or right, in or out, smileand play along or say "the Hell with the Masters" and step down from your assigned spot on thekilling line. 

Bush and theother fundamentalist arch-imperialists and corporate-military plutocrats in the White House are prepared nowto go beyond their bellicose Orwellian rhetoric. They are ready to enter the War Criminals' Hall of Fame bylaunching an unjust, illegal attack on a weak, impoverished and effectively disarmed nation that poses noserious threat to the American people. They are prepared to launch a truly terrible act of aggression,launching 800 cruise missiles into Baghdad in two days in a "Shock and Awe" campaign they openlycompare to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Their chickenhawk hearts are quickening as they gear up to fight a "war" from behind their well-guarded desks,walls and computer screens. To quote from Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," they've "fasten[ed] thetriggers, for the others to fire." They will "sit back and watch while the death count getshire." 

Bush and Blairare prepared to destroy untold numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians - United Nations put 500,000 Iraqis at risk- in the name of "democracy" and "freedom," code words for empire when uttered by Americanstatesmen, as is well understood outside the United States. Bush and Blair see the civilians they are about to butcher inIraq pretty much the same way al Qaeda saw the thousands of Americans it killed in September 2001 - expendable"offal" on the path to higher political and doctrinal objectives. 

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki analogies are accurate but not in the ways that the enforcers ofNew World Order claim. Like those hideous 1945 atrocities, also falsely sold as necessary to "savelives," the forthcoming attack on Iraq is partly experiment and partly a demonstration project todisplay current and future US power. As in 1991, cybernetic Masters of War, tucked behindcomputer screens, will test new weapons systems. They will try to make a chilling new statement to the entireworld about America's superiority in the manufacture and deployment of the means ofwhat they call "creative destruction." 

It is a moment oftruth for the world state system. Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest are prepared to put the last nail in the coffinof a multi-lateral world order. At the moment that the first bombs land in Baghdad, "the United States, the most powerful nation in history, [will] no longer just bethreatening to use its power internationally, with no nod to anyone else. It will be at the point of noreturn," writes Chicago Tribune correspondent RC Longworth, on the path to a unilateralist worldorder. 

The ultimateregime change the Bush cabal seeks is international. It wants to overthrow the last hints of serious globalcooperation and undo international law. It seeks to enshrine America as the unchallenged hegemonic power, ruling alone, by sheerpreponderance of military force. 

It is a moment oftruth for America's rising number of poor, stuck at the bottom of in theindustrialized world's most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation - the leading prison state on the planet. TheAmerican rulers of the New World Order are happy to spend half a billion dollars a day on overseas conquestand empire even as the crises of their "homeland's" many impoverished communities grow deeper. Thecries of those communities fail to elicit significant response beyond expensive mass surveillance, arrest andincarceration from a supposedly "cash-strapped" public sector whose cup runs over when it comes toserving wealth and empire. 

It is a moment oftruth, a moment of terror, for the people of Iraq, in ways too obvious to state and too painful to contemplate. 

It is a moment oftruth for America's corporate-state media, falsely labeled "mainstream."The owners and managers of the nation's "private" communications empire have emerged as full-fledgedMasters of War with flying colors both print and electronic. They have enabled the imminent massive high statecrimes in numerous ways, conveying Bush's idiotic claims that Iraq threatens America and that Saddam was linked somehow to 9-11. They have worked torelegate the American citizenry to spectator status, treating fateful questions of state policy as if they arebeyond the sphere of legitimate popular input and agency. They have treated the "war" (massacre) as"inevitable" even as millions march against it. They have failed to adequately register the protestsand fears of the people in whose name they claim to speak. The blood of dead Iraqis is already showing ontheir hands. 

Next to the WhiteHouse and the Pentagon, I can think of no structures more deserving of massive citizen protest than the America's great media corporations. 

Now those greatmanufacturers of mass consent and diversion, these giant cultural charnel grounds, these massive, deadeningstructures of neo-Orwellian/Huxlean thought control, have another important task. They must work provideex-post facto justification for the imminent war crimes by pretending to discover proof that Iraq really was athreat, that it really was connected to 9-11, that it really was building nuclear weapons and so on. It istheir job, as in 1991, to ignore and hide the mass civilian casualties, to relegate the crumpled bodies ofIraqi children, mothers and grandfathers to history's dustbin while trumping the pyrotechnics above Baghdad as a glorious victory for human "civilization." It istheir job, again, to drown the tears of Arab children and mothers in a sea of racist celebration anddisproportionate concern for "our" troops. 

Watch them asthey work to manipulate mass opinion in defense of empire, slavish and supine before the awesome march of theGreat White Men and the carefully chose subordinates of color atop the world's leading rogue state. Behold themedia Masters as they "lie and deceive, like Judas of old" (Dylan). They manufacture images,transmit high state falsehoods, and frame deceptions that promise to set the world on fire. Like the chiefs ofBoeing, Lockheed Martin and other "defense" contractors lining up to cash in on the New ImperialCentury of Permanent War, the vampire corporate media executives will "hide in their mansions, whileyoung people's blood flows out of their bodies and gets buried in the mud" (Dylan). 

It is a moment oftruth for the citizens of the western democracies. We are free to express our opposition to the plans of thewarmongers without fear of being shot or incarcerated. But how shall express our dissent in the wake of thedecision for "war" (massacre)? Shall we remain content to write letters to our public officials?Shall we stay pleased to write letters to the editor and to draft opinion-editorials for the newspapers?Should we be satisfied to write, perform and applaud protest songs? To write articles in the alternative pressand for antiwar web-sites and to speak at antiwar teach-ins and demonstrations? To hand out buttons, collectsignatures, send out mailings, construct e-mail lists, and identify protest targets? To target pro-warpoliticians for removal from office? To march and chant and hand out flyers in peaceful demonstrations? 

We have done allof these things and much more and we shall continue. Much has been accomplished and remains to be done throughthese timeworn means. But the Masters of War and Empire and Propaganda are undeterred by reasonable masscitizen action. Bush has dismissed responding to the many millions in the streets as "governing by focusgroups." 

The Masters aredetermined to carry out their hideous crimes in our name, regardless of what we say and feel. We have spokentruth to power and power has refused to hear. We have said, "Please Sir, listen" to the illegitimateDull Boy President, surrounded by his neo-fascist "posse," and he has responded with authoritariandisdain. The decision for "war" (massacre) has been made, we are told, and now it is time for us togo home and line-up obediently behind the bluebloods who alone are fit to make policy, grateful that we werebenevolently granted the right to express our opinion. "Support our troops." 

"Thepresident, who's wanted war with Iraq all along," notes New York Times columnist BobHerbert today, "has been unwilling to listen seriously to anyone with an opposing view." Further:"Mr. Bush has remained unmoved by the millions of protestors against the war who have demonstrated in theUnited States and around the world. If anyone of these millions has hadsomething worthwhile to say, the president hasn't acknowledged it...The president's mind was made up long agoand all the chatter of pro and con was just so much smoke. Mr. Bush will have his war." 

It all bringsmany supporters of peace and justice to a very different moment of truth than the sort contemplated by Bush.It brings us to the point where we are compelled to embrace extra-legal direct action and open civil unrest toundo the new slaughterhouse of Empire.

Paul Streetis a writer, social policy researcher and teacher in ChicagoIllinois.