House of Mirrors Part I- Mystical Covert Agendas

As the U.S. becomes more and more the kind of country it has traditionally opposed, the answer to where we are headed may lie more in the arcane traditions of a dim past than in a bright future. 

“‘We’re the dark matter.  We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,’ a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.” 

If anyone (correctly) thought that the war on terror and Washington’s response to it had taken on a fantastical otherworldly quality, this recent quote on the front page of the Washington Post seemed to confirm it. 

Following 9/11 the elected government of the United States of America delivered the country to a whole department (of Homeland Security) dedicated to expanding the government’s fear of darkness into everybody’s life (remember the 2003 duct tape and plastic sheeting craze?)  Now we also have a top secret military operation known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that thinks it is the dark. 

Begun as a modest hostage rescue team, JSOC has morphed into a veritable heart of darkness, with the power to murder at will and with immunity from American legal jurisdiction (which apparently still maintains that such assassinations are illegal). 

Even within the military, JSOC operates as a “Stovepipe,” operation, meaning that it operates completely in the black, reports to no one and continues to employ rogue ex-CIA professionals such as indicted Iran Contra operative Dewey Clarridge.  The Navy Seal Team that took out Osama bin Laden operated under JSOC.  Retired military personnel refer to JSOC as “Murder, Incorporated” and the “most dangerous people on the face of the earth.” 

But if JSOC’s reputation for secrecy, vengeance and death from above can’t be explained from within the context of traditional U.S. military operations or U.S. law, then what set of rules is it operating from?  Oris it simply that the traditions of rationalism and law that most Americans took for granted about the United States are subject to deeper, religious, or perhaps even mystical rules, whose anachronistic logic has found a renewed acceptance in an irrational world of personal, private and holy war? 

No one less than the legendary Cold Warrior, Time Magazine’s Henry Luce understood that his passion for defeating Communism constituted “a declaration of private war,” which, in citing the example of the privateer Sir Francis Drake made it not only “unlawful,” but “probably mad.”  As the child of American missionaries, Luce was committed to the militant spread of Christian Capitalism while viewing its ultimate triumph over the world as an inevitable consequence of God’s will. 

Known to its 19th century advocates as mystical imperialism, the term can be traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19th century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal.  The competition came to a dead stop in Afghanistan with the end of the Great Game in 1907.  The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 complicated matters by infusing a heavy dose of socialist realism.  But with the advent of the Cold War and the mysterious and intoxicating god-like qualities inherent in nuclear weapons, a new iteration of mystical imperialism came into being. 

America’s mystical Cold War warriors were far removed technologically from their 19th century counterparts whose Christian elite believed they were bringing rational western thinking to the “darker regions of the earth.” 

The sole purpose of America’s mid 20th century defense intellectuals was to rationalize nuclear war scientifically.  Their failure over time ultimately dragged an entire stratum of American scientific and political thought back into the irrational realm of medieval mysticism.  A 1960s London Times Literary Supplement marveled at the new priesthood who moved as freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department as the Jesuits once had through the courts of Madrid and Vienna, centuries before.  Tasked with defeating Communism they invented their own reality, accelerated the nuclear arms race, created the domino theory of Communist expansion and then escalated the war in Vietnam to counter it. 

President Kennedy’s science advisor Jerome Wiesner eventually came to realize that the so called “missile gap” and the massive buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal in response to it was only a “mirror image” of America’s own intentions towards the Soviet Union and not the other way around.  Yet instead of addressing the error, the U.S. slipped deeper into the Cold War mirror until its own identity began to take on the image of its “Other.” 

By 1973 these thermonuclear Jesuits and their CIA counterparts were using the U.S., NATO, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia to shake the Soviet Union’s domination over Central Asia through a Christian/Islamic holy war in Afghanistan.  In a rational world it might be assumed that this war was supposed to stop with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism.  But instead of ending, America’s full blown splurge into personal and private holy war had caused the U.S. to slip into a crisis of identity. 

Forced after seventy five years of anti-communism to finally define itself based on what it stood for and not what it stood against, the United States entered a house of mirrors in which it continues to wander.  Stricken by the results of decades of economic and military excess, it finds its mission confused and its underlying philosophical grounding threatened. 

What is America on the eve of 2012?  Who are these Americans who revel in their dark powers?  What have we become and how did we get that way? 

Join us as we explore the little-analyzed facts and mystical covert agendas that the United States continues to press on with into the 21st century and what those agendas may mean to America’s new role as the dark force that orders the universe in the run up to the 2012 presidential elections.