Happy 2003--Fo Sho!--from Cirque Minime

Another year here in Paris--that makes eight--and I still haven’t resolved my bad feelings about the US and its criminally insane policies, foreign and domestic.

Yeah, you know all this already, but at Betty Ford and in AA they told me all these problems with American wars were only in my head--part of my disease--and I should pray over them. I took those folks seriously to a point. I mean I haven’t had a drink in almost 12 years (since just before the Bush pres Gulf War). But eventually these self-helpers with their chirpy brand of American self-congratulation morphed from the solution into the problem and I’ve had naught to do with them--often to my chagrin—for some time now (since that Spring in 1999, in fact, when NATO was bombing Yugoslavia and my play, WinoTime, was bombing in Paris).

But it was around the time of Clinton’s Somalia mission, when 28,000 heavily armed Marines took a beachhead from a few dozen heavily-equipped major media camera crews, with the order to liberate a large number of under-nourished and over-photographed African kids from starvation, that I began to sense that the alienation of the American consciousness from anything even remotely resembling the Reality Principle was becoming irreconcilable.

Even some of the moderately hip artist-types that I’d come to hang out with over 20 years in Hollywood--you know, we were all seeking refuge from the philistinism of The Industry in a cutting edge, poli-disciplinary, free-form, esoteric, all-in-black, Sarrautean/ Bernsteinian/Kroetzian/Handkean, yes, very dis-the-establishmentarian Theatre (with music by Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor)--even some of these refugees from the Das Capital reading group and the Trotskyist deep massage and martial arts circles were screaming at the US military:

Feed the fucking children!! Stop the fucking genocide!!

And this was 1993. We’d still gotten no real word about Yugoslavia.

So the Liberal worm was already rounding the White House turn at the time of the Chomsky bio-doc, Manufacturing Consent, where it was clearly explained just how and by whom our minds were being turned into semi-solid unrecyclable waste, and when the peace dividend from the fall of Communism was being spent on troop movements, daily bombings and missile strikes all around Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, always in response to some insult, real or concocted, made by those well-financed, well-organized, well-equipped-by-US forces of that new enemy on the bloc: Islamic (read: Oil or Narco) terrorism.

But the worm (whose pickled form came to be personified by Chris Hitchens) seemed to be making distinctions between good towel-heads and bad, righteous sand niggers and wrongeous. For example, Hamas and Hezbollah and even Arafat’s Fatah were bad Muslims out to kill whitey and push the Jews into the Sea. But the Bosnian and Albanian Muslims were moderate democrats and victims of Serb fascism. The jihadists who trained in Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Albania (all, by the way, working partners, if not allies of the US and/or Israel), became villains when they attacked US properties like embassies or barracks or battleships or World Trade Centers, but were quickly returned to hero status when they turned their US/EU supplied firepower on the governments and public facilities of Yugoslavia or Russia or Palestine. Or take the Kurds (please): Good when pitted against Saddam; bad when fighting our delightful Turkish friends.

But this distinction was a flimsy and porous vessel, kept afloat only with hefty lardings of government disinfo and media lies. And it was in the Frankenstienian lavatory of the Balkan wars that these Liberal worm brains were finally well washed of their pacifist squeamishness and hung out in the winds of war to dry. From Roy Gutmans shrieking you'll never guess what I just heard Newsweek piece about Bosnian Serb Death Camps (for which he was Pulitzered, no less), which begat Penny Marshall’s Hitchcockian editing job on an ITV news clip that turned a displaced persons center near Sarajevo into Dachau on the Drina (for which she was presented with a Royal Get-Outta-Libel-Court-Free pass), a psychedormic poster of the New Fascism was created. This image of Semitic suffering coupled with the effective erasure of Yugoslavia as a national entity, allowed Germany finally to get out from under some fifty years of shame-based military restraint, and to take its place at the head of the EU, that realization of Hitler’s dream of a New European Order, joining hands with its natural allies, Turkey, Israel and the US, to make some good old-fashioned blood-guts-and-hair kinda war on all the bad, undifferentiated isms that were still flipping about on the deck: (Serbian) Fascism, (Yugoslav and Russian) Communism, and (Palestinian) Terrorism.

Now, mind you, we’re still back in 1993-4: Clinton I: Sorry we didn’t do more to help out sooner: Sorry we couldn’t do more to stop the deaths of 200,000 in Yugoslavia (a figure that remains unchanged) or the 2-3 million in Rwanda: Sorry we didn’t do more to stop the spread of AIDS and slavery in Africa, China, India and Russia. But this use of apologies to cover actual guilt is not the half’n’half of the UnReality that was inebriating Western thought.

The tension between what was happening and what the public needed to think was happening just continued to increase. As the absolute necessity for global war as the sole remaining viable economic engine became more acutely felt by the now fully waste-based Western economies, it was more than ever imperative that the public see these wars as civil wars rather than imperialist invasions, as occurring at the instigation of the victims: In Rwanda it was the ancient tribal rivalries between the Hutus and the Tutsis that brought about the genocide, not the shooting down of the Presidents plane by a NATO hit team, nor yet another invasion of Rwanda led from Uganda by CIA asset Paul Kagame with orders to create chaos all the way to the Congo. And in Yugoslavia, it was the Yugoslavs themselves (renamed Serbs) who brought about the dissolution of Yugoslavia by their aggressive resistance [say what?] to the rightful [sic] claims of certain nationalist minorities (again heavily armed, trained and funded by the Western forces for globalization--principally Germany and the US) to dissolve the country.

So it wasn’t long before the Liberal Katha Pollitts column was being footed by pleas for aid to Bosnian Muslim orphans, and Left Liberal Chris Hitchens was telling stories about nice Albanian women he knew personally who had had all their men folk wiped out by the evil Serbs, and the Liberal journal, The Nation, in an editorial at the time of the Rambouillet negotiations, was demanding independence for Kosovo, and the syndicated Liberal Wm Pfaff was suggesting that the 78 day terror bombing (Newsweek’s term) of Yugoslavia in 1999 was a mere inconvenience and one deserved by the Serbs (aka Yugoslavs) because of their support of the thrice-elected and twice resigned tyrant Slobodan Milosevic.*

[*As might have been expected, last week Pfaff said that the Iraqis, too, have brought on their own destruction by the US and Britain.]

What kind of bug got up into all these people? Y2K virus? Too much KY virus? Remember, were only at about 2000.

But after more than ten years of an all-out, high-tech waste-intense globalized capitalist tweekers' ball, the loonies had taken over the asylum (or at least the drug dispensary), the wired (or weird) had inherited the mansion, but the game was still being run by the same tupenny shysters and two-pack contract killers that inspired, and were inspired by, the likes of Dick Nixon and Jim Jones. The turn of the Century saw the Kool-Aid flowing like...well, like Kool-Aid.

In keeping with the Yugoslavia as a focus group paradigm, the events in Serbia 2000--the rigged and riot-driven elections that caused Milosevic to resign the presidency to Kostunica as a way to stave off civil war--were a dress rehearsal for the elections in the US later the same year. But unlike the Serbs (with their silly democratic notion that if less than 50% of the electorate chooses to take part, the election is not valid) who continue to resist the occupation of their country by Western military, financial and commercial interests, Americans veritably genuflected and spread wide their rosy cheeks before their new, most unholy Christian emperor. Oh, lets be fair: they grumbled a little over the wholesale disenfranchisement of vast portions of the electorate--particularly the colored portions--what with barred or closed polling places and malformed or lost ballots, but then they’d gotten used to that kind of treatment over the years. Voila Trent Lott. But with typical American attitude, they were all Lets get this behind us and move on, yo.

Then, the defining--or ultimately undefining--moment: 11 September 2001.

The day everything changed--or, as my friend Michael Parenti says, the day everything became more the same than ever.

It no longer matters what really happened that day.

Ask Henry Kissinger about that. Or George Mitchell.

The dialectic of enlightenment flipped over into the dialectic of mythification.

You gotta believe, baby.

All those heroes. All these villains.

Its to die for--and to kill for.

So what if all the numbers don’t crunch, if all the stories don’t jibe, if all the evidence has been destroyed, the witnesses bought off or disappeared, the news stories buried or rewritten, the contrary and questioning characters assassinated.

War rules now. Lets roll! Were at war. And in war there’s no Left or Right, or Right or Wrong; there’s just the quick and the dead. Right? Right. Your right, left, right.

But the Americans went into their latest war dance stumbling with retroactive shell shock. They are still gibbering about Vietnam and Panama and Grenada and Iraq and Somalia and Afghanistan--they don’t say much about Yugoslavia--selective memory? odd war out?--or how the first war against Iraq never really stopped, so to start another one before you finish the first one seems a bit piggish, no? Hey, you gonna finish that war?.

But for those Liberal worms like Hitchens and Pfaff, Yugoslavia and now Iraq are good wars, just wars, wars of liberation, wars for democracy.

Yeah, I know, this is madness--however understandable, it is still madness and it’s unforgivable.

And like all psychoses, it is based on a genetic fallacy. That is to say, that this madness is constructed upon an ideological or ideational structure founded in a particular falsehood, a lie or an unreality.

Everyone involved in the current, authorized discussion is required to accept, at some level, the governments story of what happened Sept 11 as justifying ongoing policies. It is, you might say, the buy-in to sit at the table and play the geopolitical game. If you’re on the Right you accept that what happened Sept 11 demonstrates the real threat posed by the new enemy of Western values which is radical, political Islam. Sept 11 was the war of civilizations equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge, and the US was caught with its defenses down around its ankles--again. If you’re on the Left you see Sept 11 as the inevitable response to Western Imperialism, to the USs support for Israel and repressive oil dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. It was to be expected and was even predicted and warned against by many, but the US government was too arrogant to meet this challenge. And if you’re way out there on the Left (or maybe its the Right) you see Sept 11 as a victory for the oppressed masses of the mostly Arab world. Finally a real victory for the little dark guy. But wherever you sit at the round table you swallow the basics of the government’s version of what went down.

Yet no one will hold in his hand, much less put on the 911 game table, that card that shows the obvious, flagrant, graceless and mawkish (in other words, military) cover-up of what can only be a missile strike on the Pentagon. Any questioning of the suggestion, made by Donald Rumsfeld after eyeballing the damage nearly an hour after the fact, that the damage to the Pentagon was cause by a Boeing 757, specifically American Airlines flight 77 with 65 people on board, in the absence of any material evidence of a 100 ton aircraft at the scene--and, in fact, an abundance of photographic evidence, from various US government and military sources, of a missile striking the DoD--is taken as a sign of high handed unfairness, illegal use of the mind, unsportsmanlike conduct, and a resentful dislike for things American, and is considered grounds for removal from the gaming table and ejection for life from the casino.

It was put to me this way by a not particularly learned or clever colleague, and one with whom I no longer correspond because of a similar sejour into the cult of the chronically lame (The Mufti of Jerusalems visit to Hitler in the 1930s is proof that the Baath Party of Iraq and Syria [sic] is fascist):

I would sooner believe the air traffic controllers and the many eyewitnesses than some pictures [nb: than the evidence of my own eyes] from some crackpot web site.

In other words, all these Liberal worms and craven clodpolls posing as artists have chosen to spin whatever might be their political critique into a full-blown endorsement of the West’s final bloodthirsty (oil-thirsty) conquest of the Third World. Until every nation, every people are dependent on the US/EU for its life energies, the death and destruction will continue. Until the planet is turned into a giant waste heap with the unsavory spawn of these few shit eating ghouls, like, but not limited to, your Bush and your Cheney and your Rumsfeld and your Ashcroft, who currently operate this inhuman garbage disposal of a global economy, all squatting atop a tower of turd-filled human skulls and divvying up the spoils of their idiotic victories: Only when there is nothing left but Nothing will these negationists of the Negation be satisfied.

I don’t know if this new dark force can be resisted and eventually stopped. Last time something like Sept 11 went down it took several decades for the truth about it to come out, and from where I sit, maybe it was too late. Maybe Sept 11 is just a continuation of that older dark force--just like the current war drums over Iraq are just the echoes of the bombs dropped there last week. But here’s how it went down in the 30s:

[from my translation of the French translation of Peter Franssens 11 Septembre: Pourquoi ils ont laiss faire les pirates de lair (Why They Let the Hijackers Do It). EPO, 2002]

May 23, 1939, Hitler called together 15 of his generals and told them:

If we want to resolve Germanys economic problems, we must expand our living space (Lebensraum) in Europe. To do that, we must invade other countries and take over the wealth of other people. Then, the non-German populations of these Eastern territories will become our reserve labor-force.1

In August 1939, the objective was to unleash a war against Poland. On orders from Hitler, the SS and the Gestapo prepared Operation Himmler. It was up to the SS to attack the German radio station in Gleiwitz, near the Polish border. For the occasion, the SS was to wear the uniforms of the Polish army to create the impression that Polish soldiers had attacked German territory. Germany would then have an excuse to invade Poland. The direction of Operation Himmler was assigned to Alfred Naujocks.

Naujocks was ordered to occupy the German radio station, to have a Polish-speaking SS make a statement, and then to pull out. The regional chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Mller, turned a dozen prisoners over to Naujocks custody. The SS anesthetized them, put them in Polish uniforms and left their dead bodies behind. This operation went down during the night of 31 August and 1 September 1939. Naujocks men fired a lot in the air, so all the elements of a real military confrontation were there. Then, all the SS members who took part in this mission were assassinated. Only Naujocks continued his carrier.

Two months after this mission, this same Naujocks set off a bomb in Munich that killed 7 people. Twelve minutes before the explosion, Hitler had been there finishing a speech. The Germans accused two British officers, but it later appeared that Hitler himself had ordered and planned this attack as a way to consolidate and concentrate the support of the German general staff around him.2 In 1944 Naujocks went to work for the CIA.3

A few hours after this phony attack on the radio station in Gleiwitz, the German army invaded Poland. That same day, Hitler said in a speech:

Tonight, for the first time, Polish soldiers on our territory opened fire. We responded at 5:45 this morning and from now on we will answer bombs with bombs.4

World War II had begun.

My question on this the eve of 2003 is, what ended WWII? Hitler’s disappearance into his bunker and the German surrender--to the Russians! The A bombs on Japan? Or is it still going on? Was Sept 11 the first shot of WWIII? Or was it just another piece of macabre street theatre brought to you by the same people who have kept the world in frightened ignorance and sniveling dependence with their expedient applications of order and chaos?

Until the American people can find their courage and screw it directly into Bush’s ass--so deeply that the entire government and national political culture feels the burn, the rest of the world doesn’t have much to hope for this or any other new year.

Mick Collins

Cirque Minime/Paris

Email address: cirqueminime@club-internet.fr