behind the Regime's war crime in Iraq.
By Chris Floyd
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/04/23/120.html<snip>
Homo sapiens is the only species that dreams of its own total demise. Our brief history of conscious thought is replete with vivid scenarios of the end of life on earth. The brain-fevers we call religions have produced most of these -- giddy, voluptuous nightmares of universal extinction, usually by fire, at divine order.
It seems that some ineradicable nihilism pervades us, like a virus, now dormant, now flaring: something in us that wants to die, to be done with the long, overhanging doom of mortality -- and to take the world with us. Our grand visions of the future seem to hide, at their core, a secret, desperate anxiety about the profound meaninglessness of existence -- an anxiety that often disguises itself in elaborate fantasies of the afterlife, in exaltations of one's "kind" (tribe, nation, faith, etc.), or in the eroticizing of death, war and destruction.
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Thus we can sometimes say, not entirely metaphorically, that nations "go mad," hurtling themselves toward ruin, sick with nihilism -- although this sickness is always painted in the colors of patriotism or religious zeal, or both. Thus we can say -- again, with some accuracy -- that humankind has suicidal tendencies, manifested most clearly in the development of world-killing, species-ending nuclear weapons.
Now draw these dangerous streams together, and you have a portrait of the blunt and brutal group-mind at work in the leadership of the world's most powerful nation. The folly, fantasy and death-fetish of the Bush Regime -- long evident to anyone who cared to see -- were finally "revealed" in the mainstream media last week by the quasi-official Establishment writer, Bob Woodward. His latest insider portrait, Plan of Attack, offers -- in the usual, easily-gummed pablum form -- a few tastes of the bitter truth behind the Regime's mad, ruinous war crime in Iraq.
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Mr. Floyd is right on target as usual.