Manuel Valenzuela: Inside the Clouds of 9/11

What remains today of the entity once known as the United States can be seen by escaping the still-omnipresent hypnotic fog that spans the land of the free and the home of the brave, from coast to coast, spawned by the smoldering inferno and avalanching debris of three years ago, when the human species once-more entered into dimensions familiar and frequent yet malicious and frightful, where all semblance of reality seemed to disappear inside the smoke of crashing airliners and collapsing towers.

Only by escaping the all-encompassing haze of fear, hatred and vengeance – that cocktail of conditioned ignorance born on 9/11 that continues to smother and imprison the minds of millions of Americans – can we begin to discern what was done to us, and what subsequently continues to be done to us and our way of life. Only then can we pragmatically stand at the doorstep of reality, banging on its heavy-metal doors, eager to be welcomed inside, seeking desperately to understand the true identity of a world that has been made mad by warmongers, greed mongers, profiteers and criminal monsters disguised as men.

Inside the clouds of 9/11 lay hidden sinister plans and malevolent intentions, indoctrinated minds and their brainwashed existence. Inside this tempestuous cloud of debris, dust, smoke, asbestos, chemicals, particulates and human flesh lie hidden war criminals and crimes against humanity that continue to run unobstructed, free to continue their reign of terror, sending the world into the abyss of perpetual war and suffering, immune from the conformist and placid sheep living in their realm whose existence continues to be lived in extravagant ignorance fed by bread and circus, tele-trash conditioning and dumbed-down education.

It is inside the clouds of 9/11 that the most successful psychological warfare technique ever devised by man can be seen for what it is, namely, the devastatingly successful mechanism by which an entire nation was transformed from placid isolationists going about their daily god-fearing lives into blood-thirsty seekers of vengeance and gluttonous purveyors of human malice. The genius of those exploiters of 9/11, with its horrific mass death and carnage, its violent destruction of buildings and human life, was in bombarding American citizens, through the television and using the mouths of media lackeys, with ceaseless images of what transpired that day along with voices of vengeance, hatred and war, thereby shaking the foundations of reality and the constructs of security hundreds of millions believed themselves to live under.

Suddenly a new reality emerged and fear, that most controlling emotion in the human animal, that passion clouding the mind and our logical, analytical thinking, was unleashed throughout the nation. Insecurity blanketed the country as images of falling buildings and crashing airlines paralyzed an entire populace. Our world came crashing down along with the World Trade Center, and in its debris-filled clouds did we find ourselves in, not knowing what to make of what had without notice transpired, not understanding the violence we had just witnessed, not comprehending a world gone mad. Our fear blinded us, and immediately rage and hatred permeated from our pores. We are but animal primates, after all, and our emotions began to control our thinking human brain.

Calls for vengeance soon filled our televisions, broadcast directly into our homes. We had been attacked; thousands of our citizens had been murdered in a most heinous crime against humanity. America found itself a nation devoid of rational thought; its population was now controlled by animal instinct, now easily manipulated by those longing for a new Pearl Harbor. Hundreds of millions became pawns in the sinister plots of a few elite; Americans were now willing to do anything, follow anyone, destroy everything responsible for such great suffering.

We became easily molded clay in the hands of the exploiters, the warmongers, greed addicts and profiteers whose interests suddenly seemed attainable. An entire populace was theirs, hundreds of millions ready, willing and able to do anything to right what had been made wrong. With a collective paranoia rampant throughout the nation and an enveloping fear and schizophrenia invading an entire populace, those in power and those that control could do anything they pleased.

Almost immediately, the seeds of blame were sowed onto a population needing an enemy and scapegoat from which to focus its collective wrath. Rather quickly and conveniently Muslims were blamed without a single investigation or an act of prudence. Arab names immediately appeared on passenger manifests, impossible to find passports were suddenly said found in the remains of the World Trade Center, parked cars containing copies of the Koran along with flying instructions in Arabic were quickly discovered, images of dancing Palestinians made the airwaves, even though the images were of children recorded months before, ambiguous video of hijackers at so-called airports circulated, and all around, the corporate media, with its many Zionist interests lurking freely, besieged our conscious with Arab bogeymen and Muslim motives, immediately finding itself an enemy to castigate and blame.

It all fell into place like a jigsaw puzzle, all too soon, all too convenient, all too surreal and all seemingly pre-arranged, as if scapegoats had already been decided upon to validate already predetermined wars in the Middle East. Yet we never wondered, we never questioned how everything had come to be so expeditiously. Hypnotized to the images of that malicious day we remained, immersed by fear and hatred and rage and calls for vengeance. We fell into the trap of a new Pearl Harbor, the interests that be had what they wanted, a militarized, paralyzed and vengeance mobilized citizenry, ready to believe anything, ready to unleash war on America’s new enemy. The barrage was ceaseless, the drums of war now beat strongly, before the American people knew it, those responsible for 9/11 had been chosen. The wheels had been set in motion.

Thus, in the American mind the placement of the Arab as evildoer extraordinaire was firmly implanted, fictionally concocted as hating our freedoms and our way of life, seen as a destroyer of liberty and American ideals, an inhuman barbarian alien to our construct of civilization that had to be destroyed. An entire Middle East and an entire race of people had become the enemy, and soon America’s army of killing machines would unleash hell into lands and onto innocent peoples having absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The new Soviet, the new Communist, the new Indian and Viet Cong, the new Nazi and Japanese warrior, the new Filipino and Spaniard and Mexican and English did America now have from which to feed its long, centuries old addiction to war.

In the unenlightened mind of millions, a few thousand fanatics could not be distinguished from hundreds of millions. One face was imputed on all Arabs, and so an entire race, an entire religion, both alien and unknown to dumbed-down Americans, had to be labeled evildoers. A culture not understood and feared, dark-skinned and non-Christian, oppressed by decades of American-sponsored dictators, exploited by American foreign policy, robbed of their land by Zionist entities, and possessing the black blood needed to run through the veins of the American Empire was thus chosen as the perfect enemy needed for perpetual war and perpetual profit.

With a seething yet blind American public, irrational in mind, devoid of analytical and logical thinking, thanks to the psychologically devastating imagery of 9/11 exploited by both government and media, the Arab world became a land of barbarians, of untermensch, of savages, heathens and pagans. Once more history, and the mind of the masses, were repeating themselves, eager to label as sub-human those it wanted conquered and annihilated, thereby validating in the American mind the certain death, destruction and devastation their complicit hatred would birth. The Islamic faith became enemy number one, and in the American mind the angel of death was asked to spill the blood of the Arab world through the instruments of death so cherished in the land of rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air.

It was 9/11 and the massive manipulation that followed that condemned Afghans and Iraqis alike to slaughter and mass murder by a delusional and thoroughly mind-controlled military and a callous and apathetic American populace whose sheer hunger for Middle East blood can only be surpassed by its enormous quantity of ignorance and insatiable thirst for oil. Just like Germans living in Hitler’s time, millions of Americans turned a blind eye, playing ignorant fools even as tens of thousands of Muslims were being slaughtered, even as reality becomes obvious and truths are made manifest. The dead and maimed are dark-skinned Arabs, after all, a lower level of human than average Joe Six-pack, much like Africans, Vietnamese and Latin Americans.

Through systemic and methodical manipulation of American minds, using the captivating and controlling power of televised imagery, warmongers in office and those in corporatist America blitzkrieged the populace with an incessant bombardment of 9/11 images, both live and taped, replayed over and over and over again, that mutated a once pacific citizenry into a ravaging and crazed army of vengeance. With a clearly distinguished enemy, inhabiting lands deemed necessary for the imperial aspirations of the Pax Americana and the Zionists in Washington, the Capitalistic Crusade could commence, the military-industrial complex’ assembly lines could now forever spit out instruments of death and profit, gas pipelines could be built and controlled, and oil could gluttonously be pillaged at the expense of 25 million Iraqis, 100,000 of whom now lie buried in graves, rubble or sand dunes.

Nation Transformed

Thanks to two towers collapsing, thanks to airlines used as guided missiles, thanks to avalanches of ash-colored debris rushing New York’s streets and thanks to the impregnating horror of human wickedness forever paralyzed into our collective minds the warmongers, the greed addicts and the profiteers, those with vested interests in a new Pearl Harbor, those seeking profit and wealth through death and destruction, those seeking free reign to destroy Palestinians and their culture, and those opportunists now transforming America into corporatist dictatorship have succeeded in shackling the collective will of the American people, making us impotent creatures easily controlled, now unable to fight for our nation, even as it is eviscerated and gutted, even as it implodes into the dustbin of human refuse.

Somewhere in the abyss of negative energy Joseph Goebbels is laughing, proud at those who took the reigns of propaganda manipulation from his grave. Somewhere he is enjoying the fabulous gift granted to those now using us as marionettes in a game of ideology, power, delusion and human malevolence. Impotent millions stand, infected with the virus of fear, hatred and vengeance, unable to escape the fictions mouthed by corporate media and those in power, unable to escape the clouds of 9/11 that make eyes blind, hearts cold and minds numb.

Unable to grasp or comprehend the greatest lie ever told the American people, millions linger in silent complicity and acquiescent submission, preferring not to know the evils done in their name, choosing to remain ignorant to the human malice their vote has retained in power, basking in the comforts prevalent in America while tuning out the untold suffering American foreign policy continues to spawn, becoming pawns in a global chess match where tens of thousands lie dead, hundreds of thousands wounded and maimed in both body and mind, and millions desperately surviving day to day, trying to evade the human hell unearthed by the greatest terrorist state in the world today.

The gift of 9/11 to those in control, the invaluable images, sounds and dastardly horrors orchestrated so very well by the neocons, Zionists, corporatists, military-energy-industrial complex and the Bushites, both for their independent and united vested interests, has made an already deeply entrenched war culture an even more menacing and violent populace, marching steadfastly to the tunes of the drums of war and the trumpet sounds of ceaseless death, maiming and destruction.

This is the new America. This is what we have become.

The psychological effects of 9/11 and its myriad collection of images, from multiple cameras and angles, cannot be underestimated or ignored when seeking to understand the transformation of America into what it is today: imperial warmonger and terrorist nation abroad and autocratic usurper of rights, freedoms and democracy at home. September 11th accounts for 59 million marching drones and brainless citizens captured by the hypnotizing allure emanating from the comforting sounds of Pied Piper Bush’s magical flute, that combination of Rovian propagandist repetition and dumbed-down talk, that has sculpted a fictional war president out of a mountain-size monument to elitist mediocrity. It accounts for a vast majority of citizens completely unaware of the incessant corporate media conditioning and manipulation that has formed a most successful controlling mechanism, making half the population placid, conformist and pacified members of society and the other half a warmongering frenzy of blood-thirsty sharks eager to follow every last dictate of those in power.

Morality Lost

In the American mind, most notably apparent in those who voted against their own interests, voting the ticket of fear and insecurity for another four years, the taped and replayed images of 9/11, never before witnessed by human eyes or bombarded into the human mind on such a grand scale, created a psychological pestilence that attached itself to tens of millions of Americans. This virus has made eyes blind to the reality of what transpires around them. It has created millions of citizens living in a vegetative state, unable or unwilling to see truths even when it is placed in front of their faces. It accounts for a sickness prevalent in the United States, where what is is ignored and what isn’t is believed, where a callous indifference to innocence destroyed and maimed is superceded by fear of gay-marriage, Bible-banning and women’s rights. The suffering of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Afghans and Iraqis is seen as necessary so that we can put closure on the conditioned fear and thirst for vengeance sprouted by 9/11.

In our diluted world, the chosen enemy must suffer the same fate we did on 9/11, yet on a much more massive scale, because we are America, we are the all-powerful, the merchant of good, the defender of freedom and democracy, the bastion and protector of humanity. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have been so brainwashed into believing that our government and elected leaders are the epitome of good that we fail to realize just how brazenly malevolent they really are. America is the Evil Empire, the Great Satan, a nation made worse after 9/11, its citizenry now complicit in the crimes against humanity the government has for decades unleashed onto the world. Today 9/11 has been surpassed dozens of times over through the death of over 100,0000 Iraqis, most women and children, and in the sheer wickedness of America’s assault on the Iraqi nation. If the death of 3,000 Americans is terrorism, what then should we call the extermination of over 100,000 Iraqis, the maiming and injury of countless more, and the importation into their nation of a human hell that is destroying the very fabric of that ancient civilization?

A war culture on steroids has become the antithesis of humanity, a cancer upon all humankind, a growing tumor spreading disease and hatred throughout the peoples of the world. We are hypocrites, preaching the values of morality yet enthralled by human wickedness; we wear Jesus on our sleeves yet fail to implement his message; tens of millions of Bible-thumper fundamentalists, the American Taliban, calling themselves Christians, take comfort in the death of 100,000 Muslims; these same call for the protection of Israel and the destruction of Palestinians, even when Jesus was himself Arab, an ancestor of today’s indigenous peoples of Palestine (I guess if you believe in creationism and the Rapture you must also believe Jesus was Scandinavian-white, blond, blue-eyed, with European facial features). We call those that behead barbarians and animals yet our bombs and missiles behead and maim thousands more and we call ourselves the essence of enlightened man?

In today’s America, compassion and empathy have been replaced by malice and moral cowardice. Fear mongering, more than anything else, decided the 2004 election. Racism and hatred, the need for vengeance and the seeking of sadistic suffering upon those seen as sub-human helped re-select the war criminals in office. It was a desire to destroy an alien culture unknown and misunderstood, scapegoated as America’s next enemy, in a long line of distinguished evildoers from which war has been harvested, that sent millions of brainwashed conduits for perpetual war to the voting booth. It was a desire to inflict the same carnage that befell our shores, the same fear reeking from our pores, that gave Bush so many votes. In 59 million Americans Bush got validation to continue his vicious circle of violence, and in the monstrous destruction of Fallujah, with over 6000 dead, hundreds of bodies rotting in the streets, swarmed by millions of flies, a third of its buildings in rubble, the wickedness America and its people have become can the world see.

The wickedness perpetrated on 9/11 released a racism and xenophobia that has existed in the United States since its inception, from the extermination and subsequent imprisonment of the Indian to the enslavement and apartheid of blacks to the destruction of Vietnam and the Philippines to the bigotry against Mexicans living in stolen land to the discrimination and exploitation of today’s immigrants. There exists in America today a hatred for Arabs and Muslims, wisely planned by those whose hands toy with our marionette strings, that has released into the air the winds of allowed carnage upon a population of innocent human beings.

This is a blatant racism, guided and exponentially increased by the atrocities of 9/11, that fails to separate monsters from normal people like you and me, wanting nothing more than to live in peace and happiness. In the death of over 100,000 Iraqis, and the maiming in body and mind of countless more, for a war of choice and not necessity, in an illegal and criminal war of aggression and profit, for no moral justification and no humanist reason whatsoever, with little or no opposition and protest from citizens, the seeds of American racism have firmly been planted yet again.

This phenomenon can best be seen with the rise of the so-called Christian Crusaders, the American Taliban, tens of millions of believers in fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, those espousers of everything Christ whose actions resemble everything Satan, self-described lovers of ‘moral values,’ crusaders of life even as they subsidize and vote for death, haters of progress and secularism, fearful of gay and Arab bogeymen, seeking the male control of women’s reproductive choice as well as the continued dumbing-down of America’s children. These millions have been brainwashed into believing their Dear Leader is a catalyst of God itself, a conversant with the Almighty, a second coming of the ‘savior’ sent to protect them in times of great insecurity and what they perceive as the nearing of biblical Rapture.

Through the fear and insecurity so ingeniously implanted by those in power into the American psyche, Christian lovers of moral values have become the vessel of convenience for those whose interests lie in perpetual war against the Arab world. Claiming the moral high ground, this army of unenlightened sheep seeks the entrance to the kingdom of God even as they foam at the mouth at the grisly truth of 100,000 dead innocent Arab and Muslim people in far off lands and even as their insatiable addiction to kill, maim and destroy resurrects in them the Nazis of the past and manifests the monsters of the present.

Yet when their Dear Leader herds them to pasture, telling them the Almighty condones the present Crusade in Iraq, so full of imported suffering and exploding rage, only the death of American mercenaries and killing machines matter. Forgotten are the children, the women, the ancients, the innocent and the plethora of Iraqi policemen who have died at the hands of the military industrial complex. Forgotten are the rapes, the cold-blooded killings, the torture, the dehumanization, the suffering, the bombings, the assassinations and the human hell created by American forces that now breathe life in Iraq. When Iraqis are subhuman, however, only the lives of the occupiers and invaders matter. American racism at its worst.

These are American Christian values, that pestilence concocted by false prophets and indoctrinated into unenlightened millions roaming the isolated netherworld of ignorance and extremist theology, that have made the United States the ultimate terrorist state and a most dangerous manifestation of the inherent evil in human existence. In truth, these values have lived as long as the nation itself, hibernating for years until that time when enemies are needed and warmonger leaders appear to shepherd the masses into the jaws of wolves.

Infecting the masses with these moral values is oftentimes too easy. All that is needed are new Pearl Harbors that serve to blind and mobilize, alien cultures or nations chosen, and a corporate media that acts as official government loudspeaker, with its vast array of prostitutes regurgitating official company and government diatribe directly into the homes of millions. Fear, racism, hatred, xenophobia, homophobia, ignorance and unenlightenment are a product of a dumbed-down populace, thanks to education and television, systematically made sheep by the system in which they live. American Christian values reflect this reality.

Escaping the Clouds

The day before 9/11 and the day after are two different worlds, – as much as two days divided by a cataclysmic event could be – never again to interconnect in the sands of time and the order of human civilization. A paradigm shift that altered the future course of humanity befell the world, and a way of life that dissolves more and more with each passing day is eroding. For a few, it was the miracle welcoming in a new Pearl Harbor from which to mobilize the masses to their lunatic world vision. For others, it was the manna from heaven needed to help justify in the populace’s minds the pre-ordained invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq for oil profits and corporatist power. For the majority of us, 9/11 and its aftermath continues to lead us towards a police state and undemocratic despotism at home, fear and insecurity in the world, and perpetual war in our daily existence.

America has been transformed for the worse, with only a few elite basking in the splendor of their long-sought reality. Millions continue to be plagued by trance-like ignorance, like bobble-head dolls agreeing with every dictate their masters command. Warmongers and greed addicts have found their habitat; profiteers are being enriched by our stolen treasure; other nations prosper at our ill-conceived wars.

Soon more wars will follow, along with a draft that will rob Americans of their children, sent to fight delusional wars for profit-making and power-grabbing crusades, sacrificed in body and mind for the continued expansion of greed and the Almighty Dollar. The world no longer seems safe; the post 9/11 world has been hijacked by fundamentalist extremists in America and beyond, taken over by a small cabal of zealots and corporatists doing with us and the planet as they wish, pitting poor versus poor, caste versus caste and religion against religion in wars which only those in power benefit from.

Just as we breathe, our futures are being stolen from us and our children. Just as our heart beats, our morality is being eroded from under us. Just as we live, so our complicity in mass murder is becoming a reality. Three-hundred million Americans have become complacent witnesses to terrorism done in our name, yet nothing is done to bring justice to the world, nothing is done to put an end to madness, nothing is done to halt the crimes of our leaders.

We have been trained well to be the obedient, complacent, conformist, acquiescent, law abiding lapdog of the Establishment, unwilling to question authority, seek accountability, demand justice, resist, protest or dissent. Given a bone or a treat we simply wag our tails in contentment, eager to fall back asleep and forget the whipping our masters give us and the world.

In the clouds of 9/11 do we find ourselves immersed in, unable to escape the all-encompassing debris that continues to make blind millions upon millions of eyes, making foggy our ability to reason and analyze reality.

In the clouds of 9/11 can a lost America be found, missing for three years, disintegrating like a morning mist from the world of today. Instead, a new America is rising, full of violence and indifference, full of conquest and arrogance, full of lack of empathy and thirst for inflicting pain and suffering.

Just as America roams the thick cloud cover of 9/11, unable to find its missing self, so too has our psychology been lost among the ruins and the dust. Missing it remains, making us unaware of what we have become, similar to the millions of Germans who in the 1930’s allowed the Nazis to rampage across the world, their minds hypnotized and oblivious to the crimes against humanity being perpetrated in their name, pretending as if nothing was happening, pretending their leaders were pure and altruistic.

In the thick debris cloud of 9/11 can we see what has happened to this nation. In here can we see what we have become. In here can we see what our own minds have mutated into and what they continue to let happen in our name.

In the clouds of 9/11 do we find ourselves trapped in, unwilling to awaken from our nightmare, unable to stop the madness and uncertain what the future course this nation will take. In the clouds of 9/11 lie the answers and solutions as to how to salvage a sinking ship. If we are to right what has been made wrong, then, the maze of fog and haze and debris and violence must we escape, finding light where only gray ash exists, finally reaching an enlightenment America so desperately needs.

Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now on sale by Authorhouse.com. A collection of essays, Beyond the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on America and Humanity, will be published in early 2005. His articles appear in alternative news websites and you can find him regularly on http://www.informationclearinghouse.info. His unique style and powerful writing is read internationally and seeks to expose truths and realities confronting humanity today. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. A diverse collection of many of his essays and articles can be found below:

Articles by Manuel Valenzuela, 2004 and at at my archives

Echoes in the Wind Sales Page

Mr. Valenzuela´s new novel is now on sale. Almost 600 pages in trade paperback form on sale internationally through secure web page transaction. In one month this title will be available on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. Also, if preferred, the novel can now be ordered at any local bookstore worldwide through its ISBN number (found on the sales webpage).

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