When he was nineteen years old Splitting The Sky was charged with killing a guard in the Attica Prison uprising ending with the murder of 39 individuals, most of them inmates. Since then Splitting The Sky has been at the centre of many major controversies involving core issues in the relationship of the ruling class to the underclass. Splitting the Sky's growing contributions to the 911 Truth Movement embodies the links with the larger quest to transcend the injustices of slavery, colonialism and economic exploitation. The quest for 911 Truth, therefore, carries forward a heritage of resistance against the forces of imperial globalization that gathered force with the genocide and dispossession of the Indigenous peoples in the course of inventing America as a promised land for immigrants and their descendants. I have attempted to elaborate some of these connections in my text, The American Empire and the Fourth World.
I wrote the core text of the preface to that volume one week after the illegal US invasion of Iraq began in 2003. It was quite clear to me that the invasion of Iraq continued many patterns of US conduct in the Indian wars. I did revisions on the preface after viewing live the spectacle of political propaganda on board the USS Abraham Lincoln beginning with George Bush imitating the Hollywood imagery of the US president in Independence Day. Bush began the spectacle by landing his fighter jet on the deck of the giant aircraft carrier. Bush emerged in his combat suit to declare that his mission of freeing the Iraqis had been accomplished. By staging the event on board a US instrument of warfare named after the author of the Gettysburg Address, Bush's propagandists sought to convey that the US president had freed the Iraqis as Lincoln has freed the slaves; that Bush was handing over the government of those formerly "enslaved" by Saddam Hussein to a regime "of, for and by the Iraqi people."[xx]
The kinds of lies and distortions of the Bush White House go very far beyond the fiction that Saddam Hussein menaced the whole world with his deadly weapons of mass destruction. The obvious implication, I believe, is that the 911 Truth Movement and the anti-war movement must merge. We must join forces to continue our international quest for a world governed by the rule of law and the self-determination of peoples rather than by the brute force of the military-industrial complex in conjunction with the lawless national security state. I have tried to develop these ideas in Volume 2 of my Bowl With One Spoon series published by McGill-Queen's University Press. The American Empire and the Fourth World is volume one of the series. Volume 2, which we hope to have on bookshelves by this time next year, is entitled Earth into Property: Aboriginal History and the Making of Global History.
Let me share some excerpts from those revisions. The following excerpt concludes the second chapter. In it I return to a discussion earlier in the first chapter of the text about the frontier theory of Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner introduced his famous essay on the significance of the US frontier in the making of American history at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The event was meant to commemorate and celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of America. I write,
In the years before he became the disgraced former governor of New York state, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer made his name and fame as the Sheriff of Wall Street-as a gun slinging investigator with an urge to prosecute some striking high-profile examples of executive criminality. Through his efforts and those of other law enforcement agents a few high-profile CEO's were eventually prosecuted for insider trading and for stealing corporate assets. The convicted included press baron Conrad Black and the media darling of American domesticity, Martha Stewart. While the public were served up a few show trials, however, there is little doubt that much of malfeasance during the Wild West years of maximum deregulation on Wall Street went largely uninvestigated, unprosecuted, and unconvicted. Moreover, the wholesale commodification of new frontiers mind and matter continued unabated. As The New York Times proclaimed in a headline: "Enron's Other Legacy: The Idea That Anything Can Be Traded." [xxi]
The prospect of even larger political scandals coming to light in the unfolding of the Enron debacle may have been significantly diminished when, during the late afternoon of September 11, 2001, World Trade Centre 7 (WTC 7) fell to the ground in a well filmed episode still widely displayed on the Internet. The fall of WTC 7, reported by the BBC fully twenty minutes before it actually occurred, shows all the attributes of a controlled demolition. No airplanes crashed into WTC 7. The official explanation given for the instant destruction of the 600 foot structure is that the building had been damaged by fires caused earlier in the day when World Trade Centers 1 and 2 plunged to the ground at the speed of a free fall. Interestingly, WTC 7 held the offices of the Security Exchange Commission that was then investigating Enron on a number of fronts, including its possible role in apparently manipulating supplies of electricity in California in order to advance its push to elevate profits through further deregulation and privatization of that lucrative energy market. Key records in Enron's investigation, along with those demonstrating possible infractions in the business activities of about 3,000 other companies, were destroyed in the destruction of WTC 7. WTC 7 also held the New York Offices of the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, the Defense Department, as well as the New York Mayor's Office of Emergency Management.
The events of 911 seem to have been anticipated by some traders on the New York Stock Exchange. [xxii]
While some corporations suffered heavily after 911, others benefited greatly. The heightened fear of terrorism, for instance, provided a bonanza for the global insurance industry. Moreover the US government's quick declaration of a global War on Terror significantly heightened the budgets and quickly advanced the further privatization of the world's largest military-industrial complex through vehicles such as the Blackwater Corporation. [xxiii] Blackwater was one of a whole generation of corporate entities whose operatives are well positioned to benefit most from the rapid development of the post-911 terror economy. The rapid increase in military budgets occurred even in the face of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield's admission made on September 10, 2001 that the Pentagon's accountants could not explain the disappearance of $2.3 trillion from the books of the US government's military spending. [xxiv]
These suggestive facts together with many, many more of their ilk suggest the continuing validity of Frederick Jackson's Turner's insights on the importance of violence and lawlessness in those moving zones of frontier interaction where the political culture of the United States takes form. In the first decade of the twenty-first century some of the leading frontiersmen of the capitalist superpower continued to move out in front of the law in order to avoid regulation. In the anything-goes-atmosphere of New World fortune seeking, the frontiersmen of business deregulation staked their claims to new forms of wealth in a globalized Indian Country where the attributes of the Wild West's new incarnation would extend to the quest to gain expanded ownership and control over the oil fields of the Middle East and Eurasia.[xxv]
In the fifth chapter I make additional references to the frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner Wall and to Eliot Spitzer.
The former Attorney General and Governor of New York, Spitzer recently faced his own lewd trial by media. This following excerpt from the forthcoming Earth into Property concludes a long narrative where I document in considerable detail the role of US business and finance on both sides of the Second World War. From the relevant evidence I develop the thesis that the military-industrial complex emerged from both the fascist Axis and from and the social democracy of Roosevelt and the United Nations. I write,
The dubious official conspiracy theory to explain the events of 911 gave the Republican Party of George W. Bush and the bipartisan leadership of the military-industrial complex some evocative, yet conveniently vague and elastic imagery of an ethnically and religiously defined enemy. Conveniently absent from day one was even a hint from the official sources that there might be some sort of domestic and/or economic motivation woven within the complex texture of an extremely elaborate and multi-faceted crime. As with the Kennedy assassination, those said to be the culprits were identified almost immediately forming the basis of an explanation that was quickly reified in report after report. The enemy appeared just when it was needed to give the US president a rallying cry and the US executive branch a justification for continuing the enormous military expenditures that have continued to grow ever since the United States adopted its permanent wartime economy after the Japanese government attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour. The mythology of 911 gave the United States yet another savage other against which to develop its self-understanding of its own civilization's superiority. [xxvi] As Richard Cizak of the National Association of Evangelicals saw it, many of his constituents responded to the official explanation of 911 by substituting Islam for the Soviet Union. "The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire," Cizak declared. One poll of right-wing Christian leaders found that two-thirds of those questioned agreed that Islam is "dedicated to world domination." They agreed that Islam is "a religion of violence." [xxvii]
The official interpretation of the events of 911 created a perfect basis to renew the alliance between Christian fundamentalists and Cheney-style business hawks that ushered in the anti-New Deal presidency of Ronald Reagan. In ways that were completely antagonistic to the social democracy of Roosevelt and Keynes, the War on Terror opened the door to ratcheting up right-wing tactics for the expanded reach of government into every facet of human interaction. Patterns began to be repeated that had earlier been deployed when the fascist Axis had first been fashioned as an anti-communist laboratory of totalitarian capitalism.[xxviii]
Now terrorism replaced communism as the all-purpose demon to be manipulated as deemed necessary in order to fend off any challenge to the omnipotence of finance capital and those who control it. Even more than the wars on communism, the war on terrorism evoked the mythological encounter between savagery and civilization that Frederick Jackson Turner had identified at the World's Columbian Exposition as the formative interaction in shaping his country's political culture.
As in both the Nazi-led and US-led versions of the war on communism, in the War on Terror business cartels were once again dealt lucrative licenses to derive large profits from their expanded function as privatized agents of the state's expanding claims to police, propaganda and military powers. The Patriot Act of 2001, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the amendments of 2008 to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are prominent projectiles in the legislative arsenal aimed at piercing the fragile protections of universal human rights both inside and outside the United States. [xxix]
Plans to eliminate habeas corpus-the basis of the principle that individuals are innocent until proven guilty-were already well advanced before the events of 911 created the necessary psychological environment to trigger military invasions abroad and police state transformations at home. The invocation of the ideals of Homeland Security conjured up the same language used by the White minority regime during the height of South African apartheid even as it exposed the outward orientation of so-called national security. In the United States, national security has always meant going outside the so-called Homeland to meddle in other people's sovereign business.
The remarkably quick enactment of the Patriot Act barely a month after the events of 911 suggests that its drafting was already well in the works even before the Twin Towers were instantly pulverized as if in a controlled demolition energized by the coordinated explosions of many thousands of thermite charges. Similarly the growth of the apparatus of so-called Homeland Security applied principles already outlined in January of 2001 in the reports of the United States Commission on National Security co-chaired by Gary Hart and Warren D. Rudman. [xxx]
The technological engines of capitalism have changed significantly since the era when the German subsidiary of IBM Corporation handled the data processing for the Nazi assault on European Jewry. Since the early 1980s much of the most sophisticated intelligence gathering has been done with computer software such as PROMIS and Echelon. These and other programs have enabled spy agencies and banking institutions secretly to observe each other's data bases, current communications and ongoing transactions through myriad forms of back door access. [xxxi] High-tech spying can also extend to outright manipulation of digital traffic.
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