Nov

27

The idea that any entity, regardless of size and potency of weapons cache, could sucecssfully occupy the entire South Asian subcontinent is patently absurd.

But if one were to undertake the laundry list of patently absurd business decisions taken in recent decades, one would be obliged to leave off due to carpal tunnel syndrome and consumption of disk space.

Rejectionists will undoubtedly cite details like the basic arithmetical proposition of an entity whose entire population is barely 400,000 attempting to assume the occupation of a land mass with a population of well over a billion souls, few of whom are noted for their eagerness to be occupied by anybody.

But those misguided souls underestimate the Resolve of the US populace, decades of conscientiously applied marketing have not been for naught, and even when the unprecedented conscription of all US nationals between the ages of 7 and 80 is unanimously and resoundingly enacted by the legislative wing of the Key Industry community, affectionately known as “Congress,” anyone who dares to suggest that there might be more than a few seven year olds who might not be up to the task of maintaining their share of 4000 under lockdown will be summarily labeled as one who sees the glass half full, and if they persist, or happen to have a particular “look,” a terrorist.

The latter, it could be argued, is not exactly inaccurate, since whatever the dictionary says, and the US International Marketing Wing, affectionately known as “The UN,” refuses to say, the practical working usage of the word has, in recent years, come to mean simply anyone who opposes or resists business decisions made by Key Industries.

The bedrock, the essence of marketing, is the equivalent of a standard game of dress-up that takes place not in the bedroom of a young girl, but in the minds, the attitudes, opinions and beliefs of the target market, but as is the case with the little girl who remains a little girl no matter in which of her mother’s grown-up outfits she may array herself, no matter what brilliantly and conscientiously applied conceptual rainment it may be wear, business was, is, and ever more will be, business.

From time to time, some of the more daring scholars and thinkers and ologists have had the temerity to point out that wars, regardless of their ostensible cause, which are almost invariably related to some emotion-invoking notion or other, are in fact about money, or some resource from which money can be made.

This is, for many, if not most human beings, such a bitter pill to swallow that they are wont to hold it in their cheeks, and spit out its dissolving remains into a tissue, which they then fling away from them, hard.

One of the most hopeful potentials our species possesses is our innate and primordial desire to Believe in Good Things.

We want this so badly that women stay for years with horribly abusive husbands and boyfriends, sustaining themselves through a life of horror by their sincere Belief that their love will change him.

This example comes to mind because our desire to believe those good things increases exponentially the closer the good thing can be associated with us.

We want to believe the best of our family, our friends, our tribe, our regional/national group, and it is from this last that comes what, if we were browsers, would be called a vulnerability.

Even those who manage to swallow enough of the pill to allow themselves to concede, albeit reluctantly, that wars fought by regional/national groups not associated with us are, ok, yeah, about the money, to recognize that same fact about what we consider to be “our” group is simply rejected out of hand.

We will assert that we know that is not so, because our loved one sacrificed his leg, his life, and he was not in it, we declare hotly, in it for the money.

This is because we have at this point in our non-reasoning, completely left the track, and the truth that was just as necessary that he, and all his comrades in arms believe it was for this or that grand emotion-invoking concept, even more so than that we believe it ourselves.

Those loved ones were not fools. Had someone suggested to them that they leave behind home and hearth and go off to this or that place and sacrifice limb or life as needed in order that a rich man might have more money, the number of takers would be small.

Thus, when that hopeful potential, that Good Thing about us, meets another popular human trait - anti-Otherness, the result is what is commonly referred to as a “Perfect Storm.”

Countless experiments have demonstrated the ease and swiftness with which we can be persuaded to de-humanize each other, and this facility has proven, time and again, to be a most effective - and lucrative - business model.

It is by virtue of that Perfect Storm that we accept unquestioningly that it is not an act itself that is inherently “wrong,” but the actor.

If committed by an Other, by someone whom we have dehumanized, or even merely enemized, that act is an atrocity, a crime, an act of terrorism.

If committed by an entity we associate with ourselves in some way, from loved one to regional/national group, the act becomes anything from a mistake, an “isolated incident” reflective of a “few bad apples,” to the most convoluted tangles of anti-logic imaginable.

And having read George Orwell cannot be considered a vaccine. In fact, one often hears him woven into those tangles, even as we fail to give even a second thought to invasions that are called liberations, to kidnappings that are called detentions, to systematic reduction, even extermination, of populations, as security operations, whereby people defending their homes and families are transformed into insurgents, and back again to the T-word.

Any opposition or resistance to business decisions of Key Industries is terrorism because, to put it very simply, rich men want more money.

He who would stand between those rich men and more money is jeopardizing revenue, they can only be considered anti-business - another, slightly more indirect, synonym for “terrorist.”

It used to be “communist.” Or among the more lettered sectors, sometimes “socialist.”

But for a variety of business reasons, it was felt that it would be best to transition to “terrorist,” and that is where we are today.

We are unable to condemn attacks against innocent people unless we are told they are committed by an entity we have enemized, dehumanized, or both.

It requires almost no effort to procure that we listen eagerly to reports of “investigations” into just which of our enemies “did it,” and even those of us who are familiar with the phrase “cui bono?” under no circumstances are we allowed even the most infintesimal spark of curiosity, the faintest dawning of that question.

As absolutely and thoroughly as if we had been born without the capacity to do so, it does not even occur to us to ask who benefits from it.

A few days ago, the idea that it would be publicly acknowledged that a team of US operatives, even characterized as a “team of advisors,” would be sent to India, would have been, at the very least, met with some astonished questions.

A few days before September 11, 2001, the idea that it would be publicly acknowledged that a team of US operatives, even characterized as a “team of advisors,” would be sent to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and shortly after that, Iraq and a few other selected locations, would have been, at the very least, met with some astonished questions.

But today, anyone who dared to suggest that both US and the UK should not do any and everything possible to “help restore security” to one of the emerging markets to which so many aspects of business will be transitioning would become immediately a person of interest in the eyes of all who heard him.

And that is how the invasion and occupation of the South Asian subcontinent will come to pass, and be embraced by the US public with all the same fervor and zeal and enthusiasm with which the invasion and occupation of other lands is manifest as the only possible destiny, by a population who recoils from the question “cui bono?” as from a foetid plate of excrement.

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