Deconstructing the "War on Terror" mantra

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To deconstruct the national “war on terror” mantra.

“War” is a term for the battle to get born, in group-fantasy. What “war” is made “on”, in the current context of use, is named by the feeling-term, “terror”, brought over into politics and policy from experience of trauma – of which birth is most powerful and universal. Having almost no cognitive (textual) content, it is a token of what provokes the most extreme anxiety: beyond Darth Vader; what “Darth Vader” represents as the form of twisted experience this “baby boomer” generation has brought America in its maximum in unconsciousness). They are still responding to the “war on terror” that was waged on their asses by the WWII fathers.


This is played out on “the enemy” as Arab-Muslim malehood. This is shown: in the Abu Ghraib pictures (pictures show the token, unconscious side of war, as “Wag The Dog” already deconstructed – it has been shown all over the globe, eaten up in the Middle East). AEI (American Enterprise Institute) pundit Michael Ledeen has called for attacking Iran with TV, waging propaganda war by planting at the picture-token level what is then politically generalized at the tcxtual, as events indicate – in other words, controlling minds by manipulating deep, unconscious group-fantasy material. What kind? -- anal male rape. This was tokened on the front page of the New York Times by showing near-naked Palestinian men running out of a West Bank Ramada Israeli jail, as if someone behind were slashing a whip. (Cf. my letter to the Times about that.)

Thirdly, the factually bogus issue of giving “control of U.S. ports” to the United Arab Emirates’ “Dubai Ports World” has received enormous mass public resonance. It is, again, symbolic of anal rape, as substitute male-birth generation, threatening to return on us as we (“U.S.” as group) have inflicted on them. The “deal” leaves the “left-side” (of a ship/vessel/mother’s body) vulnerable to “penetration” by “terrorists” who might be smuggling anything in in any cargo “package” (repetition of condom fantasy to “protect” against male-impregnation, mixing feces and semen).

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These three considerations show the necessity for using the concept, hence the words, “anal rape”, in explaining the content of the unconscious group fantasy that has seized America. It is what the symbols symbolize, What the analogies, all the way from hi-school (“up yours”, “stick it”) analogize. What Daniel Shreiber fantasized the Almighty wanted to do to him at night, with accdursed “voluptuosities”. What American cultural group fantasy began preparing for a decade or two ago, when men’s butts suddenly made their appearance everywhere as an advertising fetish. And what the great Italian film-maker Pasolini showed in the unforgettably evil “Salo: The 120 days of Sodom”.

It should be explained that this is the analysis of a massively pervasive group condition, a feeling-toned state, like shared tooth-ache, independent of particular cognitive content, agitating all. This aspect of the phenomenon is perhaps hardest to understand. It is not easily grasped that something experienced privately in one’s own gut is identical for others. Different ‘vicissitudes of instinct’ (Freud) engender different latencies for ‘triggers’, but just as Betty Friedan figured out the common condition of “feminine mystique” hindered women’s development, so this condition, the compulsion to defend against anal rape, beginning in men, dominates the undercurrent of American group life. To paraphrase a line from Willie Nelson, “What do you think all those turbans and sheets wuz about?” These are tokens of the condition created by projection, triggering the threat of becoming feminine.

Perhaps if Germans had been told they were seized by the unconscious group fantasy that the presence of Jews in their midst had come to mean “poison in the blood” – the Poisonous Placenta of fetal flash-back fantasy – perhaps they might have been able to sort out the economic, ethnic, nationalistic and cultural issues that sprang up in the l930’s without a Krystalnacht (set off by a 17 year old Jew murdering an official, in revenge for his people’s past treatment), and without delegating Hitler and the Nazis to purge their insanity. One wonders. And whether if, in fact, Americans as a group are any different, except for willingness to swap one kind of Semite for another to hate, while raising the fantasy level from fetal to (pre) Oedipal.

Finally: this is the connection to Mearsheimer and Walt’s article, section on “demonizing Muslims”.

What they document is perpetrated by the “Libby Lobby”, through the mass media. It is a fact that these are owned, controlled, programmed and processed under the auspices of the U.S. Government, and that they equate American interests with Israel’s. This is what must be called attention to. And stopped, in my opinion. It is existentially grounded on the psychodynamics of defense, by both males and females, I have come to see, against the violation of personal dignity, and decency, called “anal rape”. It is a perversion that can become accepted as a substitute for love, and that needs pointing out by an independent media source. In the balance now is whether WHRW can challenge itself to be such an educational beacon. ”