SUICIDE BOMBER Bob Woodward Offers A Few Tastes of the Bitter Truth

[acmavm]

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.

<snip>
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.

[LittleApple81]

1. That now we have to go to Moscow to hear a good analysis with some truth..

the horror... the horror....
Thanks for the post.

[acmavm]

3. Chris Floyd reads the posts here at DU, here's part of an e-mail I got

from him (and posted here) a few days ago:

Again, many thanks for your letter. I'm a big DU fan myself, have been
checking it regularly for a long time.

Yours,
Chris F.
**********************
So you see, some important people do come here to lurk. And we should be proud of that fact.

[OneBlueSky]

2. could it be that Bush is so terrified of his own death, . . .

or so angry at the inevitability of his own death, that he has subconsciously decided to take the rest of us with him? . . . "If I have to die, dammit, so do THEY!" . . . meaning everyone else . . . just wonderin' . . .

[enough]

4. Floyd always looks the beast straight in the eye

snip>

The corrosive nihilism at the heart of the enterprise ate through the gaudily-painted surface most tellingly in a single anecdote. Woodward asks George W. Bush how he thinks history will regard his adventure in Iraq. Bush, gazing out the window, shrugs and waves the question away. "History, we don't know," he says. "We'll all be dead." No fine, faith-filled talk here about God and Jesus and the immortal soul responsible for its actions throughout all eternity -- the kind of zealous patter Bush favors in public statements. This was just the cold, rotten, meaningless core of his grand vision -- "we'll all be dead." So who cares? AprÏs moi, le deluge.

snip>

[Dover]

5. Sex, Death and Let's Roll!

I'd like to see a cartoon of Bush and Cheney dancing with one another and the grim reaper tapping Cheney on the shoulder as a gesture implying he wants to "cut in".