Suicide Bomber - Chris Floyd on Bush's nihilism

[baby_bear]

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/04/23/120.html
Bob Woodward offers a few tastes of the bitter truth behind the Regime's war crime in Iraq.

By Chris Floyd

This is a very dark Chris Floyd column, and pretty scary at that.
Here are some snips, but it's best to read it all.

<snip>

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.

...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.

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.

...Last week, the Pentagon's influential Defense Science Board officially recommended the immediate development of a new generation of "tactical" nuclear weapons -- along with a new, Nietzschean will to use them, UPI reports.

Yes, this is the same group that developed a plan in 2002 for "provoking terrorist groups into action." The DSB wanted the Pentagon to foment terrorist attacks in order to flush the terrorists out of hiding so they could then be "crushed." The Pentagon never publicly rejected this morally insane scheme, first uncovered by the Los Angeles Times; perhaps we've already seen it in action, in Madrid, Riyadh or Bali.

</snip>
more....

This column comes into better perspective (for me, at least) when read along with Floyd's 2002 column in Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd1101.html
and this one from the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin27oct27.story

Thoughts?

s_m

[ozymandius]

1. I never considered nihilism a factor.

Though it bears strong consideration. I have always reckoned the Bush ilk as Chaos Capitalists. They gleefully use American military force to destabilize governments, ruin societies and landscapes in order to extract the resources necessary to bolster business interests. Deference is paid to the interests of those at the core of the cabal.

Odd, though, that Floyd would interject the idea of suicidal tendencies - like Jonestown on a massive scale.

[baby_bear]

3. It doesn't make sense to me, either.

I can see the segues from the LATimes article to FLoyd's Counterpunch article to his current column, but I think he may be ascribing an existentialistic current within Bush that he is not intellectually capable of having.

It all comes down to filthy lucre, in my opinion. How can a person consider himself a Christian yet allow millions to suffer for nothing more than money for industry and individuals?

It's beyond me, but I will keep trying to figure it out.

s_m

[ixion]

2. that's a great read, albeit tragic

We (the group) create the reality around us. And yet that most rudimentary concept is by and large lost in the group mentality, replaced by a penchant for bloodlust.

Ah, what a joy humans are. :-(