Conscious Choice: Blackwater Runs Deep

November 2007 | Prophet Motive

Blackwater Runs Deep

By Daniel Pinchbeck

Naomi Wolf’s The End of America is a must-read. Powerful and concise, inspiring and provocative, her book reveals the step-by-step parallels between the extra-legal actions of the Bush government and Fascist regimes of the past. Apparently, the shift from democracy to totalitarianism follows a predictable, almost predetermined pattern, from the creation of secret prisons and torture chambers, to increasing surveillance of citizens, to the restriction of journalistic freedom and the targeting of key individuals to the subversion of the rule of law.

We have allowed our country to roll far down this slippery slope, and it may require a mass activation of the common will to prevent the next logical — and irrevocable — steps. Reviewing the historical precedents, Wolf notes that the final stages tend to happen suddenly, in the wake of crises that are often artificially engineered by the ruling group. Incidentally, the book goes well with a viewing of Zeitgeist, a popular “mythumentary” on the Internet that follows Nietzsche’s dictum to “philosophize with a hammer.”

Wolf’s manifesto sounds a powerful rallying cry. When did our heterogeneous democracy become a “Homeland” (a term previously popularized, Wolf reminds us, by Nazi propagandists in the 1930s)? Why do we find basic constitutional rights such as “peaceable assembly” increasingly demonized by the police in many cities? Why are private mercenary armies, such as the trigger-happy Blackwater, being given free reign, both here and abroad? As individuals and communities and affinity networks, we have to overcome our learned helplessness to rise against the dangerous menace that now confronts us directly.

History informs us that totalitarian regimes inevitably collapse, but not before they inflict vast amounts of destruction. Considering the immediate crisis of climate change and species extinction now facing the biosphere, humanity does not have the time to wait for this cyclical process to fulfill itself, as it has in the past. Somehow we need to jump to the end of the reel — in which the human spirit awakens in victory — without passing through the out-dated life-movie montages of secret police raids, demonization of immigrant groups, concentration camps, resource wars, etcetera.

As much as the Bush regime would like to act in a unilateral fashion against Iran, the intricate interweavings of the global economy may prevent our government from launching “World War Four.” If the Bush regime were to find a convenient pretext — such as another terrorist attack on US soil — to strike Iran and declare martial law here at home, the US will become a pariah state, forfeiting its influence on the global stage and inciting domestic economic collapse. It is difficult to see how this could benefit the agenda of anyone — even the most ideologically blinkered NeoCon or bellicose Fox News executive. Potentially, it could lead to a mass defection from the military-industrial sector, precipitating a “fall of the Berlin Wall” scenario in the U.S.

For those who would like to advance on the spiritual path, the current crisis in national and global affairs offers a tremendous opportunity for high-speed evolution. It is one thing to contemplate Eastern philosophy from the safety of one’s yoga mat, and quite another to realize compassion through acts of self-sacrifice that may lead to direct personal risk, as courageous Burmese monks recently demonstrated. A similar determination was shown by those Western activists who recently unfurled a “Free Tibet” banner at the base camp of the Chinese Olympic team, on Mount Everest.

Lately, I often find myself contemplating the prospect, described by St. Paul, of secret “powers and principalities” acting through our “flesh and blood” leaders and their cronies. There seems to be an occult, hidden dimension to current world affairs that requires not only a rational and strategic response, but some sort of shamanic channeling of trapped, voracious energies. Efforts such as The Disclosure Project, seeking to compel the release of information about the U.S. Government’s interaction with “extra-terrestrial” or other-dimensional entities, seem less and less farfetched, as our daily reality melds with sci-fi surrealism.

Beyond the patrolled borders of our increasingly insecure “homeland” is the unified field of our ever-more interconnected “home planet,” where there is no “us” versus “them,” no far-away place where we can send our toxic trash or permit impoverished children to make our clothes for us, where the sacredness of all life is self-evident. Unfortunately for the dominant elite, this planetary consciousness seems an emergent property of our globalized world. Its development cannot be stopped, and it may soon realize itself in new institutional forms and infrastructures, superseding the outmoded authoritarian structures that currently control the movements of capital. From this perspective, “the end of America,” in its current form, may not be a development to be feared, but an evolution to be welcomed.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books, 2002) and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006). His features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wired and many other publications.

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