Democracies invariably engage much

more widely in deceptive war propaganda,

to whip up and persuade the public

At the same time they camouflage

their policies much more intensely in

hypocritical moral cant to fool the voters

Fighting terror is a non-starter,

if it is seen as making war, taking prisoners,

torturing them, locking them up

and throwing away the key

Doing such things is not really

fighting terror at all,

but responding to it in exactly the way

that most satisfies the terrorists themselves

- with state terror -

and in the way that Americans most humiliate

themselves by humiliating others

Americans are force-fed the propaganda of imminent danger. It's a cocktail of fear, terror and warmongering that is essential to our enemy-addicted culture.

The media plays their part in concocting the trigger-happy bogeyman Americans are always too eager to declare war upon, and to condition us into accepting their version of reality.

The bogeyman is dehumanized and made sub-human by the state’s propagandists, both essential elements in conditioning the populace into accepting destruction and murder of the enemy.

Now we have a newly minted enemy, the Arab bogeyman.

Years of conditioning by Hollywood vilifying Arabs had jump-started the American hatred of the Islamic culture, even before 9/11, planting the seeds of hatred and xenophobia that would fully sprout on the day catalyzing events unleashed a new American century and Americans were introduced to the dreaded Arab terrorist.

The dreaded Arab bogeyman, concocted as terrorist through years of state sponsored propaganda and manipulation, only fed into the historical hatred of people of color by xenophobic majorities.

The decimation of tens of millions of Native Americans, their condemnation into hellholes called reservations, the prolonged enslavement of Africans, the decimation of Filipinos, Koreans and Vietnamese in Asia.

The wars of aggression and senseless mass murder against Latin Americans spanning decades, the still prevalent racism against African Americans and Latinos, condemning most to lifelong imprisonment and abandonment in urban ghettos.

And the recent jingoism and bigotry exhibited against Hispanic immigrants – nothing more than America’s new slave class – by a new generation of No Nothings.

These are but a few examples of a time honored tradition of indifference, racism and hatred of peoples not possessing the characteristics of European lineage, of white Anglo-Saxon tradition. The Arab culture, then, would be treated no differently.

A new scapegoat had been chosen, one alien and fear-inducing, for fear of the unknown is the greatest fear in the human condition.

All that was needed to foment the fusion of alien dark skinned Arab with terrorism in the minds of the people would be a catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor, that would cement a hatred and anger never before seen in America.

One that would blind and make fearful entire segments of the population. Of course the chosen patsies would perform the tasks assigned to them, oblivious to the eternal fame they would garner.

Molded and nurtured, observed and guided, these patsies would become the face of evil incarnate, with the modern day Emmanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden, striking fear and terror in the minds of Americans.

It would be the events of 9/11 that would firmly, and permanently, transfix Al-Qaeda into the imaginations of 300 million Americans, striking fear and a Pavlovian induced schizophrenia into the populace with every pronouncement of its title.

Blinded by fear, made devoid of reason and logic through the manipulations of terror, the American people would follow lies and deceptions without question.

They would obey and become subservient to the dictates of the imperial ideology.

They would take as truth and reality the fictions and charades offered by the state and the corporatist media.

There is only one real difference between the capacity of a 'democracy' and a dictatorship to wage war: democracies invariably engage much more widely in deceptive war propaganda, to whip up and persuade the public.

Democracies that wage war need to produce much more propaganda to whip up their citizens, and at the same time to camouflage their policies much more intensely in hypocritical moral cant to fool the voters.

Every time the phrase "War on Terror" is seriously used, we're swept back out into the "desert of the real," the hyper-reality of non-events created for propaganda purposes, to manipulate the public through generating an endless state of fear.

Fighting terror is a non-starter, if it is seen as making war, taking prisoners, torturing them, locking them up and throwing away the key.

Doing such things is not really fighting terror at all, but responding to it in exactly the way that most satisfies the terrorists themselves - with state terror - and in the way that Americans most humiliate themselves by humiliating others.

Obviously the seeds of terror are most successfully grown in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and other such compounds and in the larger "carceral" realities of Gaza and the West Bank and the overstuffed elitism of Saudi Arabia's non-functioning society.

Each of these being places and conditions nurtured by western and especially U.S. policy.

And the same could and does multiply in the many other cream-off-the-top economic booms in former third world countries that feed the first world through outsourcing, or the creation of new higher levels of minimum-wage, gentrified slave labor.

Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global profusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.

We can no longer draw a demarcation line around it. It is at the very heart of this culture which combats it, and the visible fracture (and the hatred) that pits the exploited and the underdeveloped globally against the Western world secretly connects with the fracture internal to the dominant system.

That system can face down any visible antagonism. But against the other kind, which is viral in structure the system can do nothing. And terrorism is the shock wave of this silent reversion.

When an enemy is invisible it comes to seem internalized. It may turn out that the events on 9/11 and its aftermath were the first signs of a western empire teetering on the brink of self-destruction.