Friday, August 18, 2006

Stratfor

I've been blogging in support of the Palestinian/Lebanese cause almost continously for two weeks. One blogger kept sourcing his stuff from an organisation called Stratfor. It's a private spook outfit that peddles "intelligence". Stratfor's intelligence has included the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Al Quaida - Iraq collaboration and Cesar Chavez's downfall every year.

When you trawl the internet for stuff on Stratfor, You run into a lot of blogging. Kids are quoting Stratfor all the time. The chat on these sites is invariably of the murderin’ terrorist-sandnigger sort. I wonder what the kids on the other side are saying? Eventually I found what I was looking for. It was here:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Stratfor

Trawling through the Stratfor slime last night has made me understand what dear old Hunter S. meant by fear and loathing. He coined that phrase while covering the Nixon/McGovern Presidential election. The situation was similar to now. The Vietnam war had become a debacle and McGovern ran an anti-war ticket. He didn’t have a shit-show and the off-stage stuff was very similar to today.

It just goes to show how deep this neo-con stuff is embedded. I was left fearing that the fix is in. If it goes into Iran, the mess will be too big for a straight (if you could find one) Democrat to fix. Not in one term. Probably not in a lifetime. And those kids on the blogs will never know it.

Maybe that’s why Hunter S. shot himself.

Of course, the demons back in our day were the Chinese, Vietcong, and the Soviets. They shared a belief system. The idealogues among them believed that it would be possible for humans to live in a simple, co-operative manner. In a way that shared the resources in the most equitable way. It couldn’t work and it didn’t.

It might have worked if they had managed to get the bugs out of it. But they had to fight wars with the Hawks and profiteers of the West who saw it as bad for business. Eventually, with their infrastructure sufficiently degraded, they collapsed. Neither side could see a middle ground.

New Zealand had a try. State pensions, State Houses, a medical system that was free. I got paid to go to university. State Railway, State Postal Service. State......well, whatever it was, the State had one. It creaked and groaned but it worked, until newspapers lost their dominance. And the PR industry was born.

I think it’s our fault. Us baby boomers. We thought it was a done deal, that Dylan, Joni and the crew had got the message across. So we sat on our arses, dropped out and became Carpenters, sailors and singers. Waiting for the Greening of America.

So I apologise to the next generation. We took our eye off the ball. Hunter’s beast was loose among us and we nurtured him ‘til he grew strong. We raised him in the hope that he would enrich us and, in your time, you too.

You will have to live as we have lived. God grant you just a few years when it seems like it just might turn.

Oh....and try not to believe too hard in anything.



Stratfor Monitors and Studies Social Movements

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