ALVIN AND HEIDI TOFFLER: IN PRAISE OF OUR KINDER, GENTLER WAR MACHINE In the May, 1991, issue of World Monitor, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have published a hymn of praise to the marvels of "Third Wave" (computerized) warfare, under the title "War, Wealth and a New Era in History." You literally have to see this article to believe in it, otherwise you will suspect me of writing satire here. The Tofflers' war-lust transcends even the recent Hollywood blockbusters glorifying bigger and bigger orgies of destruction on wider and wider screens with louder and louder soundtracks. Nobody since Bruno Mussolini (Ben's son) has expressed so much unabashed joy in the art of killing, maiming and crippling human beings. Nobody since de Sade has stated the case for "value-free science" so eloquently or proclaimed its implications so blatantly. And nobody since Machiavelli has shown such total contempt for the notion that morality should play some role somewhere in human affairs. The Toffler's conversion to the Rambo-esque notion that modern technology makes killing people more fun than ever rests upon their enthusiasm for the recent Gulf War, which they describe with all the pulsating purple prose of D. H. Lawrence writing about copulation. The Tofflers have little interest in Lawrence's Super-Orgasm; they get the hots from "smart tools," "smart weapons," the "precision and customization" that reduces "collateral damage" (e.g., dead children), "precision-targeted weapons," "speed and movement," "rapid deployment," "surprise," "war...choreographed in time" (like a ghoul's ballet?), "incredible orchestration" (the danse macabre) - and so on, and so on. The more efficiently the military machine kills people, the more aesthetic it all seems to Alvin and Heidi. You might think they had discovered a new art-form more exquisite than haiku. The Divine Marquis could not have written a better rhapsody to the mathematical science of burning people and blowing holes in them. At the famous soiree that led to his arrest, Sade kept a precise tally (remember?) of how many times a whore flogged him and how many times he flogged her; he marvelously anticipated the New World Order's entire mental set, with all its anal-compulsive counting of wounds and cost-efficient analysis of pain and time- and-motion studies of torment. Before the Gulf War and the lyric ecstasies of Mr. and Mrs. Toffler, the closest approximation to Sade's dream appeared in the smoothly functioning Nazi annihilation camps, where the gas ovens worked with what the Tofflers would call "incredible orchestration," where every arm had a precise number tattooed on it, and even the gold fillings in the victims' teeth got counted, weighed and preserved for the State treasury. Naturally the Tofflers tells us that the super-brains behind this lovely little war really did minimalize "collateral damage." Total Iraqis killed, they cheerfully inform us, number "several hundred or at most several thousand." How marvelous, I think. Perhaps next they will write a glorification of Jack the Ripper, reminding us that his victims totaled "six or at most eight." I'll bet a lot of Americans believe that "several hundred or at most several thousand" figure, or at least want to believe it. As Abbie Hoffman once said, "There seem to be a lot of different realities going around these days." According to the Washington Post, U.S. losses numbered 55 killed, 155 wounded, 30 missing, and 9 prisoners of war, while Iraqi losses numbered 2,085 tanks, 962 armored vehicles, 1005 artillery pieces, and 103 aircraft destroyed (chart reprinted from Extra, May/June 1991). Either the Post believed nobody got hurt on the Iraqi side, or they don't count Arabs as human beings, I guess. However, according to the BBC on March 3, the Iraqi death toll reached 65,000 to 100,000. The London Observer for March 5 set the death-toll at 100,000. The Christian Science Monitor, March 15 (when more details became known) set the total at 100,000 to 200,000. According to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent, Iraqi casualties numbered at least 200,000, including 70,000 children. According to Dr. Helen Caldecott of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Iraqis lost 250,000. A quarter of a million, in one month, staggers the imagination. Hitler's death camps never achieved that "speed," "precision" and "choreography." Considering the hour-after-hour bombardment for more than a month, which figure seems most plausible? And, despite all the Tofflers' rhapsodizing about "smart weapons, " Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford, England, estimates that only seven percent of the munitions fired at Iraq qualify for that description. Mostly, the Iraqis got hit by conventional bombs of the sort Bucky Fuller memorably described as "delivering more and more explosive power over longer and longer distances in shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people." As Rogers points out, a lot of the tonnage dropped on Iraq consisted of cluster bombs, of which he says: "Cluster bombs have several advantages over napalm now considered obsolete in most circumstances. Without the negative overtones of napalm in the public mind, they cause destruction and death on a larger scale with more control." (Covert Action Information Bulletin, #37, Summer 1991.) Oh, well, those poor people had to die, in the logic of Realpolitik, because we had a moral duty to destroy a "new Hitler." Ah, now I see; it all makes sense, after all. But how come the new Hitler remains in power? Why did we destroy the economy and industry of Iraq, murder maybe as much as a quarter million people, and leave "Hitler" in office? I feel confusedÑespecially since the State Department finds a new "Hitler" every two or three years lately, always in a Third World country whose resources our corporations happen to covet. Most of the American press preferred and still prefers not to discuss the number of victims at all. This whole mindless cult of weapon- worship, for which the Tofflers serve as "intellectual" fronts, might collapse if we actually knew how many men, women and children our not-so-"smart" bombs stupidly killed, blinded, burned or crippled forever. It reminds one of Panama. The press told us, at the time, that "only a few hundred" Panamanians died in that merry escapade. Since then, the pitiful handful of dissident little journals still surviving here, and Pacifica Radio, have asserted the existence of mass graves in which thousands lie buried, and even the mainstream "60 Minutes" (CBS) has shown one of the mass graves, holding at least 4000 corpses, and let us hear the voices of the Panamanians who claim to have seen many other mass graves, about which the U.S.-installed new Panamanian government remains, to say the least of it, evasive. To an unprecedented extent, the government and the media now act as partners-in-disinformation (e.g., General Electric, one of the chief war contractors pardon, defense contractors owns NBC, one of the major news sources for most people; McNeil/Lehrer gets its funding from petroleum companies; etc.) The propaganda machine becomes increasingly blatant, as indicated by that crazy (or self-satirizing?) Washington Post chart. Now, thanks to the Tofflers, Futurism and/or Future Studies and/or whatever one calls our field, will appear to the intellectual minority as just another part of the War Machine's propaganda mill. One wants to weep when thinking of this: the Tofflers have now become the best-known "Futurists" in the U.S. Readers of their ode to mass murder who must number millions, since shorter versions of the Monitor article have appeared in several newspapers now have the conditioned association "Futurism= killing Third World people" as firmly implanted in their neurons as "dog=bark," "night=moon," "birthday=gifts," "Picasso=modern art" "bacon=eggs", "Rock=drugs," or the advertisers' "new car= hot sex.." I can't imagine why every Futurist in the world hasn't gone to hide in a cave for at least a year; I myself have seriously considered changing the mast-head of this newsletter to "The Magazine of Heresy" until the word "Futurism" loses the stink of death the Tofflers have given it. And the war-propaganda machine (of which the Tofflers have made Futurism a part) does seem, to the thinking minority, increasingly dishonest and dishonorable. For instance, the Tofflers do not mention any "dissident" attitudes toward the Gulf War, or any of the facts that support such attitudes. They do not attempt to "refute" the opposition, anymore than the media did. Like the media, they merely pretend that no opposition exists. They assume, without argument, that the "official" propaganda line represents the only reasonable view of the war. And the "official" line never changes. Over 50 years ago, in As We Got Marching, John T. Flynn described it in terms that fit exactly the view that the media and the Tofflers wish us to take of the Gulf conflict: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with a high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells and metal mines." The enemy leader always gets identified as crazy; the people of the country get murdered accidentally, as we nobly seek to liberate them from this monster; and all facts that cast doubt on this fairy-tale quickly become non-facts because they cannot get published or broadcast in the major media. To take one glaring example, none of the mass media has ever mentioned - nor do the Tofflers mention - that most of the oil in Bahrain belongs to a company largely owned by George Bush Jr. Bahrain coincidentally adjoins both Iraq and Kuwait, and coincidentally a permanent U.S. Army post now exists there, in the wake of the Gulf war. While Jungians may interpret those astounding coincidences in occult terms, cynics will see a more mercantile explanation. But the Tofflers, like the mass media, do not "interpret" these coincidences at all. They simply do not mention them. George Bush Jr.'s oil interests in the war area have become a non-fact - vanished down "the memory hole," in Orwell's metaphor. >p> (The only publications that have mentioned George Jr.'s oil interests, as far as I know: Common Cause, Extra, New Jersey Libertarian.) The Tofflers, like the major media, don't think we should know such things, anymore than we should know the exact number of human beings murdered in the course of what Dan Quayle so aptly called "restoring the illegitimate government of Kuwait." Or - take the matter of the "gigantic" Iraqi military build-up in Kuwait, "poised to attack Saudi Arabia," as the media constantly told us. The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times (6 January 1991) had former government analysts examine satellite photos of Kuwait, and these experts could not find any evidence of this Iraqi build-up. This story of the army that didn't exist got picked up by Pacifica Radio, In Our Times and Extra. The mass media blacked it out entirely. Our government had told us an enormous lie, but the media no longer sees its role as exposing government lies when it catches them; its role now seems only to help in the cover-up, so the lie can circulate uncontradicted. As whores or camp followers of the War Machine, the media bend any way their Client wishes and licks whatever the Client tells them to lick. Of course, sometimes a little truth still finds its way into the major media. The New York Times for April 8 quotes a Lieutenant Bill Feyk as comparing the ruin of Iraq to a journey through Hell: "It was like driving through Dante's Inferno," he said. I guess he lacked the techno-aesthetic sensibilities of the Tofflers, and couldn't appreciate the delicate "orchestration" of the burned flesh and bloody bodies. In the same story, the Times quotes a Sgt. Larry Porter: "We have all had a chance to call our wives and most of the guys could not talk about it to them. I don't think my wife needs to know what took place over here. I do not want her to know that side of me." It sounds like Sgt. Porter couldn't groove on the "orchestration" and "choreography" of mass murder either. Maybe the Tofflers should try re-educating him. I remember a time-some of our readers must remember a time-when Futurism did not serve just as another whore or camp follower for the Military-Industrial machine. In that long-ago age (over a decade ago...) Futurists saw visions and dreamed dreams. They spoke of possible Utopias. They designed alternative positive scenarios, instead of glorifying the dismal "official" New World Order scenario. Above all, the spoke frequently of Bucky Fuller's distinction between weaponry and "livingry," and of the wonderful "Utopian" things we could do, as a species, if we spent less on weaponry and more on livingry. Some Futurists still think that way-the folks at the World Game Center in Philadelphia, for instance. But the mass media has no interest in such odd ducks, out of step with the Reagan-Bush Era. Those who glorify weaponry, like the Tofflers, become the "official" Futurists-the only Futurists the public gets to hear about. The very word "livingry" has vanished down the memory hole, along with the first, fourth and eighth amendments and the idea of an independent press. Ach, Dr. Goebels, you should have lived to see this hour. I remember the great propaganda film you financed, Leni Reifenstahl's lyric Triumph of the Will, containing some of the most superb montages since Potemkin, showing how happy the Germans felt after bombing hell out of a smaller country: how they walked with a "new pride" and a "new sense of national dignity." George Bush and his kept Ideologues have stolen all your great ideas from that film, and they have done it even better than you did. They've tied it up in yellow ribbons. Robert Anton Wilson PSYOPS- HTTP://WWW.TELEPORT.COM/~WALTER _______________________________________ blast trauma data fer social dissection made available to: realpolitic junkies, info tyros, kultur buzzards & da masses ======================================= FBI-CIA-KGB-NSA-BCCI-DIA-DEA-FEMA-THULE KKK-CONTRA-JFK-RFK-MLK-MKULTRA-LAROUCHE COINTELPRO-ILLUMINATI-P2-CFR-ADL-MOSSAD BLUEBIRD-OSS-ONI-SOE-BIS-AIDS-ARTICHOKE OTO-OCCULT-NEA-BILDERBERGER-40 CTTE-SLA VELIKOVSKY-SDI-INSLAW-TESLA-TSS-CROWLEY JIM JONES-GURDJIEFF-ABWEHR-T4-WACO-BATF EFF-PGP-RHIC/EDOM-PANDORA-CAN-TAVISTOCK ENIGMA-BEARDEN-GEHLEN-SPETZNAZ-EUGENICS MASONS-ODESSA-WFMH-IRS-MI5-FOIA-TRILATS