OLIVER'S ILLUMINATIONS

 

PART TWO

 

50.
   The next morning as we floated over a mountain range hanging with glaciers, the horrors and near death that had almost swallowed me in this undulating current of a throat throttling dream vanished in the vision of the breathtaking woman in my arms. I was filled with the wonder of life, at the disbelief that I could be worthy of her affection.  She reached up to my face, brushed her fingers through my hair and ran them down my face. She let loose a long sigh and pressed her head in my chest. She gazed into my eyes and mouthed a thank you. She turned her eyes to the panorama below. Suddenly her face darkened. I felt the magic of this refuge flutter away and prepared myself for another dive into monstrosity. She pointed to three spires of stone that rose up out of the mountains. “These peaks are called The Towers of Pain, a monument to the agony Chile suffered on our own September eleventh in 1973. For decades, eleven Chilean oligarchies and several international corporations, mostly American controlled and exploited my country’s resources and its people. In 1970 the people elected a socialist by the name of Salvadore Allende. His government began to buy land from the oligarchies and compensate the corporations for the nationalization of industry but the haves never give up power and wealth without a fight. The Doctor set the tone when he said, ‘I don’t see why we have to stand idly by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.’ From that moment on, Allende’s time was limited.”                                                                        

51.
   We touched down near a graveyard on a bluff above the sea. A graceful steam ship crested the horizon. I felt we were children lost in wonder. Claudia led us down a white stone path framed by twenty-foot manicured cypresses. “The Doctor and the CIA had done their best to start a coup before Allende was inaugurated. The commander in chief of the army, general Rene Schneider spurned the CIA's demand that he overthrow Allende. He refused to subvert the constitution and actually backed Allende’s victory as the only thing that would prevent an insurrection by the Chilean people themselves. He was assassinated for his courage. Edward Korry, the US ambassador to Chile was incensed with Allende. He sent crazed letters to your president Nixon. ‘There is a graveyard smell to Chile, the fumes of democracy in decomposition.’ and his threats were visceral. ‘Not a nut or a bolt shall reach Chile. Once Allende comes to power, we shall do all in our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to the utmost deprivation and poverty.’ Hand in hand, the military, the CIA and American corporations planned Allende’s downfall. The CIA’s Project FUBELT worked to embargo Chilean copper in foreign ports. It funded mass media propaganda and fascist paramilitary groups who sabotaged railroads, bridges and power lines. A lock down of the country's industry was staged to instigate an economic crisis that would force Allende out. The workers responded by running the farms and industry themselves, without the owners and managers. They protected the infrastructure from sabotage and distributed food directly to the people. Nixon was enraged and the Doctor obliged by arranging the cancellation of all foreign aid to my country.”

52.
   We wandered into the necropolis and strolled past stone and marble testaments to past glory. We stopped in front of a mad architectural folly of riotous excess crowned with alabaster Corinthian columns and dripping with ferns. Claudia gazed at the monument in wonder and read the letters engraved on a plaque. “Los Magallanes,”, she sighed. “The mysterious islands around Cape Horn and the last words out of the mouth of our founding father, Bernardo O’Higgens.” Then the wistful look on her face vanished. “The CIA was impressed with the resilience of the people. They realized that the only way to get rid of Allende was with a military coup. With general Schneider out of the way, the generals fell in line and the oligarchy was right behind them. The CIA found the snake it needed in one Augusto Pinochet, the general Allende himself had appointed as commander in chief of the army only a month before. This time everything went as planned. On September eleventh, 1973, with infantry, tanks and warplanes, the generals attacked the Palacio de la Moneda and the forty-two men and women defending Allende. Allende gave his last speech from the palace over Radio Magallanes. Referring to himself in the past tense, he urged his countrymen and women to fight on. ‘Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced and my calm voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country.’ It took five hours to capture the palace, kill Allende and stage a gruesome suicide. Within days, anyone suspected of supporting or even sympathizing with Allende was rounded up. Fifteen thousand were murdered.”

53.

   Tears flowed down Claudia's face. She walked into a field and collapsed. I dropped down beside her. Startled insects took to the air and hovered around us. “When my people elected Salvador Allende, your president Nixon told the head of the CIA to make the Chilean economy ‘scream’. After the coup, Pinochet was appointed President by the junta. With the help of lists provided by the CIA, thousands were murdered and thousands more were soon screaming in the torture cells of Chile. Our national troubadour, Victor Jara, a beautiful man with a beautiful voice who sang our revolution with a beautiful heart was arrested and thrown into prison. His hands and fingers were crushed before he was shot forty-four times. I never knew my parents. My mother was eight months pregnant when she and my father were arrested. My father was a university professor with no ties to Allende. His crime was his education, and he was tortured to death for it. My mother was tortured and repeatedly raped by her captors. She went into premature labor. After I was born, they murdered her. I was left on the doorstep of my aunt who was a friend of the poet Pablo Neruda, our Nobel Prize Laureate and a great ally of Allende. She fled with me to Neruda’s home in Santiago hoping that his international status could protect us both, but he had been poisoned. He had died the day before and the police had ransacked the house. My aunt found the poet’s body in the house where his wife had placed it in tragic defiance, lying in state among the smashed furniture and burned books.”

  

54.

   I lay back in the grass letting the gravity of Claudia’s words sink in. I marveled at this angry, wounded beauty. She looked into my eyes and smiled a weary smile. I wanted her to tell me more but I dared not ask. We lay next to each other watching the towering thunderclouds that marched along the horizon.
   Claudia ran her fingers through the blades of grass. “Life is full of tragedy, Oliver. I’m sure you have faced it yourself. But how is it that men thousands of miles away in another country could feel we were just pawns in their sadistic games? Your president and all his men and the CEO’s of your country’s ravenous corporations were responsible for thousands of people being tortured to death. And for what? To prove the to the Russians that they would not allow a socialist country to exist in their own back yard?”
   I had nothing to say to her. I looked down at the grass in shame. When I looked up, I was confronted with a startling sight. A socialite heifer the size of an elephant had waddled over the top of the hill and spotted us. “You who! Wooo Who!!”, she squealed. “I see a couple of party poopers!” As she strutted towards us, rolls of fat jiggled and quivered everywhere on her body. She was an extraordinary sight bent over at the hips in an impossible posture. Her enormous breasts that almost touched the ground looked like fore legs. Her arms waved from her shoulders like pointed sticks. A handbag hung off one of them. She stroked the thick makeup troweled over her face and pursed her huge, lipstick smeared lips. She wagged a head almost as large as the rest of her that was crowned with a ridiculous beret.

55.
   The dogs flew up in the air and landed on our heads with their ears flattened. Oh, Christ, another angry monster, I thought.
    “What’s all this fuss I hear?”, she whinnied. “Who’s been filling your head with such nonsense? So we overthrew a commie who confiscated our investments. Did you expect us to just walk away? This is the real world. Things like this happen all the time. Get over it.”

   Claudia was having none of it. “Who the hell are you and what gave you the right to eavesdrop on a private conversation? Salvador Allende was a democratically elected president! That’s democratically elected, you bitch. You constantly crow about how your country is a beacon of democracy that shines the light of freedom throughout the world while you snuff out any democracy that gets in the way of your money and power. You instigate a coup that results in the horrors of Chile and continue to prop it up for decades. You send your secretary of state, your ambassador to chat with the dictator while he tortures and kills thousands. You turn Milton Friedman loose to pull a Dr. Mengele on the economy. His Chicago Boys bankrupted the country to level all opposition to the Free Market. Labor, social services and above all, Chilean businesses were swept away. You killed our president, tortured our people and crippled our country. The Free Market!” Claudia spat out the words as if she had a mouthful of brandy and coke. “What a pathetic euphemism for the corporate rape of the world.”

56.
   Pat took to the air and snapped at the interloper. She raised straight up. Her enormous head twitched on her snake like neck. He swooped down and nipped at her beret. “You stupid hag! Milton Friedman is dead but his ghost is coaching his disciples from hell. You are doing the same thing in America as you did here thirty years ago. First you privatize as much as you can: the government, the infrastructure, the public schools, even the military then you bankrupt the country and steal what’s left.”

   The bag was on her toes now breathing heavily and scowling. Nanette flew straight for the heifer’s nose and snapped at it. “You brainless cow, you throw people out of work, wages plummet, unions vanish. You wash away the last vestiges of the middle class with desperation and a Free Market is born. Everyone is supposed to benefit in your dog-eat-dog world. It didn’t work in Chile. Sixteen years after the coup workers earned less than before it, the poverty level was 41%, the economic growth was one of the slowest on the continent, the environment one of the most polluted, but the rich became very much richer.”
   The beast angrily swatted at the dogs. “So you sic your mosquitoes on me?” She snorted. “What class. What hospitality. You and the rest of the insects in this world can buzz around us all you want. We are the only super-power and we have plenty of bug spray!”

57.
   Suddenly I found my voice. “Those who haven’t been blessed by your Free Market shop at the mega-stores of America because they can’t afford to shop anywhere else. They work at the mega-stores because there is nowhere else to work in your ‘service economy’. A mega-store is like a death star. It hovers around Main Street full of independent family owned businesses, hardware stores, shoe stores, book stores, drug stores, grocery stores then settles just outside of towns stripped of manufacturing jobs and blasts this real American free market economy with slave labor products made by industries shipped to impoverished. It doesn’t take long before every independent business is closed and its employees and owners are working in the mega-store for slave wages wearing a vest with a smiley face on it that mocks them as their dignity is stripped from them.”

   “You terrorists hate America for her FREEDOMS!!!!”, the socialite roared. “Anyone who does not think George Bush has kept us safe must be sent to Guantanamo and water boarded! We must torture you terrorists to make the world safe for democracy! I know how George and Dick and all our patriotic leaders feel about torture! I know how torture makes them feel when they see the CIA tapes! Any red-blooded American would feel the same way!” She towered over me in a rage, her leopard spots morphing into rotted stumps. Her eyes crossed. Her teeth bristled and thrashed.
   Claudia had had enough. “Let’s go to Argentina. I feel like a tango.” She took the dogs by the hands and walked indignantly away.

  58.
   But the creature was relentless. “Islamo-fascists!”, she screeched. “Enemy combatants! We will attach electrodes to your body and FRY you! We will set the DOGS on you! We will keep you awake until you lose your MIND! We will CUT you! We will BURN you! We will BEAT you! We will lock you in a tiny box full of SPIDERS!”
   Claudia decided it had crossed the line. “Come on, everybody, the balloon needs a patch.” The beast rushed at Claudia, her stick arms twitching, her head dancing.

   Claudia didn’t bat an eye. “Lady, all your money is gone, vanished. All your gold and jewels have disappeared, your real estate foreclosed, your pied a terres sold. Your Swiss accounts are empty. Your Cayman Island money is no more. Your jet has crashed. Your Maserati is burning. Your yacht is on the bottom of the Mediterranean. You’re a pauper.”
   That did it. She screamed, clutched her chest, turned blue and dropped like a stone. As she lay dead at my feet, I smiled. “The bankers could use some company.”
   We skinned the corpse of the beast and cured the hide with dog piss and a bonfire. Claudia broke out a bottle of wine. “To Nemesis!”, she toasted.
   We enthusiastically dove into a vengeful sewing bee. When we had finished, the balloon inflated itself and fluttered into the air. We climbed aboard and sailed peacefully away. I breathed in the fresh air and felt the agony of Chile lift out of me. What an amazing adventure, I thought. It wasn’t long before I glanced over the rail of the basket and noticed a dazzlingly city unfurling beneath us.
   “Ah, Buenos Aires, my favorite city in the world!”, Claudia exalted.

59.
   The balloon drifted down behind a stately, Belle Epoch building in the center of the town. Crowds of well-dressed people took no notice of us as they streamed past. Claudia led us down a narrow street to a tailor’s shop. “The first thing we must do is lose the Tarzan and Jane outfits. We must have elegant clothes for this elegant city.”, she announced.  

   The tailors fussed and primped taking measurements and copping feels. They cooed and clucked as they rolled out yards of beautiful fabric and filled our imagination with haute couture. For her, an evening gown, a light skirt and blouse for afternoon walks, scarves and sweaters and waistcoats and shoes and shoes and shoes. For me, beautiful slacks and a cashmere blazer, silk shirts and neckties, snakeskin belts and shoes of the finest leather. The dogs got all wrapped up in the process, offering opinions and complementing our decisions. Hours went by.

   After a while I blocked out all the yammering and prattling and just stared out the window at the skyline of Buenos Aires. I had never seen anything like it. Its towers and tree lined streets beckoned. This baleful history lesson was beginning to get the better of me. I was drowning in the tears of the dispossessed, the desperate and the dead. I needed a night out on the town.

60.
   Claudia found us lodging in a swank hotel owned by a cousin of hers. Dressed in beautiful clothes and ready for a night out, we paused to look over the city from our balcony. But Claudia had more tears to shed. “My aunt fled with me to Argentina where she thought we would be safe but the government of Isabelle Peron was rotting with corruption. Guerrilla warfare had festered for years. Inflation and the labor unions danced a fatal waltz. On March 24th, 1976 with a proclamation of the intent to restore Basic Christian Values, the terror began. The generals, many graduates of The School of the Americas including the one in charge wove a spider’s web of torture and murder throughout every corner of the country. The Doctor soon arrived to tell the generals that the American administration would turn a blind eye if things were done quickly. Thirty thousand were dead by the time it was over. In Argentina, the generals didn’t need graduates from Milton Friedman’s Chicago School to decimate the unions and middle class, they just tortured them to death. One of them casually said, ‘In order to save twenty million Argentines from socialism it may be necessary to sacrifice fifty thousand lives.’ The American corporations needed low wage workers for their investments in the country. David Rockefeller offered generous loans to the generals as they murdered union leaders, students, journalists, professors, nuns, priests, jews.”

61.
   I could hear no more. We launched ourselves into the Buenos Aires night in search of consolation. We  found ourselves in an empty, stately ballroom. A pair of musicians was waiting for us. They began to play. We danced. The walls of the room seemed to bend and fold around us as if to wrap us in a comforting embrace. The musicians were lost in their song. We were lost in each other.

“Mi Buenos Aires querido 
My dear Buenos Aires 
cuando yo te vuelva a ver 
When I see you again
no habra mas pena ni olvido
There will be no more pain or loss
El farolito de la calle en que nac
The lantern on the street where I was born
 Fue el centinela de mis promesas de amor 
Was the sentinel of my promises of love 
Bajo su inquieta lucecita yo la vi
Under its restless light I saw
A mi pebeta luminosa como un sol
My girl as luminous as a sun
Hoy que la suerte quiere que te vuelva a ver 
Today, chance wills me to see you again”.

62.

   I woke up the next morning feeling sorry for myself. I got out of bed and stood naked at the window gazing out at the dawn lit metropolis. Claudia lay in bed with the dogs sleeping at her feet. She offered a sleepy smile. A portrait of Pablo Neruda stared over my shoulder and out the window. Wine bottles and glasses from the night before littered the table. “My life may not have been as hard as yours, but it wasn’t easy and I don’t have a magic balloon to fly around in.”
   “You have magic dogs.”, replied Claudia, rolling her eyes.
    “Magic dogs and generations of booze and guns in my family.”
   “I grew up with guns too.”, she said with feigned diffidence.
    “Well, I suppose that goes without saying and, judging from your tale of woe, your guns were bigger than my guns.”, I sneered.
    She threw back her head and let out a warm, rolling laugh. The dogs stirred. Their ears perked up and they opened their eyes. I walked back to the bed with a macho swagger. “In my country we have a Hollywood cowboy movie star whose motto is ‘Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.’ I always thought he was an asshole but, in this case, with an impudent, sultry, black haired beauty sprawled on the bed in front of me, maybe I should follow his example.”
   This time Claudia let loose an explosive laughter that chased the dogs off the bed. “Oh, Mr. Cowboy Man, I’m ever so afraid and turned on.”
   “As well you should be, frail, quivering woman.” I jumped on the bed.
   “Enough!”, laughed Claudia. “We must get dressed and go out.”
   We ate a breakfast of bread, fruit and cheese and wandered out into the city.

 

63.

   As she led us through the streets, I asked her a question. “What am I supposed to do about all this misery you’ve been showing me, be ashamed?”
   “What happened to my mother in Chile became an industry in Argentina. Hundreds of women were forced into premature labor then thrown from airplanes into the Rio Plato.”, Claudia winced. “Their children were raised by the people who murdered them. What is the burden a child must bear when he discovers that his parents were murdered by his parents? To not know what has been done in your name is shameful. You will tell your countrymen what you have learned and pray they will believe you.”
   We entered a plaza filled with somber women wading silently through a carpet of pigeons rustling and cooing at their feet. When they saw Claudia, they nodded their heads and made room for us in their procession. Claudia spoke in a whisper. “Tens of thousands of people simply disappeared during the Dirty War. These Mothers of the Disappeared will never know what happened to their loved ones. You may look at us as a sad collection of banana republics, but the seeds from which this horror sprang lie in fallow ground in your own country: Extraordinary Rendition, The Patriot Act, The Military Commissions Act, Guantanamo. You think you are immune to fascism and tyranny but how many of you remember the fact that there was a large and powerful Nazi Party in America before World War II? Fascism is a cancer in every country that is never cured. It merely lies dormant waiting to awake and metastasize. That woman over there spent twenty years in prison. That woman lost her entire family, all her friends, all their friends, everyone she ever knew.”

 

64.
   The Argentine sun pressed on my shoulders. The air was thick with the whispers of the dead. It was hard to breathe. I broke from the crowd and wandered away.I collapsed on a bench in front of a church. Pigeons roosted on the bench and settled at my feet. The bells of the church began a melancholy serenade. Claudia stood over me with a concerned look on her face. “You look ill.”

   The dogs joined me on the bench. Nanette looked up at Claudia with pressed lips. “What do you expect? You have been laying it on awfully thick.”

   “I know things have been bad.”, I said. “ I’m not naive and I’m not a ‘My country right or wrong.’ kind of guy but it’s all been a bit much - an American School of Assassins, corporate omnipotence, torture, murder, rape...”
   Claudia looked away. She sat down next to me and hung her head. After a few minutes she turned to me and took my hand. “Forgive me, Oliver. My feelings for you have come so suddenly, they scare me. I lecture you like a child, but I am hiding behind a facade. I have not been considerate. I have not been honest about my feelings for you.” She leaned over to me and kissed me. “I can only hope you feel the same for me, but I will not ask you if you do.” She looked down forlornly.
   “Are you kidding? You are the most wonderful women I’ve ever...” I paused, speechless. “I’ve ever touched. I am most impressed with you. I am completely impressed with you. You are as far away from me as I can imagine yet I feel I have always been where ever you are taking me. The sunset wraps itself around you. The moon crowns you. I will do anything to keep you. I feel at home with you, and I have never felt at home anywhere.”

65.

   Claudia blushed. “I owe you a drink, Shakespeare and I know a man with a bar.” She took my hand and pulled me to my feet. “I’ve known Boris forever.” A look of affection graced her face. “He used to feed me wine and fairy tales on his knee when I was very young. How he managed to survive the dirty war is probably a secret I’d rather not know but I love him. I know he will like you. How could he not?”
   She led us down an alley lined with carved doors mounted with ornately cast hardware. We stopped in front of a large sign depicting a well-endowed bull with the words ‘Los Huevos’ scrawled across it. It swayed in the breeze above a humble store front.
   Claudia rang the bell. The door swung open and a large, florid man wearing an electric yellow shirt and the reddest pants I had ever seen stepped out. A thick black mustache twirled into rings crawled over his lips. Wide sideburns equally curled at their ends stretched across his cheeks. He embraced Claudia then turned to me. His dark eyes stared deep into mine. “Hello, handsome. I am Boris.” He put one arm around me and the other around Claudia.
   Claudia kissed him on the cheek. “These are my thirsty friends Pat, Nanette and Oliver.”
   He lowered his girth down to the dogs. He cradled their heads in his beefy hands. “Hello, my friends. Come in and drink with me.” Then he sprang up and took me in his arms. He kissed me on each cheek and held me at arm's length lifting me to my toes. “Aren’t you the lucky one, my daughter.”, he said, rolling his eyes at Claudia.

66.
   Boris ushered us in and opened a bottle of wine. He sat us down under yet another portrait of Pablo Neruda. Claudia contemplated a glass of wine in her hand. “Boris, Oliver is on a journey of illumination. He has heard a great deal of our sad story but now he needs a rest.”

   Boris looked into my eyes with sad resignation. “I’m afraid there is no time for you to rest, Oliver. There is no time for any of us to rest. The horror that tortured our continent is stronger and more insidious than ever. What was once a vicious, covert army has grown into a voracious institution that picks at the bones of the poor and the helpless. Its tentacles reach across the world wrenching countries from their citizens and enslaving them. It is taking your country away from you, Oliver and it is enslaving your people.”
   Boris stood up and pointed to the portrait above him. “Claudia has told you about the great Chilean poet, I have no doubt, a soldier in the blood bath of South America. In 1954 another soldier tried to throw off Corporate America’s colonial yoke in Guatemala. 90% of the land was owned by a few families and the United Fruit Company. Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president enacted his own Homestead Act, opening only unused land to the peasants and compensating its owners according to the land’s worth. For this, the CIA overthrew him. For the next thirty years, CIA installed dictators murdered 100,000 Guatemalans. The ferocity of these murderous rampages inspired a new concept of permanent dominance.”
   Oh God, more of the same, I thought, swallowing my glass of wine and pouring another.

67.
   Boris must have caught the flash of cynicism in my eyes. To bring his point home, he grabbed me and stood me up. A tango swelled on the jukebox. He swept me around the room. “This new concept was a purging of every person who would challenge the elite, every person who would think about challenging the status quo, every person related to that person, every person who knew that person. A genocide raged throughout the continent that locked us behind an Iron Curtain the Soviets would have been proud of, but even that was not enough for the elite. As political refugees flooded out of country after country, the School of the Americas graduates and their CIA masters came up with a plan to follow them. It was called Operation Condor. They assassinated people all over the world no matter what country they fled to. Allende appointed Orlando Letelier as ambassador to the United States in 1971. In 1973, he was serving in Chile as Minister of Foreign Affairs when Allende was assassinated. He was tortured for a year before international pressure resulted in his release. He moved his family to Washington DC and became the leading opposition in exile to the Pinochet regime. Many of the murderers who carried out assassinations for Operation Condor were on the payroll of the CIA. Some were caught and convicted but pardoned by United States presidents. The Doctor was well aware of Operation Condor but refused to stop Pinochet from assassinating Letelier and his assistant with a car bomb in 1976. The man who planted that bomb worked for the CIA before carrying out the killing for Pinochet’s assassination squad. It was all one big, ugly family, Oliver and the family has gotten bigger and uglier and much, much more efficient.”

68.
   Boris pressed his face close to mine. “Those adolescent days of torture and assassination are being replaced by the bureaucracy of The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Why kill a country’s leaders and replace them with an unreliable dictator when you can saddle it with parasitic loans? Banks, not tanks, Oliver. Banks, not tanks.The money pays off the oligarchy that agrees to the loans and builds the infrastructure the corporations need to steal the resources they want. The loans come with ‘structural adjustments’ that privatize the government, the water, the power. They are flooded with cheap food and cheap goods that destroy their ability to produce anything on their own. Haiti is a good example. In ten years, its people went from being self-sufficient to eating dirt. Haiti’s starving farmers poured into the cities and became sweat shop slaves producing plastic trinkets for Disney. Imagine, Oliver, nations and nations of slaves. Today it’s the best of both worlds. A third world country pays for the plundering of its resources and its people are turned into slaves who produce the products that global corporations sell to the first world. It’s much more efficient than the old days when you had to go to all the expense of capturing and transporting slaves to your country. Now when you are through pillaging, when you have used your slaves up, you just leave them to starve and move on.”

   The tango on the jukebox came to an end. Boris sat me down, whipped out his glasses and unrolled a map. “But my time is short. Someone else will continue the story. You must visit the Giant of the Atacama. This map will show you to the way.”
  

69.
   The wine had got the better of the dogs. “The giant of the Atacama?”, slurred Pat. “What the hell is that?”
    “You’ll know it when you see it.” He turned to me. “You have very far to go indeed.”, he whispered as he rolled up the map. “Where this will take you will teach you much more.”

   “Is the giant a good giant or a bad giant?”, mumbled Nanette.
   Boris slowly opened my collar and slid the map down my shirt. “There was one more link in the chain the plutocrats who run your county needed, Oliver. You Americans had been convinced by your masters that in your great struggle to save the world from Communism it was necessary to commit many of the same crimes your enemy committed. When the Soviet Union fell, your enemy was defeated. There were no more excuses to train terrorists to topple democratically elected governments and install dictators, no more excuses to keep the incredibly lucrative war machine running. Then America suffered her own September 11th and a new enemy sprang up, an enemy that was everywhere and nowhere, an enemy you must fight forever in an endless war, a perfect enemy. Your masters had yearned for, in their own words, a ‘Pearl Harbor Type Event’. Your own intelligence warned you that terrorists were going to hijack passenger planes and fly them into skyscrapers but you did nothing and three thousand people were killed. You then conquered two countries and bombed a third. It’s as though you were waiting for an excuse to unleash yourself upon the world.