THE LATEST CONTRIBUTION FROM THOMAS DONNELLY, Deputy director of the Project of the New American Century (PNAC), provides under the title Toward a Global Cavalry Overseas [1] a “road map” for the US conquest of the world by a “global cavalry,” patterned after the US cavalry that spearheaded in the nineteenth century the conquest of the North American continent that expanded the territory of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and grabbed half of the territory of Mexico. After reviewing the “geopolitical and strategic context in which American military power is exercised” nowadays virtually everywhere in the world, “redeploying it to new bases” in even such former Eastern Block countries as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania, T. Donnelly and V. Serchuk state in conclusion: “In sum, the strategic imperative of patrolling the perimeter of the Pax Americana is transforming the U.S. military, and those few other forces capable and willing of standing alongside, into the cavalry of a global, liberal international order. Like the cavalry of the Old West, their job is one part warrior and one part policeman––both of which are entirely within the tradition of the American military. …  Although countless questions about transformation remain unanswered, one lesson is already clear: American power is on the move.”
        Given the fact that the conquest “of the Old West,” which the present-day US “global cavalry” is supposed to emulate on a worldwide scale, resulted in the most awesome genocide in the history of mankind, we shall first review some of the basic historical facts about this conquest, which are still unknown to the majority of the US public, as well as the world public at large. We shall then draw the appropriate conclusions, pointing out in the process that present-day USA itself has neither meaningful freedom nor meaningful democracy, and that its propaganda machine demeans those noble words by using them to justify the world conquest planned by the PNAC neo-cons and their associates and supporters within the US government and military. The main conclusion is that, through an eventually total control of the media of communication, this conquest will ultimately lead to a mental slavery of all those who succumb to an American ideology which is primarily meant to serve the economic and political interests of the American ruling elites. It is pointed out, however, that the same technologies, which are nowadays used to deceive and subliminally enslave, could be also used to enlighten the human mind and liberate the human spirit. By their very nature, some of them might eventually lead to the formation of an enlightened world public opinion capable of stemming the unrelenting charge of a US “global cavalry” bent on imposing a demeaning, exploitative and socially injurious Pax Americana on all of humankind.


1. Genocide of the Native North Americans and the Resulting US Mentality
   
THE AMERICAN MEDIA and the US educational system systematically portray the United States of America as the “land of liberty” whose “framers of the Constitution” were men of principle who fought for freedom, democracy and human rights. For example, in an April 12, 2002 article entitled “Happy Birthday Mr. Jefferson,” its author, Thomas L. Krannawitter of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, describes Thomas Jefferson as a “great humanitarian.” In the beginning of this article he states that “no one in human history has done more [than Thomas Jefferson] to advance the cause of human freedom” –– overlooking the fact that on his Monticello estate Jefferson maintained well over one hundred black slaves. The article ends with the following statement: “If America is ever to truly get beyond race––if Americans are ever to view one another simply as fellow citizens and friends––we will do so only by embracing the color-blind and universal principles of Thomas Jefferson.”
        One arrives, however, at a totally different impression of the “color-blind principles of Thomas Jefferson” when one reads on p. 120 of Stannard’s American Holocaust [2] the following passage: “Jefferson's writings on Indians are filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives are to be given a simple choice––to be ‘extirpate[d] from the earth’ or to remove themselves out of the American way. Had the same words been enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed at European Jews, they would be engraved in modern history.”
        Given the fact that Americans are indoctrinated since childhood with the belief that the conquest of the “Old West” represented a heroic act perpetrated against “savages” who stood in the path of “progress,” one can wonder how the world would react if German children grew up with “Nazis and Jews” games patterned after the “Cowboys and Indians” games regularly played by American children. 
        Given, however, this insiduous American indoctrination (which is an integral part of the “brainstuffing” discussed in Sec. 4), it is no wonder that in [1], T. Donnelly sets up as a shining example the US “cavalry of the Old West,” which largely implemented the nineteenth century policy of “extirpation” advocated by Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and other highly respected US presidents. This systematic genocide eventually “gave currency to the concept of the Indian as ‘The Vanishing American.’ The decision of 1871 to discontinue treaty-making and the Allotment act of 1887 were both founded on the belief that the Indians would not survive.” ([3], p. 77)
        Of course, those past American presidents did not formulate their genocidal policies in isolation from the rest of the US white population. Thus, “[i]n 1784 a British visitor to America observed that ‘white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.’” ([2], p. 243––emphasis added) And Francis Parkman, “the most honored America historian of his time,” wrote that the Indian “will not learn the art of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together.” ([2], p. 244)
        This last racist “verdict” is especially poignant in view of the willingness of the “Five Civilized Tribes” to emulate Western civilization, and their great success in that respect [4]. That, however, only kindled American greed, which under Andrew Jackson led to the clamor of white Americans for the lands of these five “tribes.” For example, “[t]he Creeks, who had already lost their land in Georgia, voted to remain in Alabama and submit to state law, but they were told this was impossible. … By the end of the removal process, it was estimated that the Creeks had lost 45 per cent of their population. ([4], pp. 167-168). Similarly, the policies advocated by President Andrew Jackson, who had written that “the whole the Cherokee Nation ought to be scourged,” eventually resulted in the forced removal to Oklahoma of the peaceful Cherokees, and gave rise along the Trail of Tears to the death of “8000 men, women and children,” that is of about half of the remaining Cherokee Nation ([2], pp. 121-124). This last fact did not pass unnoticed in Europe, where “[t]he persecution of the Cherokee contributed to a growing revulsion among Europeans at what they saw as American hypocrisy.” ([4], p. 168)
        But that was just the beginning of the mass slaughter. As illustrated with many particular instances in Chapter 8 of James Wilson’s The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America [4], the forms of sheer bestiality that the genocidal campaigns against the native population in the Western United States assumed might not have been matched even by the barbarity of the Nazis against the Slavs, the Jews and other “racially inferior” people.
        It is interesting in this context to observe that the subject of the “racial inferiority of the Slavs” has seen a recent revival in the United States, where Thomas Barnett of the US War College writes that “you have to be careful with that Darwinian pessimism, because it is a short jump from apologizing for globalization-as-forced-Americanization to insinuating—along racial or civilization lines—that ‘those people will simply never be like us.’   Just ten years ago, most experts were willing to write off poor Russia, declaring Slavs, in effect, genetically unfit for democracy and capitalism.” ([5]––emphasis added)
        As was to be the case later with the Nazis, the concept of “biological superiority” was introduced by white Americans soon after the publication of Darwin's monumental work The Origin of Species. Thus, “Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, published a decade after the [1850s] Gold Rush [in California], gave scientific racism a new intellectual authority. Subtitled Or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, it seemed to offer a purely biological explanation for the global ‘success’ of northern Europeans at the expense of other peoples. Where the seventeenth-century Puritans believed that God had chosen them to populate the New World, nineteenth-century Americans could now feel confident that nature had selected them for the same purpose. Within only a few years, references of Darwin and the theory of Evolution were commonplace in writings about Native Americans. … Although Darwinism was clearly not directly responsible for the near-extermination of Californian Indians, it sprang from, and contributed to, an intellectual climate in which genocide was seen as natural and unavoidable.” ([4]., p. 235-236)
        The final outcome was predictable: “In under four centuries, disease, warfare, hunger, massacre and despair had reduced [the native North American] population from an estimated 7–10 million to less than 250,000.” ([4], p. 283). Actually, this estimate of the original native North American population might be very much on the conservative side, since “one of the most well-regarded specialists in the field recently has suggested that a more accurate estimate [of the pre-Columbian native American population] would be around 145,000,000 for the hemisphere as a whole and about 18,000,000 for the area north of Mexico.” ([2], p. 11)
        The racist and genocidal attitudes of nineteenth century white Americans and their leaders, which led to the total genocidal extermination of many native North American nations and the virtual enslavement of the pitiful remnants of the rest, is still very much alive in some of their present-day off-spring. However, after once proud and independent Native North American nations were reduced to pitiful remnants, who are now living in “communities plagued with social and health problems: poor housing, diabetes, alcoholism, social breakdown, violence, fatal accidents (the second commonest cause of death), homicide and suicide” ([4], p. xxvi), the  attention of US governments became directed against other nations and cultures––the latest victims being Afghanistan, Iraq and other Muslim countries.
        The American mentality that is a natural outgrowth of the successful genocide of the Native North Americans is often illustrated by the politicians and the members of the US armed forces currently engaged in the global extension of the “conquest of the Old West.” For example, on the front page of the March 30, 2003 issue of the Sunday Times, reporter Mark Franchetti quotes US Corporal Ryan Dupre as saying: “The Iraqis are a sick people and we are the chemotherapy. I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No I won’t get hold of one. I’ll just kill him.” (Emphasis added) The report goes on to describe how Dupre’s unit killed several “friggin’ Iraqi” civilians later that day.
        Equally enlightening in this respect is the article in the June 27, 2003 issue of The Boston Globe, in which Yvonne Abraham reports that the Massachusetts “Senator Guy W. Glodis has angered Muslims and a civil rights group over a flier he sent to fellow senators that says terrorist attacks could be deterred if convicted Muslim extremists were buried with pig entrails.” (Emphasis added)
        The above two cited representative statements of contemporary Americans––one a corporal in the US army and the other an American senator––reflect a mentality of which the earlier cited US leaders, who had advocated the “extirpation” of all the native North Americans, might have been proud. This is the kind of mentality that has remained deeply ingrained in the American psyche, leading to the well-documented massacres of “gooks” in Vietnam, and to the boundless suffering and atrocities that the US armed forces and US spy agencies have inflicted in a great number of countries which US governments had decided to favor with their attentions since the inception of the United States of America, and until the present day. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that the United States has not only refused to endorse the International Criminal Court, “set up to try war crimes and acts of genocide,” but as Reuters.co.uk reported on July 1, 2003, “[t]he United States has declared almost 50 countries ineligible for military aid, including Colombia and six nations seeking NATO membership, because they back the International Criminal Court and have not exempted Americans from possible prosecution.” (Emphasis added)


2. American Double-Talk and Double-Think

Indeed, while busy carrying out the most extensive genocide in history, nineteenth century US governments found the time to also intervene in the affairs of other countries after President James Monroe launched in 1823 the doctrine which bears his name. Thus, while hypocritically claiming that it stood for the “defense of democracy,” the US intervened militarily in Puerto Rico in 1824, in Mexico in 1845 and 1847 (annexing half of Mexico’s territory in the process), in Nicaragua in 1857 and 1860, in the province of Panama in 1860, and in Cuba in 1898 ––rendering Cuba, until Castro came to power, a favorite territory for the US mafia and for exploitative US corporations enjoying the favors of vicious dictators supported by US. This unabashed pursuit of US “manifest destiny” [6] continued uninterrupted into the twentieth century, assuming after World War II epidemic proportions, as US governments intervened in countless countries under the guise of “fighting communism” and bringing “freedom and democracy” to the unfortunate victims of their attentions. However, after the end of the Cold War, the slogan of “fighting communism” had to be replaced by a suitable new slogan. The choice fell on “fighting terrorism”––but the ultimate goals and methods have remained the same.
        In an article entitled Dawn of Imperial America, published on January 1, 2003 in The Toronto Star (which is one the leading mainstream Canadian newspapers), the political commentator Richard Gwyn cited the following February 24, 1948 statement by George Kennan––who was head of U.S. State Department Planning at that time, and, in Gwyn’s words, a “brilliant diplomat who authored the doctrine of ‘containing’ the Soviet Union that determined U.S. policy throughout the Cold War”:
        “We [Americans] have about 60 per cent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population. Our real task in the coming period (will be) to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.  … The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered then by idealistic slogans the better.” (Emphasis added)
        In the same article Richard Gwyn goes on to compare the United States to the Roman Empire, pointing out that the American media are “spin-doctoring so that Americans can continue gorging themselves on the world’s goodies.”
        This comparison of the American to the Roman Empire is actually not at all fair to the Romans. As the political commentator Walden Bello pointed out in his May 12, 2003 article Pax Romana versus Pax Americana: Contrasting Strategies of Imperial Management (available on this PFPC website),“[t]he Romans realized that an important component of successful imperial domination was consensus among the dominated of the ‘rightness’ of the Roman order.” He then goes on to state: “As sociologist Michael Mann notes in his classic, Sources of Social Power, the extension of Roman citizenship to ruling groups and non-slave peoples throughout the empire was the political breakthrough that won the mass allegiance among the nations dominated by the Romans. Political citizenship combined with the vision of the empire providing peace and prosperity for all to create that intangible but essential moral element called legitimacy. Needless to say, extension of citizenship plays no role in the U.S. imperial order. In fact, U.S. citizenship is jealously reserved for a very tiny minority of the world's population, entry into whose territory is tightly controlled. Subordinate populations are not to be integrated but kept in check either by force, or the threat of the use of force, or by a system of global or regional rules and institutions––the World Trade Organization, the Bretton Woods system, NATO––that are increasingly blatantly manipulated to serve the interests of the imperial center.”
        In addition, behind the faēade of all the made-in-USA “truths,” piped in via TV and other media, there lies in US a reality of shattered basic family values, of widespread crime, of people fearful to “get involved” when witnessing an accident or a crime in progress, of extreme poverty in a country which has the means but not the will to eradicate it, of a huge gap between the superrich and the totally destitute, and of a myriad of other social ills, which spell a very clear message: after World War II handed to the United States the rest of the world on a platter, and resolved in it the still lingering effects of the Great Depression, converting it into the main superpower on Earth, not only did America not know how to handle that grave new responsibility by establishing at least a humane equivalent of Pax Romana, but in fact it turned back the clock of human evolution, relying on the instrumentalist motto that “everything that seems to work is good” as a guide to mass manipulation and officially sanctioned “disinformation.” This fact was amply illustrated not only under President Richard Nixon, but under virtually every single US president since World War II, and especially under George W. Bush, Jr., whose administration clearly reveals what America has become––which coincides with what Bertrand Russell had predicted, right after World War II, that a society which embraces instrumentalist types of “truths” so dear to the American ruling elite would become.
        Instrumentalism is the name given to the philosophy of John Dewey, which this leading American philosopher had developed towards the end of the nineteenth century by following the pragmatic doctrines of the American psychologist William James. Dewey was an educational reformer, who espoused many progressive ideas that stressed the student-centered rather than the subject-centered school. However, his pragmatic philosophy also asserted that the concept of truth is basically equivalent to a consensus as to what is convenient and desirable.
        Bertrand Russell wrote that “[i]t is natural that [John Dewey's] strongest appeal should be to Americans.” ([7], p. 827) Then, upon demonstrating the logical untenability of the criterion that “an idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives,” he wrote the following about this philosophy, which in some form or another has by now insinuated itself in all aspects of the American mode of thinking, ranging from politics to science: “The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness––the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.” ([7], p. 1828––emphasis added)
        These were truly prophetic words, and the 2003 Iraq crisis has finally demonstrated to the entire world the enormous extent to which Americans have become susceptible to false arguments and to the insidious propaganda of their government and media even when the rest of the world condemned the actions of that government.
        The journalist Neil Mackay published in the September 15, 2002 issue of the Scottish newspaper Sunday Herald an article entitled Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President, in which he wrote the following: “A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure ‘regime change’ even before he took power in January 2001. …  The plan [written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project For The New American Century] shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: ‘The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.’ …  The PNAC document supports a ‘blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.’”
        It is these “American principles and interests,” which serve the American ruling elites, that hide behind the rhetoric of “freedom and democracy,” and all the Orwellian double-think and double-talk associated with it.


3. Do Meaningful Freedom and Democracy Exist in the United States?

THE DOUBLE-THINK AND DOUBLE-TALK of the US media and educational system is so insidious that few people in the USA ask the following pertinent and very obvious question: Does the population of the United States actually enjoy a meaningful form of freedom and democracy?
        At first sight, it might appear that the answer is yes, since many ordinary Americans naively believe they are the guardians of “freedom” and “democracy” in the entire world. As a result, they meekly acquiesced while their governments constantly waged wars or deposed by means of CIA supported coups legitimately elected leaders under the pretext that they were trying to bring “freedom” and “democracy” to such countries as Guatemala, Iran, Congo, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Iraq, and many others. The list of American post-World War II “interventions” is almost endless but, very often, the American sponsored replacements were brutal dictators heading puppet regimes willing to do the bidding of American corporations, while holding their own people in a state of misery. However, with the exception of Vietnam, the great majority of Americans kept silent about these outrages, in part because their notions of “freedom” and “democracy” have been shaped by the relentless propaganda that they hear each time they turn on their television sets, to listen to the news about the latest of their government’s interventions allegedly on behalf of “freedom and democracy” in some foreign country. As they do that, it does not cross their minds that they themselves actually enjoy neither meaningful “freedom” nor meaningful “democracy.”
        Partly inspired by what he has observed and witnessed in North America during more that four decades, this author has introduced in two futuristic works [8,9] the concept of brainstuffing. As opposed to brainwashing, “brainstuffing” takes place since infancy, and consequently its victims never even realize that their brains have been “stuffed” with false or misleading information. Interestingly enough, this concept can be traced to a letter which Albert Einstein wrote to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium soon after he arrived in Princeton to take permanent residence in 1933. In it he remarked in connection with Princeton high society the following: “Here, the people who compose what is called ‘society’ enjoy less freedom than their counterparts in Europe. Yet they seem unaware of this restriction since their way of life tends to inhibit personality development from childhood.” ([10], p. 529)
        In contemporary USA this “unawareness” extends to much of its population. One should therefore ask: Do brainstuffed people know how to be free?
        Freedom requires in humans the ability to perceive various social alternatives and to intelligently choose between them. Thus, for citizens belonging to advanced contemporary societies, true freedom presupposes knowledge of basic political and social facts, imagination, the exercise of critical faculties, the ability to envisage new social possibilities, an educational system that makes them aware of social injustices and of the true state of affairs in their countries, and much, much more. The capacity of experiencing freedom and taking advantage of it is due to state of mind, and not just to the individual's physical environment. However, amongst the citizens of five nations in which this author has lived for protracted periods of time, and of several others in which he’s lived for shorter periods of time, the Americans turned out to be the most conformist and at the same time by far the most ignorant of both the world culture and the larger issues that face mankind on the micro as well as the macro level. Hence, true freedom eludes them in the same way that the beauty of a great work of art eludes coarse and insensitive people who have been brought up in a backward social environment: they simply do not have any conception of what it really means, and confuse the following of certain social routines with the exercise of freedom.
        As the Canadian political commentator Michele Landsberg correctly observed in a February 16, 2003 Toronto Star article, “The history of U.S. foreign policy is paradoxical: so much bush-league covert action, so many lies, so many failures, so little understanding of consequences, so many botched interventions. And yet, such openness. … Perhaps U.S. leaders can afford to be so open because they believe their citizens to be infinitely manipulable through the obligingly docile media. The patriotic American public, after all, bought the lies about the Gulf of Tonkin (a supposed attack on U.S. warships that actually never happened), precipitating the disastrous Vietnam War. They believed the TV version of the Gulf War, with ‘smart bombs’ zipping through windows to kill only bad guys. And for all I know, they believe the charade that Saddam Hussein is linked to Al Qaeda. The U.S. media have almost turned themselves into an arm of government propaganda.”
        The title of that Toronto Star article is: U.S. lies shouldn't be leading us into battle again. In it Ms. Landsberg lists some of the most conspicuous public lies that US governments had heaped upon American citizens since World War II, and which were accepted by most of those citizens without much questioning. So, one can ask: What is the meaning of freedom of choice when one does not know how to choose, and accepts unquestioningly lies which can be called “instrumentalist truths” (in the sense discussed in the preceding section) since they are certainly profitable to those who dispense them?
        The same is true of democracy. The wider the political spectrum one has in a country with representative democracy, the more democracy one has, since then one has more choices. The totalitarian regimes of the Soviet bloc had only one party, and yet they called voting for the unopposed candidates of that party “democracy.” In US one basically has two parties, but from a European’s point of view, their differences are negligible when it comes to the socially most fundamental political issues. Compare that with the much wider and more meaningful political choices of a Frenchman, an Italian, a German, a Scandinavian, or, since the end of the Cold War, of just about any European nation.
        So, the United States is de facto only one step above the past Soviet-bloc regimes. However, due to systematic brainstuffing and daily propaganda––which keeps Americans ignorant of social, political, cultural and economic achievements beyond their borders––most US citizens do not even realize that they live in a self-enclosed and chauvinistic society which constantly congratulates itself on being “the best”; whereas, when considered from a global and informed point of view, this claim is not only false but utterly preposterous.

 
4. Participatory Democracy vs. Mind Control

ACCORDING TO POLLS, the majority of the American people supported the invasion of Iraq, carried out under the title “Operation Iraqi Freedom”––a typically Orwellian instance of double-speak in which “invasion” is called “operation freedom.” However, in addition to showing how the truth is hidden from the American people, the Iraqi crisis also demonstrated the deficiencies of representative forms of democracy in such countries as the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy, in which the huge majority of the population was against that war, and yet whose governments sided with Washington.
        This shows that the ultimate form of true democracy is the participatory one, in which each citizen has a direct and equal voice in the decision making process at all levels, so that there is no need for corrupt politicians who betray the trust the electorate placed on them at election time.          As explained by this author when describing the socially advanced Terran society in his Memoirs of the Future [8], due to computer technology, true participatory democracy based on coordinated group decision making is a technically achievable goal. This form of participatory democracy is also the ultimate goal presented in the article entitled On Some Future Social Effects of the Communications Revolution [11]––available online on the PFPC website in the section Strategies of Transition to a First People's Century. In this article it is envisaged that the existence of the new means of communication that enable manifold inter-personal interactions (such as the Internet and its future offspring) will gradually change people's attitudes towards political procedures, making them more alert and willing to demand direct participation in the decision-making process, first on a small scale, and then gradually on larger and larger scales exemplified in [8,9]. Given the prevailing contemporary mentalities in Western countries, such a change in attitudes is not ascribed to altruistic motives, but rather to the enlightened self-interest that consumers in capitalist countries exhibit once they become aware that they are being offered, via skillfully designed commercials and propaganda, inferior products, while better products are actually available. Thus, what the Internet and its off-spring might do is to make people fully aware when and how they are being cheated and manipulated by their ruling elites.
        Not surprisingly, the US power elite has diametrically opposite goals in mind. These goals are very much in tune with an alternative extrapolation of contemporary USA society introduced in the same futuristic books [8,9] under the ironic name of the Free World Federation, or FWF.
        In FWF the epitome of a totalitarian corporate state has been achieved, and mind control becomes the chief weapon used by the ruling elites to control the masses. Hence, the rich and powerful govern a docile populace conditioned by subliminal techniques––which have originated in the present era of TV advertising and manipulative news reports––to react with Pavlovian predictability to the subliminal cues of their masters. At the same time, to make sure that nobody steps out of line, absolutely all the activities of FWF citizens are monitored by a giant complex of inter-connected computers called Centro.
        Some contemporary manifestations of this striving for total control are already in evidence in the US. One can study and marvel at them on the DARPA website at http://www.darpa.mil/, where one can read the following proud declaration: “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). It manages and directs selected basic and applied research and development projects for DoD, and pursues research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions.”
        One of these “high-risk research and technology” enterprises is the Department of Defense’s “Total Information Awareness” project, intended to place into “a virtual, centralized grand data-base” every credit card purchase US citizens make, every subscription they buy, every medical prescription they fill, every website they visit, every e-mail they send or receive, every academic grade they acquire, every bank deposit they make, every trip they book, every event they attend. In other words, the “Total Information Awareness” project is an early prototype for Centro. Because of protests from even such mainstream US politicians as Senators Daniel Inouye and Dianne Feinstein (who described this project as a “[p]rogram [that] could lead to [an] ‘Orwellian America’” [12]), for the time being the US Congress has trimmed down this plan. However, the Pentagon is at present developing “LifeLog”––a super-diary recording heartbeats, travel, Internet chats, and everything else a citizen does, sees, tastes, touches and hears everyday, and which it can provide to private firms to analyze behavior. The November 9, 2002 issue of New York Times contains an interesting relevant article entitled Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at the Personal Data of Americans, which deals with such contemporary issues that determine how ordinary Americans will live their lives in the near future.
        Thus, USA is well on its way to becoming a real-life version of the FWF corporate state described in [8,9]. If PNAC plans are to succeed, this impending “achievement” has to be exported to the entire world, which will then become the global stage on which the US will be playing the role of modern totalitarian Rome, and the remaining nations of this world that of its duty-paying “provinces”––with some of them, such as Israel, enjoying the privileged status of “most-favoured” protectorates.


5. Toward an American New Century vs. Toward a First People’s Century

IF AMERICA IS TO BE COMPARED with ancient Rome, then Europe has to be compared with ancient Greece––and from the point of view of the ancient Greeks the Romans were merely conquering barbarians, who eventually borrowed their culture but never managed to match the cultural achievements of the Greek civilization. On the other hand, in order to prevail, the twentieth century Americans didn’t have to conquer a Europe whose Western territories were the birth-places of their own forefathers––a ruthless breed of people who, as I documented in the first section of this article, proved capable of the most extreme acts of barbarity and genocide in the history of mankind––acts which led to the almost complete extermination of the North American continent’s native peoples, who were its rightful owners. Rather, after two incredibly destructive world wars of its own doing, an exhausted Europe yielded to the United States world power since, like ancient Greece, after it was split for centuries amongst many constantly warring nations, it had no longer the will to resist the expansionistic ambitions of inferior cultures. Fortunately, within several decades Europe came to its senses, and for the first time in its history it finally aims at a higher goal of unification, rather than at a continuation of fratricidal wars. But for the time being, the military power still remains in the hand of the only remaining superpower in the world: U.S.A.
        With the help of top European scientists, escaping the senseless savagery on their own continent right before and during World War II, a new breed of American scientists developed weapons of mass destruction without precedent in the history of mankind. Then, without much protest, they acquiesced to their government’s use of those terrible weapons against innocent civilian populations. Hence, towards the end of World War II, the American military carried out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the murder of civilian populations on a much larger scale than ever before witnessed by mankind. That proves that, at the moral level, those in positions of responsibility in the United States at that time were not any better than their forefathers, who had exterminated millions of Native North Americans.
        The European scientists, and the scientific traditions they brought along with them, helped their American colleagues to develop a very sophisticated technology, which together with the military supremacy that their country had achieved, enabled their governments and corporations to economically exploit a large portion of the world’s nations and intervene, without any fear of reprisals on their own continent, wherever they felt that was politically and economically advantageous [13, 14]. With most of the world at their disposal, for a while the American ruling elite achieved for their own upper and middle classes a standard of living which exceeded that of all the other countries in the contemporary world––albeit the lower classes still lived in dire misery.
        But internal contradictions began to manifest themselves despite the highly privileged position that the American upper classes secured for themselves at the economic apex of the entire world, from where they were exploiting the natural and the manpower resources of this entire planet [15].
        Those innate weaknesses manifested themselves most visibly in the quality of their post-world War II presidents, none of whom came even close to being on par with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had saved the American system from the ruin of the Great Depression and successfully guided it through World War II. Furthermore, the moral and intellectual weaknesses of top American political leaders are becoming more and more apparent as the decades flow by, and men who are mere mouth-pieces of the ruling elites assume the most prominent political positions by means of heavily subsidized political campaigns.
        There are many more internal weaknesses: enormous economic disparities between the rich and the poor, a low-quality primary and secondary educational system that produces a lot of functional illiterates amongst high school graduates, crime rates in the big cities without parallel in other economically advanced parts of the world, a propensity of the common people to indulge in shallow activities that starve their minds and stifle their spirits, disrespect for the environment, and so on, and so on. 
        But most telling, although much less evident, is the total lack of a firm belief system that would guide the scientists, educators and other creative people amongst the North American intellectual elite towards an enlightened society, motivating them to build upon the firm foundation that had been handed down to them by their European predecessors. Hence, the Americans have not developed an intelligentsia that would guide it on the path of social progress ––as has often been the case in European countries. True, there are American intellectuals who play the role of social critics, but they are few, isolated and largely ineffective on a national scale. By contrast, all one has to do is read Andrei Sakharov’s last memoirs [16] to understand what a crucial role the Soviet intelligentsia played during the last years of the Soviet Empire. As opposed to the docility of their American counterparts during the Reagan era, which made a mockery of the notion of democracy, the Soviet scientists and intellectuals were in the front lines of the fight for Gorbachev’s perestoika––a period during which the Soviet system displayed more genuinely democratic features (cf. [16], Chapters 6 and 7) than the American system has since World War II.
        Will an American intelligentsia ever emerge, which will serve as a beacon for the forces of progress in North America, and bring down the American Empire, with all its intrinsic corruption, moral decadence and social injustice, the way the Soviet Empire was brought down not too long ago?
        Thus far, the prospects appear dismal, since there still are no significant traces of an American intelligentsia in the European sense of the word––highly educated and sophisticated people who are aware of the social ills in their country, criticize those in power, and if necessary fight them, in the press and the other media, with courage and in the name of the oppressed. Instead, there are university educated Americans who seem to be as conformist and lacking in moral fiber as the rest of the population, and one has the PNAC neo-cons who are now in seats of power. Amongst the academics there are some notable dissenters (such as Noam Chomsky) who could form the core of an American intelligentsia, but as shown during the American protest against the invasion of Iraq, these dissenters are far too weak to make any real difference, and they failed to reach the bulk of the population, the way Andrei Sakharov and many of his colleagues reached millions of Soviets during the perestroika years (cf. [16], Chapter 7; according to E. Kline's forward of [16], “In a poll taken shortly after his death, Sakharov was named the most revered figure in Soviet history, edging out Lenin––Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and other notables all trailed some distance behind.”). Besides, the American system can deal with isolated dissenters by using subtle and underhanded methods that are much more effective than those ever invented by the Soviet system.
        Hence, for the time being, the hope for a better future, free of American imperialism, lies elsewhere. After the end of the Cold War, key nations in Europe and elsewhere are finally beginning to awaken to the threat that American hegemony is posing to them and to the rest of the world. Of course, some politically commentators are pessimistic about the prospect that these nations will provide a counterbalance to US power [17]. But how many of these pessimists foresaw the total collapse of the Soviet Empire even five years before it actually happened? Besides, despite the neo-con rhetoric of a “global cavalry,” twenty-first century US governments will not be able to successfully practice on these nations the type of genocidal policies that their nineteenth century predecessors had practiced on the native North American nations. So, assuming that the American ruling classes do not destroy all of mankind with their self-serving and reckless acts (disregard of environmental safeguards, crass commercial exploitation that exhausts key natural resources of this planet, arrogant acts of military aggression that might eventually backfire into conflicts leading to nuclear annihilation, etc.), the downfall of their empire might be as rapid as that of the Soviet Empire once these developed nations become fully aware of contemporary realities and decide to finally remove the last vestiges of the yoke imposed by the American military, economic, political and cultural imperialism.
        And, hopefully, these recovered nations will not repeat the mistakes they made in the past, and allow another wave of barbarians to again take control of the fate of the human race.
        In the meantime, however, the strategy of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) makes it perfectly clear that whenever and wherever US economic pressures and propaganda do not succeed, the brute force of arms will be used in order to subjugate one by one the nations of the world by imposing on them a “made in USA” idea of “freedom and democracy” that suits perfectly the American ruling elites, but certainly not their victims across the globe.
        But as the world-wide demonstrations preceding the US invasion of Iraq have shown, men and women in all parts of the world are finally awakening to the true nature of the American system that hides behind the American faēade of “freedom and democracy.” On February 15, 2003 millions across the globe demonstrated with the slogan “The World Says No to War.” The arrogantly dismissive reaction to those mass demonstrations, without precedent in history, by the US, UK, and the other “conservative” governments in league with the present American administration provided clear evidence that humankind is at a critical juncture in its historical development. As some astute political commentators, including even those of the New York Times, have remarked, a new superpower has arisen: world public opinion. If this “superpower” eventually prevails, then perhaps, with American hegemony finally gone, in the not too distant future this sorry planet will eventually have the chance to achieve a higher form of social organization based on true freedom and democracy.


EDUARD PRUGOVECKI is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, but at present resides in Mexico. His website is at http://individual.utoronto.ca/prugovecki/.


References

[1] T. Donnelly and V. Serchuk, Toward a Global Cavalry Overseas: Rebasing and Defense Transformation, AIP Publication, July 1, 2003 (available on this PFPC website and also at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.17783/pub_detail.asp).
[2] D.E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993).
[3] Encyclopędia Britannica, vol. 12 (William Benton Publisher, Chicago, 1967), pp. 65–78.
[4] J. Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (Grove Press, New York, 1998).
[5] T.P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: It Explains Why We’re Going to War, and Why We’ll Keep Going to War, in Esquire, March 2003 (available on the PFPC website).
[6] M. Lemoine, Uncle Sam's Manifest Destiny, in Le monde diplomatique, May 2003 (available on the PFPC website).
[7] B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (Simon and Shuster, New York, 1945).
[8] E. Prugovecki, Memoirs of the Future (Cross Cultural Publications, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2001).
[9] E.  Prugovecki, Dawn of the New Man: A Futuristic Novel of Social Change (Xlibris, Philadelphia, 2002).
[10] R. W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (The World Publishing Company, New York, 1971).
[11] E. Prugovecki, On Some Future Social Effects of the Communications Revolution, published in June 2002 on Utopias Forum, http://www.wfs.org/prugovecki2.htm.
[12] Cf. Senator D. Feinstein's website at http://feinstein.senate.gov/Releases02/r-tiap.htm.
[13] N. Chomsky, World Orders Old and New (Columbia University Press, New York, 1994).
[14] T. Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (Verso Books, London and New York, 2003).
[15] J  Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (Verso Books, London and New York, 2003).
[16] A. Sakharov, Moskow and Beyond: 1986 to 1989 (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1991).
[17] W.W. Wagar, The Condominium of the Rich: A Reply to Robert Skidelski (PFPC website).