The circus is in town: The United States of Absurdity, Circa 2015

By John Grant

"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."

                    - Franz Kafka, The Trial

A couple weeks ago, our military special operations command began an eight-week military exercise called Jade Helm 15 in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. As reported in The New York Times, some Texans worried it was “actually a ruse for a federal takeover of the state.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor movements of federal special ops elements. A group of volunteers planned to follow military vehicles they could detect and post their locations on a website.

This is not your traditional, old-school military. This is ARSOF Next. No, that’s not a movie title along the lines of Apocalypse Now. ARSOF Next: A Return to First Principles is the title of a propaganda magazine put out by the US Army Special Operations Command. ARSOF stands for Army Special Operations Forces, the doctrine specializing in surgical strike capabilities and special warfare now taking over our military.

According to the magazine, the United States has reached a “strategic inflection point” characterized by an “uncertain strategic security environment framed by diminishing defense resources and an increasing number and variety of potential threats.” Huge invasions and occupations are totally yesterday, something the Bush debacle in Iraq made quite clear. “Social, political, informational and economic trends in international competition are converging between state and non-state actors and others for superiority over the physical, cognitive, moral security and adequate governance of populations.” Read this military gobble-de-gook about 10 times and you begin to realize we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The nation state idea begun with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia is breaking down and corporate and other “non-state actors” are filling the void. The New York Times has been running a series on the lawless nature of the world’s oceans, where seaborne slavery and unaccounted-for murder are common occurrences. The next step up in this brave new world is the geographical “failed state,” a term of world politics applied by still-intact nation states to those places where anarchy rules. The “free” market is now king and the still-civilized world is engaged in a world-wide capitalist free-for-all. The “real” world is becoming very mixed up with the cyber world. This all means powers like the US will rely more and more on sophisticated intelligence-gathering and secret, a-legal operational capacities to protect their realms. Hence ARSOF Next and PR about our military as a great empathetic institution.

One of the burdens faced by American politicos is sustaining a nostalgic fiction that we’re still living in a golden age of American Exceptionalism...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2818