The Poor-Man's Guide to Modernity - Independent Media Center

greatest and richest Republic on earth today whose economic foundation was laid by Adam
Smith, trumped the foundation of liberty and separation from empire laid by its founding fathers
with the prime directive that it was to be a Republic. It has silently descended into a policestate
without a murmur of protest from either its super-educated or its rank and file. They both
today stupidly stand together in line to have their body cavities examined, groped, molested,
humiliated, or irradiated with deadly radiation every time they travel by air. Soon, it will be every
time they visit a shopping mall, governmental office, school, and perhaps even getting on and
off highways to and fro from work. Mobile radiation scanners are already deployed in many
cities which scan all passerbys, cars, trucks, for the so called “terrorists”. The rulers meanwhile
have their own private jets which take off and land on private runways and terminals bypassing
the fate of the masses. No radiation scanners violate their physical being, and no perverts
molest their women and children.
All this travesty only exists because the public is continually taught the facile view, or forced to
acquiesce to the facile view at the threat of themselves being labeled “terrorist”, that they are
under mortal threat from the “terrorist”. Referring back to Zbigniew Brzezinski's ode to
hegemony quoted at the very beginning, the method of circumventing domestic impediments
to the “sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power” become empirically selfevident:
“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it
more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a
truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. [Because] the pursuit of power is not
a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or
challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being.” (pgs. 211, 44) Q.E.D.
As the aforementioned examination discloses, in this perpetual battle between good and evil,
strong and weak, hegemons and victims, wolves and sheep, rulers and masses, evidently both
sides have been well equipped. But unfortunately, it is only the one side which has continually
figured out, from time immemorial, how to capitalize on its own core strengths and others'
weaknesses. And it has artfully trapped the other in bread and circuses.
This was the craft of kings from antiquity who ruled in the name of the divine for their own
private interests with “all authority is an extension of god's authority”. And is now the craft of
Machiavelli in modernity who showed the prince how to rule for private interests in the name of
democracy with “god is on your side”.
Indeed, it is only upon that singular characteristic that the following observation of Zbigniew
The Poor-Man's Guide to Modernity 191 / 334 Zahir Ebrahim