The Game of Terror

Because he can't be exploited by superstition anymore
Because he can't be bribed or bought
by the things that you adore - Bob Dylan

It looks like a lot of liberals have twisted themselves into knots again over Hugo Chavez. He tends to make a certain kind of liberal do that, just as he makes a kind of headline writer misrepresent his remarks: "Venezuela's president is afraid of Halloween", for instance, or "Chavez seeks Halloween ban".

What he said was something else: that it is not a Venezuelan custom for families to dress their children as ghouls and witches - it "is contrary to our ways" - and that Halloween is a US "game of terror," an aspect of the culture of "terrorism, putting fear into other nations, putting fear into their own people."

Is Chavez superstitious, as the press of the Northern Hemisphere would have it? I've quoted "right-hand path" occultist Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defense for her warning of the dangers posed by black lodges to children, and her advice to victims of occult attack. In Sane Occultism (reissued as What Is Occultism?) , Fortune describes superstition as "the tribute paid by ignorance to knowledge of which it recognises the value but does not understand the significance." That's not Chavez.

It doesn't take much persuasion these days to sell the case that the "War on Terror" is a lie. Much of the deceit has been laid bare, and safe assumptions can now be made about that which yet hasn't. It's only faith-based denial that holds anyone still in the dark. But it's more than a lie, and that's not so widely recognized. It is also a superstition - the combustion of ignorance ignited by fear - and it means to do more than knock over a few resource-rich nations. It's also intended to be a new foundation for social control.

A healthy culture maintains its health from a sustaining mythology. Not lies, but true myths, that nurture our better selves. But that's not where we are today. The dominant culture is sick unto death, and the longtime rot in its founding myths of democracy and liberty has finally hollowed out the concepts and left nothing but the words: signs, pointing to nothing.

Americans - and not just the citizens, but all of America's imperial subjects - are being slipped a death-obsessed superstition in place of a mythology of life, because misrule has squandered the power of the Old Stories, and as we come crashing towards a convergence of crises this century, the ruling elite has exhausted the means of maintaining control by gentler methods. I wish those calling for UFO "disclosure" would realize that when it arrives, what arrives will be another officially-sanctioned superstition; another system of control. Because they don't want us to know, they need us to fear. And they need us to fear, because they fear us.

And let's note how today's generalized terror, which finds specificity in nightmares such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, is of a continuity with the covert application of the occult establishment's strategy of control, as described in official and unofficial histories and numerous survivors' accounts. Horrification, and the dislocation of identity by a perpetuating state of anxiety, belongs to the method of the fascist left-hand path.

It may be November 2, but in Washington it's still Halloween.