Satirical News and the Build Up to the Third World War
Posted Aug 29, 2008

Satirical News and the Build Up to the Third World War

By Pablo Ouziel

Perhaps a couple of decades from now we will all be praising the mainstream
media for the wonderful work they have done reporting on our collective
insanity. If we could all leave aside for a minute our nationalisms and
ideologies, we could see through every page printed, every word aired, or
every media image shown, that global confrontation is just around the
corner. The media seems to be seeing what its readers, viewers and listeners
are not able to grasp. A large scale war is now unavoidable, and we have all
contributed to it through our obtuse obsession with ourselves and our
ideals, and our lack of holistic understanding of human interaction. That
said, it could be that news is no longer news, and are just part of the
21st century satirical entertainment culture. If that is the case, we can
safely say that once the television is turned off, the war ends.

Week after week, escalation is the game being played by “our” governments.
Every country flexing its muscle to see what it is able to obtain, as the
cake of global resources is safely being distributed between those with
access to the knife. The British fighting for the little bit of oil which
they might be able to extract, if they push the boundaries of their empire
past the legal 200 nautical miles from the shoreline of its colonized
Ascension Island. The Americans pushing for their famous missile shield in
the ex-soviet states, which for years now professor Chomsky has been
labeling as a declaration of war. The Israelis focused on their territorial
expansion on Palestinian land, through their now world-renowned settlements.
The Russians with their personal conflict in Georgia, which the
³international community² of hypocrites is unanimously condemning, with the
same might as they unanimously support every aggression they personally wish
to impart.

Literally every country in the world, no matter where we look, is bent on
this culture of aggression. Nobody is able to trust anybody, because deep
down we all know that we are selfish, and as soon as we can, we are going to
do everything possible to get on top of the game. But the worse thing of
all, is that we look at ³our² countries as if they were people with a life
of their own—we talk about America as if it was a conquering woman, the
pom-pom girl of world aggression, we look at Britain as the wise old
fashioned conservative who thinks he knows everything, while Russia is the
head of the Mafia and Israel the holder of the truth, the bearer of
humanity’s suffering.

Farcical stereotypes have been continuously set up by very effective
spin-doctors with enough resources to govern the world. Put a barking dog
behind a herd of sheep and they are bound to go in the direction you plan
for them to follow. That is what we have today - barking dogs disguised as
politicians, and sheep seeing themselves as citizens with a right to vote.
The problem is that in this equation there is no shepherd to guide anyone to
greener pastures. This is status quo necessary for those in power to remain
in power, building fraudulent imagery about the true state of the world.

It is this Status quo, which allows popular debate to remain framed in words
like “hope” and “change” for Obama, as he sits in the foundations of
corporate America, presenting his strategy for change, while demonstrators
outside of Denver’s “freedom cage” are getting arrested. The same status
quo, which constantly reminds us of McCain’s bravery as a POW, in a war
which was unjustified and which killed many innocent Vietnamese civilians.
The status quo, which allows for 90 Afghan civilians to be killed in one day
by American troops, without a single minute of mourning by civilized
Americans who claim to be helping them.

In Spain, there is a saying which says, “no lo cogería ni con pinzas”, which
translated to English could mean something like “I wouldn’t touch it with a
barge pole”, and sadly that is the state of our political systems worldwide.
The problem is that global populations seem either too naïve, too ignorant,
too indifferent, or too powerless, to reject this social reality and
confront it with serious intentions for change.

As our politicians keep fighting for power while rallying the national flag,
millions of people are confronting each other without knowing each other.
Yet, as the suffering keeps mounting with the ringing of war bells, none of
those firmly behind their candidates are gaining much from these
paramilitary adventures. Only the corporate interests of a very small global
elite keep pushing ahead, as their lapdog politicians keep barking, and the
herd of sheep keeps moving towards what Samuel P. Huntington coined as “the
clash of civilizations.”

Mired in our own limited sphere of thought, dealing with our own personal
problems, we are too disconnected from each other to ever get a grasp of the
fact that no matter what our politicians tell us, Americans and Iraqis,
French and Afghans, Iranians and Israelis, Russians and British and the rest
of us, we are not all that different from each other. Yet, because most of
us only know each other through the imagery of the television set, we allow
our barking politicians to lead the way towards conflict.

Make no mistake about it, last century’s great depression ended with the
build up to the Second World War, and the unacknowledged economic depression
of today will give way to the official beginning of the Third World War.
When that happens, the whole of humanity will be subjected to the kind of
depression which can only be felt with the destruction of social existence.
We must be thankful to the media for all those images of reality which they
have been streaming endlessly through their networks, for only the
accumulation of those images allows us to see where the world is heading. I
wish the media was satirical, then I could turn off the television set
knowing we are not heading towards global war. However as things stand, it
might be in one year, it might take five or ten, but sooner or later
imperial attitudes lead to major conflict.

Pablo Ouziel is a sociologist and freelance writer