Part 1: When America Became the Dark Force

“‘We’re the dark matter. We’re the
force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,’ a strapping Navy SEAL,
speaking on condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.”

If anyone thought the war on terror
contained an otherworldly quality, this quote
on the front page of the September 11, 2011 Washington Post from Dana Priest
and William M. Arkin’s book Top Secret America confirmed it.

9/11 had taken America through the
mirror and there was no coming back.

Following 9/11, the elected
government of the United States willingly delivered over what remained of
America’s civilian control to a department of Homeland Security, dedicated to
expanding the unelected government’s fear of darkness into everybody’s life.
Added to this was a top secret military operation known as the Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC) that thought of itself as the dark.

Begun as a modest hostage rescue
team, by 2011 JSOC had morphed into a veritable heart of darkness, with the
power to murder at will and completely unaccountable to American or
international law.

At the
height of its notoriety under General Stanley McChrystal in
Iraq and Afghanistan JSOC operated completely in the black as a “Stovepipe,”
operation reporting to no one and employing infamous rogue ex-CIA professionals
such as indicted Iran Contra operative Dewey Clarridge.

The Navy Seal Team that was said to
have taken out Osama bin Laden operated under JSOC. Retired military personnel
refer to JSOC as “Murder, Incorporated” and the “most dangerous people on the face of the earth.”

But if JSOC’s reputation for
secrecy, vengeance and death can’t be explained from within the context of
traditional U.S. military operations or U.S. law, then what set of rules is it
operating from? Or is it simply that the rational enlightenment traditions that
most Americans take for granted have become subjected to deeper and older rules
of behavior rooted in an irrational world of personal, private and holy war?

No one less than the legendary Cold
Warrior, Time Magazine’s Henry Luce understood that his passion for defeating
Communism constituted “a declaration of private war,” which, in citing the
example of the privateer Sir Francis Drake made it not only “unlawful,” but “probably mad.” As the child of American missionaries, Luce was committed
to the militant spread of Christian Capitalism while viewing its ultimate
triumph over the world as an inevitable consequence of God’s will.

Described
by Tournament of Shadows authors
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac as mystical imperialism, the term can be
traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19^th century efforts to
establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal.

The competition came to a dead stop
in Afghanistan with the end of the Great Game in 1907, when Imperial Russia and
Great Britain chose to accept Afghanistan as a neutral buffer state between
empires. But with the advent of the Cold War in 1947 and the mysterious and
intoxicating god-like qualities inherent in nuclear weapons, a new and more
apocalyptic iteration of mystical imperialism came into being.

The sole purpose of America’s mid 20^th
century defense intellectuals was to rationalize nuclear war, not mystify it.
America’s cold warriors were far removed technologically from their 19^th
century counterparts whose Christian elite believed they were bringing
enlightenment to the “darker regions of the earth.”

But whether by design or by accident
within a short time an entire stratum of American scientific and political
thought found itself immersed in an irrational realm that looked, smelled and
tasted like medieval mysticism. A 1960s London Times Literary Supplement
marveled at the new priesthood who moved as freely through the corridors of the
Pentagon and the State Department as the Jesuits once had through the courts of Madrid and Vienna, centuries before.

Tasked with defeating Communism by
any means possible they invented their own reality, accelerated the nuclear
arms race, created an imaginary domino theory of Communist aggression in Southeast Asia and then
escalated a real war in Vietnam to counter it.

President Kennedy’s science advisor
Jerome Wiesner eventually came to realize that the so called “missile gap” and
the massive buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal in response to it was only a
“mirror image” of America’s own intentions towards the Soviet Union and
not the other way around. Yet instead of addressing the error, the U.S. slipped
deeper into the Cold War mirror.

By 1978,
these thermonuclear Jesuits and their CIA counterparts were using the U.S., NATO, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia to
shake the Soviet Union’s domination over Central Asia through a
Christian/Islamic holy war in Afghanistan.

In a rational world it might be
assumed that this war would stop with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the
collapse of Communism. But instead of ending, America’s full blown splurge into
personal and private holy war caused the U.S. to slip into a crisis of identity.

Forced after seventy five years of
anti-communism to finally define itself based on what it stood for and not what
it stood against, the United States entered a house of shadows in which it
continues to wander. Stricken by decades of economic and military excess, its
mission has become confused, its legal, moral and philosophical foundation
abandoned and its role as leader of the western world questioned as never
before.

America is clearly not the country
it was before 9/11 but what has it become and what do the current candidates
for the 2016 presidential election tell us about the direction we’re headed?

Join us as we explore the
little-analyzed facts and covert agendas that the United States must now
reconsider in the 21^st century and what those agendas mean to
America’s role as “the dark force that orders the universe,” in our next
installment of America, an Empire in Twilight Part II.

Copyright – 2022 Fitzgerald &
Gould All rights reserved

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, published by City Lights (2009), Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, published by City Lights (2011).
Their novel The Voice , was published in 2001. Their memoir, The Valediction Three Nights of Desmond was
published by TrineDay (2021) and The Valediction Resurrection was published by TrineDay (2022). For more information
visit invisiblehistory , grailwerk and valediction.net