By Daniel K. Buntovnik, 6November 2016
This piece addresses dilemmas facing opponents of war and imperialismin the 2016 U.S. presidential race, the future of war-profiteering, eumemicist racism, the alt-right rehashing of neo-Nazi occultism, and Net-Centric Warfare as black magic.
Although the ruling class of the United States of America bends over backwards to display its cleavage into so-called Republican and Democratic factions, this apparent split is, to a significant degree, exaggerated. Every day, conscious and unconscious agents of plutocratic, oligarchical dictatorship are working hard to drum up minor differences between the political parties of the bourgeoisie. This encourages us to spend a disproportionate amount of our time focusing on the disagreements between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and their parties, disengaging from the reality of their joint pursual of key political objectives.
The deeper the illusion of Democratic-Republican cleavage is driven into the citizenrys consciousness, the more the popularity contest in which the masses are quadrennially enticed to (indirectly) participate is lent legitimacy. The suggestion that this contest represents a real opportunity to take part in the national policy-making process is enhanced by the impression of cleavage, while elevated awareness of bipartisan fusion and unity across the bourgeois political spectrum threatens to foment disenchantment and revolt, because it leads to the conclusion that American elections offers little in the way of actual choice.
The scope of the great false dilemma goes beyond what is commonly understood by the term two-party system. This is because U.S. presidential electoral politics have, in the 21st century, actually developed into a four-party system, composed of two Big League parties and two Little League parties. The Little League parties, by virtue of each one functioning as a fallback or an auxiliary to its Big League counterpart, serve as a farcical opposition force to what is generally understood by the term two-party system (i.e. the two Big League parties). Presently the Little League two-party system is composed of (1) the Green Party, absorbing disaffected ex-Democrats such as Jill Stein and the Gaddafist Cynthia McKinney as well as syphoning off resources from opportunistic Marxian micro-sects, and (2) the Libertarian Party, absorbing disaffected ex-Republicans such as Gary Johnson and Ron Paul (in whose case we see the revolving door between Libertarians and the GOP). Other third parties are relegated to competing with each other as well as with the Greens and Libertarians to gain access to the Little League two-party system.
Both the Libertarian and Green parties attempt to harness the storm of anti-war sentiment, but fail to adequately address imperialist war as an integral function of the capitalist system. Both pledge to put an end to what Gary Johnson calls the imperialistic foreign policy of the U.S.A., which Jill Stein says is turning our republic into a bankrupt empire. Notice how for these peewee politicians, U.S. foreign policy is not imperialist, but imperialisticimplying that it merely resembles imperialism; and nevermind the multi-century policy of invading and annexing foreign nationshalf of Mexico, Hawaii, the Philippines, just to name a fewthis doesnt have anything to do with why the U.S.A. is a wealthy country today; the wars and drone attacks of the 21st century are only in the process of transforming the country into a bankrupt empire but were not there yet! The Little League political players qualify their anti-imperialist posturing with significant caveats; the figurative fine print of Johnsons program lets us know that he still wants to build a strong military, and Stein meanwhile pledges to continue spending as much as $298.5 billion per year on public sector U.S. militarism. Thats still $83 billion more than the country with the second highest military budget in the world, the Peoples Republic of China [X].
Some attempt to paint an image of the Green Party as an attractive political center for revolutionary socialism and peace, but the Green Party and its micro-sect surrogates are oriented towards accommodating right-wing nationalist theory. Their objective is to co-opt supporters of Hillary Clintons Democratic socialist ex-competitor, Bernie Sanders, whose campaigns central theme was about saving capitalism for the many, not the few with a national political revolution, the very notion of which stands in antagonistic contradiction to the act of abolishing capitalism through transnational social revolution (for a variety of reasons, some of which I explored here). Rather than criticizing the trustbuster thrust of Robert Reich inspired slogans like political revolution against the billionaire class, the Greens and their surrogates facilitate assimilation of the fantasy implicit in these slogans, that of a salvageable capitalism based around restored small business competitivity and regulationnot expropriationof the big corporations (labelled democratic socialism), along with continued deportations and borders, a fantasy which is rendered explicit upon closer examination of the discourse of individuals like Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, and Robert Reich.
If Jill Stein, the theoretically electable candidate in this years Electoral College with the most far-reaching proposals for U.S. militarism reduction, became the president of the United States and implemented her reforms, the U.S. war machine would likely be slightly weaker than it is now (although it would probably remain quite powerful, given Jill Steins pledge to provide it with an approximate yearly budget surpassing that of any other nation), but this would only be worthwhile if in the process of implementing these reforms, awareness of the need to ultimately abolish the basis of war (capitalism and hegemony of the bourgeois state) grew and the movement centered around this awareness became stronger. Otherwise the next president could simply reverse the course, and its not inconceivable that the Pentagon would find some sly way to circumvent those hypothetical budget cuts or perhaps even orchestrate a coup. However, given that Stein has virtually no chance to become president, why should anyone lend support to anti-war individuals and groups who do not plainly articulate abolition of capitalismthe precluder of peace in modern timesthrough social revolution as their ultimate goal? Are we really so cynical to believe that people are too stupid to understand the basic demands of socialism? Tax the rich, sure, but dont become a stooge of the richplenty of them ultimately wouldnt mind paying higher taxes if it meant saving even a bit of their privilege. The would-be revolutionarys entryistic support, even if critical, for the reformist political center degenerates into de facto agitation for reformism, promoting non-abolitionist consciousness, which cannot be reconciled with abolitionist consciousness. The anti-war movement would be strongerwould existif it was centered around the objective of ending the basis of war, not around the idealistic embrace of leaders like Jill Stein, who vows to maintain the U.S. position of global supremacy in military financing, or Bernie Sanders, who views each imperialist war through an atomizing lens so that he can pick and choose which ones to support (such as the ones in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Syria to which he gave and gives thumbs up).
Given this reality and the hopelessness of leveraging the electoral process towards anti-war ends, the voter who would like to contribute to the stopping of imperialist war and militarist aggression only has one realistic option: throw away her vote. A protest vote for one of the fifth party candidates existing outside of the Big and Little League two-party systems (aka the four-party system) who may propose the actual abolition of capitalism and imperialist warfare is essentially equivalent to writing-in flip tha system and can be considered the most desirable fashion of throwing away ones vote. The vote can be considered thrown away, because these candidates are denied even the hypothetical possibility of election by the nature of the system. But they are still a leg up over abstention because at least in certain cases they may be tallied and recorded, contributing to statistics which may stand as a testament to present levels of vanguard working class consciousness for generations to come, and at the very least there is a chance that, even if the write-in vote is not counted, it may appear as an unsettling anomaly to the one tasked with disregarding it. In that regard, and following the line of thought advanced by Eugene Debs on the desirability of not getting what one wants as opposed to getting what one doesnt want, these hopeless votes are not thrown away but serve a kind of a purpose; they communicate anti-war sentiment.
Votes which can truly be considered thrown away are those cast tactically based in the doctrine of lesser evilism, in which case a vote for one of the peewees of the Little two parties registers simultaneous disaffiliation and affiliation with one of the Big two parties insofar as a Green vote is a disaffected Democratic vote and a Libertarian vote is a disaffected Republican vote. Then there are those who consider it better to vote for a Big evil (as opposed to the Little lesser evil), so long as its not the greatest Big evil. Perhaps the most twisted are those who believe it best to institute the most backward, reactionary, fascistic government possible, in the hope that this will be more likely to stir up revolt than a somewhat less murderous and oppressive bourgeois dictatorship, which is a dubious proposition to say the least. All these votes are thrown away, from the perspective of the anti-war voter, because they contribute to the perpetuation of mass criminal state violence and signal the voters consent to this, whether it be reluctant or enthusiastic.
A key point of unity in the political programs of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is their mutual promise to engage in war-profiteering once elected. To be sure, although there is a general consensus among the U.S. ruling class about the need to wage war for profit, there are indeed nuances between Clinton and Trumps visions for the future of war-profiteering, rooted in a real cleavage of the U.S. bourgeoisie. While Trump has taken up the cause of the backwards and regressive old stock white supremacist and nativist bourgeoisie by advocating protectionism, trade tariffs, and the mass deportation of Mexicans as a sort of neo-Indian removal policy, Clinton represents the progressive faction of the bourgeoisie which embraces a new stock-inclusive white supremacy wherein the impression of cosmopolitanism is fostered by augmenting fluidity between manners of othering and ascribing social inferiority (i.e. by supplementing racism with civicism and culturism, allowing for the development of a black bourgeoisie), and the progressive extension of the governments conception of whiteness as it is nowadays defined by institutions such as the Census Bureau and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which essentially occurs in two waves: first, the extension of whiteness in the 19th and early 20th centuries to the descendants of non-Anglo Saxon Germanic peoples and shortly thereafter to non-Germanic peoples of Christian Europe, followed by extension of whiteness in the late 20th and early 21st centuries which de-emphasized the alignment between Christianity and whiteness and began to include peoples of certain parts of Asia and Africa, the Balkans, Iberia, and Latin America as white persons.
The language deployed by the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns in the political platforms presented on their official websites is a 21st century confirmation of the assertion made long ago by high-ranking U.S. militarist turned anti-war dissident Smedley D. Butler that War is a racket. Although both campaigns frame their proposals for financial investment in war not as direct investment into warfare itself, but as investments in weapons manufacturing and war waging capabilities (i.e. the military industrial complex), both nevertheless take for granted that war is, was, and should continue to be a profitable business. Perhaps both presidential candidates have a sense that the public at large would find the proposal to perpetrate mass violence and terminate countless human lives in exchange for the accumulation of wealth distasteful if not presented delicately, cloaked as a call to invest in the mere machinery of war. However, this tactic is transparent; the call to invest in the tools and technologies of war is in fact inseparable from the call to invest in war itself, for these investments would be obsolete if there was no war in which to deploy them. And insofar as these weapons systems, war waging capabilities, and an empowered military industrial complex are said to function as a deterrent to hot war, they escalate the renewed cold war between great power factions, resulting in proxy-type wars.
Consider the following definitions from OxfordDictionaries.com before we examine the candidates programs more closely:
First, Donald Trumps official presidential campaign website (donaldjtrump.com), informs us that Trumps vision is to:
Invest in a serious missile defense system to meet growing threats by modernizing our Navys cruisers and procuring additional, modern destroyers to counter the ballistic missile threat from Iran and North Korea.
The only profit this investment will bring to anyone other than defense contractors is the metaphorical wages paid to cover the psychological cost of irrational paranoia over the ballistic missile threat [to people in North America] from Iran and North Korea, countries whose militarism is largely a reaction to U.S. jingoism in the first place. Of course, we should also all know by now that defense is really a militarist dog whistle for war: the so-called United States Department of Defense was more accurately and less Newspeak-ishly called the Department of War between 1789 and 1947. Hence why, for Trumps PR team, the way to invest [] in [] defense is by procuring [] destroyers!
The fact that Trump openly calls for (primarily poor non-U.S. citizen) human lives to be sacrificed for the purpose of (primarily rich white American) financial gain should not even come as a surprise, given the blatantly imperialist statements he and his associates like Rudolph Giuliani have made, such as:
In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils. Instead, all we got from Iraqand our adventures in the Middle Eastwas death, destruction and tremendous financial loss. Donald Trump [X]
While Hillary Clinton does employ the same lexical register of financial speculation to proudly raise the call for war-profiteering just as loudly and just as clearly as Donald Trump, her teams investment pitch is nuanced by the form of innovation it advocates. The Klinton-Kaine Kampaign website (hillaryclinton.com) promises us that, as president, Hillary will:
Invest in innovation and capabilities that will allow us to prepare for and fight 21st-century threats. That includes leveraging our information advantage through whats called net-centric warfare capabilities and preparing for asymmetric threats.
Clintons P.R. team has spiced up the war-for-profit pitch by plugging in a reference to what seems to be one of the latest militarist buzz phrases: net-centric warfare. A Wikipedia article on the term defines it as a doctrine or theory developed by the U.S. baby killer establishment in the 1990s which seeks to translate an information advantage, enabled in part by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the robust computer networking of well informed geographically dispersed forces.
In Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority (2000), David Alberts, John Garstka and Frederick Stein describe Network Centric Warfare as the best term developed to date to describe the way [U.S. militarists] will organize and fight in the Information Age.
The intuitive connection between networks, information, cyberspace, and global media is indicative of the fact that militarist buzzwords like net-centric warfare, information warfare, and cyberwarfare are essentially all iterations of the same thought process. Thus Hillary Clintons call to invest in Net-Centric Warfare in 2016 echoes her words to Congress in 2011, when she lamented (in a global context wherein non-American media networks such as Al Jazeera, RT, Sputnik, CCTV, and teleSUR were gaining traction in the Anglosphere as well as a stronger foothold in other regions) that We are in an information war, and were losing that war. Thus Hillarys campaign pledge cannot be seen as an addendum thoughtlessly tacked on to the platform so as to pander to the pro-military crowd, but a longstanding sign of her approach to imperial affairs.
In Network Centric Operations: Background and Oversight Issues for Congress (2007), Clay Wilson explains that Network Centric [Warfare] relies on computer equipment and networked communications technology to provide a shared awareness of the battle space [sic] for U.S. forces.
One might well imagine some Defense clerks producing a flashy video of U.S. Army/Marine Corps baby killers consulting their smartwatches in between murdering savage Near Oriental men to post statuses on each others timelines about where the remainder of the unarmed men are seeking asylum from these brainwashed SS-worshipping death squads and livestreaming satellite images as they operate a genocidal dragnet across a dusty and generic Fallujah-esque town (perhaps filmed on the set of Homeland), their wounded comrades meanwhile being treated by medical androids remote controlled by ethically-compromised doctors on another continent, to sell this concept to bloodthirsty sociopaths in Washington D.C. The U.S. military would probably prefer that when the public hears the term net-centric warfare, it would imagine something like this, happening far away, directed at un-American others, and keeping America safebut leveraging our information advantage has much broader implications.
One indication that the scope of this project goes well beyond the battlespaces of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen is the fact that the term net-centric warfare is regarded as being synonymous with that of net-centric operations (Wilson, 2007). This supplanting of warfare by operations, like the supplanting of battlefield by battlespace, signals an important shift in the way U.S. militarists perceive the nature of conflict in the 21st century, sometimes referred to as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The supplanting of the term warfare with that of operations marks a symbolic step towards the normalization of the state of perpetual warfare and the rendering ubiquitous of military operations outside their traditional spheres which have become reality under the so-called War on Terror.
This shifting emphasis in bourgeois military theory (from warfare to operations) can be traced back to the emergence of the asymmetric warfare paradigm (also alluded to by Clinton, cf. asymmetric threats) which began to gain currency towards the end of the genocidal U.S. war in Vietnam as baffled U.S. militarists struggled to fathom how their country had allowed them to be defeated (see Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars [1975]). The architects of the U.S. genocide in Vietnam expressed dismay at their defeat because they felt there had not objectively been sufficient loss or degradation of U.S. military machinery or manpower to warrant defeat; instead they identified the erosion of the subjective political will to continue fighting among the U.S. populace as the cause of their defeat. This view can be summed up in the rhetorical question of one U.S. militarist: Was the United States defeated in the jungles of Vietnam, or was it defeated in the streets of American cities? [Aquino, p. 6].
Similarly observing that [the Vietnam War] was fought as much, if not more, in the living rooms of America as in the living jungles of Southeast Asia, the U.S. militarist authors of Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority resolve that the battlespace of the future [] will no longer be private or remote [Alberts, p. 63]. But because the political costs of using [lethal weapons] against domestic anti-war dissidents and peace activists are likely to far outweigh their effects, the crushing of domestic civilian and non-state actor threats to the will to sustain U.S. militarist campaigns of genocide abroad (the national will to victory [Aquino, p. 4]) is primarily viewed as being a job for methods like Information Warfare, Military Information Support Operations (MISO) (also known as Psychological Operations [PSYOP]), Operations Other Than War (OOTW) [Alberts, p. 59], and Effects-Based Operations (EBO) [Smith, p. 1], although thats by no means to say that they dont consider the brazen use of lethal force against U.S. citizens out of the question [X]. The same authors note that in some instances of so-called Operations Other Than War the line between war and peace and between friend, foe, and neutral is blurred beyond recognition and that Information Operations blur the boundaries between civilian and military, having the potential to totally redefine the nature of warfare [Alberts, p. 59].
The doctrine of net-centric warfare thus encapsulates the idea that anyone who does anything to oppose the U.S. war machine must be regarded as a foe of the state, including those who do so in totally non-violent ways such as:
The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s helped to further entrench the paradigm of asymmetric warfare, as the subsequent Soviet/Russian geopolitical recession undid the relative symmetricality of what had previously been seen as a bipolar global battlespace. Nowadays the U.S. military behemoth swallows up a whopping 37% of global military spending, more than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the U.K., India, France, and Japan combined, perpetuating the asymmetry between U.S. militarism and all other centers of militarism, competitors and partners included. This trend is tempered however by certain developments, such as the so-called Sino-Russian rapprochement and the recent expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a geopolitical counterweight to U.S. military dominance and a vehicle for the joint operations of Russian and Chinese capitalists and militarists eager to further develop their own brands of imperialism.
Nevertheless, despite the Klinton Kaine Kampaigns programmatic inclination towards the discourse of warfare (i.e. its selection of the term net-centric warfare as opposed to net-centric operations) and its characterization of Russia as a foreign adversarial power, the displacement of warfare by operations as the dominant theoretical framework of U.S. baby killer circles is unlikely to be reversed because the threat of massive nuclear annihilation encourages the reframing of 21st century conflict between similarly matched great power blocs as symmetrical operations. The current U.S.-Russian cyber or information war, although these refer to operations other than war in the traditional sense, may be considered a symmetric situation or perhaps even a situation of U.S. inferiority. For example, despite having an inferior budget, the number of Russian intelligence operatives in the U.S. is said to be at least three times superior to the number of U.S. ones in Russia [X]. Hillary Clinton and U.S. militarists broad conceptualization of warfare, redefined and expanded to include a variety of operations which were heretofore held to be operations other than war, should be read as an attempt to accelerate the militarization of domestic policing, expand proxy wars, and work around the limitations imposed by mutually assured destruction, not as an imminent push to engage Russia with nuclear warheads, as the peewee two-party system bourgeois candidate Jill Stein has argued in her alarmist pro-Trump lesser evilist discourse [X].
In a country with few immediate signs of threat to the national will to victory in the form of mass movements, perhaps just as critical as directly suppressing dissident voices, if not more so, is the manufacturing of consent which seems to assure that a minimal amount of dissent hardly pops up in the first place. We know that the U.S. and global public is targeted by the military and intelligence forces en masse through operations such as the Message Force Multipliers program, which sought to achieve information dominance by saturating U.S. television with war-mongering talking heads around the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Another example of this kind of operation is the Pentagon spending half a billion dollars on the production of fake Al-Qaeda videos that portrayed the insurgent group in a negative light. Thats almost an entire fiscal year of U.S. military funds spent on some videosbut how could we even know what the real U.S. ritual human sacrifice budget is when U.S. militarists cant account for $6.5 trillion in funds [X]? Surely the fact that U.S. militarists do not release such information is part of some asinine strategy on their part to leverage [their] information advantage over us information scroungers who are not privy to those classified true facts. A President Jill Stein might well leave us with a military caste who can only not account for $3.25 trillion!
One expression of Effects-Based Operations (which a U.S. militarist named Smith defines as military operations directed at shaping the behavior of foes, friends, and neutrals in peace, crisis, and war) is the emergent military strategy of meme warfare or memetic engineering [X, X, X]. Modelled on an analogy to genetics (the science of biological heredity) first posited by raging anti-Muslim bigot Richard Dawkins of the Islamophobic New Atheist set, memetics (the science[?] of cultural heredity [as well as intra-generational cultural transmission]) supposes the existence of the meme as a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds [Brodie, p. 11]. Another theorist describes memetic engineering as the conscious construction of information packages which are likely to replicate themselves across a network of minds [X]. The prevalence of memes is thought to be a consequence of our evolved capacity to imitate [X]. Meme warfare proposes the weaponization of mimesisdelivering ideas to targets (enemies, friends, and neutrals) in such a way that they assimilate those ideas which in turn induce behaviors that facilitate the meeting of the weapon-handlers objectives.
We can anticipate that the project of creating a memetically engineered (or psychocivilized) society entails the desirability of control and influence over information distribution networks as well as control and influence over the production of knowledge and information, helping to explain the drive of U.S. militarists to forcibly penetrate media and academia, like the horrific and snarling incubi which these demonic rape culture perpetuating militarists are.
Closely related to the concept to memetic engineering is eumemics. Like eugenicists, advocates of eumemics believe that populations can be improved by the manipulation and control of scientists, though in this case it is the pathologization of devalued thoughts (dubbed mind viruses), not biological traits, which prevails. Nevertheless, memeticists do hypothesize that memes drove biological selection as well as genes [McNamara].
The transition from eugenics to eumemics nevertheless proceeds relatively seamlessly from the perspective of so-called race science, for the neo-Nazi movements embrace of anti-Semitic American fascist Francis Parker Yockeys critique of materialistic scientism reveals a perspective on race which leads quickly to the supplantation of eugenics by eumemics.
In The Scientific-Technical World-Outlook (a chapter from his 1948 book Imperium), Yockey argues that [by 1850] science was on the road which was to cultuminate in [] frank admission of the subjectivity of physical concepts, that the very study of matter itself revealed the profound knowledge [] that matter is only the envelope of the soul, and that the transition from 19th century materialism to the new spirituality of the 20th century was thus not a battle, but an inevitable development. For Yockey, the neo-Nazi worldview is not based on science or materialism, although these are seen as useful in the service of [] unlimited will-to-power. The Nazi blowhard concludes that the Idea [of a strong Western Culture that creates Races and is the higher Reality] is primary, though superiority in weapons [furnished by techno-scientific methodology] is essential. Neo-Nazism thus attempts to remedy the fact that the racial basis of German Nazism was objectively pseudoscientific by dislocating race from this framework and repackaging it as a transcendent subjectivity, beyond science and pseudoscience. This outlook may be rooted in the adoption of an asymmetric model of warfare by Nazi strategists in the post-war years, in which case Operation Paperclip signals the beginning of the supplantation of warfare by operations.
In another chapter of Imperium on the Subjective Meaning of Race, the fascist Yockey argues that race is [] what a man feels and that this [feeling] influences, whether immediately or eventually, what he does. Race is not, according to Yockey, the way one talks, looks, gestures, walks, it is not a matter of stock, color, anatomy, skeletal structure, or anything else objective. He further elaborates that every race [] expresses a certain idea [] and its idea is bound to be attractive to some individuals outside it, and that every healthy, ascendant race accepts recruits who come in on its terms and who have the proper feeling. This notion of the true meaning of race being a subjective feeling, existing independently of objective scientific study, is expressed by government policy in cases such as United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the law must uphold a popular, but unscientific conception of the so-called white race [X]. Popular and governmental conceptions did evolve thereafter, but remain unscientific. Perhaps it is this subjectivity that permits anomalous individuals such as Leo Felton, an African-American man, to become accepted as leaders in White Power prison gangs [X], and others, such as Barack Obama, to become legatees of the worlds leading white supremacist institutions.
The so-called Alt-Right movement, an innovative reiteration anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and Nazi bullshit for the Information Age which has emerged as one of the most vocal factions of Donald Trump supporters, places a heavy emphasis on memes and the memetic model of cultural evolution [X, X]. One Alt-right-wing 8chan forum set up last year calls itself The Bureau of Memetic Warfare and greets visitors with a Black Sun banner. It would almost be edgy if U.S. militarists had not already proposed a Meme Warfare Center a decade sooner [Prosser].
Seeming to fulfill the late comic George Carlins prediction that when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts, it will not be with jack-boots; it will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts, The Daily Stormer, an Alt-Right website, notes that a movement which meets all of the [Southern Poverty Law Center]s definitions of Neo-Nazi White Supremacism using a cartoon frog to represent itself takes on a subversive power to bypass historical stereotypes of such movements, and thus present the ideas themselves in a fun way without the baggage of Schindlers List [sic] and American History X [sic]. They are talking about the so-called Pepe, a cartoon frog and internet-centric meme which even the Klinton Kaine Kampaign has addressed [X].
The same neo-Nazi website notes that the Alt-Right is in the process of forming an actual religious doctrine around the god Kek, who is believed to be the spiritual root of meme magick [X]. Alt-Right occultists have actually come to believe that the net-centric meme Pepe the Frog is a hierophany of the Ancient Egyptian god called Kek, who was depicted as a frog or theriocephalous frog-man [X].
Of course, some Alt-Right irony bros will inevitably fall back on the plausible deniability tactic when it suits them, and claim that internet meme-cum-hierophany discourse is pure satire done simply for the lulz; however, it is obvious from white nationalist texts like Esoteric Kekism, or Kek as a Bodhisattva of Racial Enlightenment that there is a genuine desire on the part of the so-called Alt-Right to engage in the time-honored fascist pastime of blatant cultural misappropriation of Eastern religious traditions so as to try to rehash yet again the aestheticized pseudo-mystique of an esoteric neo-Nazism, pioneered by classics like Maximine Julia Portas (Savitri Devi). Plausible deniability of the sincerity of Alt-Right discourse is stoked by public figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, who has emerged as a cultural broker between the mainstream world and the largely web-bound (net-centric) movement. In a March 2016 Breitbart piece, Yiannopoulos argued that the reactionary/misogynistic/racist memes produced by the movement are merely meant to poke fun at political correctness, but the other representatives of the Alt-Right have vehemently scoffed at the idea that no one in the Alt-Right actually believes anything that they are saying, and simply say it as part of some obscure joke [X, X]. Meanwhile, there are others on the Alt-Right who are less chagrined by the fact that a gay Jewish man (Yiannopoulos) has become their unofficial spokesperson, basically seeing him as a useful idiot who is contributing to the rightward shift in the Overton Window [X].
Right-wing occultists are likely to the view those who ironically or jokingly spread the Cult of Kek and meme magick memes in a similar light, as the former use it to recruit devotees and initiates to their race-hate occultist worldview (see, for example, the Alt-Rightist recommendation made in the hypertext of the previous link that readers familiarize themselves with the work of British occultists Phil Hine and Peter J. Carroll to begin understanding meme magick as a form of chaos magick). Chaos magick is in turn considered to be a form of Satanism by prominent proponents of Satanism. For example, Anton Long (alleged alias of David Myatt, a proponent of neo-Nazi Satanism) writes in Toward Understanding Satanism (a classic Order of Nine Angles text) that, standard definitions of Satanism [] encompass, and so may describe [] the type of esotericism propounded by advocates of chaos magick and others who assert such things as reality is what I make it or what others have made it, or perceived it to be, so that Reality is a matter is perspective [sic] and thus demons/gods/religions/techniques beliefs can be usefully used without believing in them [X]. Hine is extensively cited as an authority in the book Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology (2009) [X] and Carroll has associated with activists in the British neo-Nazi movement via his involvement in the magazine Chaos International [X, X]. Additionally, in a subsection of The Occult World (2014) entitled Contemporary Occult War, religions studies professor Christopher Partridge relates that the interest of Carroll (described here as the founder of of chaos magic) in waging a purely politicized occult war in the form of a conspiracist libertarian condemnation of the European Union should be contextually understood in relation to the sinister family of traditions derived from the [(explicit concern) with esoteric conflict against Jewish influences of the] Order of Nine Angles (the previously mentioned neo-Nazi/Satanic group which developed out of English Wicca in the late 1960s or early 70s) [Partridge, pp. 632-3].
Another self-described Satanic grouping, with documented ties to U.S. militarism and whose original High Priests contributions to the theoretical framework of U.S. militarist operations in the 1980s prefigure the emergence of Net-Centric Warfare in the 1990s in ways explored below, is the Temple of Set. This occultist religious sect was founded in 1975 by the U.S. militarist Michael Aquino, a PSYOPs officer during the U.S. genocide-war in Vietnam, after he left his position as a high-ranking member of Anton LaVeys Church of Satan. In addition to reported disillusionment with LaVeys proposal to sell positions in the Church of Satan to those willing to pay big bucks, the split may have arisen in part from what Aquino saw as the Church of Satans equivocal stance on the question of whether Satan was real or symbolic. The Temple of Set, Aquino writes in Black Magic (1975-2010), resolved this dilemma [] by asserting the actual existence of Satan (as Set the original, pre-Judaeo/Christian entity) [X]. Aquinos collapsing of Christianity into Judaism and expression of desire to bypass its framework by displacing the figure of Satan with that of Set can be seen as an iteration of the same anti-Semitic concern with esoteric conflict against Jewish influences described by Partridge (2014). The anti-Semitic leitmotiv of Western esotericists can be traced back even further, to foundational figures of the contemporary occultist worldview such as Aleister Crowley, who lamented that The Jew has eaten his way into everything. The caricature of Semitic thought, Christianity, rotted Roman virtue through introducing the moral subterfuge of vicarious atonement [X]. In many ways modern proponents of magick in the West are heavily indebted to blatant cultural misappropriation which was facilitated by European colonialism. (For examples of the way in which contemporary Western esotericism and occultism cannot be contextually separated from their basis in Orientalism and cultural misappropriation, see the pivotal role played by European, especially British, colonialism in opening up mystical countries like Egypt and India to raging anti-Semitic white supremacists such as Aleister Crowley, Helena Blavatsky, and C. W. Leadbeater).
Like the newly founded occult-oriented neo-Nazi Cult of Kek, the Temple of Set was also based on cultural misappropriation of Ancient Egyptian/Kemetic mythology. The Egyptian gods Set and Kek share a number of similarities. Both have been called gods of chaos. Ancient Egypt Online notes that Set was a storm god associated with strange and frightening events including eclipses and that his glyph appears in the Egyptian words for turmoil, confusion, [] storm and rage [X]. The same source indicates that Kek (or Kuk) represented darkness, obscurity and night and that this darkness was the chaotic darkness which existed before the creation of the world [and] although he was a god of the darkness, he was also associated with the dawn and given the epithet, the bringer-in of the light [X]. It is further noted that Kek was also associated with Sobek, depicted as a theriocephalous crocodile-man who was said to be the son of Setwho also took the form of a crocodile [X].
Net-Centric Warfare theorists posit the existence of three domains relevant to the warfighter:
The quasi-religious underpinnings of this three-domain model of the battlespace need to be rendered explicit to understand, in the following section, Net-Centric Warfare as a reflection of the darker side of modern Western esoteric thought. We would also do well to take into consideration and keep in mind the argument of religions scholar Mircea Eliade that, contrary to what may still be considered conventional wisdom by some, religion does not necessarily imply belief in God, gods, or ghosts, but refers to the experience of the sacred, and consequently, is related to ideas of being, meaning, and truth [X].
Though the doctrine of the domains of Net-Centric Warfare is presented as trinitarian in form, in essence it replicates the Cartesian dualist meme; it is the bifurcation of the battlespace into physical and cognitive fronts, echoing long-posited binary oppositions between the body and mind, the material and the spiritual, which is fundamental to Net-Centric Warfare theory. Information is an intermediary between these two poles because it inhabits consciousness (where it is processed), but it can also be materialized into the external world via systems of communication (e.g. a book contains information which derives from the cognitive domain but exists in the physical domain). The information domain is thus not autonomous, but exists only in the relation to, and as an aspect of, the physical and cognitive domains. (The question of the nature of the information domain and its relation to the central dichotomy between tangible (external/physical) and intangible (internal/cognitive) which we find in the discourse of Net-Centric Warfare can also be located in the field of memetics, in the debate between memeticists of internalist and externalist persuasions [X]). The information domain is therefore secondary to the fundamental dynamic of Net-Centric Warfare, which is concerned with the ability to influence a targets feeling or cognitive state so as to affect what he or she does in the world, thus altering the physical state of the battlefield. Net-Centric Warfare utilizes objective means (such as physical control of external information flows) to target subjective phenomena (e.g., morale, the will to victory, the will to resist, and the will-to-power). This is why information dominance is in fact a euphemism for cognitive dominance.
Returning to the notion of the sacred as the defining element of religion, we see that Net-Centric Warfare is in essence a theological expression of U.S. militarism in the way that it recognizes the mind itself as sacred. The Cartesian split between spirit and matter observed in U.S. militarist doctrine is imbued with the analogue which Mircea Eliade called the sacred-profane polarity and analysis of the discourse on Net-Centric Warfare (and similar militarist buzzwords) reveals numerous traits consistent with a type of religious thought. Elaborating on this dichotomy between sacrality and profanity which he argued was key to understanding the constitution of religious thought, Eliade put forth in The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959) that:
[In] all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. [] The polarity sacred-profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. [] Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power [X, pp. 12-13].
By inaugurating the pursual of general dominance in the cognitive domain as the ultimate key to victory in any war, the cognitive apparatuses of not only enemy combatants and their host populations, but also those of the U.S. military protagonists civilian co-nationals became consecrated as sites of battle. For U.S. militarists, the lesson drawn from their defeat in Vietnam was that domination of the battlefields physical domain amounts to an unreal victory if the enemy is still able to leverage information superiority and prevail in the cognitive domain. The consequence of being made acutely aware of the possibility of defeat in spite of superior physical force was the invigoration of a militarist discourse around the menace of asymmetric threats. To pursue an old-fashioned warfighting strategy that did not adequately take the nature of asymmetric threats into account became sacrilege. Focusing too narrowly on the physical, material domain (unreal) at the expense of having a sense of concern for the cognitive, spiritual domain (real) became a form of profanity in the militarist mind, a vulgarization of what it means to pursue victory, a kind of false idol worship. The newfound reality of the all-encompassing nature of war, its delineation so blurred that it was no longer distinguishable from peace, no longer fought exclusively on the traditional battlefield but across a vaster battlespace that penetrates inside the hearts and minds of foes, friends, and neutrals in peace, crisis, and war was the new theology of Militarism. War was profane; operations became sacred.
U.S. militarist Michael Aquino, the self-proclaimed Setian Satanist who ran PSYOPs in Vietnam in the early part of his career, called this shift from the battlefield of the physical domain to the battlespace of the cognitive one MindWar. In a 1980 military research paper co-written with another U.S. militarist named Paul Vallely (now a Fox News senior military analysti.e. Message Force Multiplier) and entitled From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory Aquino (and Vallely, although Aquinos voice seems to dominate the text) explain how, in their view, victory on the physical battlefield is only assured by militarist domination of the cognitive battlespace. One source claims that although the paper never appeared in its intended publication outlet (Military Review), it was nevertheless widely circulated among military planners, and [] distributed by Aquinos Temple of Set [X]. Implying that commanders should be more concerned with the conquest of minds than with tangible victories, Aquino writes:
The MindWar scenario must be preeminent in the mind of the commander and must be the principal factor in his every field decision. Otherwise he sacrifices measures which actually contribute to winning the war to measures of immediate, tangible satisfaction.
It seems clear that Aquinos articulation of the need for U.S. militarism to switch gears from traditional war to sublime MindWar developed in tandem with his involvement in the Satanic cult scene. In one of his more esoteric ramblings, Aquino notes that,
Perhaps the most important contribution of the original Church of Satan (1966-1975CE) was its focus upon and glorification of the psyche, even though its original ambition was to downplay that concept in favor of mere fleshly gratification [X].
This critique was likely formed, if these precise words were not themselves written, around the time of his break with the Church of Satan to form the Temple of Set in 1975, five years before writing the MindWar paper. With the help of a thesaurus, his criticism of the Church of Satans undue emphasis on fleshly gratification became that directed at the U.S. military for its undue emphasis on tangible satisfaction (i.e. the physical domain). Moreover, his appreciation of the Church of Satans focus upon and glorification of the psyche forms the entire basis of the MindWar doctrine, with its focus upon and glorification of the cognitive domain.
Aquino argues that MindWar only operates in nonlethal, noninjurious, and nondestructive ways and that it essentially amounts to [overwhelming] your enemy with argument. This is apparently as simple as [seizing] control of all the means by which [the enemy] government and populace process information to make up their minds, and [adjusting] it so that those minds are made up as you desire. But Aquino also makes it clear that, in the MindWar scenario, the U.S. populace is approached by its would-be militarist overlords as an enemy. While at first painting Americans who called for the defeat of the U.S. effort to commit genocide in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as victims fallen to the lies of enemy propaganda, Aquino goes on to imply that MindWar must attack and ultimately destroy the will of anti-war citizens because their opposition to the jingoistic national will to victory of the U.S. is merely a sign of their weakness and vulnerability to enemy psychological operations, arguing:
[The main PSYOP/MindWar effort] must originate at the national level. It must strengthen our national will to victory and it must attack and ultimately destroy that of our enemy. It both causes and is affected by physical combat, but it is a type of war which is fought on a far more subtle basis as well in the minds of the national populations involved.
[]
MindWar must target all participants if it is to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war.
Of course, to accept MindWar as noninjurious and nondestructive, we would have to ignore the destruction and injury such a practice perpetrates against freedom of thought, freedom of information, and freedom of expression. We would also have to ignore that, given the fact that in most cases and for obvious reasons (e.g. bumbling U.S. militarists inability to even speak enemy languages) it is more feasible for U.S. militarists to strengthen the U.S. national will to victory with programs like the Message Force Multipliers than it is for them to destroy the will of the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries to resist U.S. military occupations and bombing campaigns, MindWar perpetuates lethal operations and augments the death toll by keeping the U.S. populace compliant with the war effort and consistently failing to keep enemy populations submissive to occupation forces and unresentful of U.S. bombing campaigns. In what seems a telling Freudian slip, Aquino recently uttered, MindWar [] was an attempt to [] stress out the conscious parts of the human mind, to sort of [] create a mind slave [X].
Aquinos twisted conception of truth is also revealing of the fact that we are dealing with a religious concept when we talk about Net-Centric Warfare and MindWar. Arguing that legal restrictions on PSYOPs which forbid them from being deployed against the U.S. public are wrongheaded, Aquino writes:
Under existing United States law, PSYOP units may not target American citizens. That prohibition is based upon the presumption that propaganda is necessarily a lie or at least a misleading half-truth, and that the government has no right to lie to the people. The Propaganda Ministry of Goebbels must not be a part of the American way of life.
Quite right, and so it must be axiomatic of MindWar that it always speaks the truth. Its power lies in its ability to focus recipients attention on the truth of the future as well as that of the present. MindWar thus involves the stated promise of the truth that the United States has resolved to make real if it is not already so.
Here we arrive at the eschatological aspect of U.S. militarist doctrine; it deals with the end of days or the end of an age. By laying claim to knowledge of future events, to the power to preordain or predestine the ultimate outcome of any given U.S. military endeavor (which will invariably be victory), Aquino invokes what Afrofuturism scholars dub the futures industry, a synthesis of the scientific and corporate activity [of big science and big business] into a relatively coherent narrative which is then [disseminated] throughout the world [by global media] in this way exercising control over the future through the art of prediction and the imperial production of futurist narratives [Eshun, Yaszek]. Investment in the futures industry is evidenced by the work of think-tanks such as the Project for the New American Century, and the impetus towards an eschatological approach is demonstrated by U.S. policy-maker initiatives to transform the War on Terror into a New Thirty Years War. The interest of the bourgeois futures industry in occultism may also derive from the latters conceptualization of aeonics (the magical manipulation of psycho-historical forces [Partridge, p. 632]) or aeonic magick (i.e. the kind of magic concerned with producing large-scale [civilizational] changes [altering the destiny of millions of peoples] over [] centuries [X]).
The first words had a magical aspect to them, and the modern word still retains much of the powerful magicality of the primitive utterance. With words, one person can render another happy or push them to despair, and its with the help of words that the professor transmits her knowledge to students, that an orator leads his audience to predetermined conclusions, affecting their decisions. Words provoke emotions and constitute the general means by which human beings reciprocally influence one another.
Sigmund Freud, in Introduction la psychanalyse (1916) [Freud, p. 11]
In light of the exposition of the religiosity implied by Net-Centric Warfare theory and its constituent concepts (including but not limited to: the physical/information/cognitive domains, meme warfare, information warfare, operations other than war, and psychological operations), as well as the occultism of its state actor pioneers (Aquino/the Temple of Set) and non-state actor practitioners (the Alt-Right/the Cult of Kek), it is reasonable to expect that further unpacking Net-Centric Warfare in the context of its esoteric underpinnings will help to demystify its actual workings. As a consequence of seeking an answer to the question What is Net-Centric Warfare?, we have been been confronted by the pioneers and practitioners of it with the concept of magic[k] and a variety of types of it, including: meme magick, chaos magick, black magick, and aeonic magick.
When we talk about black magic in particular, it is possible understand a number of different things. It is commonly understood that black magic is the evil kind, while white magic is the good kind; the person whose words render another happy does white magic and the one who pushes another to despair does black magic. Black magic and white magic are also said to correspond to the terms Left Hand Path and Right-Hand Path. Some have argued that good and evil are relative to the perspective of the individual, the cultural or class grouping, and that for this reason black magic cannot be equated with evil, nor can white magic be equated with good. The Temple of Sets Michael Aquino would be an example of someone who falls into this camp, in that, although his religious worldview is indebted to a profound degree to early modern occultists such as Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky, he does not seem to like the fact that they used the terms black magic and white magic simply to identify their moral biases (in the sense that they upheld the convention that black stands for that which is immoral and white stands for that which is moral). For Aquino, black magic (or the left-hand path) does not imply any moral or ethical stance, since according to him, it refers to one of two approaches to magic in general rather than to the ends to which [it is] applied [X, p. 61]. However, given what we know about Aquinos almost five decades of prominence on the Satanic cult scene, we cannot take his theory of morally ambiguous black magic as a pure abstraction; consideration of his actual life and career, which we have already seen was dedicated not just to serving, but also enhancing the efficacy of, the genocidal enterprise of U.S. militarism, might be taken as an indication of this particular approachs predisposition to being used towards unethical ends.
A closer examination of Aquinos discourse in Black Magic (1975-2010) reveals that his attempt to dissociate the concept of black magic from its common definition (evil) is mired in contradictions. Here Aquino argues that the ideal member of his Satanic cult is initially amoral but that the cult does argue for a high personal ethical standard which is based on a Platonic love of and dedication to virtue for its own sake not on social or religious-ideological conditioning, threats, or enticements [Aquino, p. 4]. Elsewhere in Black Magic, however, Aquino does express clear concern about safeguarding what he calls the ethical reputation of the Temple [p. 40], noting that, Only if [a Satanist is] known to be a strictly ethical individual will [his or her] freedom from social norms be tolerated. Otherwise [he or she] will be ostracized and probably persecuted by society [p. 94]. Contradicting his initial claim that the Temples argument for its members high ethical standards is not based on social or religious-ideological conditioning, threats, or enticements, Aquino admonishes his followers that ritually sacrificing any life-form will result in the offenders immediate expulsion [from the cult] and referral to law enforcement or animal protection authorities [p. 119]. Aquino again contradicts his initial claim of the cults recognition of the supremacy of the individual Satanists personal ethical standard over social conditioning when he elaborates on the formula by which the Satanist is to avoid persecution/cultivate an ethical reputation: he is to determine not only whether [a particular black magic working] will be ethical in his eyes, but also ethical according to the cultural mind-sets of all other parties to the working [p. 106]. We see thus that the Temple of Sets concern about projecting out an ethical reputation as a law-abiding, non-human/animal (or even plant) sacrificing cult into the world functions as a defense mechanism, its ethical reputation being a mere shell to protect its actual mission, which is to create an unsafe space (since Aquino asserts that black magic is dangerous) for freedom from social norms and the social morality [p. 112] of intrusive subjective universes (Aquinos term) of other psyches, to the extent that such freedom and occult deviancy can be cultivated without provoking ostracization and persecution by the wider society.
Aquinos concern with dissociating black magic from its connotation of evil cannot be understood without apprehending his view that good/evil values are merely appropriate for the profane masses, who cant and dont want to understand anything more precise [p. 106]. Aquinos attempt to dissociate black magic from its connotation of evil mirrors the way in which his conception of the net-centric MindWar doctrine was intimately tied up with the desire to dissociate U.S. militarism (particularly in Southeast Asia) from its connotations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Turning the basic question of what is good and what is bad into a mystical equation serves to transform that which is unethical (imperialist war, use of black magic to manipulate the profane masses into compliance with the former by painting it as good from the perspective of their class-blind/class-collaborative national interests) into that which is ethical. Publicly identifying oneself as a Satanist and establishing a cult institution with the exoteric faade of an ethical reputation rather than keeping ones wacko beliefs to oneself would seem to serve the purpose of, not only empowering oneself and gaining social influence (to the extent that one can accrue cult members and rise in the military industrial hierarchy), but also transforming the lay publics perception of Satanists into its oppositei.e. from equating Satanism with evil and unethical practices to equating it with decent, ethical people who dont really want to hurt anyone.
What does make the term black magic problematic is not its moral connotation by itself, but this in combination with its racial one. We must be skeptical when accusations of black magic are levelled in order to smear that which is genuinely good. For example, televangelist Pat Robertson has infamously called Haitians cursed in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010 for [swearing] a pact with the devil [X], in reference to the sacrificial Voodoo ritual performed in the Kayiman woods which is said to have initiated the slave rebellion against French rule, which was a revolution whose basis was the super-exploited and racialized enslaved proletariat of the island. From the perspective of international scientific socialist and transmodern decolonial communist ethics, the Haitian revolution was much more ethical than anything the Temple of Set ever dideven if we are to accept that the former did involve animal sacrifice and the latter wouldnt hurt a flybecause it was revolutionary and promoted freedom while the latter was/is a cesspit of fascist U.S. militarist reaction. Certain African and Afro-diasporic artists have appropriated terms commonly associated with Satanism in Western thought such as black magic and black mass to affect decolonization. For example, in the music video to the song Black Magic Woman, the Ghanaian singer Azizaa plays up the notion of black magic and some of its tropes in a way that is feminist and coloniality-confronting. It is dubious however to suppose that the path of revolutionary or afrofuturist black magicians such as Dutty Boukman or Sun Ra is one and the same as that taken by imperial militarist or fascist black magicians such as Michael Aquino or David Myatt/Anton Long. Their paths could not be more opposite. Furthermore, two people cannot follow the same path and arrive at different ends, unless they started at different ends, and in that case ones left-hand would be the others right.
Although it is genuinely possible to detourne black magic from connotations of evil as certain artists have succeeded in doing, we will nevertheless put aside the problematic black is wack, white is right racial baggage of the black magic/white magic distinction from this point forth and use the term black magic in the traditional sense of pertaining to that which is evil, as we move now to analyse bourgeois Net-Centric Warfare as it relates to the black magic worldview of its U.S. militarist, neo-Nazi, Satanist, and bigoted Eurocentrist neo-pagan pioneers and practitioners.
* * *
Many of the constituent concepts of the theory of Net-Centric Warfare can be read as analogues to those which are elaborated upon by self-proclaimed Satanic organizations. To illustrate these striking parallels, which show how the idea of black magic as it is understood/explained by Satanic groups meshes almost perfectly with that of Net-Centric Warfare, a three-column table is presented below. The first two columns in the table present the terminology used by the Satanic cults known as the Temple of Set and the Order of Nine Angles. According to religions professor Connell Monette, these are two out of the three western esoteric groups that are openly aligned with the Left Hand Path (i.e. black magic) [X], the other being the Church of Satan (founded by Anton LaVey in 1966 as the first above ground, openly Satanic organization). Monettes claim is likely inaccurate (see other groups such as the Satanic Temple, Brotherhood of Satan, etc.though some of these may treat the figure of Satan as symbolic), but these are certainly what we might call the big three.
As previously alluded to, the Temple of Set split off from the Church of Satan in 1975 when many of its members became disillusioned with LaVeyan Satanism and can thus be seen as its successor, so LaVeys cult has been omitted from the table. The Order of Nine Angles, meanwhile, is also said to have formed sometime in the 1960s or 1970s in Shropshire, England but takes a more underground approach. Its number of adherents is rumored to range anywhere from a handful of people or even a single individual using numerous aliases (David Myatt) all the way to anywhere from 300 to 2,000 people spread throughout the world [Monette, 2014]. Both the Temple of Set and the Order of Nine Angles proclaim themselves to be genuine Satanists, with Aquino stating that the Temple upholds the actual existence of Satan and Myatt stating that the Order represents traditional Satanism. There are some signs that the Order of Nine Angles was influenced or took inspiration from the Church of Satan; e.g. its name is said to have been appropriated from a text called Ceremony of Nine Angles written by Aquino in 1971 when he was a member of the Church of Satan (although the Order claims its name comes from an aspect of esoteric tradition which existed before [1966][X]) and the pen name of the Orders primary theorist (Anton Long) also seems to have been pastiched from the name of Anton LaVey, former head of the Church of Satan.
One of the most fundamental differences between the Temple of Set and the Order of Nine Angles is their approach to public relations. While the Temple, as we have seen, is concerned about maintaining an ethical reputation and not portraying itself as evil, the Order actively tries to cultivate an evil reputation. It does this in part by defending human sacrifice as part of traditional Satanism. To become a full-fledged Adept of the Order, one is expected to partake in what it calls human culling to [remove] the worthless and thus [improve] the stock. Monette mentions that ONA members are said to have joined police and military forces in seeking out opportunities to kill people and the Order also claims that in 2011, several images were circulated on the internet of someone in NATO-issued combat fatigues with a NATO-issued weapon and nextto an O9A sigil [in Afghanistan] [X].
In The Satanic Letters of Stephen Brown: Vol. Iwhich detail written correspondence between the Order of Nine Angles and the Temple of Set from 1990 to 1992 (in addition to ONA letters to third parties)the ONA criticizes Aquinos group for instructing its members to disaffiliate from and disavow connections to Satanic groups and individuals advocating human sacrifice (e.g. the Order of Nine Angles) and pedophilia (e.g. the Ordo Templi Baph-metis and its magazine Abraxas, which were both under the thumb of a member of the Temple of Set named James Martin). Here the ONA derides Aquino and the Temple of Set as inauthentic Satanists, insufficiently loyal to the genuine tenets of traditional Satanism because their policy of public disaffiliation with persons openly calling for sexual abuse and murder constitutes a code of ethics which members must adhere to. In a true Satanic organization, the ONA argues, there is nothing that is restricted or forbidden.
However, it can also be remarked that the ONAs literature is similar to that of Aquinos in that it is riddled with internal contradictions. While human sacrifice and sexual abuse are necessarily permitted under the premise of nothing is forbidden, the ONA literature on culling nevertheless mentions that victims [of human sacrifice] can never be children and voluntary sacrifices are always male, thus positing restrictions on the practice [X, pp. 12, 14]. The fact that the ONA generally posits human sacrifice within a eugenics type framework (by virtue of likening it to culling) also contradicts the claim that the organization embraces evil, given that the supposed goal here is to improve the human race and do it good by transforming it into a more highly evolved god-race which Myatt calls Homo Galactica. The claim of no restrictions on individual members of the Satanic cult also disappears when the ONA literature notes that a group wishing to conduct such a sacrifice with magickal intent must first obtain permission from the Grand Master or Grand Lady Master [ibid., p. 12].
We also find in the Satanic Letters that in about 1986 or 1987 Aquino was a sent a copy of a magazine called Ganymede which had a reputation in the UK for promoting pedastry and paedophilia because Martin had written an article in the magazine which was [] along those lines. After members of the Setian priesthood were ordered by Aquino to interview James Martin, he resigned from the Temple. (This would have been right at the beginning or middle of the Presidio of San Francisco military base sex scandal in which Aquino was accused of sexually abusing dozens of children.) Additionally, it is explicitly revealed that at least one member of the Temple of Set, identified as John [REDACTED] later known by the alias Richard Saunders or Bro Richard of Shropshire, had a working relationship with the Order of Nine Angles via the Brotherhood of Balder (an organization in which he held dual membership [] whilst a Priest of Set). The Satanic Letters implicitly suggest a working relationship between the ONA and another (then) member of the Temple of Set, the New Zealand neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton, because in the Letters ONA member Stephen Brown (probably David Myatt) is forwarded a copy of and replies to an intra-Temple of Set letter between Bolton and a U.K.-based David Austen within a few weeks of it being sent.
Examine below each row from left to right as you observe the parallels between Satanic cult and U.S. militarist jargons.
Net-Centric Warfare as Black Magic:
Similarities in Conceptualization Between Occult Groups and the U.S. Military
Satanic cult jargon
sacred/esoteric
U.S. militarist jargon
profane/exoteric
Temple of Set
Net-Centric Warfare
The Abyss (1)
of the acausal world
of the acausal world
Michael Aquino, Black Magic (1975-2010).
Jacob Christiansen Senholt, The Sinister Tradition (2009).
Anton Long, The Error of Egoism (2011).
Order of Nine Angles, Naos (1989).Connell Monette, Ch. 3: The Order of Nine Angles (2014).
Edward Smith, Effects Based Operations (2002).
David Alberts et al., Understanding Information Age Warfare (2001).
As we can see in the table, the dynamics of Net-Centric Warfare are very much akin to those of black magic.
Firstly, the framework within which the psychological manipulation/black magic is posited to occur is similar. The elaboration of a trinity of domains in Net-Centric Warfare theory corresponds to a trinity of universes, worlds, or realms which are elaborated upon in the literature of the modern Satanic movement. Recall that the Net-Centric Warfare trinity of domains is in actuality a Cartesian duality between the physical domain and the cognitive domain. This dualism is paralleled by the Satanic cults, which call these two domains the objective universe or the causal world and the subjective universe or the acausal world. Like Net-Centric Warfare, they also posit some kind of mechanism for the transcendence of these two poles, the two fundamental domains/universes/worlds. In the case of Net-Centric Warfare, this intermediary is the information domain, while the Temple of Set refers to a Magical Link between the physical domain and the cognitive domain, and the Order of Nine Angles meanwhile calls this interstice the gate, nexion, or, alternatively, The Abyssa Crowleyan trope which has worked its way into the Satanic discourses of late-stage capitalism, along with the related idiomatic phrase to cross the abyss.
Excerpt from:
What is Net-Centric Warfare? | Daniel K. Buntovnik
