The purpose of this text is not to discuss the events in Syria. That analysis was provided in the last article, “Crasser than a Thousand Dead out of the Blue,” which concluded that the country has been used as a proverbial whiteboard on which someone drew a diagnosis of the larger situation of this world, in the blood of the people who died in it. The moral merits of such a horrible lesson depend upon the calculation whether it can prevent more dead than it costs. The killing capacity of the weapons of mass destruction that were alarmed by the incident indicates that this is possibly the case. The Damascus massacre is all but an isolated event but also a warning signal what is to be expected out of the laws of nature, the enemy of the enemies, if the imperialist grasp for hegemony is not defeated. The purpose of this text is to discuss the imperialist reactions to it, because it is already obvious to the world that this is everything the challenged system has to offer – reactions, no solution.

Maybe the duplicity of the Americans and their willing accomplices in the current regimes of Arabia and others is best exposed in their own words, as it was when one politician said that it was a “moral obscenity.” There is no such thing as a technical obscenity, as there might be a technical equivalency in comparison to a moral one. Something is either obscene and a moral issue or it is not. There also is no such thing as a “moral obscenity” as opposed to an immoral act. That wishy-washy language should be read as an indicator of a lack of moral clarity. And the statement came as it was possible to see the total lack of the militarist obscenity that would have to be expected from soldiers going through the houses to kill the people. Such contradictory language signifies efforts to exploit the feelings of the weakest elements of a failed ideology.

But it is not just the propaganda. In the narrative of American imperialism, chemical weapons play an iconic role derived from its 20th century legacy. Their use is supposed to be the trigger which takes a situation beyond an imaginary boundary where historical analogies are playing an entirely different role. Only in this case a massacre is not just a massacre but a perceived opportunity to reassure oneself of one´s historical association. Yet under the conflict theory of delayed extinction, the border between the right and the wrong side of history is not running between one power and the other but between the Anarchy that will allow humanity to escape the generation trap and the hegemonic project that led it into there in the first place.

The American reaction is psychologically understandable but not morally. Syria has not only served the world a lesson of the destination of the imperialist project, it also is to the American themselves an unpleasant mirror of their situation. The message delivered by it as far as the future of the military-industrial complex in a changed climate is concerned is not a light one: Disarm or be held responsible for unprecedented historical collapse of the atmosphere, and consequences to be expected from it outmatching any historical crime in opposition to which you might like to define yourself. Yet at the first glance this is an impossible choice to the imperialist: If it ignores the challenge it may lose its narrative. If it gives in to the temptation of militarist aggression it is providing the precedent for how it is itself to be held responsible for hurting the climate. And if it chooses, in the face of this dilemma, to follow the truth then it has to come clean about its past lies. Either way, the big lie of as what Americans perceive themselves can no longer be sustained.

The interesting question is how such a relatively small incident can be able to pose a bigger challenge to the imperialist propaganda than any historical precedent. The answer can only be that it was not just mirroring the American policy but triggered by specific events in it. Whoever did this seems to have waited for the right moment and that would mean, in terms of conflict theory, a time when the imperialist war machine would be least likely to stand the truth about where its approach is headed. Actually the timing is the strongest point against a false flag attack, because the surprise effect appears to have reached full force. Given the American reaction up to now, the most likely interpretation is that someone with at least partial insight into NSA crimes has waited for a certain pattern of behaviour to be displayed by it. Obviously there is secret information that triggered the incident but that the Americans do not want to talk about.

Which is inherently questionable, because it would be expected that if it was so it would be published to gain understanding. It could be something like the spies receiving notification from dissidents that they do not like to be spied against, or any other major embarrassment which can be imagined to leak from one regime to the other until it has reached all of them, stopping only short of the public. The contradictory nature of the American response suggests that their spies know more about that trigger than their regime would like to admit. This is the basic conclusion to be made out of what is known by now: The Americans seem to be responding not to find the truth but to hide the truth, because the occurrence of the incident was the response to the spreading of a truth unfavourable to them. While the warmongering in fact provides convenient distraction from the pitiful incapability of the failed system to cease its spying attacks, and the without knowledge of that inexplicable military coup in Egypt, it also indicates that for the warmongers apparently there is still more to cover up.

It is the big lie that is at stake – if the Americans were truthful about the full background of the Damascus killings, they would also have to be in their entire approach to the region, and that would mean fundamental change. So the militarist reflex triggered by it is an outgrowth of that big lie which could not continue without developing such ideological extension. But it cannot continue with it either. Everybody knows the possible results of the chain reaction such violence would initiate. Having an enemy that cannot be defeated by supreme force, because it is the supreme force which defeated all other enemies to become the enemy of all, requires to focus attention on the absurdity of its developments, since that is where the inherent contradictions of supreme force first appear. The current warmongering is such an absurdity, given that every previous assault has not only led to an objective deterioration of the situation of the people in whose name it has been committed, but also to a further increase of the stranglehold that regime has on itself, with assaults on the outside world becoming mere gateways for the more secret compartments of it to overpower its less secret ones. Of course these people know of the ultimate consequence their actions will have for them, and some of them want to avoid it until their accomplices implicate them against better knowledge. At this point the internal spasm of the American empire has already escalated to a pathological level, yet before it might begin to affect anyone. It is an accumulating force that intends to inflict damage upon others before it damages itself to the point of inoperability. As these words are being written, it still remains a danger to all of humanity. It has though been transformed from a hidden threat that needed to be leaked, whistleblown and warned against into an open threat targeting a convenient prop.

We conclude that the entire scenario is a scientific setup, with the American empire being framed as the participant in a morbid experiment. The experimenter has pulled its trigger for violence as far as it comes to patterns of perception being associated, and is testing its response. The Syrian regime seems to play the role of the laboratory assistant, the Syrian people are in that of its cat. But who is the leading scientist?