Today America would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government. - Henry Kissinger

Mystery monolith in Seattle 2001

A black, steel monolith nearly three meters high has mysteriously appeared in a park in Seattle. The unmarked sculpture, planted on a grassy knoll in Magnuson Park, seems to have been put in place on New Year's Eve. It is believed to be a reference to the black monoliths featured in the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a collaboration between director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke.

As in the film, the appearance of the black structure raises questions, the most obvious one: who is its creator? The hollow monolith placed on the park's Kite Hill bears no plaque. The only traces left are several plastic bottle-caps littered around the sculpture. Local press reports quote park visitors joking about "intelligence increasing by the moment" with the presence of the monolith, a clear reference to the film.

Visitors to the park agreed that whoever is responsible put in considerable effort. The block had smooth welds, no obvious construction marks and had been carefully positioned. As one local resident observed: "You don't just drop a large metal monolith in a park without some planning." But some people had an altogether more radical theory. "Maybe it isn't the work of humans after all - what the monolith is and what it means is never fully explained in the film," said Seattle resident George DeMet.

Monoliths play a central role in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there are many interpretations of their meaning and origins.

The film begins with feuding apes, which learn to use bones to kill each other after finding a black monolith. Time then flashes forward three million years, and the bone evolves into a spaceship. In the film, a scientist flies to the Moon to examine another mysterious monolith, which is buried below the surface. Eighteen months later, in a top-secret mission to Jupiter, the ship's "foolproof" computer Hal 9000 kills the crew - except one man, Bowman, who manages to disconnect it.

2001, A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the writing of Arthur C. Clarke, is, with hindsight, a pompous, pretentious exercise. But when it debuted it sent shivers up the collective spine. It has a hallowed place in the Cryptosphere because it helped fashion what the Videodrome embodies today. At the heart of the film is the worship of the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution and the positioning of a mysterious monolith as the evolutionary battery or "sentinel" that transforms the ape into the space man (hence the "odyssey").

Clarke and Kubrick’s movie, 2001, opens with a scene of the "Dawn of Man," supposedly intended to take the viewer back to the origins of humanity on earth. This lengthy sequence is vintage Darwinism, portraying our genesis as bestial and featuring man-like apes as our ancestors. In the film, the evolution of these hominids is raised to the next rung on the evolutionary ladder by the sudden appearance of a mysterious monolith.

Commensurate with the new presence of this enigmatic "sentinel," our alleged simian progenitors learn to acquire a primitive form of technology; for the first time they use a bone as a weapon.

This bone is then tossed into the air by one of the ape-men. Kubrick photographs the bone in slow motion and by means of special effects, he shows it becoming an orbiting spacecraft, thus traversing "millions of years in evolutionary time."

The next evolutionary level occurs in "2(00)1" (21, i.e. the 21st century). In the year 2001, the cosmic sentinel that is the monolith reappears again, triggering an alert that man is on to the next stage of his "glorious evolution."

That same year, the World Trade Center attacs took place and the Bush administration began to erect a garrison state under the auspices of "national security". The chronically recapitulated theme of exchanging freedom for security is one of the most prevalent symptoms of this transformational period. However, semiotic intimations of this emergent garrison state may be descernible in the 1997 film Starship Troopers.

Based on the sci-fi novel by Robert Heinlein, the film presents a socialist totalitarian world government that owes its very existence to a thereat from "beyond". Synopsizing the theme of the film, literary critic Geoffrey Whitehall makes an interesting observation : Against, yet within, its cliched ontological galaxy, Starship Troopers mobilizes the beyond to critique this dominant us/them narrative. It seeks to reveal how identity/difference, a relation of FEAR, founds a political galaxy.... fear is the order word of a security discourse. Historically, a discourse of fear bridged what it meant to be human in the world under Christendom (seeking salvation) and the emergence of modernity (seeking security) as the dominant trope of political life in the sovereign state. The church relied on a discourse of fear to establish its authority, discipline its followers and ward off its enemies, in effect creating a Christian world politics. Under modern world politics, similarly, the sovereign state relies on the creation of an external threat to autor its foreign policy and establish the lofty category of citizenship as the only form of modern human qualification.

It is interesting that, the very same year of Starship Troopers’ release, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski published The Grand Chessboard. In this overtly imperialistic tract, Brzezinski delineated the geostrategy by which America would attain global primacy. According to Brzezinski, this period of American hegemony would represent little more than a transitional period preceding her amalgamation into a one-world government. In one of the most damning portions of the text, Brzezinski reveals the catalyst for America’s imperialist mobilization:

“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”

A "truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat" did appear. His name was Osama bin Laden. Starship Troopers was premised upon the same thesis that would underpin American foreign policy four years later… consensus facilitated by an external threat.

"Predictive programming works by means of the propagation of the illusion of an infallibly accurate vision of how the world is going to look in the future"