Why is Ron Paul America’s last chance?

Because he is the only candidate who is not owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military-security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby.

All of the others, including President Obama, are owned by exactly the same interest groups. There are no differences between them. Every candidate except Ron Paul stands for war and a police state, and all have demonstrated their complete and total subservience to Israel. The fact that there is no difference between them is made perfectly clear by the absence of substantive issues in the campaigns of the Republican candidates.

Only Ron Paul deals with real issues, so he is excluded from “debates” in which the other Republican candidates throw mud at one another: “Gingrich voted $60 million to a UN program supporting abortion in China.” “Romney loves to fire people.”

The mindlessness repels.

More importantly, only Ron Paul respects the US Constitution and its protection of civil liberty. Only Ron Paul understands that if the Constitution cannot be resurrected from its public murder by Congress and the executive branch, then Americans are lost to tyranny.

There isn’t much time in which to revive the Constitution. One more presidential term with no habeas corpus and no due process for US citizens and with torture and assassination of US citizens by their own government, and it will be too late. Tyranny will have been firmly institutionalized, and too many Americans from the lowly to the high and mighty will have been implicated in the crimes of the state. Extensive guilt and complicity will make it impossible to restore the accountability of government to law.

If Ron Paul is not elected president in this year’s election, by 2016 American liberty will be in a forgotten grave in a forgotten grave yard.

Having said this, there is no way Ron Paul can be elected, for these reasons:

Not enough Americans understand that the “war on terror” has been used to create a police state. The brainwashed citizenry believe that the police state is making them safe from terrorists.

Liberals, progressives, and the left-wing oppose Ron Paul, claiming that “he would abolish the social safety net, privatize Social Security and Medicare, throw the widows and orphans into the street, abolish the Federal Reserve,” etc.

Apparently, liberals, progressives, and the left-wing do not understand that privatizing Social Security and Medicare and destroying the social safety net are policies that many conservative Republicans favor and are policies that Wall Street is forcing on both political parties. In contrast, a President Ron Paul would be isolated in the White House and would never be able to muster the support of Congress and the powerful interest groups to achieve such radical changes. Moreover, Ron Paul has made it clear that a welfare-free state cannot be achieved by decree but only by creating an economy in which opportunity exists for people to stand on their own feet. Ron Paul has said that he does not support ending welfare before an economy is created that makes a welfare state unnecessary.

Candidate Paul cannot take any steps to reassure Americans that he would not throw them to the mercy of the free market, because his libertarian base would turn on him as another unprincipled politician willing to sacrifice his principles for political expediency.

If libertarians were not inflexible, candidate Paul could endorse Ron Unz’s proposal to solve the illegal immigration problem by raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour, so that Americans could afford to work the jobs that are taken by illegals.

Economist James K. Galbraith is probably correct that Unz’s proposal would boost the economy by injecting purchasing power and that the unemployment would be largely confined to illegals who would return to their home country. However, if Ron Paul were to treat Unz’s proposal as one worthy of study and consideration, libertarian ideologues would write him off. Whatever liberal/progressive support he gained would be offset by the loss of his libertarian base.

Why can’t libertarians be as intelligent as Ron Unz and see that if the Constitution is lost all that remains is tyranny?

In short, Americans cannot see beyond their ideologies to the real issue, which is the choice between the Constitution and tyranny.

So we hear absurd accusations that Ron Paul, a libertarian “is a racist.” “Ron Paul is an anti-semite.” “Ron Paul would favor the rich and hurt the poor.”

We don’t hear “Ron Paul would restore and protect the US Constitution.”

What do Americans think life will be like in the absence of the Constitution? I will tell you what it will be like, but first let’s consider the obstacles Ron Paul would face if he were to win the Republican nomination and if he were to be elected president.

In my opinion, if Ron Paul were to win the Republican nomination, the Republican Party would conspire to refuse it to him. The party would simply nominate a different candidate.

If despite everything, Ron Paul were to end up in the White House, he would not be able to form a government that would support his policies. Appointments to cabinet secretaries and assistant secretaries that would support his policies could not be confirmed by the US Senate. President Paul would have to appoint whomever the Senate would confirm in order to form a government. The Senate’s appointees would undermine his policies.

What a President Ron Paul could do, assuming Congress, controlled by powerful private interest groups, did not impeach him on trumped up charges, would be to use whatever forums that might be permitted him to explain to the public, judges, and law schools that the danger from terrorists is miniscule compared to the danger from a government unaccountable to law and the Constitution.

The reason we should vote for Ron Paul is to signal to the powers that be that we understand what they are doing to us. If Paul were to receive a large vote, it could have two good effects. One could be to introduce some caution into the establishment that would slow the march into more war and tyranny. The other is it would signal to Washington’s European and Japanese puppets that not all Americans are stupid sheep. Such an indication could make Washington’s puppet states more cautious and less cooperative with Washington’s drive for world hegemony.

What America Without the Constitution Will Be Like

In the January 4 Huff Post, attorney and author John Whitehead reported on the militarization of local police. Some police forces are now equipped with spy drones. Whitehead reports that a drone manufacturer, AeroVironment Inc., plans to sell 18,000 drones to police departments throughout the country. The company is also advertising a small drone, the “Switchblade,” which can track a person, land on the person and explode.

How long before Americans will be spied upon or murdered as extremists at the discretion of local police?

Recognizing the privacy danger, if not the murder danger, the American Civil Liberties Union has issued a report, “Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance.”

The ACLU believes, correctly, that liberty is threatened by “a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by authorities.”

The ACLU calls on Congress to legislate privacy protections against the police use of drones. I support the ACLU because it is the most important defender of civil liberty despite other misguided activities, but I wonder what the ACLU is thinking. Congress and the federal courts have already acquiesced in the federal government’s warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency. The Bush regime violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act many times, and all involved, including President Bush, should have been sent to prison for many lifetimes, as each violation carries a 5-year prison term. But the executive branch emerged scot free. No one was held accountable for clear violations of US statutory law.

The ACLU might think that although the federal executive branch has successfully elevated itself above the law, state and local police forces are still accountable. We must hope that they are, but I doubt it.

The militarization of local police has received some attention. What has not received attention is that state and local police are also being federalized. It is not only military armaments and spy technology that local police are receiving from Washington, but also an attitude toward the public along with federal oversight and the collaboration that goes with it. When Homeland Security, a federal police force, comes into states, as I know has occurred in Georgia and Tennessee, and doubtless other states, and together with the state police stop cars and trucks on Interstate highways and subject them to warrantless searches, what is happening is the de facto deputizing of the state police by Homeland Security. This is the way that Goering and Himmler federalized into the Gestapo the independent police forces of German provinces such as Prussia and Bavaria.

Homeland Security has expanded its warrantless searches far beyond “airline security.”

The budding gestapo agency now conducts warrantless searches on the nation’s highways, on bus and train passengers, and at Social Security offices. On Tuesday January 3, 2012, the Social Security office in Leesburg, Florida, apparently a terrorist hotspot, became a Homeland Security checkpoint. The DHS Gestapo armed with automatic weapons and sniffer dogs demanded IDs from local residents visiting their local Social Security office.

Thomas Milligan, district manager for the Social Security Administration office, said staff were not informed their offices were about to be stormed by armed federal police officers. DHS officials refused to answer questions asked by local media and left with no explanation at noon, reports infowars.com.

The DHS gestapo justified its takeover of a Leesburg Florida Social Security office as being an integral part of “Operational Shield,” conducted by the Federal Protective Service to detect “the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”

One wonders if even brainwashed flag-waving “superpatriots” can miss the message. The Social Security office of Leesburg, Florida, population 19,086 in central Florida is not a place where terrorists devoid of proper ID might be visiting. To protect America from the scant possibility that terrorists might be congregating at the Leesburg Social Security office, the tyrants in Washington sent the Federal Protective Service at who knows what cost to demand ID from locals visiting their Social Security office.

What is this all about except to establish the precedent that federal police, a new entity in American life, the Federal Protective Service, has authority over state and local police offices and can appear out of the blue to interrogate local citizens.

Why the ACLU thinks it is going to get any action out of a Congress that has accommodated the executive branch’s destruction of habeas corpus, due process, and the constitutional and legal prohibitions against torture is beyond me. But at least the issue is raised. But don’t expect to hear about it from the “mainstream media.”

Americans in 2012, although only a few are aware, live in a concentration camp that is far better controlled than the one portrayed by George Orwell in 1984. Orwell, writing in the late 1940s could not imagine the technology that makes control of populations so thorough as it is today. Orwell’s protagonist could at least have hope. In 2012 with the erasure of privacy by the US government, protagonists can be eliminated by hummingbird-sized drones before they can initiate a protest, much less a rebellion.

Never in human history has a people been so easily and willingly controlled by a hostile government as Americans, who are the least free people on earth. And a large percentage of Americans still wave the flag and chant USA! USA! USA!

The Bush regime operated as if the Constitution did not exist. Any semblance of constitutional government that remained after the Bush years was terminated when Congress passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. One wonders how the National Rifle Association, the defender of the Second Amendment, will now fare. If there is no Constitution, how can there be a Second Amendment? If the President, at his discretion, can set aside habeas corpus and due process and murder citizens based on unproven suspicions, why can’t he set aside the Second Amendment?

Indeed, it is folly to expect a police state to tolerate an armed population.

The NRA is very supportive of the police and military. Now that these armed organizations are being turned against the public, how will the NRA adjust its posture?

Many NRA members, pointing to the “Oath Keepers,” former members of the military who pledge to defend the Constitution, and to police chiefs who support the Second Amendment, believe that the police and military will disobey orders to attack citizens.

But we already witness constantly the gratuitous brutality of “our” police against peaceful protesters. We witness military troops all over the world murder citizens who protest government abuses. Why can’t it happen here?

If you don’t want it to happen here, you had better figure out some way to get Ron Paul into the Presidency and to get him a cabinet and subcabinet that will support him.

Meanwhile, the police state grows. On January 4, 2012, the Obama regime announced by decree, not by legislation, the creation of the Bureau of Counterterrorism which will among other tasks “seek to strengthen homeland security, countering violent extremism.”

Take a moment to think. Do you know of any “violent extremism” happening in the US?

The regime is telling you that it needs a new police bureau with unaccountable powers to “strengthen homeland security” against a nonexistent bogyman.

So who will be the violent extremists who require countering by the Bureau of Counterterrorism? It will be peace activists, the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the unemployed and foreclosed homeless. It will be whoever the police state says. And there is no due process or recourse to law.

Given the facts before you, you are out of your mind if you think Ron Paul’s rhetoric against the welfare state is more important than his defense of liberty.

The NDAA takes the civilian judicial system out of the equation regarding who is a “combatant” or “terrorist” and substitutes military command over every person inside or outside of the United States. By defining the entire U.S. as a battlefield, all the Pentagon needs to do, in order to exercise this power, is get the approval of the sitting president.

Historically in the U.S., questions of criminality were determined by civilian tribunals. The country has now yielded the principle of arrest, detainment, punishment, and imprisonment to executive privilege. This catapults American jurisprudence back into the reign of George the Third.

Although many progressive figures have stated that this is a “major step toward a police-state, but we are not there yet,” the reality is that this act is nothing short of a military coup, and one that transforms the authority of the president into the sort of military dictatorship that Augusto Pinochet, Kim Jung Il, and Bashar al-Assad would be proud [All these men are dictators, but it should be noted that the Pinochet dictatorship was brought about and supported by the US -- Ed]. While it is not surprising that a weak-kneed coward like Obama would acquiesce to the demands of the military, one must wonder why the Pentagon, at this time, would insist upon the authority to undermine the U.S. Constitution and establish a military/police state.

After all, there is no threat from within to our peace and security. There is no nation on earth that could even fantasize about waging war with our bellicose government. Why did not the Pentagon wait until there was a real, or meaningful threat to the U.S. before doing away with practically 300 years of American jurisprudence? The answer is clear: with the passage and signing of this bill, there has been a military coup that has taken place, and the identity of the individual in the White House and the bought-off congressional representatives no longer have anything to do with who is making the decisions in this country, either internationally or domestically.

It is obvious that the corporations that benefit from drones and endless assaults on the world’s people would insist upon unregulated, unlimited power, but what is astonishing is that the American people would allow this coup to take place without so much as an objection. We have become so intimidated, uneducated, and propagandized as a nation that we permit Police, the Pentagon and “Private Contractors” to govern our lives.

What are the implications of the Pentagon and its corporate allies deciding to dismember the Constitution at this time:

1)  They are saying that the military/corporate complex is in charge, and electoral politics mean nothing;

2)  They are warning those who would criticize our foreign or domestic policies that the consequences of excessive criticism could land you in jail for the rest of your life, or that it could be fatal;

3)  They are saying that our civilian judicial system is now subordinate to military control and domination;

4)  They are telling the American people that dissent is dangerous, and outside the law;

5)  They are informing the world that the true masters have stepped forward from the shadows to demonstrate that Americans are no more in control of their own government than the citizens of any fascist regime in the world;

6)  They are reinforcing the concept that we are in a perpetual state of war, and that there will never again be periods of peace; and,

7)  They are saying that obedience, and not democracy, is the order of the day.

In sum, the passage of this legislation is nothing short of a consolidation of state power into the hands of the military and its corporate allies. By passing these laws during the presidency of a self-identified Democrat, the Pentagon can claim widespread national support for their theft of the American economy and its transformation into an imperial empire. In order to continue spending 50-75% of the American budget on wars of aggression and the ongoing development of weapons and machinery of destruction, the Pentagon has to be certain that it can control a potentially rebellious populace.

Knowing what an opportunistic sham Obama is, and recognizing that his only goal is to remain in office, the Pentagon can continue to define our foreign policy as one of permanent war, and reap the financial advantages that flow from having a Republican Congress, and an unprincipled president in the White House.

When these bills move through the Congress, they are so enormous and yet so routine that almost all attention is drawn to one or more peculiarly putrid or pretentiously benevolent little attachments. Either the bill simply must be passed because it contains hurricane relief or veterans aid or unemployment insurance or because it finally allows GLBT Americans to join in our crusades of mass murder. Or, alternatively, the bill desperately needs amending because it sanctions torture or lawless imprisonment or expands an especially hated war or an especially transparent investment in unwanted weaponry manufactured by some campaign donor. But the underlying insanity of the bill itself never makes it into the corporate conversation.

In the case of this latest National Defense Authorization Act, there has been a toothless rhetorical amendment passed asking the president to end his warmaking in Afghanistan in something less than three years if it’s not too much trouble. But that positive measure has been absolutely overwhelmed in what little discussion of the bill exists by a section of the bill giving presidents and the military the power to lock you away without any of the process guaranteed you by the U.S. Constitution. Now, President Obama may veto the bill because he would prefer that section to be even worse than it is. He has expressed concern that it limits, rather than expands, his options. He should veto it because it rips out the heart of our Bill of Rights and grinds it into the dirt.

But a bill like this should not be passed simply because the latest erosion of our civil liberties is removed and the even worse un-codified understanding and practice is left to continue. A bill like this one should be rejected in its entirety. This bill kills human beings in large numbers, endangers us all through encouragement of foreign hostility, contributes to the development and proliferation of genocidal weaponry, creates massive environmental destruction, advances a foreign policy built around an unsurvivable energy policy, funds both sides of an unending Afghan occupation, funds prisons where we already hold many hundreds of men behind bars without charge or trial, and gives presidents de facto power to ignore our rights for the duration of a global war that has no end. And this bill destroys our economy through unfathomable wasteful spending in the midst of a manufactured deficit crisis and an actual humanitarian crisis at home and abroad.

Military spending is worse for job creation and retention than any other kind of spending or even tax cuts. Jobs is not the silver lining in militarism. There is a choice that confronts us between militarism or jobs, militarism or human services, militarism or a safety net for the ill and the elderly and the impoverished. We’re dumping over a trillion dollars a year into “security” spending in “defense” and other bills combined, well over half of discretionary spending. The deficit “crisis” is not the creation of sick people getting old and multiplying without having had the decency to bribe their way into major government contracts or bailouts from the Federal Reserve. Single-payer health coverage, not cuts to Medicare, is the solution there. The deficit is not purely the result of the Obama tax cuts (sorry, Bush is gone now) or of the bad economy. There is a way to improve the actual economy by spending existing public dollars in different ways.

In 1963, Senator George McGovern and House members F. Bradford Morse and William Fitts Ryan introduced a bill that gained significant support and hearings and would have begun a process of economic conversion from a war economy to a peace economy, retraining and re-employing anyone thrown out of work in the process. Meanwhile, the military was secretly beginning a war in Vietnam, and certain elements were plotting to blow President Kennedy’s brains out of the back of his head. We took a turn for the worse, and economic conversion has never seriously begun. Yet, for decades members of Congress had the decency to at least propose it.

Here’s a bill introduced 20 years ago, in 1991. Do some of the names on the bill look familiar? Waters, Pelosi, Schumer, Slaughter, McDermott, Markey, Panetta (yes, Panetta), Lewis, Pallone, Towns, Berman, Payne, Waxman, Boxer, Wyden, etc. Here’s a solution backed by these people 20 years ago, more desperately needed now, and not under consideration. That’s not their fault. They are cogs in a money-marinated machine. It’s our fault.

In the absence of an overall conversion-to-sanity-and-sustainability bill, there is a related bill that has been introduced in the current Congress: “The Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act of 2011″ introduced by Eleanor Holmes Norton. This bill is a concise thing of beauty which says:

(a) In General- The United States Government shall–

(1) by the date that is three years after the date of the enactment of this Act, provide leadership to negotiate a multilateral treaty or other international agreement that provides for –

(A) the dismantlement and elimination of all nuclear weapons in every country by not later than 2020; and

(B) strict and effective international control of such dismantlement and elimination;

(2) redirect resources that are being used for nuclear weapons programs to use–

(A) in converting all nuclear weapons industry employees, processes, plants, and programs smoothly to constructive, ecologically beneficial peacetime activities, including strict control of all fissile material and radioactive waste, during the period in which nuclear weapons must be dismantled and eliminated pursuant to the treaty or other international agreement described in paragraph (1); and

(B) in addressing human and infrastructure needs, including development and deployment of sustainable carbon-free and nuclear-free energy sources, health care, housing, education, agriculture, and environmental restoration, including long-term radioactive waste monitoring;

(3) undertake vigorous, good-faith efforts to eliminate war, armed conflict, and all military operations; and

(4) actively promote policies to induce all other countries to join in the commitments described in this subsection to create a more peaceful and secure world.

(b) Effective Date- Subsection (a)(2) shall take effect on the date on which the President certifies to Congress that all countries possessing nuclear weapons have–

(1) eliminated such weapons; or

(2) begun such elimination under established legal requirements comparable to those described in subsection (a).”

If you’re going to begin conversion with one sector, why not start with the worst? The answer does not ultimately lie in backing a particular bill so much as in educating, mobilizing, changing the public discourse, and applying nonviolent pressure. But there are bills that exist or could easily be made to exist that merit our unqualified support.

Either we will move the money from where it destroys to where is sustains life, or our civilization will meet the fate Kennedy met in Dallas.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post, Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to a recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by the Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from Review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

The second half of the essay will detail the politics of CTD, the regime which has moved furthest from the notion of a sovereign representative democracy. We will clarify the differences and similarities between traditional military-civilian and fascist dictatorships and the up-to-date CTD, focusing on the ideology of apolitical expertise and technocratic rule as a preliminary to an exploration of the profoundly colonial hierarchical chain of decision making.

The penultimate section will highlight the reason why the imperial ruling classes and their national collaborators have overturned the pre-existing “democratic” oligarchical ruling formulas of “indirect rule” in favor of a naked power grab. The turn to direct colonial rule (a coup by any other name) was consumated by the major financial ruling classes of Europe and the US.

We will evaluate the socio-economic impact of rule by imperial appointed colonial technocrats, the reason for rule by fiat and force over the previous process of persuasion, manipulation and co-optation.

In the concluding section we will evaluate the polarization of the class struggle in a time of colonial dictatorship, in the context of hollowed out electoral institutions and radical regressive social policies. The essay will address the twin issues of struggle for political freedom and social justice in the face of fiat rule by emerging technocratic colonial rulers.

What is at stake goes beyond the current regime changes to identifying the most basic institutional configurations which will define the life chances, personal and political freedoms of future generations, for decades to come.

Decaying Democracies and the Transition to Oligarchical Democracies

The decay of democracy is evident in every sphere of politics. Corruption is all pervasive, as parties and leaders vie for financial contributions from the wealthy and powerful; congressional and executive positions have a price tag; each piece of legislation is influenced by powerful corporate “lobbies” which spend millions writing the laws and engineering their approval. Prominent influence peddlers like the US felon Jack Abramoff boast that “every congressperson has their price.” The vote of citizens counts for nothing: the politician’s campaign promises have no relation to their behavior in office. Lies and deceptions are considered “normal” in the political process. The exercise of political rights are increasingly under police surveillance and active citizens are subject to arbitrary arrest. The political elite depletes the public treasury subsidizing colonial wars and pays for their military adventures by eliminating basic social programs, public agencies and services.

Legislators engage in vitriolic demagogy in virtual Punch and Judy puppet conflicts as public displays of partisanship while in private they feast together at the public trough. In the face of the discredited legislative institutions and the overt, gross buying and selling of public office, executive officials, elected and appointed, seize legislative and judicial powers.

Decaying democracy evolves into an “oligarchical democracy” as executive officials rule by fiat; overriding democratic rules and ignoring the interests of the majority. An executive junta, of elected and non-elected officials, resolves questions of war and peace, allocates billions of dollars or euros to a financial oligarchy, and reduces living standards of millions of citizens via class-biased “austerity packages.” The legislature abdicates its legislative and oversight function and submits to the executive junta’s “accomplished facts.” The citizenry is assigned the role of passive spectators – even as anger, disgust and hostility spreads and deepens. Isolated voices of dissenting representatives are drowned out by the cacophony of mass media contracted prestigious “experts” and academics shilling for the financial oligarchy and advising the executive junta. No longer do citizens look to the legislatures for relief or redress from the executive siezure and abuse of power. To fortify their absolute power, the oligarchies emasculate the constitutions, citing economic catastrophes and all pervasive “terrorist” threats. A vast and growing police state apparatus, with unlimited powers, enforces constraints on civic and political opposition. As legislative powers are sapped and executive authorities enlarge their sphere of action, the remaining democratic freedoms are curtailed via “bureaucratic restrictions” on time, place, and forms of political action. The purpose is to minimize the critical minority from mobilizing a sympathetic majority. As the economic crises worsen and the bondholders and investors demand higher interest rates, the oligarchy extends and deepens their austerity measures. Inequalities widen, exposing the oligarchical nature of the executive junta. The social bases of the regime narrows. The well-paid skilled workers and middle class employees and professionals begin to feel the acute erosion of wages, salaries, pensions, working conditions, and future career prospects. The narrowing of social support undermines the junta’s claim to democratic legitimacy. Faced with mass discontent and discredit and with strategic sections of the civil bureaucracy in revolt, factional strife breaks out among rival cliques within the “official parties” of government. The “democratic oligarchy” is pushed and pulled in several directions: it decrees social cuts but can only find limited support in implementing them. It decrees regressive taxes but cannot collect them. It launches colonial wars but cannot win them. The executive junta alternates between force and compromise; robust promises to the international bankers and then, under mass pressure, backsliding.

Over time oligarchical democracy is no longer useful as to the financial elite. Its democratic pretensions no longer can deceive the masses. Prolonged elite factional warfare erodes its willingness to impose the financial oligarchy’s full agenda. At this point oligarchical democracy as a political formula has run its course.

The financial elite are ready and willing to discard all pretenses of ruling via democratic oligarchs. They are seen as willing but too weak; too subject to domestic pressure from factional rivals and not willing to proceed to savage cuts in social budgets, even greater reductions in living standards and working conditions.

The real power behind the executive juntas comes to the fore. The international bankers discard the “native junta” and impose non-elected bankers to rule – dubbing their private bankers as technocrats.

The Transition to a Colonial “Technocratic” Dictatorship

The naked rule by foreign bankers is disguised by an ideology which describes it as rule by technocrats who are experts, apolitical and above private interests. The reality behind the technocratic rhetoric is that the officials appointed have a career of working with and for big financial private and international interests. Lucas Papdemos, the appointed Greek Prime Minister, worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and, as head of the Greek Central Bank, was responsible for cooking the books covering up the fraudulent budgetary accounts leading Greece to financial disaster. Mario Monti, the appointed Prime Minister of Italy was employed by the European Union and Goldman Sachs. These appointments by the banks are based on their total loyalty and unstinting commitments to impose the harshest regressive policies on the working populations of Greece and Italy. The so-called technocrats are not subject to party factions, nor remotely responsive to any social protests. They are free of all political commitments … except one, to secure the payment of the debt to foreign bondholders – especially the loans owed to major European and North American financial institutions. The technocrats are totally dependent on the foreign banks for their appointments and tenure in office. They have not a smattering of a political organizational base in the countries they govern. They rule because, foreign bankers threatened to bankrupt the countries if they were not appointed. They have zero independence, in the sense that the “technocrats” are merely instruments and direct representatives of the Euro-American bankers.

The “technocrats” by the nature of their appointments are colonial officials explicitly appointed at the behest of imperial bankers and sustained by them. Secondly, neither they nor their colonial mentors were elected by the people over whom they govern. They are imposed by economic coercion and political blackmail. Thirdly, the measures they adopt are designed to inflict the maximum pain by totally altering the basic relation-between labor and capital, by maximizing the power of the latter to hire, fire, fix salaries and working conditions. In other words, the technocratic agenda imposes a political and economic dictatorship.

The social institutions and political processes associated with a democratic-capitalist welfare state, corrupted by decadent democracies, eroded by oligarchical democracies are threatened with total demolition by the emerging colonial technocratic dictatorships (CTD). The language of social regression is full of euphemisms but the substance is clear. Social programs regarding public health, education, pensions, and disabilities are slashed or eliminated and the “savings” transferred into tributary payments to foreign bondholders (banks).

Public employees are fired, their retirement age extended and their salaries reduced and their tenure eliminated. Public enterprises are sold to foreign and domestic capitalist oligarchs with services curtailed and employees shed. Employers shred collective bargaining agreements. Workers are fired and hired at the whim of the owners. Vacations, severance pay, starting salaries and overtime pay are drastically reduced. These pro-capitalist regressive policies are dubbed “structural reforms.” Consultative processes are replaced by the dictatorial powers of capital – “legislated” and implemented by the appointed technocrats. Not since the time of Mussolini and fascist rule and the Greek military junta (1967-1973) has such a regressive assault on popular organizations and democratic rights taken place.

Comparing Fascist and Technocratic Dictatorships

The earlier fascist and military dictatorships have much in common with the current technocratic despots regarding the capitalist interests they defend and the social classes they oppress. But there are important differences which disguise the continuities.

The military junta in Greece and Mussolini in Italy seized power by force and violence, outlawed all opposition parties, press trade unions and closed the elected parliament. The current “technocratic” dictatorship is handed power by the political elites of the oligarchical democracy – a “peaceful” transition at least in its initial phase. In contrast to the earlier dictatorships, the current despotic regimes retain the hollowed out and emasculated electoral facades, as rubber stamp entities to provide a kind of “pseudo-legitimacy,” which beguiles the financial press but fools few public citizens.

From the very first day of technocratic rule the key slogans of the organized movements in Italy was, “No to a government of bankers”; while in Greece the slogan that greeted the puppet pragmatist Papdemos was “European Union, IMF, Get Out.”

The earlier dictatorships began as full blown police states, arresting pro-democracy movement activists and trade unionists before pursuing their pro-capitalist policies. The current technocrats first launch their vicious all-out assault on living and working conditions, with parliamentary assent and then in the face of sustained and determined resistance by the “parliaments of the street”, proceed to escalate police state repression by degree … practicing incremental police state rule.

Policies of the Technocratic Dictatorships: Scope, Depth and Method

The dictatorial organization of a technocratic regime is derived from its policies and political mission. In order to impose policies that result in massive transfers of wealth, power and legal rights from labor and households to capital, especially foreign capital, an authoritarian regime is essential, especially in anticipation of sustained resistance. The international financial oligarchy cannot secure “stable and sustainable” long term extraction of wealth with any semblance of democratic governance, even a decaying oligarchic democracy. Hence the last resort for the bankers in the EU and USA is to directly appoint one of their own to push, shove and impose a sequence of comprehensive large scale, long-term regressive changes. The mission of the technocrats is to impose an enduring institutional framework which will guarantee long-term, high interest payments based on decades of impoverishment and popular exclusion.

The mission of the “technocratic dictatorship” is not to put in place a single regressive policy of short duration, such as a salary freeze or dismissal of a few thousand school teachers. Their intent is to convert the entire state apparatus into an efficient press to continuously extract and transfer tax revenues and income from workers and employees to bond holders. To maximize the power and profits of capital over labor, the technocrats grant the capitalists absolute power to fix the terms of labor contracts, as far as hiring, firing, longevity, hours and working conditions.

The technocrats “method of rule” is to have an ear only for the foreign bankers, bondholders and private investors. The decision process is closed and limited to the coterie of bankers and technocrats without the least transparency. Above all, under colonial rules the technocrats must ignore the protestors if possible or, if necessary break heads. Under pressure from the banks, there is no time for mediation, compromise or delays as was the case under decaying and oligarchical democracies.

Ten historic transformations dominate the agenda of the technocratic dictatorships and their colonial mentors.

1) Massive shifts in budgetary allocations from welfare to bond and bank payments.

2) Large scale changes in income policies from wages to profits, interest payments and rents.

3) Highly regressive tax policies, increasing consumer (VAT) and wage taxes and lowering taxes on bondholders and investors.

4) Eliminating employment security (“labor flexibility”), increasing the reserve army of unemployed to lower wages, intensifying the exploitation of employed labor (“higher productivity”).

5) Rewriting labor codes, undermining the balance of power between organized labor and capital. Wages, working conditions and health issues are taken out of the hands of rank and file unionists and put in the hands of technocratic “corporate commissions.”

6) The dismantling of a half century of public enterprises and institutions and privatizing telecommunications, energy, health, education and pension funds. Trillion dollar privatizations are windfall profits on a world historic scale. Private monopolies replace public and provide fewer jobs and services without adding any new productive capacity.

7) The economic axis shifts from production and services for mass consumption in the domestic market, to exports of specialized goods and services to overseas markets. This new dynamic requires lower wages to “compete” internationally but shrinks the domestic market. The new strategy translates into an increase in hard currency earnings from exports to pay the debt to the bondholders but results in greater misery and unemployment for domestic labor. Under the technocratic “model,” prosperity accrues to vulture investors buying lucrative but financially strapped local producers and real estate on the cheap.

8) The technocratic dictatorship by design and policy aims at a “bipolar class structure” in which the bulk of the skilled workers and the middle class is impoverished and suffers downward mobility while enriching a strata of local bondholders and business owners who cash in on interest payments and the low cost of labor.

9) Deregulation of capital, privatization and the centrality of financial capital leads to greater colonial (foreign) ownership of land, banks, strategic economic sectors and “social” services. National sovereignty is replaced by imperial sovereignty in the economy as well as politics.

10) The unified power of colonial technocrats and imperial bondholders dictating policy concentrates power in a non-elected power elite. They rule with a narrow social base and no popular legitimacy. They are politically vulnerable, therefore, constantly dependent on economic threats or physical force.

Three Stages of Technocratic Dictatorial Rule

The historic task of the technocratic dictatorship is to roll-back the political, social and economic advances gained by the working class, public employees and pensioners since the defeat of fascist capitalism in 1945. The unmaking of over sixty years of history is no easy task, least of all in the midst of a deep ongoing socio-economic crises, in which the working class has already experienced severe cuts in wages and benefits and the number of young unemployed (18-30 years) throughout the EU and North America ranges between 25 to 50 percent.

The proposed agenda of the “technocrats” – parroting their colonial mentors in the banks – is ever more severe reductions in living and working conditions.The proposed “austerity” occurs in the face of growing economic inequalities between the wealthy 5% and the bottom 60% between Southern Europe and Northern Europe. Faced with downward mobility and heavy indebtedness, the middle class and especially their ‘educated children’, are outraged by the technocrats call for even greater social cuts. Outrage spreads from the lower middle class to business and professionals on the verge of bankruptcy and loss of status.

The technocratic rulers, constantly play on mass insecurity and fear of a “catastrophic collapse” if their ‘bitter medicine’ is not swallowed by the anguished middle classes who fear the prospect of sinking into the working class or worse.

The technocrats call on the present generation to sacrifice, to commit virtual suicide, to save future generations. With gravity and humble posturing they speak of “equal sacrifices”, a message belied by the firing of tens of thousands of employees and the selling of billions of euros/dollars of the national patrimony to foreign bankers and investors. Lowering public expenditures to pay bondholders and entice private investors erodes any appeal for “national unity” and “equal sacrifice” ..The technocratic regime strives to act decisively and quickly to impose its brutal regressive agenda, the rollback of sixty years of history before the masses have time rise up and bring them down.

To preclude political opposition the technocrats demand “national unity”, (the unity of bankers and oligarchs), the backing of the decadent electoral parties and their leaders and their total submission to the colonial bankers’ demands.

The technocrats’ political trajectory will be short lived given the draconian systemic changes and repressive structures they propose, the best they can accomplish is to dictate and implement policies and then return to their lucrative sanctuaries in the overseas banks.

Technocratic Rule: Stage One

With the unanimous backing of the mass media and the full backing of the powerful bankers, the technocrats take advantage of the downfall of the despised and discredited politicians of the past electoral regimes. They project a clean government image which speaks to a regime which is efficient and competent, capable of decisive action. They promise to put an end to deteriorating living conditions and partisan political paralyses. At the onset of their rule the technocratic dictators exploit the justified popular disgust with privileged “do-nothing” politicians to secure a measure of popular consent or at least passive acquiescence from the majority of the citizens drowning in debt and in search of a “savior.”

It should be noted that among the most politically aware and social conscious minority, the bankers resort to a colonized “technocratic regime” cuts no ice: they immediately identify the technocratic regime as illegitimate deriving powers from foreign bankers. They affirm the rights of citizens and national sovereignty. From the beginning, even under the cloak of emergency powers, the technocrats face a core of mass opposition.

The bankers realistically recognize the technocrats must move quickly and decisively.

Stage Two: Technocrats’ Shock Policies

The technocrats launch 100 days of the most egregious class warfare against the working class since the military/fascist regimes. In the name of the Free Markets, the Bondholder and the Unholy Alliance of political oligarchs and bankers dictate edicts, and laws are passed, immediately firing tens of thousands of public employees. Scores of public enterprises are rushed to the auction block. Job security is abolished and firing without cause becomes the law of the land. Regressive taxes are decreed and households are impoverished. The entire income pyramid is turned on its head. The technocrats widen inequalities and deepen immiseration.

The initial euphoria greeting technocratic rule is replaced by bitter reproaches. The lower middle class looking for a paternal dictatorial resolution of their condition, recognize “another political swindle”. As the technocratic regime races to fulfill its mission to the foreign bankers, the popular mood sours, bitterness spreads even among its ‘passive collaborators’. There are no crumbs from the table of a colonial regime empowered to maximize the outflow of state revenues to bondholders.

The compromised political oligarchy tries to revive their fortunes and “questions” the particularities of the technocratic “tsunami” smashing the social fabric of society. The scale and scope of the dictatorship’s extremist agenda and the ongoing build-up of mass frustrations frightens the political party collaborators, while the bankers urge them on to bigger and deeper social cuts. The technocrats in the face of the burgeoning popular storm begin to cower.

The bankers call for greater backbone and offer new loans for “keeping the course.” The technocrats bunker down – alternating between pleas for time and sacrifice with promises of prosperity “around the corner.” Mostly they rely on constant police mobilization and de facto militarization of civil society.

Mission Accomplished: Civil War or the Return of Oligarchical Democracy?

The outcome of the “experiment” with a colonial dictatorial technocratic regime is difficult to predict. One reason is because the measures adopted are so extreme and extensive, that they unify almost all important social classes (except the top 5%) against them at the same time. The concentration of power in an “appointed” elite further isolates them and unifies most citizens in favor of democracy against colonial submission and unelected rulers. The measures approved by the technocrats face the unlikely prospect of full implementation, especially by civil servants and public employees facing firings, pay cuts and reduced pensions. The across the board cuts undermine “divide and conquer” tactics. Given the scope and depth of the downgrading of the public sector and the indignity of serving a regime clearly under colonial tutelage, it is possible that breaks and fissures will take place in the military and police apparatus especially if they provoke popular uprisings which turn violent. The technocratic juntas cannot ensure that their policies will be implemented. If not, revenues will falter; strikes and protests will scare off predator buyers of public firms. The big squeeze will undermine local business, production will decline the recession will deepen.

Technocratic rule is by its nature transitory. Under threat of a mass revolt the new rulers will flee to their overseas financial sanctuaries. Local oligarchical collaboraters will hasten to augment their billion dollar euro overseas bank accounts in London, New York and Zurich.

The technocratic dictatorship will make every effort to hand power back to the oligarchical democratic politicians with the proviso that they retain the regressive changes in place. Technocratic rule will end up with “paper victories” unless the overseas bankers insist the “return to democracy” operates within the “new order.”

The application of force could boomerang. The technocrats and democratic oligarchs renewed threats of an economic catastrophe for non-compliance will be counter-manded by the reality of real existing misery and mass unemployment. For millions the living catastrophe resulting from technocratic policies will outweigh any future threats. The rebellious majority may choose to rise up and overthrow the old order and take its chances in an independent democratic socialist republic. One of the unforeseen consequences of imposing radical colonial appointed technocratic dictatorship is that it clears the political landscape of parasitic political oligarchies and lays the groundwork for a clean break. It facilitates renouncing the debt and reconstituting the social fabric of an independent democratic republic.

The serious danger is that the discredited politicians of the old order will demagogically attempt to seize the democratic banners of the “anti-dictatorial anti-technocrat” struggle to bring back what Marx called “the old crap of the previous order.” The recycled political oligarchs will adapt to the “restructured” new order of eternal debt payments as part of a deal to maintain the ongoing process of unending social regression. The revolutionary struggle against the colonial technocratic rulers must continue and deepen, to block the restoration of the democratic oligarchs.

The last time I’d heard about a coordinated cultural event like this was when there were over a thousand productions of Lysistrata, an anti-war satire by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, taking place across the US and around the world on a single night—in March 2003, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq. Such events are hopeful in themselves: they invoke something primal and positive, the power of certain narratives, illuminated by the imagination, to persist and unite us in something other than hatred, clannishness and war—in fact, their opposite–across enormous swaths of time and space. They are a form of resistance, because they represent the survival of things most power structures would rather we be without: intelligence, consciousness, dignity.

The Facebook page for the much smaller rolling flash mob of ICHH readings (there were apparently about twenty-five across the US) has comments on the surprising relevance that many who attended them discovered in the seventy-five year old play. I was at the reading organized in San Francisco by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, one of the country’s oldest self-described political theater companies, itself founded just over fifty years ago.

It gave me pause the next day to realize that as a small group of us sat in the Mime Troupe’s darkened rehearsal space in the Mission District, across the bay in Oakland, police from eighteen different local law enforcement agencies (yes, you may well ask why there are that many to begin with, much less why they were all were involved) must have been mapping out a pre-dawn assault on the Occupy Oakland camp that would end up being one of the most violent in the nation so far. Hearing the Mime Troupe read Lewis’ play gave me lots of food for thought, but most of it was in the form of questions on just exactly what kind of relevance we’re talking about—or not—right now.

It Can’t Happen Here was modeled on the dispatches about Hitler’s rise that Lewis’ wife Dorothy Thompson, a prominent journalist, filed from Europe in the early 1930s. Its setting is mostly a fictitious small town in northern Vermont. The time period for the action is described, tellingly, as: “very soon, or never.” The title is obviously ironic.

While Euro-fascism is the frame, Lewis’s Buzz Windrip, the good ol’ boy in ICHH who rides his “Corporative” Party to power, is based largely on Louisiana governor and US Senator Huey Long, with a dose of the aw-shucks cornball humor of popular radio comedian Will Rogers thrown in. Long was actually (certainly by today’s standards) a left-wing populist, who frequently attacked the Roosevelt administration for not going far enough to restrain the greed of banks and redistribute wealth. He had a tendency to long oratory and fiery rhetoric. He did build a formidable political machine that eventually allowed him to control most of the political and economic deal-making in his state. In 1935 he was assassinated on the steps of the Louisiana state house, as he was preparing to launch a presidential run to challenge Roosevelt the following year.

ICHH, like a lot of Sinclair Lewis’ work, is steeped in his disgust at anti-intellectualism and the ease with which great numbers of what he perceived as the US’s unsophisticated and socially isolated people—Lewis called them “the booboisie”—can be swayed by rhetoric that appeals to their prejudices and base instincts, like opportunism and fear.

And in many portrayals, he did get something about that patented all-American blank stare of utter ignorance and simultaneous infinite self-importance dead-on correct. It’s a toxic combination that never seems to die in our culture, where publicly, these days, it seems mainly endemic in the political right. There are some comments from clueless characters in ICHH about how the youth of today (once again, this is the 1930s) don’t really want to work, have had everything given to them, don’t know how to do anything for themselves and are just a bunch of lazy whiners… and you can hear Rush Limbaugh bellowing to his ditto-heads as he tries to dismiss the growing numbers of Occupy-ers in just that way. One of the play’s worst villains is Shad Ledue, a brutal, lumpen goon. Interestingly, he is the only member of the lower classes among its main characters, and he is mainly characterized by resentment and envy of the well-meaning middle class characters who have patronized him, on whom he revenges himself as he rises in Windrip’s ranks.

But these bitter portrayals of a certain kind of US lowest common denominator stop short of any real understanding of the economics that underlie the culture, the skeleton under the skin. Like most of the liberal intelligentsia right down to today, Lewis mostly faulted personality types, not material conditions, for the evils that men do. It’s not that personal psychology is irrelevant, by any means (and it sure is dramatic, too), but if you’re going to take on political subjects, you have to realize that character defects alone do not explain why wars are fought, or millions of people lose their homes or jobs, or crucially, where and when and why dictators take power.

Rather than much of ICHH itself, it’s the social context of the 1930s that may be most relevant to the 2010s: a time of financial collapse, fear, unemployment, scapegoating, dislocation, and severe ecological stress. There is a lot of history that seems to be repeating itself these days, a sure sign that we have not learned its lessons. But history follows neither a straight line nor a circular path, maybe something more like a spiral, so that when certain phenomena reappear, they always reappear in a context that has changed, and those phenomena are, in turn, altered by their time and place.

What isn’t like the 1930s? The US is no longer an isolated, fortress republic, but deeply enmeshed in a global financial system in hyper-drive that is whipping not just its people but most of the world around like a rabbit in the mouth of a wild dog. And it now also has a hugely expanded global military presence to maintain, and a series of resource wars that aren’t serving as middle class-building public works programs with high moral objectives, like Roosevelt’s war, but only as venal and vicious corporate welfare boondoggles offering the deadly job of cannon fodder to the poor. It’s now 75 years since the Works Progress Administration put 8.5 million Americans directly to work (almost 13,000 of them in the Federal Theater Project) and there’s no sign of the possibility of anything like that in a political system that’s marked by a crawling servitude to private money in both major political parties, and has even granted corporations the legal status of persons in just about every significant respect (except serving time for crimes, apparently).

I started to think that many of Lewis’ stalking horses have already gone galloping out the barn door, since the beginning of the Reagan revolution at least. And so what we have is a situation where the kind of totalitarianism he feared now actually seems superfluous. Power and wealth have continued to concentrate in ever fewer hands, the spectrum of discourse to be narrowed, and dissenters to be functionally silenced by marginalization, without the need for formally suspending the constitution, disbanding parliament and declaring anyone president for life to make it so. “It” hasn’t happened here, because something else did: a kind of stealth coup, carried out over decades.

In fact, most people really didn’t seem to know why their lives were so out of their own control until recently, when the little Toto of the Occupy protests began to pull back a curtain and show how the men at the levers of the spin machine were wildly pulling them to blow smoke and bellow, while their promises and their threats were equally empty, because the real problem is not drugs, terrorists, immigrants, or homosexuality, and the real solution isn’t either of those bizarrely entwined American fantasies, the Free Market or Jesus. And who’s wielding the power is not a dictator, not any single person, benign or malign, but a percentage: the 1% who control more than 40% of the nation’s wealth, and have basically succeeded in rigging its political system to preserve and increase that share, at the expense of the rest of the population and the natural world. Sinclair Lewis may have imagined tyranny; he never foresaw oligarchy.

After the reading, my husband and I talked with R.G. Davis, who founded the Mime Troupe in 1961, and left it in 1970. It was something of a surprise to see him there: he has long been critical of what he considers the Mime Troupe’s loss of political acuity, and also its reliance on formulaic melodrama to produce its annual message plays, both of which unfortunately put it in tune with Lewis’s work here. Davis thought the only way ICHH could be considered relevant to what’s happening in the US right now is if you radically altered it in a way that would basically undermine both the play’s structure and its ideology. He talked about the “creative misreadings” that can sometimes produce a new interpretation that’s fertile in a different context and a completely different way than was intended by the author. Apparently the French students who carried out their own version of an Occupy movement in May 1968 had read Mao in such a creative way—so maybe anything is possible.

On the way home from the reading, we drove past an enormous police sting at the Valencia Gardens housing project: a whole block filled with squad cars, lights flashing, officers surrounding a group of black and brown young men on the steps of the complex, that looks for all the world like a minimum security prison. The next day, after an Iraq vet at Occupy was hospitalized with a cracked skull from a police projectile, and tear gas filled the streets of Oakland, the Washington Post had a picture of a cop petting a cute stray cat in the ruins of the Occupy Oakland camp. In other words, business as usual in 21st century America. “It” happens every day.

When Anna Hazare ended his second fast for the JLB in August, his followers and the media claimed that his campaign was an unqualified success. Hazare himself was more circumspect, but his promise that he would move on to campaign for the right to reject and recall candidates suggested that he too felt he had scored a victory. But has he? Most people thronging to demonstrate in support of his demands thought that the campaign was a straightforward one against corruption, but it was both more and less than that. More, because the demand of Team Anna was that parliament should pass their particular bill, the Jan Lokpal Bill, by a particular date; and less, because it defined corruption in a superficial manner.

Team Anna certainly won the first round, given the government’s inability to read the public mood. By first presenting a bill so weak that it made a mockery of the idea of curbing corruption, and then resorting to preventive arrests of Anna and his close associates, it helped to mobilise massive crowds against itself. At this point in the proceedings, it was easy for a casual observer to feel that the campaign was standing up not only for a strong law against corruption but also for freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly, which were being crushed by a government bent on negating all democratic rights and freedoms. Indeed, this is what many people out on the streets believed. Who would want to oppose such a campaign? But, ironically, as the government backtracked, giving permission for the fast and initiating a public consultation on the Lokpal Bill, it regained some legitimacy, while the Hazare campaign, as it became increasingly aggressive, lost it. The government wisely agreed to a formula that would allow Hazare to break his fast without losing face, but even a cursory examination of the terms of that agreement make it clear that it was a major retreat for India Against Corruption (IAC) from their earlier hardline stand. Why were they forced to back down?

An authoritarian bill backed by the extreme Right

Questions were raised about the dangerously authoritarian character of the bill they were backing, with its creation of an unaccountable, unelected body that would have the power to tap phones, intercept emails, and remove every government functionary from the Prime Minister and Chief Justice to the lowest cleaner.¹ Access to judicial review for those targeted by this all-powerful body would be meaningless, given its power to remove judges it did not like. By defining corruption as the disease rather than seeing it as merely a symptom of a deeper disease – power without accountability, power to commit crimes with impunity – the JLB was a formula to introduce a new source of corruption rather than eliminating it. It was also, potentially, an assault on India’s democratic institutions, one heightened by the demand that either the law should be passed by parliament by August 30, or the government should quit. This ultimatum ruled out any possibility of pre-legislative discussion and debate of the two bills, or consideration of other proposals like those of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), which had successfully campaigned for what has turned out to be the country’s most effective tool of transparency to date, the Right to Information (RTI) Act. And the demand that a parliament elected by hundreds of millions should quit because a few hundred thousand people claiming to represent ‘civil society’ were demanding it mocked the conception of democracy. Where the RTI Act had put power to combat corruption into the hands of ordinary citizens, the JLB seeks to concentrate this power in the hands of a super-powerful state institution.

The enthusiastic participation of the extreme Right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other members of the ‘family’ of organisations affiliated to it (the Sangh Parivar), also disturbed many. During the second fast in August, the backdrop of Bharat Mata (Mother India as a Hindu goddess) was replaced by Mahatma Gandhi and RSS members were kept away from the dais, but their cries of ‘Vande Mataram!’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki jai!’ continued to be as frequent as before. Sushma Swaraj claimed openly that the RSS was mobilising for the protest² and the VHP told the media it provided free food – a major crowd-puller – for 20,000 protesters. These proclamations are discounted by some on the Left, who argue that the RSS would naturally try to claim credit for any mass movement. However, this isn’t true. Bigger crowds were reported at the protests against the nuclear tests in 1998, hundreds of thousands of workers have marched in protests against attacks on labour rights, but the Sangh Parivar did not try to claim credit for them because they did not identify with the cause. In this case they did, and the reason is not hard to find. A campaign against narrowly-defined corruption in a government not controlled by them, a demand that the government should either pass a law setting up a super-state they could easily control or else quit, suited them perfectly. They were not trying to capture the movement: it was tailor-made for them.

Both the authoritarian character of the bill and RSS backing for the IAC can be explained by the characteristics of the leadership of the movement and the movement itself.

The leaders

The ‘civil society’ panel that drafted and negotiated with the government over the Jan Lokpal Bill consisted of Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, Santosh Hegde, Shanti Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan. Anna Hazare himself, projected as the leader of the campaign, hails from Ralegan Siddhi, a village in Maharashtra. As a detailed study of his village by Mukul Sharma reveals, he holds absolute power in it: there have been no gram panchayat elections for the last 24 years, nor even elections to cooperatives, and no campaigning is allowed during state or national elections. Just as a mother is entitled to slap her child (according to him), he feels he is entitled to use coercion or violence against those who infringe his rules. Alcohol is banned, and anyone taking it is tied to a pole and flogged. Although he opposes untouchability, dalits are supposed to follow the occupation dictated by their caste, and have been forced to adopt vegetarianism. In a streak of puritanism reminiscent of the Taliban, satellite dishes, cable TV and any music other than religious songs are banned.³ The comparison with Gandhi by dim-witted mediapersons is belied by Anna’s bloodthirsty calls for the death penalty.⁴

None of these journalists thought it fit to ask how he could campaign for the right to reject and recall candidates if he doesn’t recognise the right to elect candidates in the first place, and contemptuously dismisses the average voter as prone to being bought by liquor, saris or cash! Nor did they think to ask: If he is so keen on electoral reform, why not implement it in his village as an experiment? Why not propose reform in electoral funding, so that the disgruntled 10 percent can put up their own candidate, instead of rejecting all candidates and disrupting elections time and again at enormous cost to the tax-payer and political stability? What exactly should be the conditions under which candidates can be recalled?

The striking authoritarianism of Hazare’s outlook, the lack of any whiff of democracy in the village he rules as an absolute dictator, and his belief in caste hierarchy, all make him amenable to the politics of the Sangh Parivar. But the relationship goes much deeper. Some of his staunchest supporters were shocked when he held up Narendra Modi as a model for other chief ministers to emulate. He later clarified he was opposed to communalism, but this does not explain why he chose to praise a man who orchestrated the massacre of thousands of innocents. Bribery need not always take the form of money; it can also take the form of promotions, appointments to sinecures, etc. The promotion of police officers who had participated in the Gujarat pogroms and victimisation of those who had done their job by trying to prevent the slaughter are among the worst forms of corruption.

Even in the narrower sense of corruption adopted by Team Anna, Gujarat has a shameful record. As Mallika Sarabai pointed out in her letter to Hazare, ‘irrigated farmlands have been stealthily taken by the government and sold off at ridiculous prices to a small club of industrialists. There has been no Lokayukta in Gujarat for nearly seven years so hundreds of complaints against corruption are lying unheard. From the Sujalam Sufalam scam of 1700 crores to the NREGS boribund scam of 109 crores, the fisheries scam of 600 crores, every department is involved in thousands of crores of scams…The state is in terrible debt because of his largess to industry while 21 lakh farmers wait for compensation.’⁵

So what made Anna give Modi such a glowing character-reference? This cannot be explained simply by any apparent naivety. If Hazare was so effusive about Modi, it was because their world-views and agendas converged. Two points in particular are worth noting. One is the extremely complimentary comments by top RSS leaders about Ralegan Siddhi, likening it to Ram Rajya and organising tours of it for their activists, as well as organising programmes in support of him; and the other is the decision taken by the RSS in its all-India leaders’ meeting in March 2011 – before Anna’s fast in April – to launch a campaign against corruption.⁶ The impression of converging agendas is confirmed by L.K.Advani’s announcement of a rath yatra against corruption⁷ and Team Anna’s deafening silence concerning Modi’s patently corrupt attempt to appoint a Lokayukta who had acquitted all the accused in the Best Bakery massacre, and therefore could be trusted to toe the state government line.⁸

Two other members of the drafting team also have relationships with the Sangh Parivar. Arvind Kejriwal maintained close links with BJP MPs during the agitation as well as drawing in Hindutva gurus like Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. His association with the anti-reservationist Youth for Equality created revulsion among Dalits, as did his dismissal of their suggestion that there should be a Dalit on the drafting committee on the grounds that legal specialists were needed to draft a law (as though Dalits were incapable of drafting laws, regardless of the fact that the Indian Constitution was drafted by one!).⁹ And Justice Santosh Hegde, whose father was all-India vice-President of the BJP, just last year referred to L.K.Advani (of the infamous Ram Janmabhoomi rath yatra that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and slaughter of thousands of Muslims) as a ‘father figure.’¹⁰

The Right-wing bias of these three members of the JLB drafting committee explains why it leaves out NGOs from its ambit, since inclusion of NGOs would be a blow to massive outfits like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living (already accused of illegal land acquisition¹¹ ) and Baba Ramdev’s offshore financial transactions. It also explains why most Dalit, Adivasi and minority-rights activists stayed away from the movement, fearing that the JLB’s definition of ‘corruption’ would target the beneficiaries of affirmative action as well as members of the legislature and judiciary who supported attempts to level the playing field for sections of the population suffering discrimination.

The fourth member of the team, Shanti Bhushan, is a corporate lawyer whose most high-profile case in recent years has been that of Novartis versus the Cancer Patients Aid Association.¹² Novartis is attempting to prevent the production of generic versions of imatinib mesylate (an anti-leukemia drug) beyond the period of its original patent by a process called ‘ever-greening,’ whereby a minor change in the form of a drug is used to renew its patent. This particular case has attracted worldwide attention, because it would mean that the life-saving drug would only be available at the Novartis price of Rs 120,000 per month instead of being made available by Indian companies for Rs 8,000 per month: obviously a death sentence for all leukemia patients other than the super-rich. In other words, Shanti Bhushan was hired by Novartis to argue that a company’s right to profit trumps the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution.¹³

Bhushan Sr.’s professional dealings with his corporate clients explains why corporates are left out of the Jan Lokpal Bill. This curious omission is also why companies like Jindal Aluminium, a company that tried to silence critics of its illegal mining activities with a false defamation suit,¹⁴ are willing to back the Anna movement with substantial donations.¹⁵ It is also why the corporate media could abandon any pretence of objectivity and play an active role in promoting the movement.¹⁶ . For all of these power elites (big business, mass media), the solution to corruption is to privatise everything, minimise state regulation of private capital, and terminate even inadequate social security and welfare schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. They would like to secure their privileges (for which they now have to pay bribes) without paying bribes. Anything that cuts into their right to make money constitutes ‘corruption.’

These neoliberal underpinnings of the JLB have been criticised by many left-wing commentators and one important trade union federation. As the New Trade Union Initiative points out, ‘the fight against corruption must include demands for legislation and effective implementation of the laws that govern capital alongside rigorous and stringent implementation of the laws that govern work, the provision of social security and social protection, and all laws that provide working people access to their basic needs. Corruption necessarily flows from above and is deeply rooted in how capital seeks to maximize profits and not merely a product of corrupt civil servants or a grasping political class.’¹⁷ While it might not be feasible for the Lokpal to monitor all NGOs and companies, in cases where a politician or bureaucrat has colluded with a company or NGO to rob the public (of land, revenue, etc.), it makes no sense to nab the junior partner-in-crime (the politician or bureaucrat) while allowing the major beneficiary of corruption (the company or NGO) to get away with it. In such cases, as suggested by the NCPRI, the Lokpal or Lokayukta should have power to investigate and prosecute any other person who is co-accused in the case before it.¹⁸

The involvement of the fifth member of the team, Prashant Bhushan, caused consternation among some of his former admirers, since he has been associated with social justice causes. But his fundamental similarity to the other members of the drafting team in terms of elitism and authoritarianism are evident in his vehement arguments that the issue of the JLB should be resolved by a referendum.¹⁹ If a referendum were held on each and every clause of the bill, it would cost the earth and take forever, so that is clearly not feasible. Instead, the bill will be (in fact has been) drafted by ‘experts’, and the public will only have the right to vote for one bill or the other. Ironically, far from being an expansion of participatory democracy, as he claims, this constitutes a much less democratic procedure than pre-legislative public debate on a bill, with the possibility of the public feeding into the drafting process.

Apart from leaving out the people who will be affected by the bill from the deliberations on it, a referendum can be framed in a way that elicits the result that is desired. In this case, for example, Bhushan Jr. made it clear that there would be only two options, the government Lokpal Bill or the JLB: no possibility of voting for the NCPRI or other proposals, and not even the option of rejecting both bills! (The hypocrisy of demanding the right to reject in elections while leaving it out in the proposed referendum is truly stunning!) Even if the intention is to get feedback on the JLB, there are two different ways in which a referendum could be framed. If the choice is between the government bill and JLB, as Bhushan wants, those who reject both would have to abstain; then it is possible that the majority of those who vote, knowing only that the latter is stronger, would vote for it. But if the choice is ‘the JLB: Yes or No’, many more are likely to vote, and the ‘No’ vote is likely to predominate, given the deep suspicion on the part of Dalits, Adivasis, minorities and workers that the JLB is designed to rob them of their rights.²⁰ No wonder referendums are favoured by dictators!

The JLB is marked by the elitist and authoritarian outlook of its drafters. While some of these features have been diluted since the first draft was put out, the marks of its parentage are still all too evident.

The followers

There has been a great deal of debate on the class composition of the crowds that came out in support of the JLB, but what is more relevant is the political character of the crowds; after all, there was a significant presence of plebeian elements in the mobs that brought down the Babri Masjid as well as the crowds that flocked to Hitler’s speeches, but this did not make them any less fascist.

Kiran Bedi’s slogan of ‘Anna is India and India is Anna’, with its disturbing echoes of the Emergency (‘Indira is India and India is Indira’) as well as Nazism (‘Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler’), was abandoned, but its spirit haunted the speeches of Team Anna, who repeatedly claimed that they spoke for ‘the people’ or ‘civil society’ as a whole. Equally revealing was the ubiquitous slogan ‘I am Anna’. What this conveyed was blind faith in Anna’s leadership, and a promise to follow wherever he went, do whatever he ordered. This abdication of the responsibility to think for oneself in favour of blind faith in a charismatic leader is typical of fascist movements. This does not mean that all those who wore ‘I am Anna’ caps or T-shirts were fascists, but that they could easily be manipulated by fascists.

If blind obedience to a leader is one side of the coin, the other side is intolerance of dissent or questioning of the stated goal. This too was very much in evidence. The good-natured and non-violent character of the assembly, noted by some who visited Ramlila Maidan, lasted only so long as questions were confined to ‘Where have you come from?’ and ‘What do you do?’As soon as even mildly probing questions were asked about the JLB, good nature vanished and the strong undercurrent of violence beneath the sanctimonious appearance of non-violence came to the surface.²¹ The most horrifying report of such violence was that of a student who was chased into a river by fellow-students and pelted with stones until he drowned because he refused to participate in the anti-corruption protests.²²

Finally, the aggressive waving of the national flag and frequent chants of ‘Vande Mataram!’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki jai!’ conveyed a great deal about the character of the movement. As one journalist said, ‘Never in India’s history, not even during the freedom movement or war-time, has such aggressively patriotic fervour been unleashed… Democratic plurality, ideological diversity and argumentativeness were integral to our freedom movement… So here is the quibble. Once you produce the national flag, and Bharat Mata, all arguments cease… A democratic movement has to give space for disagreement, argue with those who have a different point of view, not wave the national flag and shut them up.’²³

All these characteristics – blindly following a leader, crushing dissent, and ultra-nationalism – are characteristics of fascism. Nothing could be more different from mass organisations of the labouring poor, with their openness to often heated argument and debate.²⁴

Some conclusions

Put together, these characteristics of the goal of the campaign, its leadership, and its mass following suggest that IAC, if it can be called a mass movement at all, is a populist movement which is similar in many ways to the völkisch (populist) movements that fed into the rise of Nazism. Norwegian right-wing mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had advised the Sangh Parivar that instead of attacking Muslims, they should focus their attacks on those whom he bizarrely described as ‘the Indian cultural Marxists’ – namely the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, with its commitment to the protection of minorities – and seek to overthrow it.²⁵ But it is the Sangh Parivar that could give some lessons to Breivik. It knew that the slaughter of Muslims, as in Gujarat in 2002, could gain votes for it; that this may be changing, hence their switch-over to carrying out terrorist attacks that are blamed on Muslims; and that a massacre of, say, young members of the Congress Party (analogous to the massacre carried out by Breivik) would simply backfire against it. Instead, its assault on the UPA is far more subtle, cashing in on the public revulsion that has built up over issues like rampant inflation and corruption. In the past, campaigns against corruption by Jaiprakash Narayan and V.P.Singh have been used by the Sangh Parivar to boost its popularity and bring it to power, and it is entirely possible that the Anna Hazare campaign could have the same result.

Whether regime change will result depends to a great extent on the reaction of the UPA government. Harping on about the supremacy of parliament in order to discredit popular protest is simply not convincing, because the legitimacy of parliament depends on the degree to which it upholds the fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution. Why would the Constitution guarantee rights like freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly if democracy meant only the right to vote every five years? Obviously, these are also means by which citizens achieve some measure of control over their own lives, as well as communicate what they want from their representatives. If the UPA had taken more trouble to listen, rather than ignoring protests or all too often crushing them, it would not be facing a crisis.

It is not too late to start listening, beginning with the issue of corruption in the narrow sense. Some action against it has been taken, but belatedly and not enough. The best features of all the Lokpal proposals should be brought together and a strong set of laws enacted and implemented. If the government demonstrates that it is serious about taking action – and not just against its enemies – some of the damage done in the last six months could be reversed.

However, it is far more important to tackle the underlying disease that results in corruption: untrammelled power and impunity. For example, Anna’s fast unintentionally drew attention to Irom Sharmila’s decade-long fast against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Every time the repeal or even amendment of this law is mooted, Army chiefs (who seem to believe that the army cannot do its work without raping, torturing and killing innocents) objects. Yet this law is patently unconstitutional, since it violates the right to equal protection of the law (which is denied to the victims) and to equality before the law (since the perpetrators are effectively above the law). Armed insurgency is admittedly a serious problem, but impunity for state security forces only makes it worse by alienating civilians. AFSPA and other laws that allow security force personnel to commit crimes with impunity need to be repealed or radically amended if the most blatant and corrupt abuse of power is to be curbed.

There are other issues on which the UPA needs to listen to protesters rather than using its majority in parliament to ram through policies that are not only unpopular but also violate fundamental rights. The programme to provide biometric identity numbers to all residents and the nuclear power programme come to mind. The former is being pushed through without a proper debate and in the face of powerful arguments against it. And with wind and solar energy already cheaper than nuclear power and rapidly getting cheaper, the argument for nuclear power, which is hazardous, expensive, and will leave a deadly legacy of nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years, is extremely questionable. These policies reek of corruption, because they benefit a tiny elite while the rest of the population pays the price, either as taxpayers or because their human rights are violated. Unless they are put on hold while an informed, transparent public debate on their pros and cons takes place, the UPA is likely to suffer in the next elections.
More generally, the disease of untrammelled power, of which corruption is merely a symptom, needs to be tackled. If bureaucrats have the power to formulate or interpret legislation in a manner that deprives people of their rights or entitlements, then it is their power that must be curbed, not just the bribes they take from desperate people who have no other way of obtaining those rights or entitlements. If police have the power to torture innocents and threaten to kill them unless they confess to crimes they have not committed, then it is their power that must be curbed, not just the fact that they routinely use it to extort bribes. Responding to social movements by enacting legislation and carrying out measures that empower ordinary working people would be one way of tackling corruption at its roots; a massive increase in transparency, which is already mandated by the RTI Act, would be another.

The Left – both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary – also has an important role to play. Most sections of the Left in India have little or no understanding of fascism; they do not seem to know, for example, that fascism is a mass movement before it seizes power. These sections are so intent on training their guns on the centre that they are often oblivious of the fact that they are doing it in a manner that strengthens the extreme Right. They have yet to develop the political skill of being critical of the government when it violates human rights or colludes in corruption, without providing support to Right-wing forces engaged in subverting democracy.

Postscript

If the IAC and the Sangh Parivar won the first round of this struggle, the second round was won by the legal experts, Left intellectuals and social justice activists who stayed out of the campaign and criticised both the government’s Lokpal Bill and the JLB. The third round has now been launched by Team Anna. In their press conference on September 11, there was no mention of Modi’s attempt to appoint a Lokayukta in Gujarat in violation of the core principles of the JLB, no mention of the murder of RTI activist Shehla Masood in Bharatiya-Janata-Party-ruled Madhya Pradesh; but Anna did promise to campaign in forthcoming elections against candidates who oppose the JLB.²⁶ In a subsequent interview, he said that he would not be campaigning for any party, and suggested that Advani should ensure that all BJP Chief Ministers appoint Lokayuktas before starting his yatra. However, given that the BJP has pledged support to the JLB, it has already gained from Anna’s campaign and would undoubtedly gain more in future. It remains to be seen who will win the third round.

1. Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘At the risk of heresy: why I am not celebrating with Anna Hazare,’ Kafila, 9 April 2011.
2. Iftikar Gilani, ‘Is RSS running the Anna show?’ Tehelka, 18 August 2011.
3. Mukul Sharma, ‘The making of an authority: Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi,’ Kafila, 14 April 2011.
4. ‘Corrupt MPs should be hanged till death: Anna Hazare,’ News X.
5. ‘Mallika Sarabai’s letter of warning to Anna Hazare,’ NDTV, 14 April 2011.
6. Bhanwar Megwanshi, ‘India: The communal character of Anna Hazare’s movement,’ South Asia Citizens Web, 5 September 2011.
7. ‘Advani plans Rath Yatra against corruption,’ Zeenews, 8 September 2011.
8. ‘Why did Modi prefer Justice (retd) J R Vora for Lokayukta post?’ TwoCircles.net, 5 September 2011.
9. Bhanwar Megwanshi, ‘This is why Team Anna makes me nervous,’ Tehelka, 1 September 2011.
10. ‘Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde withdraws resignation,’ NDTV, 4 July 2010.
11. Imran Khan, ‘The Art of Living Illegally’, Tehelka, 10 September 2011.
12. ‘Novartis and Bayer appeals to be heard by the Supreme Court in the next 30 days’, Spicy IP, 5 July 2010.
13. Reghu Balakrishnan, ‘Novartis changes tack in patent law challenge’, DNA, 5 March 2007.
14. ‘Nelson Fernandes vs Jindal Aluminium Limited’, Human Rights Law Network.
15. ‘Hazare’s Lokpal Campaign cost over Rs 50 Lakh, Jindal Aluminium contributed 20 Lakh.’
16. Anil Dharkar, ‘The Topiwala Camera,’ Outlook India, 5 September 2011.
17. ‘NTUI statement on the fight against corruption’, 24 August 2011.
18. ‘Collective and concurrent Lokpal anti-corruption and grievance redressal measures.’
19. ‘Team Anna seeks referendum on Lokpal Bill’, CNN-IBN, 8 June 2011.
20. Seema Chishti, ‘Why the Ramlila surge worries minorities and those on margins,’ Jantantra, 14 September 2011.
21. Jay Mazoomdaar, ‘Everybody loves a good protest’, OPEN Magazine, 14 September 2011.
22. A.Selvaraj, ‘Student drowns after campus gang chases him into river’, Times of India, 31 August 2011.
23. Shekhar Gupta, ‘Annationalism’, Indian Express, 3 September 2011.
24. Anurag Modi, ‘Metro-Middle class, NGO and media: Trio at the crossroads’, Countercurrents, 22 August 2011.
25. ‘Norwegian mass killer Breivik’s manifesto hails Hindutva’, sify news,26 July 2011.
26. ‘Hazare asks people not to elect MPs who oppose Jan Lokpal Bill’, IBNLive, 11 September 2011.

Captain America offers spectator-consumers the chance to yet again sit back and be taken for a phantasmagorical ride. The new Hollywood film is another forces of good versus the forces of evil production, where the goodest good guy is a white superhero whose scrawny body is technologically transformed into the perfect muscular male. Moral, good, manly, just, brave, caring, altruistic — all in a physical package that buckles women at the knees. He might as well be God.

Is there anything realistic about the film? Is it the American propaganda tool that the Russia media venue Russia Today (RT) has portrayed it as? Look at the comments that follow this short RT Captain America video and you see that people question Russia Today‘s motives — rejecting it as a flagrant example of ugly Americana.

Here’s one example. “Can’t anyone just enjoy a movie?” said a guy, DaveSquibbSr, who seems to display some rather hysterical patriotic fervor about how the mass media lies to the people and falsely demonizes private enterprise.

Another example: “Dear RT News: Fuck You. By the way, Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now are without a doubt anti-war movies. And the others mentioned contain anti-war messages too,” wrote Austionous, who lists his favorite video as Glen Beck’s patriotic cheer-lead The Real Story: Iraq.

The real story is that the Pentagon’s military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan — never mind Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Rwanda or any of the other sites of U.S. covert operations — has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1,228,000,000,000 since 2001, and the ticker is ticking, and the United States economy and all social services are in collapse. The real story is that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi people and at least 4000 US troops have died, with scores of thousands of U.S. veterans wounded and traumatized. Remember Iraq war veteran Timothy McVeigh?

But here’s the best RT Captain America comment of all, replete with the threat of violence that differs little from the threat of violence advanced by Norwegian freedom fighter Anders Behring Brievik — label and segregate, kill the multiculturalists amongst us, and purify Europe by forcibly repatriating all Moslems.

“Anyone who points at Hollywood and accuses them of doing anything other than making entertaining movies for profit,” says acircleoflight, “needs a tattoo on their forehead that says, ‘I’m too stupid to understand fiction’. And then when we have all these people properly labelled, kill them and send their meat to a starving country. Nothing that comes out of Hollywood is nonfiction. Movies based on ‘real events’ or ‘based on a true story’ are still Fiction. Its never actually what happened.” This guy or gal self-identifies as a ‘pagan’ whose “spirituality is based in logic and reason.”

And that’s a death threat against, well, against your humble correspondent. Alas, I’ll have to go into hiding now, hunker down and secure my own little heavily armed fortress in preparation for the Christian crusaders, soon to come my way, as this story gains readership.

Hmmm. I wonder if that’s what Moslem immigrants or Rwandan Hutu refugees feel like? I mean, the mass media, governments, and plenty of the common people hold these awe-fully biased and ugly stereotypes about Moslems, you know, towel-headed camel jockeys and all that, and about people of color (niggers, spicks, chinks, gooks), more generally, and every Rwandan Hutu is considered a genocidal machete-wielding savage. How did these stereotypes and mythologies of persecution become so deeply seated in the mass psychology?

What is it about multiculturalism that people find so scary? The idea that we should share? Do unto others as we want others to do unto us?

Anti-Islamic fervor is whipped up by governments, corporations and individuals to provide an excuse for state terror and rationale for weapons proliferation. Such fervor is alive and thriving in the white power economies of the U.S., Canada, England, Italy, Japan (though this is changing), and, well, Norway. When stories about the twin Oslo attacks first broke, the mass media immediately launched into their private inquisition about Islamic jihadists, grounded in nothing but speculation and fear-mongering. Russia Today was no different and just as bad as the British and U.S. press.

Your correspondent, a bit too quick to speak (several friends were quite correct about this) but also caught off guard, was stupid enough to get caught up in it, and missed the chance to say, “Hey, wait, it’s a blond-haired blue-eye white man who looks more like the Viking comic book superhero THOR… This is no Osama bin Laden recruit, so please kick your Islamophobia, and stop perpetuating war against innocent people…”

Too Stupid to Understand Fiction

It seems that Norway’s self-proclaimed savior decided to launch his own personal revolution, hoping to inspire Christian Holy War against non-white immigrants who are, in somebody’s mind, soiling the blood of virile white men and defiling their (the white man’s) virgin white women. This sounds like a Neo-Nazi screed about Aryan blood purity. In fact, he has been labelled a Nazi, and saddled with all kinds of other labels, which people and organizations — who seem to have a lot in common with Breivik — have used to distance themselves from him.

Did Breivik act alone? Did he independently flee the proverbially chicken coop of Norwegian normality and privately hatch his personal ideology and revolutionary intent? Christian purity, dirty Arabs, the imminent destruction of Israel? I don’t think so. I think there are other cells, and plenty of them, or movements, and militias, spread over Europe and North America, who are quite pleased with Breivik’s as-yet simmering revolution.

I think Breivik knows perfectly well that his ideas are embraced, and that’s what gave him the sense of entitlement to do what he did. He expects to see Europe “burn”. They are also shared by plenty of North Americans. In fact, the celebrated American Islamophobe Robert Spencer was cited 64 times in Breivik’s ‘Manifesto’. Spencer co-founded the hate group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Jihad Watch. The latter was funded (2003) by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Center for the Popular Study of Culture), a “conservative” group that set out to influence Hollywood and spread their ideas about freedom.

“Some of the ideas [Breivik] expressed are good, barring the violence.
Some of them are great,” Italian official Mario Borghezio reportedly told British press. Borghezio is a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. How does a guy like that defend civil liberties? It brings a whole new meaning to the words. “Christians ought not to be animals to be sacrificed,” he said. “We have to defend them.”

The xenophobic hatred of non-white people is written all over the walls of Fortress Europe and Fortress America and Fortress Canada and Fortress Israel. Who could miss it? Kill the Moslems. Kill the Libyans. Kill the Somalis. Kill the Yemenis. Kill the Iraqis and the Afghans and the Iranians. And kill every last Rwandan Hutu — the fact that they are Christian doesn’t matter, since their spirituality was void and null after they, according to the standard mythology, chopped off their own sisters’ heads. Kill the Palestinians. To justify, to win popular support, the same people who advance these racist sentiments, and generally the ones who take action on them, are the ones who secretly produce and secretly disseminate much of the supposed ‘hate’ propaganda (Kill the Christians, Kill the Americans, Kill the Jews) that is directed at their own ethnic demographic (Christians, Americans, Jews).

Hollywood plays a huge role. Films like Captain America… well, tattoo my forehead “I’m too stupid to understand fiction.”

Kill the Arabs in Sudan — another rallying cry — and arrest Omar Al-Bashir, the Arab Islamic president of Sudan: He’s committing genocide says the powerful Jewish ‘Save Darfur’ lobby, and he’s enslaving good Christians the Christians redouble. Hollywood actors and the mass media say so, it must be true. This rhetoric spews forth from think tanks and universities and ‘human rights’ agencies and from the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Empire operates in a curious manner. Take Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts, where English professors like Dr. Eric Reeves sit in their quaint offices, surrounded by Shakespeare and Milton (and by eugenics professors like Seymour Itzkoff), worshipped by starry-eyed bleeding heart liberal elite women, and they hatch political screeds on genocide informed by intelligence operatives — you know, Central Intelligence Agency types — who are fomenting the Pentagon-backed guerrilla insurgencies on the ground in those far off places like Sudan.

Harvard University’s Samantha Power has confirmed that this is our problem from hell: America has entered the age of genocide. Of course, we don’t have anything to do with it, and poor Lady Liberty has to drag her allies with her, kicking and screaming, and stepping on the tails of her gown dragged through the mud on the rocky road to freedom. Of course, we sell ‘em the humvees, missiles, tanks and fighter-bombers to get there.

The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists

What’s a guy gotta do to get a little recognition in the world? It was only a few days after his shooting spree in Oslo and the former nobody Anders Behring Breivik already had a huge Wikipedia entry with 164 references — and it’s expanding by the day. Obviously, he didn’t create it. Is this capitalism? Or education? No one has created a page for me. Not a single word!

I mean, Rwandan government agents like Tom Ndahiro, who spin the lies for President Paul Kagame, have labeled me a “notorious Tutsi genocide denier” and such praise for my work is not restricted to Rwandans. Canadian academic Dr. Gerald Caplan, who is often seen at the side of dictator Paul Kagame, has published articles deriding me and the other “genocide deniers who drink the each other’s putrid bath water.” (Seems Caplan forgot to have his work peer-reviewed: its rather hysterical.) Meles Zenawi, the dictator in Ethiopia was a bit nonplussed by my exposure of genocide there. You’d think someone would create a Wikipedia page for me.

What’s wrong with this picture? Do I have to become an elite warrior of the Christian Knights Templar? Embrace Zionism? Steal a few million diamonds from Congo and get away with it? Plagiarize the Unibomber’s manifesto and then re-enact the Crusades by massacring a bunch of kids at summer camp? Or should I dress as a soldier and have my picture taken like King Leopold II? Leopold is still celebrated in Belgium, his crimes covered up. Is this the future historical situation of Mr. Breivik — our modern day THOR?

“The recent killings in Norway were horrific,” said British rock star Steven Morrissey (former Smiths singer). “As usual in such cases, the media give the killer exactly what he wants: worldwide fame. We aren’t told the names of the people who were killed — almost as if they are not considered to be important enough, yet the media frenzy to turn the killer into a Jack The Ripper star is… repulsive. He should be un-named, not photographed, and quietly led away.”

Does the coverage around this one Norwegian guy at all remind anyone of a guy named O.J. Simpson? Like the twin World Trade towers demolitions in New York City on September 11, 2001, did the twin Breivik attacks provide the corporate media system with the perfect topic to whip up hysteria and manufacture mass distraction? The media is now turning over every rock they can find in the hunt for clues to Breivik’s madness. Imagine if they investigated the crimes of the big mining or military or pharmaceutical corporations, or the kickbacks to government officials?

Breivik’s most favorite movie was the vaingloriousy bloody Roman war flick Gladiator. No. 2 was 300, an American comic fantasy action thriller marketed by Warner Brothers. No. 3 was independent film Dogville, with Hollywood stars James Caan, John Hurt, Lauren Bacall and, especially, Nicole Kidman — who has the townspeople killed for sexually and emotionally abusing her.

Dogville is under attack. Danish director Lars Von Trier, a self-proclaimed Nazi, stated that he’s “sorry for having made it” [the film] whose machine-gun massacre at the end might have inspired Breivik’s armed assault on the little Norwegian island Utoya. While advocates of Nazism might want to look at themselves in psychotherapy, at the very least, the film Dogville is a harsh critique on American ‘society’ and there is absolutely no reason for Von Trier to apologize for making it. Why is an independent filmmaker bullied and shamed into apology? Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino applauded Dogville; does that make Tarantino culpable in mass murder? Why isn’t director George Lucas under attack for making Star Wars now that killer robotic drone technologies are deployed against innocent people all over the world?

Why isn’t Steven Spielberg under attack — if not arrested — for his alliance with the Pentagon in the war production Saving Private Ryan, for which he was awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Service by Secretary of Defense William Cohen at the Pentagon? The award honored Spielberg for making “a historic contribution to the national consciousness.” Stephen Speilberg also has the unprecedented distinction of producing mass hysteria about sharks through the one film — Jaws — responsible for demonizing sharks as ruthless killers and, in large part, for the ongoing decimation of shark species and the uncertain fate of our oceans. What kind of national consciousness does such cinematography contribute to? How is Cohen’s ‘national consciousness’ any different from the disease of nationalism?

William Cohen was Secretary of War under President William Jefferson Clinton at the height of the U.S. invasion of Central Africa. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair. Cohen has been involved at the deepest levels of secrecy and denial in, for example, intelligence, torture, and special operations.

Saving Private Ryan provokes deep psychological sentiments and emotions based in the standard constructions and discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy and freedom. “Ryan, I must be quick to point out,” Secretary of War Cohen disingenuously declared, “is not a recruitment promotional for the Pentagon. It speaks to us, however, about the importance of values, discipline, determination and sacrifice.”

Who is “US”? It doesn’t speak to me that way. It speaks to me of war, blood, private profits and deceptions that have ripped apart millions and millions of people’s lives, and for no good reason, and that have exterminated entire nations of people. How are Cohen’s important characteristics — values, discipline, determination and sacrifice — different from the patriotism and nationalism that the Pentagon uses to conscript and recruit young people to do its dirty work? Under the Nazi regime, all music had to ‘fit’ within certain standards defined as ‘good’ German music — and censorship was ruthless. How does that differ from the Pentagon’s approval or or rejection of films?

Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen escorts Steven Spielberg through a military honor cordon into the Pentagon (1999).

The Pentagon routinely influences the scripts and the direction of Hollywood films. Plot-lines have been changed, history altered, and scripts modified to meet the Pentagon’s approval. If the Pentagon doesn’t like the direction, plot, themes or characters of pre-production films they won’t support them, and don’t.

In keeping with the privatization of war, the Pentagon’s interests are often served by civilian firms packed with ex-military who maintain tight ties to the war room. Professional soldiers with long service records in covert and psychological operations — Navy Seals or 10th Mountain Division Rangers or Green Berets — are often hired as consultants to enhance war films.This way, the Pentagon and U.S. officials can ‘plausibly deny’ involvement in a film’s direction or production — but the links, ideologies, patriotism and emotional hooks all satisfy the ideals of the American fighting machine.

Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine who earned three purple hearts in Vietnam, has worked in Hollywood as an actor, producer, writer, and consultant, with major credits for Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. “We are fighting Islamo-fascists who will not tolerate the existence of non-Muslims — infidels — on this earth,” Dye said in a Los Angeles Times article. “These are folks who are told they cannot rest until every infidel is driven from this earth…. They aren’t people you can negotiate with.”

Dye’s consulting company is Warriors, Inc., but he works three days a week to influence mass media reportage on wars the U.S. is involved in. He is a frequent ‘independent expert’ cited in corporate media stories. Dye worked as a reporter for Soldier of Fortune magazine, and he has run his own radio program. Dye’s record in Vietnam raises questions about his involvement in illegal operations like the Phoenix Program. Later, during the Reagan administration’s terrorist covert guerrilla wars Latin America, Dye worked “reporting and training troops in guerrilla warfare techniques” in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Reagan projects in Latin America were meant to subvert democracy, institute dictatorship and further U.S. corporate interests; hundreds of thousands of people died from massacres, beheadings, dismemberment and disappearing.

Who says violence in cinematography has no connection to the real world? In Captain America we find some fascinating themes that should inspire anyone to question the motives of the corporate enterprises and the star-studded casts — Hollywood, the Pentagon, Viacom, Paramount, Walt Disney, Marvel Entertainment — that bring such phantasmagorical extravaganzas to the public’s pleasure.

Isn’t Empire the main theme of Captain America? Military superiority in a we-are-the-forces-of-good-they-are-the-forces-of-evil narrative that never threatens our sensibilities or ever makes us squirm in our fifteen-dollars-a-shot-plus-popcorn-and-soda seats? Is the film aimed at indoctrination for war and the manufacture of consent for our participation in elite military imperatives premised on private profit and power?

What about Hollywood’s presentation of ideas about the manipulation of the human body achieved by modern science through genetic engineering, pharmaceutical products, (breast implants, plastic surgery, liposuction), hormones and steroids? Are there any references to these scientific advancements?

What about the theme of patriarchal male domination and the ideologies of the sexual control of women and male supremacy? Come on, can’t anyone just sit and watch a movie?

Not Just a Soldier, a Good Man

“We’re gonna make a new breed of super-soldier,” one of the military grunts proclaims. “Stay the way you are,” the slightly mad scientist with the German accent tells the scrawny un-superized-soldier, prior to his physical transformation to glossy super-chested hero. “Not just a soldier, but a good man.”

A good man. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” the as-yet-unsuperized hero says. Could be anybody from America. The mythology is that any one of us can rise to great heights if we set our minds on it. Isn’t this the great American dream?

The soldier is a good man. The goodness projected by our Captain America savior translates directly to the commonly held belief in the goodness of the average U.S. soldier who, of course, is spreading truth and democracy around the world. This is not a guy who tortures or massacres innocent people, he is a very principled and very ethical hero — like the great white American savior Jake Sully in the blockbuster 3-D emotional sensation Avatar. The projected image of the good soldier in these films maps directly onto U.S. forces deployed at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, or the heroes “defending American values” in Afghanistan through Operation Enduring Freedom. America’s soldiers are not unprincipled killers — the kind of sociopath that some people are portraying Anders Behring Breivik out to be — they are good men. Right?

Of course, Hollywood has its way with reality. Camp Lemonier is a Pentagon outpost for so-called ‘snatch-and-grab’ terrorist operations run by covert forces, in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, with secret CIA torture centers. These illegal operations and covert guerrilla wars involve violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The U.S. backs bloody dictatorships and nasty warlords all across the region. Such facts are obscured by Hollywood and its propaganda films, aren’t they?

Survivors of U.S.-backed state-sponsored genocide in Ethiopia; the government of Meles Zenawi is committing massive atrocities against numerous indigenous tribes. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

We Take the Brain

The new Captain America film is packed with action adventures and high technology war weapons. Consider the film’s presentation of the secret weapons of the HYDRA — the Nazi deep science division presented as the ominous evil enemy. It sure looks a lot like the Pentagon’s billion dollar boondoggle the Northrup-Grumman Corporation B-2 bomber. Coincidence?

Well, in the film this stealth bomber has a different name altogether, and its not our name for the thing, its the Nazi’s name for it. Like the choice of the language that the Allied scientist speaks with — a decisively Germanic accent — the choice of the stealthy ‘flying wing’ resembling the Pentagon’s B-2 bomber is no coincidence, but an intentional choice based in the hidden history of allied war crimes of WW-II.

Modern aerospace programs and technologies had their genesis in the secret aerospace programs of the Nazi-American war machine. On April 12, 1945, having crushed the last bastion of Nazi military resistance, U.S. forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower secured Thuringia, the heart of the Nazi secret weapons research and development programs in Germany. Eisenhower led the charge to transfer superior and futuristic Nazi weapons technologies to the United States before the weapons facilities were turned over to the allied invading Soviet army on July 4, 1945. The Soviets, of course, drew the iron curtain over Thuringia and Eastern Germany for the next 43 years (until 1989).

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the removal of futuristic aerospace ‘assets’, including the Fi 103 ‘flying bomb’ (propaganda name ‘V1′), the A4 rocket (‘V2′), and the world’s first deployable jet turbine aircraft, the Messerschmidt Me 262 (which as a fighter could attain speeds of over 800 km/h). At least five Me 262 planes were assembled under the direction of U.S. forces in control of the Messerschmidt Me 262 production factory from April to July 1945.

The biggest and most secretive catch was an intact prototype of an all-wing, single engine, single-seater jet plane, type named the Horten Ho IX or Go 229 V-3. The futuristic Northrup-Grumman Corporation ‘stealth’ bomber — the flying wing — unveiled in the United States (circa 1989) bears a striking similarity to the Nazi Go 229 V3. It is widely unknown that at least one complete Go 229 V-3 plane and a large number of finished parts of the prototype fell into U.S. hands and disappeared into supra-governmental ‘black’ programs in the secret weapons complex post WW-II.

Who ran this weapons complex? John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1952-1959. Allen Dulles ran the Central Intelligence Agency, until recently known as the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.). The Dulles brothers had ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930′s and into the war. Most interesting was the Sullivan and Cromwell — Dulles brothers’ law firm to a guy with a mustache named Adolf — one of their clients. So began the post WW-II era in secrecy and denial, the Cult of the Atom, and the mythology of the comic strip superhero, Captain America.

“While watching the trailer for this movie I spotted a number of what-if planes and tanks,” posted a guy named ‘Nick” on a specialized military technology Internet forum. “The main one is a giant Nazi flying wing bomber that looks like an overgrown Ho-229 [sic] and it was being chased by what looks like an XP-55 Ascender. There were also some Nazi armoured cars that looked rather slick and streamlined, only on screen for a few seconds so not too sure. This should be a fun summer movie to switch off the brain and enjoy!”

Allied intelligence ascertained well in advance the locations of the supreme Nazi weapons facilities, including the exact factories and their production capabilities but the Allied bombing campaign did not target the weapons complex. For example, while bombs fell in an ostensible attack on the V2 rocket production facilities near Nordhausen on April 3, 1945, the V2 centers were entirely spared: some 8,800 civilians instead died when the bombs hit the town. There was no military significance to these killings, merely eight days before the American troops arrived. This is yet another example of U.S. government war crimes that went unchallenged.

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the exfiltration of over 2000 Nazi scientists — experts in biological warfare, rocketry, munitions, intelligence and psychological operations (torture and propaganda) — to U.S. military and intelligence bases, mostly, but not exclusively, in the continental United States. This mass and secretive recruitment and exfiltration occurred under highly classified programs of the O.S.S. — and continued under its later incarnation, the Central Intelligence Agency. These O.S.S./CIA programs were called Project Paperclip and Project 63. Through the defense and intelligence establishment’s then “Operation Sunshine,” Nazis belonging to the elite ‘Gehlen Org’ — named for Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen — were exfiltrated into the CIA.

The U.S. Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) was set up early in WW-II and tasked with collecting scientific data on the level of research attained by the Germans in select technical fields and weapons — primarily, at first, concerned with the atom bomb. Some 3000 researchers and engineers wearing U.S. Army and Air Force uniforms were attached to General Patton’s Third Army solely for this purpose, and they converged en masse on the Nazi secret underground weapons complex in Thuringia after the Allied invasion.

Their slogan was: “We take the brain.”

Taranis, an unmanned combat aircraft prototype unveiled in Britain in 2010.

Taranis, designed and manufactured by Northrop Grumman with assistance from Boeing, the B-2 ‘Spirit’ bomber aircraft each averaged US$737 million in 1997 dollars ($1.01 billion today). Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft ($1.27 billion today), while the total program cost (development, engineering, testing) averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997 dollars ($2.87 billion today). In 2010, Britain’s scandal-ridden BAE Systems unveiled a new unmanned stealth bomber prototype of its own, Taranis, funded by the people of Britain to the tune of 143 million pounds.

The B-2 has been deployed in Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and in the recent illegal war against Libya, yet Hollywood films glamorize weapons of mass destruction, and they inspire young people to want to operate them, no matter the moral or ethical questions, which are never asked. Raining bombs down from the sky is as immoral as sitting in a remote office somewhere far from the actual war theatre pulling some joystick which rains UAV-deployed weaponry down on innocent men, women and children. Pakistan offers an egregious example which has only slightly scratched the surface of the impenetrable western mass media propaganda system.

The film Top Gun offers the premier example of western technological war propaganda and nationalism, completely stripped of all moral and ethical conundrums cast as another contest of good (US) versus evil (them). Captain America (Tom Cruise), to the rescue. Of course, he always gets his girl. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.

The Brain Drain

The military-entertainment complex comprises a lot more than the sleek propaganda and psychological mind-melts plastered across the big screen in such films. Often there are direct ties between current or past Pentagon or intelligence officials. For example, Captain America is a Paramount Films, Viacom Industries, Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Corp. production (the exact relations between these industrial giants are opaque and fluid).

One Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer director for some 19 years, who  directed the interests of the corporation, was former U.S. General Alexander Haig — the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army (1973), White House chief of staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford (1973-74), Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces (1974-79), and secretary of state under President Reagan (1981-82). While serving MGM, Haig was also a director of the multinational defense contractor United Technologies International (UTI), the parent company of Sikorsky Helicopters, the maker of the Blackhawk choppers of the Pentagon’s Somalia propaganda film Black Hawk Down.

Other highly leveraged corporate ties proliferate. For one example, one of the directors of aerospace and defense giant GE Company, Barbara Scott Preiskel, is also a director of the Washington Post, and she is Senior Vice-President of the Motion Picture Associations of America, New York, NY. You see the Motion Pictures of America cited on every pre-preview trailer. For another example, consider that Lucille S. Salhany sits on the Hewlett Packard board of directors with Philip M. Condit, Chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company, and that Lucille S. Salhany was President of United Paramount Network (1994-1997); Chairman and Director of Fox Broadcasting (1993-1994); and Chairman of 20th Century Fox Television (1991-1993).

Directors of Viacom Corporation (the parent company of numerous other media entities) include media magnate Sumner Redstone, a 1944 Harvard University and 1947 Harvard Law School graduate who served in the “Military Intelligence Division” during World War II. ” While a student at Harvard, he was selected to join a special intelligence group whose mission was to break Japan’s high-level military and diplomatic codes. Mr. Redstone received, among other honors, two commendations from the Military Intelligence Division in recognition of his service, contribution and devotion to duty, and the Army Commendation Award. Mr. Redstone served in the Military Intelligence Division during World War II.”

Redstone’s 2010 annual compensation for Viacom was $35.3 million, while Viacom CEO received the largest annual compensation in America — $84.5 million — while Viacom’s No. 2 director received $64.7 million in 2010.

The U.S. government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, established soon after Pearl Harbor, had the dual mission of providing intelligence advice to the joint Chiefs of Staff and representing the United States in combined Military Intelligence matters with its British counterparts; they were also involved in interrogation operations (torture) against Japanese and German war prisoners. The Military Intelligence Division was also used to coordinate and implement various international ‘deception operations.’

The film Pearl Harbor only advanced nationalistic and patriotic sentiments meant to further indoctrinate and recruit warriors. Starring great white hope Ben Affleck, the 2001 production is rife with inaccuracies and devoid of any serious geopolitical context. The oversimplified plot was purely based on emotion and jingoisms. Even U.S. military historians agreed.

One of the great cover-ups of the World War II era was the U.S. government’s advance knowledge of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, it seems that U.S. taxpayers needed to be coaxed into another blood-drenched war that would claim the lives of so many aspiring Captain Americas.

But that was not the only big World War II whitewash that Hollywood has massaged for the Pentagon and its corporate allies. While the blockbuster film Schindler’s List also helped recast the hidden history of World War II, it serves other propaganda purposes — favorable to capitalism and the elites who benefit most from it.

Schindler’s List fits neatly into the narratives about the Holocaust that have become industries unto themselves. Remember the wealth that ghetto refugees carried along with them in the film? Diamonds, easily concealed: the state of Israel was born out of the blood diamonds plundered from the Congo (Africa). While the suffering of the Jews in Europe was very real, it is their ‘victim’ status that has been used and abused to shield them against all charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide being perpetrated by Israeli interests in the Congo, Angola, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana — its a long list — and the Palestinian territories. (Of course, the same ‘victim’ status has been used, falsely, by the elite Tutsi dictatorship ruling Rwanda today.) But Jewish film director Stephen Spielberg has played a major role in creating war propaganda that suits his personal preferences and private interests in real life. Exemplifying his deep anti-Arab sentimentality, Spielberg was boycotted by the Arab League for having secretly donated $1,000,000 to Israel in 2006 during the second War on Lebanon.

The ‘good versus evil’ dichotomy is often used to inculcate emotionally seated ideas about patriotism and nationalism, and to indoctrinate subjects and citizens, and this dichotomy was profoundly advanced by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals and the post-WW II Cold War propaganda.  Nuremberg and the formation of the United Nations  were nothing more than sham dress rehearsals for the victor’s justice of the international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia (ICTY), Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International criminal Court. The fire-bombings of the city of Dresden and Nordhausan (Thuringia), and the atomic atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima all warranted investigation and prosecution for war crimes. Had the American and British and Belgian and French military officials and the monopoly capitalists that backed them been tried in an international court of law by a truly international League of Nations, the world would most likely be a far different place today.

Instead, the prevailing establishment narratives about genocide — born out of the Nazi Holocaust — set the stage for the evolution of deeply manipulative and hegemonic discourses that politicized the international human rights and war crimes arenas. These politicized doctrines have transformed all reasonable definitions and applications of international ‘humanitarian’ law into tools that the most powerful nations use against their ideological, political or economic enemies. Schindler’s List quite neatly fits into the political economy of genocide and the financial and political imperatives of the Holocaust industry, and it’s no surprise to find that corporate executives from Hollywood film enterprises — like Viacom director Sheri Redstone — and are deeply connected to powerful Jewish and Zionist organizations.

And the weapons procurements, productions, proliferation and profits continue to rise.

Norway is a key partner in the ongoing and illegal “War on Terror.” Norway provides a base station (on its home turf) for the U.S. Missile Defense program intelligence and reconnaissance gathering against Russia and its neighbors. Norway is the 14th largest arms importer in the world, and a major exporter, with the highest military expenditures per capita of any country in Europe.

In 2002, Norway sent 18 F-16 fighter-bombers to support the Pentagon’s illegal ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ and the illegal coalition attacks against Afghanistan. Norwegian Armed Forces are involved today in covert ‘counterterrorism’ [read: terrorism] operations with U.S. and British Special Forces in Afghanistan: between 2001 and 2010, Norway had sent over 6938 soldiers who participated in the illegal International Security and Assistance Forces (ISAF) occupation of Afghanistan.

Norway is also part of the international coalition that attacked Libya, in contravention of international law, on March 17, 2011. Norway has six General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets, and two Lockheed Martin C-130 J-30 tactical transport aircraft, operating against Libya from an air base in Crete. By April 26, 2011, Norwegian F-16s had dropped over 200 bombs on the people of Libya.

The people of Norway are not innocent spectators to the wars their government and troops and intelligence apparatus are involved in. The anti-Arab sentiments in the country are reflected by their global position vis-a-vis the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Israel — the predominant purveyors of Empire. The Norwegian government’s recent shift to stand up against Israel’s war crimes is certainly something to watch.

Imagineering War

In 1999, the University of Southern Califonia was awarded a $42 million grant by the U.S. Army to establish the Institute for Creative Technology (ICT). The ICT “was created to combine the assets of a major research university with the creative resources of Hollywood and the game industry to advance the state-of-the-art in training and simulation.” The ICT is an Army University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). The contract is managed by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s Simulation Training Technology Center (RDECOM STTC).

“At USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), high-tech tools and classic storytelling come together to pioneer new ways to teach and to train. Our goal is to create engaging and effective immersive experiences that shape the future of learning. With applications for leadership, and decision-making, ICT also seeks to redefine the range of skills these experiences can address.”

Sound pretty benign? Check out the page where this text appears and you will see that it revolves around U.S. military agendas. The graphics openly display soldiering and military hardware. One of the main thrusts of interactive simulations is war gaming, a billions of dollars a year industry.

The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has enlisted film studios and video game designers and it reflects the extensive overlap between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Officers from the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) sector of the DoD play an integral part in developing these simulations. ICT video games Full Spectrum Command and Full Spectrum Warrior use the Xbox and Sony Playstation platforms. Pac Man, Game Boy and DOOM were all used by the military as training simulation programs.

It is important to truly appreciate the subservient role that the mass media and entertainment industries play in further institutionalizing the American addiction to war and space. It is no anomaly that the Pentagon has sponsored hi-tech ‘brainstorming’ sessions with some of Hollywood’s most celebrated science fiction writers and producers. With a five-year, $45 million dollar contract with the U.S. Army, the Institute for Creative Technology in Marina del Rey (CA) has been tapping the creative genius of John Milius (co-writer: Apocalypse Now), David Ayer (writer: Training Day), Ron Cobb (creature designer for Star Wars films). Hollywood consultants are paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a day to dream up new high-tech military gizmos — coming to an Army near you.

It doesn’t take the brawn or brains [sic] of Captain America to figure out that this Pentagon research and development institute facilitates advanced robotic and simulation warfare systems. Drones. That is, robotic killing technologies such as Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) and a whole fleet of related warfare technologies.

Early in 2002, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld added over $1 billion to the fiscal 2003 defense budget request to develop certain Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) programs. The DOD invested more than $3 billion in UAV development, procurement and operations between 1996 and 2001; invested $2.3 billion more by 2005 and another $4.2 billion before 2009. According to the so-called UAV Roadmap produced several years ago, the UAV inventory of all the military services was expected to grow to 290 vehicles by 2010. How many are really out there now?

The deployment of drone technologies with bombing and strafing capabilities represents the most egregious American immorality and cowardice — the opposite of everything the Captain America supposedly stands for. There’s no courage involved in the war games environment where some G.I. Joe operates a joystick — hardly any different than masturbation — in some isolated control room far from the killing fields.

Contrary to the propaganda of assurance and accountability ever touted by the Obama administration, the drones are every day deployed to spy on, terrorize, strafe and bomb innocent civilians from Pakistan to Iraq to Darfur to the Mexican border of the U.S.

Farmers working in poppy fields in Balakh, Afghanistan. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

“Al Qaeda seeks to bleed us financially by drawing us into long, costly wars that also inflame anti-American sentiment,” John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s Office of Homeland Security counter-terrorism adviser. “Going forward, we will be mindful that if our nation is threatened, our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.”

America will pursue war “in the shadows” Brennan said, “relying heavily on missile strikes from unmanned aerial drones, raids by elite special operations troops, and quiet training of local forces to pursue terrorists… No civilians are ever hurt… And by that I mean, if there are terrorists who are within an area where there are women and children or others, you know, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger.”

“In the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision, of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop,” said good soldier John Brennan, lying through his teeth. According to a British investigative journalism agency, and countless witnesses on the ground, civilians are routinely killed by drones. Brennan is a veteran CIA operative with a distinguished career in deception and death for profit.

Never explained are the direct connections between drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the poppy (opium) growers who are not on the Central Intelligence Agency’s list of approved growers. The opium trade is used to fund covert operations all over the world — to back our Captain Americas in their pursuit of freedom and truth.

In 2005,  Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld appeared in a Pentagon press conference with Marvel superaction heroes Spiderman and Captain America. The purpose of the Pentagon photo op was to launch a new domestic war propaganda program aimed at active duty troops dubbed “America Supports You.”

Under Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, the Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle sector has grown exponentially, exceeding its own expectations, and the military roles, uses, launch platforms, control rooms and payloads of UAVs — like government expenditures on research, development and acquisition — are out of sight. In 2005, tactical and theater level unmanned aircraft alone, had flown over 100,000 flight hours in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States, Belgium, France, Germany and Israel are the leading producers of UAVs and related weaponry.

These are the Predators and other UAV drones being deployed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon to bomb and strafe “insurgents” in remote Afghan villages, to patrol and surveil national borders in Israel and Texas, and to “stop genocide” in places like Sudan, where NATO alliance forces — especially the US, Canada, Britain and Israel — are deeply involved in perpetrating war crimes.

For example, instead of offering anything close to the truth about Sudan, the military-entertainment complex’s “Save Darfur” (a province in Sudan) narrative has been based on flagrant propaganda channeled from the Pentagon and intelligence operatives in Sudan, and onto the western English-language press, through mouthpieces like National Security Council operative John Prendergast or the Holocaust Memorial Museum or Smith College English professor Eric Reeves. The ‘Save Darfur’ and ‘Never Again’ sloganeering advances by these propagandists relies accusations (e.g. Reeves) of a “genocidal war against African people’s” ostensibly being committed by President Omar Al-Bashir, whose government is under a Pentagon ‘regime change’ attack.

May the Force Be with You

Today’s battle-fighting environments — often cast in jungles, like Apocalypse Now or Rambo or the post-apocalyptic Mad Max genre films or Predator — are awash in weaponry and mythologized storylines that destroy the links between state-sponsored terrorism and domestic violence, between war propaganda and our complicity in war crimes, environmental destruction and terrorism. The ugly truth is that the ‘universal American soldier‘ is indoctrinated to kill, and to kill ruthlessly, and is not some aberration who went astray of the pack and lost his sense of ‘goodness’.

We see this lone aberration soldier gone awry in the Rambo films, and it is most starkly personified by Marlon Brando’s caricature of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. The film is packed with references to Central Africa, culminating in the bloody death where Kurtz (Brando) exclaims, “the Horror, the horror,” right out of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel on Belgian atrocities in the Congo, Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now is no anti-war film. Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is a Special Operations assassin with the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Captain Willard is sent up the Mekong River to deep territory to assassinate a rogue U.S. Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who has gone ‘native’. There’s that theme of rogue U.S. commando again. In fact, MACV-SOG was responsible for covert operations, and sometimes these actually were against U.S. military — but probably against officers and soldiers who opposed the illegal Pentagon or CIA operations and had become ‘liabilities’ that needed to be ‘neutralized’.

The MACV-SOG operations supplemented a ruthless CIA ‘counterinsurgency’ program called ‘Phoenix‘ — an instrument of terror, accountable to no one, a psyop gone mad — that cut like a scalpel deep into the hearts and minds and bodies of Vietnamese civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions and all reasonable codes of war. Tortures, assassinations, kidnappings, detention for years without trial or survival — ‘neutralizations’ of soldiers, fathers, mothers, supporters, innocent bystanders, friendly agents, entire families and entire villages, that occurred late at night after people went to bed. “Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.” And everything occurred behind the smiling faces and democratic assurances — standing up in front of the patriotic Western mass media for photo-ops — of intelligence and defense officials’ lies.

Hollywood cinematography introduced robotic technologies to the general public through the Hollywood Star Wars trilogies — everything from the 1970′s hit TV series The Six Million Dollar Man to the Schwarzennegger Terminator films. Thus we can say for certain where the language and public introduction of the new Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAV) technologies came from — language like ‘drones’, names like Predator and StrikeStar and DarkStar. These films habituated U.S. citizens to an increasingly militarized environment, the physical and social environments of every day life now characterized by rapid technological changes that are occurring at a rate far more accelerated than the rate of human adaptability, and beyond the capacity for any organized social protest.

These major Hollywood productions clearly facilitated the military objectives of “turning science fiction into fact” and it is in the context of the popularity of these films, and the hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to their production and proliferation, that we can situate the realities of the “death-and-destruction” technologies that were developed behind them. Indeed, the technologies did not appear overnight: the Hollywood Star Wars type films were the chronicles of death foretold. Drones, droids and other ‘futuristic’ robotic systems employed in war zones today include sophisticated gadetry like Robotic Vehicle Trainers and these, in turn, revolve around simulation and gaming technologies.

“The robotic vehicle trainer teaches Soldiers how to operate robots like the Talon, SWORDS and PackBot,” reads the US Army RDECOM Research Laboratory description, “using a virtual environment in the ‘America’s Army’ video game.” RDECOM is the U.S. Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command, another war-making agency that has a direct relationship to Hollywood.

Simulation centers create the means for remotely piloted killing machines to perpetrate atrocities (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide) on innocent civilian populations in places where the Pentagon seeks to limit soldier (human) casualties.

While the text explaining what the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is supposedly about makes laudable (I’m being very sarcastic) attempts to classify their activities as civilian — there is always some civilian benefit, like the peaceful atom and the medical uses of biological weapons — there is no attempt to cover up the fact that this “university research center” is highly militarized and serves the Pentagon’s war-making agenda: it is written all over the ICT web site.

For those traumas and casualties that do occur, the survivors can try to piece themselves — and their relations with their significant others — back together and lead semi-productive lives with the support of Bill Ford — one of the ICT’s trauma recovery simulation coaches. Retired Sergeant Major and Vietnam war veteran Bill Ford is a virtual human who is “based on the personality and experiences of real soldiers and marines.”

Remember that rush of emotion that overwhelmed your body when watching the 3-D simulation of the decimation of ‘Home Tree’ in Avatar?

Hollywood, in conjunction with academic and military research institutions, has honed in on subliminal psychology and ways to more deeply impact and influence human emotion. Avatar was no progressive film, but a deeply compromised narrative with all the same old stereotypes and ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy, and contrary to commonly held public beliefs, the film helps to inculcate deeply insidious messages that actually enhance the western imperial project of Empire.

That is, Avatar facilitates conquest, and resource plunder, it does not challenge it. It does not challenge the destruction of the earth, and it facilitates the ongoing genocides of indigenous peoples, everywhere. Like Captain America, already is, or King Kong, Avatar became an industry unto itself — complete with Na’vi action superheroes, books, costumes, T-shirts, and other materialistic paraphernalia peddled by Toys R’ Us and other garbage producers.

Enter scientists like Jonathan Gratch, a member of the ICT research and development team, whose research focuses on virtual humans and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision-making and physical behavior. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR and RDECOM. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and AFOSR is the Air Force Office of Scientific Research — two of many amongst the most secretive military-intelligence entities on earth.

ICT’s Associate Director Dr. Stacy Marsella has lead research efforts on a number of technologies, but his most recent work includes “modelling beliefs about others (Theory of Mind) plays in multi-agent based social simulation and the design of virtual humans, software-artefacts that look like, act like and can interact with humans within virtual environments.” Doctors Gratch and Marsella’s accomplishments include development and implementation of the Pentagon requisitioned MRE/SASO warfare systems: the “Mission Rehearsal Exercise” [play MRE Movie Clip] and the Stability and Support Operations [play SASO Movie Clip] training prototypes.

ICT Associate Director Dr. Albert Rizzo’s latest project “has focused on the translation of the graphic assets from the Xbox game, Full Spectrum Warrior, into an exposure therapy application for combat-related PTSD with Iraq War veterans.” ICT director Randall Hill graduated with a bachelor of science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point and subsequently served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for six years with assignments in field artillery and military intelligence before getting an advanced degrees in computer sciences (artificial intelligence).

No connection between Hollywood and the Pentagon?

The Marvel Universe

The Pentagon’s public web pages — for all these agencies — are awash in public relations, greenwashing (the Pentagon is the top global environmental polluter) and propaganda (read: perception management) whitewashing their true missions, agendas and record. Hollywood sets the stage by programming the minds of entertainment consumer-spectators.

While Hollywood continues to falsify the consciousness of consumer-spectators through the bombast of 3-D film extravaganzas like Captain America, the other forms of mass media — the information overload of “news” productions, advertising and military-corporate whitewashing — are sure to help finish the job.

Walt Disney Corporation purchased Marvel Entertainment in 2009. Hollywood’s Walt Disney productions are legendary, of course, with such animation films as The Lion King, Madagascar, and Pocahontas — each with its own subliminal themes dedicated to the indoctrination of youth in service to the entrenchment of capitalist interests (values, desires, associations) at a young age.

The indoctrination of children to serve the military-entertainment complex in its operational war theaters begins at an early age. It’s not just the films. Amongst the many commodities being mass marketed by Marvel Industries are a whole line of superhero action apparel for children. You can also get your superaction hero dolls and fleece blankets and T-shirts and underwear.

That’s right, for just $16.50 you can order your superaction hero pajama tops and shorts set on line today and tuck your tiny tot into bed in his Captain America pajamas for a restful night of superhero action associations — influencing the developmental character structure at a deeply subconscious level through dreams — which translate into early childhood indoctrination for weaponry, war and patriarchy. The Lion King, for example, has a deeply anti-immigration message, this crafted over and above the more obvious racial stereotypes and patriarchal themes of male power and dominance that serve the ongoing evisceration of resources from Africa, and the depopulation that attends these. Such animation shorts are filled with mythologizing themes and images that distort the spectator-consumer’s perceptions of reality, underscoring the supposed supremacy of the white societies (the light-skinned lions) and the supposed sociopathologies of people of color (the dark-skinned lion plotting with sniveling and drooling hyenas to leave the ‘spoiled’ badlands and take the good lands).

Never mind the elderly ape with walking stick being the closest thing to a human. While the Pentagon and multinational corporations are engaged in exercises to depopulate landscapes in Africa, we have co-existent and simultaneous the production and mass consumption of racialized animation imagery of The Lion King or Madagascar — and it’s not a whole lot different with Out of Africa either, it’s just different — that inculcates the white consciousness with the un-peopled Africa. This is yet another debasing projection of savagery and bestiality onto African people — and the blotting out of indigenous tribes of East Africa in favor of the mining and tourism interests of white western capitalism, backed by the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Along with these primary western agents of disinformation come the Pentagon’s ‘humanitarian’ entourage, Hollywood actorvists like George Clooney, Mia Farrow, and Don Cheadle, our Captain Americas for Sudan, and Ben Affleck, Angelina Jolie and now Emile Hersch, our Captains America for Congo. Hollywood films that disinform consumer-spectators and whitewash the historical and contemporary realities of western military and multinational corporate interventions in Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Congo are spread around the globe through the global cinema distribution complex. These films include The Devil Came on Horseback (Darfur, Sudan); Hotel Rwanda; Black Hawk Down; The Last King of Scotland; King Kong and Blood Diamond.

In the late fall of 2005, the Hollywood film King Kong opened to sellout crowds everywhere. The high-action cinematography and special effects combined with the racy recycled story of Beauty and the Beast to bring home a walloping fortune for everyone involved. Behind the film, however, is a dark forest of conservation organizations, primatologists and public relation firms peddling billions of dollars in so-called ‘conservation’ programs for Central Africa. Behind these conservation organizations, funding them, or working with them directly, are some very interesting corporate species. As you penetrate deeper and deeper into this jungle of surprises, the landscape gets curiouser and curiouser.

The King Kong industry and Kong paraphernalia was peddled at Starbucks and Burger King, but there’s a whole jungle of Kong-related products on sale out there. The King Kong media machine pumped articles into many print magazines, including WIRED, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Turner Broadcasting (CNN/TBS/TNT) ‘scooped up’ the rights for the television network premier of King Kong from owner-producers NBC/Universal and Universal Studios Home Entertainment peddled the King Kong DVD and King Kong computer games.

Remarkably, there are many real life parallels to the characters and events in the King Kong epic. Included in these are interests connected to Universal Studios. One interesting entity cashing in on the King Kong frenzy is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). Behind or partnered with them are a whole troop of multinational corporations whose interest in gorilla conservation appears to be a front for the control and exploitation of Banana Republics — Rwanda, the two Congos, Uganda, Central African Republic, Gabon.

One of these secretive firms, ESRI (Earth Sciences Research Institute), has worked in the defense sector for years, initially focused on supporting defense mapping organizations and advanced terrain analysis and other cartographic military necessities for military base development. “Now as a result of Congressional mandate,” said expert John Day in Military Geospatial Technology, “technology is being deployed into a wide range of warfighter, intelligence and base support programs; and ESRI is playing a leading role in that transformation.”

At the heart of the King Kong tale is the white damsel in distress. Like the Tarzan myth, the sassy white female makes the adventure, and her sexuality is the central draw. Ann Darrow (actress Naomi Watts) makes her Kong debut in a flimsy nightgown and she closes the film in an equally seductive dancing gown. The seductress captures the imagination of the viewers, adding a titillating energy of subliminal sexual desire, but her white femininity is situated in a subordinate role, and her sexual availability is advertised most clearly when the big beast pokes at her. For the spectator-consumer, the titillating advances provoke subliminal sexual emotions.

Like Tarzan‘s Jane, Kong‘s Ann Darrow offers a metaphor for the real life femme fatales of the primate conservation community involved in the imperial enterprise of ‘conservation’ in Africa. A central character is Dian Fossey, the primatologist whose pioneering research on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda led to her murder in 1985. Another is Sigourney Weaver, the Hollywood star who played Dian Fossey in the late 1980′s Hollywood film Gorillas in the Mist. And then there is Jane Goodall, the internationally renowned chimpanzee specialist. More recent femme fatales to enter the fray are Daryl Hannah and Madison Slate.

The buck doesn’t stop there. The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) has a base in an out-of-this-world place called Walikale, in South Kivu province, Congo. The JGI has been involved with militias and land theft, and is indirectly backing extortion, war crimes and genocide in Eastern Congo.

Of course, like the place itself (Walikale), such stories appear completely off the map of establishment media reality — an so they appear as crazy as the people of color, portrayed as drooling tribal zombies, in King Kong.

Black Hawk Down

“And ah, can someone explain to me how Hollywood was dishonest with Black Hawk Down?” said DaMarlboroMan3, commenting on RT’s Captain America video. “We were there to help people and they tried to kill us and we killed a lot of them to defend ourselves. Somalia has no resources we would want unless dust becomes the next big thing on wall street.”

And, ah, DaMarlboroMan3 watches too many Hollywood movies (or smokes too much). Black Hawk Down was an outrageous war propaganda production that completely falsified the story of western occupation and plunder of Somalia. Scandalous corporate entities like Save the Children, and the deceptive spin on the Pentagon’s war machine there, were chronicled in journalist Michael Maren’s expose The Road to Hell.

The early 1990′s crises in Somalia had its roots in the invasion of Western humanitarian aid organizations that occurred steadily as big money and big relief flooded into Somalia from 1981 onward. By the mid 1980′s the aid machine had crippled the local economy and Somalia could not feed its own people.

After a furious political scramble involving Royal/Dutch Shell, Agip and other petroleum vultures, all oil concessions were granted (1989) to Conoco, Chevron, Amoco (BP) and Philips Petroleum. The Pentagon’s Operation Restore Hope was never a “humanitarian” mission: that was the cover story.

U.S. forces killed scores of thousands of Somali people — and a few Captain America wannabees were dragged through the streets to ridicule our American arrogance. The Israeli-American-Ethiopian-Ugandan mission in Somalia today is far more nasty, involving U.S. Covert Ops in war crimes qualifying the US and Israel for the International criminal Court, and the western powers are equally culpable in the massive ongoing famine. So, oil in Darfur, covert operations in Somalia? This is the new, old, ‘humanitarian’ warfare in Africa and Hollywood covers it all up.

Like the representations of the females in Avatar, in the Indiana Jones series, in The Lion King Pocahontas and the many King Kong flicks, the typical Hollywood propaganda film casts females either in weak or subservient roles, or as lusty sex-craved female fatales out to eat every good man alive. In both cases the stereotypical females are overshadowed by dominant male roles, protectors and saviors of all that is good, out to rid the world of the scourge of evil.

The White Male Savior-Slaughterer

Sigourney Weaver appears in Avatar as an older woman scientist who can hardly trot for the scenes where she appears in human form, and so she is recast as a young, nubile, sexually attractive Na’vi avatar. Weaver can’t accomplish what she wants, nor can the other non-white minorities (Latino helicopter pilot), until their dominant white male Jake Sully comes along and saves the day. The crippled Jake Sully is portrayed as an impotent soldier who, like the Six Million Dollar Man, can be made whole again through the technological transformation to an avatar. But even as a paraplegic, Jake Sully retains his white male superhero savior status and all the privileges that come with it, and this status is enhanced and reconfigured — just as Captain America is physically reconfigured — when he embodies a Na’vi, the people his occupying imperialist other-worldly corporate-dominated (earth) society has come to conquer.

Many Hollywood propaganda films promote technological utopia: science and technology are presented as a religion we should all (continue to) worship. The scrawny weakling but omnipotent moral soldier in Captain America is marvelously transformed into a spectacle of masculinity. Not only is he smart, and moral, now he is the super athletic man. In Avatar, Jake Sully goes native with the help of the futuristic technologies of the conquerors (that would be you, me, US). Here is the glorification of science, and the real-time corporate influence (aligned with Hollywood) provides the impetus behind the higher ‘moral’ purpose to save and not bomb ‘Home tree’. Weaver’s scientist character facilitates this medico-pharmaceutical-academic narrative which, translated, means biopiracy and theft of indigenous people’s traditional knowledge, intellectual property, and ways of life. Sounds a lot like genocide, but the film does not leave ANYONE with any greater awareness of the actual genocides against indigenous people’s that are happening while we sit in the theater watching the film.

The story is only slightly different in District 9. The weaponry is futuristic, to the average spectator-consumer’s eye, but the Pentagon has already created weaponry which the general public is almost totally unaware of: directed energy weapons; advanced artificial intelligence systems; nanotechnology; biological weapons; and weather as a weapon. These things don’t just appear out of the blue. District 9 is another film with a deep, dark anti-immigration message, but now the ‘illegals’ and ‘refugees’  are actual aliens from elsewhere in the universe. I saw in District 9 a depiction of a present day state, South Africa, which had fallen from black control under the unseen hand of white corporate control in the near future,” says anthropologist Dr. Enoch Page. “That white control was exemplified in that film by a white male corporate executive who superficially seemed to be a racist bungling idiot, but in exercising his racism against the aliens he got infected with their genetic material and began to morph himself into the physical form of that oppressed alien population. As the man morphs into the other he is, of course, rejected by his own who deem him crazy or at least lost in battle. Consequently, he can only gain safe haven among the oppressed and begins to assist their liberation (but only with the thought of being healed so he can return to his white wife and white life). The total completion of his metamorphosis probably will be the basis for a sequel to that film. So we are seeing in recent films venues for projecting an imagined future in which the strategy of appropriating the physical form of the oppressed becomes the vehicle for a white male hero.”

District 9 builds tension in the spectator-consumer by playing on deep-seated psychological anxieties about bodily fluids and primordial origins of existence. This tension is mapped over all the standard racial stereotyping where the whites — the forces of good — are superior, civilized, educated and rational, and they (we) must protect them (our) selves. In contradistinction, the non-whites — the mixed up crazy forces of evil fighting amongst themselves — are disgustingly irrational, violent, drug-dealing crack-addicted savages (the African warlords in the films) out to get us, or disgustingly insect-like alien prawns, whose biological material is infectious and dangerous to our society, mimicking the Africa disease narratives about ebola and malaria and HIV/AIDS spreading to the uninfected global north. “It is important [to note] that we are seeing in both these films images of formerly colonized people of color who are aiding and abetting the white invasions as fellow Americans,” says Dr. Page. “In District 9 we never see them come to the aid of the aliens. Even the raunchiest Africans engaged in the lowest of trade and behavior racially despise the aliens, while at the same time seeking to gain parts of their bodies to enhance their own sexual and physical powers. In Avatar people of color are positioned more centrally in support of the hero and defect from the cause of the invasionary force along with him but not on their own.”

Avatar went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing more than US$2.730 billion ($2.8 billion adjusted for inflation) in box-office receipts worldwide. It should be no surprise to find out that Sam Worthington (Jake Sully) also stars in Call of Duty: Black Ops a first-person shooter video game released worldwide on November 9, 2010 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 consoles, with a separate version for Nintendo DS. Within 24 hours of going on sale, the game sold more than 7 million copies, 5.6 million in the U.S. and 1.4 million in the U.K.

Talking about immigration and plunder of resources and human trafficking, note that Marvel Entertainment director Morton Handel is also a director of American Uranium Mining and Trump Entertainment Resorts. The Trump casinos in Atlantic City exploit Mongolian students, lured into the United States through a U.S. State Department affiliated program, in hopes of experiencing the American Dream, and then forced to accept horrendous working conditions, to engage in survival sex, to be subject to rat infested living conditions and drug dealers and armed gangs. This is the trafficking and slavery side of the war on immigrants, refugees and people of color.

The film Blood Diamond also stars a muscular great white male (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a seductive white female (Jennifer Connelly) who assumes a subordinate role. Here the white savior warrior is again the savior of the other protagonist subordinates [1] first, the white female; [2] second, the African negro and freed diamond mine slave (Djimon Hounsou) who found the big diamond everybody is killed for.

Blood Diamond is packed with overt and covert racial codings that further entrench white superiority and the discourses that proclaim the need for white economic, political and military deployments to rescue/save Africa. “It’s my teekit to geet out of thees God-forsaken continent,” the white South African mercenary hero (DiCaprio) tells his soon-to-be-lover girl.

Blood Diamond appeared at precisely the same time as the diamond industry was whitewashing its bloody operations through the Harvard University-sponsored development of the Kimberley Process — another faux mechanism shielding the true agents of warfare and plunder in Africa through a hegemonic protection mechanism — conquerors policing themselves — that criminalizes anyone who cuts into the profits of the big diamond cartels.

Blood Diamond ends by informing the reader that the Kimberley Process has sorted it all out, when in reality it merely rinses the blood off the diamonds sold in western luxury boutiques. The happy Hollywood ending arrives when the freed slave succeeds in testifying at some faux international court — another euphemistic ‘United Nations’ reference — and the journalist chick (Connelly) gets her story. Both of the subordinate role (white female, freed negro slave) successes relied on the supreme white warrior savior muscle male (De Caprio) who, in the end, is presented as a reformed and moral man, a good man, a martyr.

The Captain America of the savage jungles — themes of darkness portrayed in such films as King Kong — is our Hollywood hero Tarzan, another white Marvel comic action hero of stellar repute, and a popular fixture around Hollywood since the 1950′s. Of course, every Tarzan has his seductive and easily seduced sidekick, Jane.

Tarzan and the Lion Man was set in the Ituri forest in Congo. “It has the makings of a good story,” the publisher wrote, on the book jacket of the 1934 Edgar Rice Burroughs classic. “A motion picture company in the wilds of Africa, two beautiful girls, ruthless Arabs [emphasis added], a half-maniacal scientist, a tribe of gorillas that he has taught to speak English, a coward who looks like Tarzan, and Tarzan himself.”

The whole Tarzan genre set the stage for the historical and ongoing conquest of Africa — led by the Central Intelligence Agency, the French and Belgian and Israeli (Mossad) secret service, the Pentagon and the French Foreign Legion, and the rapacious multinational corporations that have long been plundering and killing on the continent.

In this 2009 AFRICOM image screen-captured from a 'Operation Lightning Thunder' video, the Pentagon forgot to expunge the white pilot.

Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa

Hotel Rwanda covers up the United State’s invasion of Central Africa. From the very first words, where the image has yet to appear and the screen is completely black, the film Hotel Rwanda sets up viewers to think a certain way about what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Here is a story about good versus evil. An ominous African voice is heard, clearly the announcer on a radio program, and he is describing the Tutsis as ‘cockrrrRRROACHES.’ The voice is black and the cataclysm unfathomable, as anyone will tell you, and the black screen underscores the evil darkness of Africa. This voice of terror returns throughout the film to haunt the innocent Tutsi refugees, on screen, and the viewers gripping their seats.

The good guys are the Tutsis, the victims of genocide. They are not killers in the movie: they are never killers. At the end of the film, when a well-attired guerrilla force is shown — the “rebels” of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — they are rescuers. They are disciplined, organized. They keep a tidy United Nations camp safely behind their lines. They don’t kill Red Cross nurses, or orphaned children, in the film: they reconnect them to their families. They are good men — the forces of good fighting the forces of evil. The Hutus in the standard Rwanda genocide stories are always the bad guys, and they are all bad guys. Every Hutu is a genocidaire. These are Hollywood’s forces of evil.

“Speaking as an Englishman I am often appalled by the blatant propaganda that comes out of Fox News,” said randomsamno9, commenting on Russia Today’s Captain America video. “But on an equal level or perhaps even more so RT is pure propaganda… RT just spends all day bitching about the US rather than giving you actual news. Also ‘The Last King of Scotland‘ may have been a fictionalized account but that doesn’t change the fact that Amin was a real mass murderer rather than a fictional one.”

Oh really? Back in the late 1960′s the big imperialists were alarmed by Ugandan President Milton Obote’s socialist shift. Imagine the audacity of an African leader — who was supported by Israel — actually taking care of his people at the expense of foreign interests! In a new alliance with Sudan, Obote challenged the Israeli backing of southern Sudanese guerrillas from Uganda, armed by Israel to punish Sudan for backing Arabs in the Six-Day War (1967). Everywhere derided as a nasty dictator today, Obote was a truly great African leader who was saddled with false accusations of genocide and war crimes, these actually committed by his enemies.

Idi Amin Dada received training in Israel after Ugandan independence. As one of Obote’s generals, Amin maintained Israeli supply lines to the Sudanese rebels. Backed by Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli Defense attache, Amin’s army overthrew Obote in 1971 and restored relations with Israel (severed in 1967). In 1972 Israel refused Amin’s request for tanks, and so Amin expelled Israeli residents from Uganda, severed relations, and forged a pact with Libya. Well, we all know how Washington and the Israelis feel about Muammar Gaddafi — the supreme commander of the Islamic forces of evil, and so Israel and the west blockaded the Amin government, which overnight became a ‘dictatorship’ in western news reportage. Enter and the falsified narrative in Hollywood’s Last King of Scotland.

The real mass murderer is Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president for the past 25 years, but this is the Pentagon’s man. The Last King of Scotland deflects public attention away from the ongoing Acholi and other genocides committed by the Museveni dictatorship, and Museveni is far more bloodthirsty and ruthless than Idi Amin ever was. The early 2009 US-Israeli-Ugandan ‘Operation Lightning Thunder‘ was a massive military failure that led to thousands of civilian deaths in the border areas of South Sudan, northern Uganda and eastern Congo. But I am not even scratching the surface on the Museveni apparatus of terror in Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia or Congo. The prisons in Uganda are packed, the people starving, with high maternal death rates, after 25 years of “a model African success story”. All “development” aid to Uganda has been converted into weapons and war.

All of the documentary films about the Uganda/Sudan/Rwanda region — The Devil came on Horseback, Shake Hands with the Devil, Lost Boys of Sudan, Invisible Children — serve a one-sided and essentialized agenda: the advancement of Empire. Enter the Pentagon’s PR machinery — each year pumping thousands of “news” stories into the New York Times and Washington Post and National Public Radio — and the pictures of U.S. troops holding smiling African children orbuilding  schools in desert villages. Enter the great white actorvist hero Ben Affleck and the corporate sustained catastrophe in the Congo that his debonair Hollywood image and sleek Stars-and-Stripes privileges shield us from seeing.

Do western war superhero films like Captain America influence children? Exit the matrix, jump back to the most deadly conflict in the world: Congo. The western human rights nexus likes to shake its trigger-happy fingers at foreign armies, rogue militias and uncooperative governments, and the Pentagon and State Department, with the help of USAID, are quick to accuse them of everything and anything the US, NATO and Israel are also doing. Massacres, torture, mass rape, spreading land mines across the land, and, of course, child soldiers. Well, look at the image of the child soldiers below, a photo snapped by your soon-to-be-killed foreign correspondent in eastern Congo. There’s no mistaking the red-white-and-blue superhero graphic splashed across one soldier’s T-shirt, and the twelve year-old children with AK-47′s and cigarettes didn’t pick these fruits of western progress out of the trees of the King Kong forests nearby.

“The recruitment of young people to military service in African conflicts has provoked a unanimous moral outcry from the West,” writes Danish academic Dr. Kasper Hoffman. Child soldiering is by no means new or restricted to Africa, Hoffman notes, since children aged 16 can bear arms in U.S. military, and the West engages in a disingenuous hegemonic discourse where the use of child soldiers is always equated to disorder and moral corruption in Africans. But Hoffman found that child soldiers in Congo were heavily influenced by Hollywood superaction hero films.

The West likes to point its trigger-happy fingers at African conflicts, like the wars in Congo, where many child soldiers — called ‘kadogos‘ — joined militias of their own accord to defend their country against foreign invaders. The West use accusations of child soldiering, immorality, tribalism and irration spirit magic to demonize the highly organized and nationalist Mai Mai militias, and most all violence is blamed on the Mai Mai or the remnants of the Hutu Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) that fled the illegal RPA invasion in 1994. Mai Mai do not fight with any sense of purpose or morality, according to arrogant Western agents and the corporate mass media, themselves complicit in plunder and genocide in Congo — the Mai Mai worship spirit mediums and they rip out and eat the bloody hearts of their victims and they walk backwards into battle wearing bathroom fixtures on their heads (Newsweek, 1996).

Hoffman found that Mai Mai militia members fight out of a sense of pride, nationalism and a highly ethical sense of home-defense. They have seen entire villages wiped off the face of the earth by the U.S.-backed Rwandan (Kagame) and Ugandan (Museveni) troops and they know very well that clandestine cells of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) are perpetrating terrorism there. The RPA/UPDF employ ruthless and unaccountable false flag operations and pseudo operations (covert psychological operations developed by British Maj. Frank Kitson during the Mau Mau insurgency on Kenya) to disguise their origins and intent.

The Global War on _____  (please fill in the blank).

Western governments and United Nations, and the human rights, development and ‘humanitarian’ industries — the merchants of death that profit off violence — all play along with Western media reports that generally whitewash reality to exonerate Rwanda and Uganda and the corporations involved in eastern Congo (Banro, Moto Gold, DHL International, OM Group). More expedient to the mass media whitewashing of war in Congo, every Congolese Mai Mai and Hutu soldier is accused of mass rape, this offering another essentialized narrative convenient for conquest, and one that is peddled by tabloids from the New York Times to Wired to the BBC, from CNN to OPRAH to Democracy Now. Even the rape of men is excluded by the international discourse which confines all discussion about war in eastern Congo to the manipulative discourse about rape of women.

“The influence of Western action films emerges clearly in the care of the self among the kadogos Mai Mai,” reports Dr. Hoffman in The Ethics of Child Soldiering. Popular culture influences the forms of violence, slang, gestures, and body language of the militia members that re-enact the attitudes and actions of ‘freedom fighter’ heroes. They aren’t just mimicking Captain America: the kadogo internalize the deeper ethical constructs of freedom and resistance and apply them to the formation of their self and strength of purpose. The Rambo (Stallone) and Commando (Schwartzenegger) films were especially important in offering a sense of purpose and ethical direction to sustain their unending struggle.

“In these films the heroes are subject to grave injustices and are made to suffer immensely before they vanquish their enemies against all odds through the use of spectacular violence,” wrote Hoffman. “The sublime qualities of the hero such as manliness, bravery, initiative, innate sense of justice, strength, speed, power, muscularity, warrior-skills, tactical abilities, etc., insure him of victory in the end.”

Of course, the heroes in these films are the white saviors, the good men, the super-ethical-anything-in-the line-of-duty-goes-soldiers, the Captains America and Captains Norway.

Breivik in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon.

“I grew up in the 80′s and read a lot of comics — not Captain America but i know the story line,” says CasinoHijack, another commenter on the Russia Today Captain America propaganda video. “Looking back at my old comics I saw a ton of guns, violence, and every woman superhero looks like a stripper. Now that I’m older and more aware of the world we live in I see the propaganda in those comics and how it helped getting young men to fight for something they are not truly aware of. I educate kids all the time of the negative side of comics and superheros. Now I’m their super hero.”

Super heroes, super heroines. We have become saturated by media that seeks to create super duper dumbed-down spectator entertainment warfare consumer conquerors who plead ignorance, rationalize our supposed non-participation in war, and even fight back against all who suggest that we might be more culpable than we want to believe. Kill them and feed their bodies to the starving masses in Somalia…

“The military-industrial complex, contrary to initial expectations, did not fade away with the end of the Cold War,” wrote Tim Lenoir, in the excellent research paper All But War is Simulation. “It has simply reorganized itself. In fact, it is more efficiently organized than ever before. Indeed, a cynic might argue that whereas the military-industrial complex was more or less visible and identifiable during the Cold War, today it is invisibly everywhere, permeating our daily lives. The military-industrial complex has become the military-entertainment complex. The entertainment industry is both a major source of innovative ideas and technology, and the training ground for what might be called post-human warfare.”

Sadly, post-human warfare prosecuted by western military institutions and their highly armed proxy forces involve real human beings on very real battlefields. What has not evolved to match the technologies themselves are the moral and ethical standards by which these post-human battles can be seen to be inhuman, fostered by machine thinking, cold warrior killing. This is the all-too-omnipotent man that the military-entertainment complex has created — the man whose psyche is grounded in absolutes about god versus evil themselves informed by nationalistic propaganda themes based in fear, hatred, difference and the false beliefs about superiority.Nationalism, patriotism, subliminal sexuality, female sexual control, and the destruction of matriarchal power all go hand in hand, as this translates to the anchoring of authoritarian beliefs in the basic character structure of the human beings in everyday technological society.This is fascism. “‘Fascism’ is the basic emotional attitude of man (sic) in authoritarian society,” wrote Dr. Wilhelm Reich, in his potent 1933 work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life…. It is the mechanistic mystical character of man in our times which creates fascist parties, and not vice versa.”We can name several of the most egregious manifestations of this post-human fighting man. We saw him in Avatar — no, not Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he was the ‘good soldier’ of the Captain America variety whose goodness and humanity is projected into the consciousness of the masses by the military-entertainment complex and its video games and other industrial war-making offshoots. It is the antagonist, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the supreme destructor who takes out ‘Home Tree’ and everything else that gets in his way.

We can be sure that Quaritch will be back, more lethal than ever, along with the corporate world government Imperial earth forces — Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 are already in production and, as we have seen over and over, imperialist forces never die, they only come back to finish the job. The early (white) conquistadors to arrive in the Philippines were slaughtered after the indigenous people were abused and their goodness exhausted. Ditto the first (white) Puritans to land on Turtle Island (North America) and the first (white) settlers who became the subjects of umpteen Cowboys and Indians films.

Dances with Wolves was no radical critique of western military conquest and genocide: the narratives about ‘good’ soldier / ‘bad’ soldier, ‘good’ white man / ‘bad’ white man, and whitey-goes-native all reared their ugly heads. The white hero also saves a white woman in this film — though she too first had to undergo a transformation to native. The good-versus-evil / savior-versus-savage films all entrench racial (white) superiority and they are coexistent with the overwhelming racialized propaganda about Christians versus Pagans, Christians versus Moslems, Christians versus Arabs, Israelis versus Arabs, Jews versus Arabs, Arabs versus black Africans, civilized people versus savage others, Christianity versus Islamic Fundamentalism.

So what are the real life consequences of all this warfare gaming, warfare simulation, warfare propaganda, racial propaganda, anti-immigration propaganda, technological propaganda, and weapons proliferation?

Well, most of the actual atrocities occur out of sight of the western media, because the media corporations are directly tied to the profits and perks of the power structure and the imperial project falsifies our consciousness about victims and killers. Soldiers do what they do because they can. They can get away with it because they are taught to. Their training, their education, the dynamics of the groups they are surrounded with, the messages in the mass media, the entire process of enculturation within and from a society premised on the supposed permanence and necessity of war, conquest and private profit.

The international legal term thrown around by ‘human rights’ and ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrines is impunity. People are not being held to account for their wrong actions. Wrong actions come from wrong thinking, wrong education, wrong messages about virulence and domination and entitlement encoded in a zillion different ways in the mainstream cultures of technological civilization. Such wrong thinking infects and grows in the minds of people increasingly isolated and disconnected from their true inner nature, their loving and compassionate selves and from the earth. Every now and then somebody is called out for their white supremacy — some Bronx Catholic Seminary principal or other — but most of the racial profiling and extrajudicial executions committed by police go unchecked by the system, unnoticed by the (white) public, and the perpetrators are often enough rewarded or celebrated.

The fears and insecurities are compounded by the many forms of class warfare and structural violence that We The People are increasingly subject to. Meanwhile the very same elites producing and disseminating the disturbing propaganda — disguised as harmless entertainment — are benefiting from the manufacture of consent and the structural violence that insures their elite economic status. More and more ordinary people, all over the world, are watching as their lives and loves are being stolen from them. We can see the contradictions that surround us, and we are many.

While presenting good versus evil narratives to justify bombing the coasts of North Africa, there is little discussion of why there are so many people, mostly people of color, seeking refuge and survival in the economically advantaged countries of North America and Europe. Refugees are presented as aliens, devoid of context or agency, people who ostensibly seek to steal our jobs and steal our land and steal our sons and daughters and steal everything that we have worked so hard to build. There is little discussion or awareness of why or how the rich First World countries got so rich or came in ‘first’.

At its roots, the film engages in class warfare against the average middle and lower class spectator-consumers of the United States, and it facilitates imperialist conquest against people everywhere else, based on a hierarchical order of ethnicity that values white people and devalues people of color by degrees and categories and labels.

On immigration and refugees and displaced peoples, the military-entertainment and their corporate ‘news’ partners inculcate emotional and irrational beliefs grounded in fear, confusion, associations, falsified history, stereotypes and simplifications. The manufacture or production of ‘refugees’ and ‘displaced peoples’, or the political economy of the misery industry that feeds on them, are never examined. These things falls under the rubric of charity and philanthropy and… with all the ‘good’ things we are doing for those people over there, the least they could do is stay put and show some appreciation.

That is: “I think RT is stretching on this one” said MarcFaust. “The REAL story is the fact that it was renamed “The First Avenger” to other parts of the world because the USA is SO fucking horrible. How dare the US do whatever it takes to quell terrorism and donate billions across the world with aid… fucking Americans!”

These films distill the context and truth of the world down to nothing of value, save to perpetuate suffering and further institutionalize injustice. It is all summed up by that moment in Avatar when the white conquerors are force-marched (very politely!) onto their aerospace weapons platforms and sent back to earth sans unobtanium. The losers look for sympathy. It’s as if they expect more privileges, even as losers.

Of course, almost every Hollywood film has some brand recognition and product placement. For example, how many products do you see advertised in the ‘anti-war’ film Across the Universe? And what about product placement and brand recognition in The Matrix? How many products do you see there? Neo gets a cell phone delivered by Fed-X. But what else? Take a hard look, and then look again, and then again. How many?

So, coming to the end of this little not-so-comic tale, we can at last examine the violence perpetrated within the dominant cultures themselves — in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Norway — the so-called thriving democracies. The psychic propaganda assault — of patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, racial superiority, male domination, subliminal sexuality, consumerism, individuality and desire — saturates our society with irrational emotional beliefs and psychological insecurities. Fear is a driving force, and testosterone its sidekick. These are the effects inculcated by the propaganda films of the military-entertainment complex.

When the story of the Oslo massacres first broke, mass media outlets of all stripes, including Russia Today (“Oslo-Terrorist-Norway-Jihadist“), were quick to broadcast the typical western fear-mongering propaganda about Islamic jihad.

Naturally, the global assault on our consciousness, where everything Islam is suspect, where Israel is above reproach, has not spared Norway. Not every Jew is a victim, and many are perpetrators. Not every Christian is a fundamentalist, and many are. Not every Hutu is a genocidaire; many Tutsis are. Not every Tutsi is a victim; many Hutus are.

Of course, the killing sprees perpetrated by individuals are no different then those perpetrated on the battlefield. In one case the mass murder is sanctioned by society, and in the other case society is victimized by it.

You get what you pay for. We get what we pay for. Perhaps that’s why we have more killing, more bloodshed, more conquest, more rape, more white supremacy of the Anders Breivik and Tim McVeigh variety. These men are products of the societies in which they lived. Both men apparently believed themselves to be superheroes, called to rid their societies of the scourge of evil, to assault a tyrannical federal government out of control, and both brought other innocent human lives to a definitive end.

And so we have Timothy McVeigh, who appears to be a fine example of what our society teaches people they can do. Norwegian nationalist Anders Behring Breivik — now described as an aberration, a Christian fanatic, a psycho, fascism behind a mask of morality — appears to be another. McVeigh might have been part of a government conspiracy; he claimed to be a martyr in defense of U.S. government tyranny, but he was a Gulf War veteran socialized by our permanent warfare society and he probably suffered from serious post-war traumatic stress disorder. Breivik saw himself as a martyr who would spark a revolution, “a real European hero”, “the savior of Christianity” and “the greatest defender of cultural-conservatism in Europe since 1950,” and he called for a patriarchal revival. The two men held some similar beliefs. They are very much not alone in their fanaticism. They are Captains America, by any other names.

Make Love, Not War

Why did Anders Breivik target the young people? Vulnerability, for one: they were an easy target and the most vulnerable to attack. He targeted them for political currency: they symbolized multiculturalism and waved flags calling for Palestinian liberation and truth and equality. If I had any heroes in this story, it would be these kids. They didn’t do anything wrong. Were these kids naive? I don’t think so. They stood up for what they believed is right, and good, and just. They believed in working for a better world. I guess they believed in love, and advocated for it. They had something going for them: the bluebird of consciousness.

I mean, just look at these kids — really look at them — and weep.

Some of the younger victims of the Breivik massacre in Oslo, Norway, 2011.

And if you can’t weep, then you are moving too fast, watching too many Hollywood movies, drinking too much coffee, consuming too much New York Times or Economist, chasing after some addiction or other, caught up in meaninglessness, in denial, suffering from collective amnesia or the mass psychology of fascism, and stuck.

Stuck. Are you stuck?

These could be your friends, or your kids. They are not just someone else’s kids, they are now part of our collective responsibility to wake up and stop the violence. To show compassion and tolerance, to sacrifice and to share, to organize for the betterment of all. There’s plenty of information out there on how this needs to be done. What is lacking is the courage and the initiative. What is needed is love, more love, and more love.

Gosh, I can’t think of a single Hollywood movie where love is the motivation for superheroism. We see plenty of love nonsense in the Hollywood war films, white male white female protagonists fall in love, blah blah blah, and in sit-com films like City of Angels or Beyond the Universe, films that ostensibly have nothing to do with war, blah blah blah, but where do we ever get propaganda that peddles love? Where is our U.S. Government Department of Peace? Why isn’t the Dalai Lama speaking out for state-sanctioned acts of love in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan, achieved through an immediate U.S. military withdrawal?

To help explain the absurd result of May 2, I have enlisted the aid of columnist Ethan Baron. Before I get to specifics, two things deserve special mention. First, Baron is a U.S.-born journalist who recently became a citizen after living here for 20 years. This was the first time he cast a vote in a federal election, and maybe his last.

Second, Baron’s column—a model of sobriety, candour and wit—appeared in the Province, without doubt the country’s most pathetic excuse for a newspaper. Its editors think so little of their readership, and have such little respect for the craft of journalism, that the front page, I was told, is not for reporting “news” stories but for reflecting what’s topical in the minds of its readers. This explains the endless spate of redundant full-page sports pics replete with inane headlines. I think the Province’s motto is: “No news is good news.”

I would love to reprint Baron’s entire column, but I’ll focus on one exquisite passage:

The actual explanation for the Conservative majority is more sinister than mere feeblemindedness. Canadians, in droves, turned up their noses at democracy, choosing a party that has attacked it at every turn. These voters made their electoral decision with one hand holding their wallets and the other flailing around from their eyes to their ears, willfully shutting out the endless evidence that it is the people, and not just Parliament, that Harper holds in contempt.

Pause a moment to take in the breathtaking genius of this passage. Harper’s assaults on Canadian institutions, the rule of law, and the democratic rights of Canadian citizens are public knowledge, which should have told voters that Harper is overtly subversive and a danger to Canadian sovereignty. In view of the Speaker’s finding of contempt of Parliament, Harper should even have been forced to resign his seat.

Lamentably, facts such as these did not matter come election day, nor did the idea that a political candidate had to have a modicum of intelligence to stand for office. On May 2, millions of voters looked at the “Conservative” label in their local riding, shut their brains off, internalized the negative propaganda, and cast a vote for Harper’s parrots and sockpuppets.

However, as in the U.S., party labels in Canada have long since ceased to have any useful meaning, yet “conservative” still evokes illusions of fiscal responsibility. As Baron mentioned, Harper racked up a $55.6 billion deficit in 2009-10—the highest in Canadian history. Not even the most spendthrift NDP government could have accomplished such a feat of wanton profligacy.

Baron is dead right—we did this to ourselves and did it willingly. A CTV poll even reported that 50% of respondents wanted a majority Harper government just so they wouldn’t have to vote in so many elections.

We chose fascism over democracy, and now our national traditions, civil liberties and the rule of law are vulnerable to the whims of a dictator who sees the public good as an obstacle to be overcome in the name of rampant corporatism. For example:

• The CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster has been a staple of Canadian identity and national unity since its creation as a Crown Corporation on Nov. 2, 1936. As a Crown Corporation the government of the day is forbidden to exercise operational control over it, yet Harper is talking about defunding it altogether. Meanwhile, a pro-Harper, Faux-News style disinformation channel (SunNews) was recently approved.

• The Charter of Rights guarantees freedom of opinion, yet the Israel-first Harper will doubtless try to criminalize dissent about Israeli war crimes and the Holocaust®. Already, scientists who warn of the dangers of man-made climate change have been muzzled.

Why so many Canadians “turned up their noses at democracy,” cannot be answered simply by reading the entrails of the May 2 vote. The answer goes back to 1980, when the radical individualism and unenlightened self-interest of “neo-conservatism” took hold as a secular religion. It began in the U.S. under the benighted corporatist presidency of Ronald Reagan, who successfully tapped into the cult of greed and visceral hatred of government that animates American individualism. Over the next four decades, public spending, civil liberties and the rule of law soon became treated as a moral evils.

In Canada, which was created specifically to resist the contagion of U.S. individualism, governments at all levels played an integral role in shaping and defining Canadian nationhood, and was respected for it. We had respect for the public good, but no more. Just as in the U.S., it is the norm to:

• attack public spending as tantamount to theft from “taxpayers,”
• condemn industry regulation as an attack on corporate profits,
• disparage political dissent, and
• embrace militarism and xenophobia, among other things.

Yes, Canada, you elected the first de facto fascist majority government in your history, and why? You were too lazy, indifferent or ignorant to take your electoral responsibilities seriously. You have no time for politics, and want politicians to think for you.

Welcome to Canada, Ethan Baron—make yourself at home!

This means that in the very countries where social democracy built arguably the world’s strongest welfare states – Finland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium – people are now turning to parties to the right of the traditional conservative forces which have always opposed and attempted to undermine this achievement. Why is this, and what should we be doing about it?

First of all, we should stop calling names and start offering some real analysis of what is going on so that we can build a real movement to halt and reverse it. Most people who are voting for these parties are not fascists, and calling them such merely fuels the paranoia which benefits the far right.

Indeed, the parties themselves, with the exception of the Flemish Vlaams Belang, have no historic links with fascism or Nazism and present a very different profile to that of, for example, the chronically unsuccessful and quite laughable British National Party.

Take the True Finns. They are opposed to further immigration and back the usual law-and-order agenda of the far right, but they have also emerged as defenders of the welfare state and of redistributive tax and benefit policies. This puts them, on many issues, to the left of the social democrats. They present, in addition, a much more realistic analysis of the European Union than do the mainstream parties.

This is also true of the country which, as translator for the Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP), I know best. The Dutch version of the True Finns is the PVV, the ‘Party for Freedom’. The PVV wants to end immigration from outside Europe, and has called for the Koran to be banned and for a tax to be placed on headscarves. On the other hand, thrown into the frankly weird mix of PVV policies is, as in Finland, a call to defend the welfare state. Moreover, as with the Finns, the PVV presents a sound analysis of the EU, one which does not rely on the xenophobia which characterises much anti-EU rhetoric, not all of it from the right, and especially in Britain.

There are at least three probable major reasons for the appearance, at this critical moment in European history, of such a movement.

Firstly is the fact that social democratic parties no longer make the slightest attempt to defend or promote the interests of the working people who created them. Instead, they have not only allowed conservatives to attack the welfare states which were their greatest achievement, but have joined in the demolition with unbounded enthusiasm.

Secondly, parliamentary democracy has been hollowed out and no longer has any real meaning. This process of undermining almost two hundred years of progress towards greater popular representation has not gone unnoticed on the European ‘street’. The peoples of Europe are, of course, as represented as ever we were, but only in bodies which no longer have any real power.

The open contempt shown by the elite for the votes against the EU Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty, and the current move to bring economic policy entirely into the hands of unelected bodies in Brussels and Frankfurt are not the work of some bogeyman Hitlerites, but of ‘respectable’ politicians of the centre-right and centre-left.

In France, it is beginning to look as if the candidate of the ‘Socialist’ Party in the coming presidential election will be the current head of the IMF. No wonder the Front National leader Marine Le Pen is doing so well in the polls.

This removal of popular influence over real political decisions has been promoted by the announcement – again, by ‘respectable’ mainstream politicians – of debates about national identity, about ‘what it means to be French/Dutch/British/etc’, which are entirely without meaning, simply Weapons of Mass Distraction.

What we need in response to the rise of right-wing populism is a more effective populism of our own, but it must be a populism rooted in a proper analysis of the situation we are in, including of the politics of the far right. It is an analysis which we need to take into the street, demonstrating to people, for example, that in practice these far right parties never, ever challenge the neoliberalism of the elite. The PVV itself is now officially ‘tolerating’ a right-wing Dutch government which has launched a vicious attack on working people and the welfare state while handing economic decision-making to the European Commission and the European Central Bank.

Recently, there was a demonstration in Amsterdam against Geert Wilders, the populist right leader of the PVV. People came from England to it, having previously tried to keep Wilders off their country’s hallowed soil.

The SP was criticised for wanting nothing to do with the event, believing that it was unwise to single out Wilders and that instead we should campaign against the neoliberalism to which, for all his talk of defending the welfare state, the PVV is now compromised. It believes such demonstrations are counterproductive.

Watching a recording of the speech by one of the visitors from London, you could see their point.

‘This demonstration has one slogan’, he said.

I waited for it, though scarcely with baited breath.

It turned out to be ‘Smash Geert Wilders’.

Not even ‘Smash the PVV’.

We were being called upon, in lieu of political analysis or any kind of effective response, to “smash’ an individual who has never called for violence against his opponents.

With friends like this, we scarcely need enemies, whatever they call themselves.

And Covenants without the Sword are but Words, and of no strength to secure a Man at all.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 165

Seventy-five years ago, a head of state stood up before the world body to demand justice for his people, who had been terrorized and murdered by an imperial aggressor. All prior attempts to mediate the matter and appeal to the principles of collective security and equality of nations were deliberately ignored. The leader’s name was Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia; the world body was The League of Nations; the aggressor was Fascist Italy.

Selassie’s address, delivered in June 1936 in Geneva, is not some arcane tidbit of long-forgotten 20th-century history. It is a highly meaningful document that depicts how Great Powers quickly betray their principles under the cover of law. The criminals and victims may have changed in 75 years, but the polite rationalizations we offer up to appease international crime today are pretty much the same. What Italy did to Ethiopia in 1936, Israel now does to Palestine and Lebanon, and U.S.-led imperial forces do to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Now, as then, aggression has the tacit support of a world body designed to prevent such violence, yet any equation between the failed League of Nations and the United Nations likely does not register with most people. The lessons of history are lost because we are careful to compartmentalize them to the time they happened and treat them as museum pieces. Our governing myths of progress and the perfectibility of man instill in us the conceit that whatever happened “back then” could not have any meaning today because we know so much more and the world is so much different. Yet the world is not different. Time may march on, but man runs in erratic circles.

The League of Nations was established in 1920 to ensure the world would never again suffer the horrors of mustard gas, trench warfare and other manifestations of total war. It failed because it practised appeasement toward Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, thereby emboldening them to commit further aggressions. The United Nations was established in 1945 to prevent genocide, total war, acquisition of territory by force, and other noble goals. It has failed because it practices appeasement toward Israel and the U.S. (“Isramerica”), thereby emboldening them to commit further aggressions. Take, for example, the acquiescence or active participation of the UN in mass murders like:

• Israel’s 2008-2009 “Cast Lead” massacre of Palestine when it dropped banned white phosphorous bombs on civilians;
• the U.S.’s gratuitous carpet bombing of Afghanistan in November 2001; or
• the U.S.-led “no-fly zones” and economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s that caused the deaths of more than 500,000 children.

Now read Haile Selassie’s description of Italian terrorism:

Emperor Haile Selassie delivers his address to the League of Nations, June 1936

It is not only upon warriors that the Italian Government has made war. It has above all attacked populations far removed from hostilities, in order to terrorize and exterminate them.… Special sprayers were installed on board aircraft so that they could vaporize, over vast areas of territory, a fine, death-dealing rain. Groups of nine, fifteen, eighteen aircraft followed one another so that the fog issuing from them formed a continuous sheet. It was thus that, as from the end of January 1936, soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes and pastures were drenched continually with this deadly rain. In order to kill off systematically all living creatures, in order to more surely to poison waters and pastures, the Italian command made its aircraft pass over and over again. That was its chief method of warfare.

There is no difference in the contempt for human life, or in the premeditated violation of the official morality of peace, yet how many of us see this connection and recognize the cruel fact that the very concept of collective security is untenable? To persist in a discredited behaviour despite evidence to the contrary is proof of irrationality, and it is only from such an irrational perspective that we can explain why the world has again degenerated into sociopathic hypocrisy. This is why Selassie’s address still resonates so powerfully.

First, it tells us we must re-evaluate our perception of time. We see it as an arrow moving from the past to the future, and life becoming technologically, materially and, ostensibly, intellectually stronger along the way. The myths of progress and the perfectibility of man are so hardwired into our arrogant, reptilian, Judeo-Christian brain, that we equate novelty with superiority, and look on past failures as products of an inferior, hence irrelevant, technological, material and intellectual time. We can acknowledge and understand these failures, but not learn from them.

The second, more important, reason concerns morality. The Second World War was more a Manichean battle between good and evil than it was a political battle between opposing armies. By demonizing the enemy, admittedly easy to do given the atrocities the Nazis committed, we perversely deified ourselves and associated the failures of the past with the enemy. Small wonder that the war redefined our moral and political frame of reference and created an even greater discontinuity with the past. After all, the period 1918-1939 gave us fascism, genocide and war — what lessons could we possibly learn from it?

To have acknowledged that the League of Nations was a philosophical failure would have forced the Allies to examine their own culpability for the rise of fascism and the redundant impotence of the United Nations. Instead, we tell ourselves that the League’s failure was a political matter and could be remedied by a better Covenant and the participation of the U.S.

The morality of the immediate post-war period is a ridiculous anachronism yet it is somehow still invoked to define for us who is good and bad, who is an aggressor and who is a victim. In fact, though, the Allies that defeated the fascists are the new fascists. Jews, the eternal victims of genocide, are inflicting a new holocaust on Palestinians. The U.S.—that great icon of justice that takes most of the credit for defeating Hitler—justifies torture, wages war on its own citizens, sabotages international law, and coerces other nations into betraying the UN Charter.

The moral degeneracy of the UN was entirely predictable, because it is no different from the League of Nations. Collective security denies the essential role of war as an instrument of politics and defines “peace” according to the interests of the powerful. Without an effective, objective means to uphold its principles, collective security merely legitimizes bullying and delegitimizes dissent. In other words, those ultimately responsible for genocide are not the perpetrators, but rather those who knew it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it.

Instead of an arrow to describe time and human history, we should use Penrose stairs, an optical illusion in which a rising or descending staircase seems to double back on itself. Given its irrationality, the Penrose stairs is perfect for describing the lack of human progress despite the linear passage of time.

To free ourselves from the Penrose loop we have to disabuse ourselves of deeply ingrained delusions about war and peace, and good and evil. To do that, we need to study history actively. In that regard, Part II will focus on detailed comparisons between the attack on Ethiopia and present-day attacks on Palestine and Libya.

Zombie values find expression in an aesthetic that is aired daily in the mainstream media, a visual landscape filled with the spectacle of destruction and decay wrought by human parasites in the form of abandoned houses, cars, gutted cities and trashed businesses.

— Henry Giroux¹

Zombie culture hates big government, a euphemism for the social state, but loves big corporations and is infatuated with the ideology that, in zombieland, unregulated banks, insurance companies, and other megacorporations should make major decisions not only about governing society but also about who is privileged and who is disposable, who should live and who should die.

— Giroux²

The storms have been gathering for a few years now, and in one tidal wave centuries-old institutions, traditions, and values are being leveled out of existence, washed over by the roaring seas of neoliberalism. Yet no one attendant to the decades-long warning signs can claim shock; but that this wave should sweep through so thoroughly, and in the first term of the first Black president, who many deludedly believed either a “liberal” or “Marxist”– this, it seems, came unawares for most.

Across the country, millions are gripped with panic, watching their once-secure lives turned over so suddenly and sold to an insidious system which could be best described as inverted authoritarianism — a creeping culture in which individuals, institutions, and identities are subject to one infallible authority: corporations. And across the country, dozens of governors now find themselves at the right place at the right time to “change the course of history,” to plunge the final stake into democracy’s heart, effectively doing away with all petty talk of government for the people by the people. But this scheme would never sell well unless Emergency Time was declared, and the masses stripped of all ability (and right) to think clearly, which helps make the idiotic ramblings of the governors look logical.

And one consensus has towered above all: public workers are to blame; from podiums where the high and mighty bay in strong but familiar tongues, they are counseled toward austerity measures because, apparently, their society is in the red, and only by taking pay cuts, pink slips, and less hours can they do their share to sustain it. In times of surplus and stability, however, no mention of the common good or public benefit passed the lips of these elected oligarchs, all conceived from the union of Reagan and Thatcher, the latter who brayed in ’87: “[T]here is no such thing as ‘society.’ There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.” Two decades later, a simpleton from Kentucky elected to the Senate confided into a news camera that “we’re all interconnected. There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor. We all are interconnected in the economy.”

Florida’s CEO governor seems keen on the idea, seeking to, as The New York Times reported recently, create a “business-friendly environment” in which financial and environmental regulations are dealt fatal blows, and corporations walk off brimming with nearly $2 billion in tax cuts, and the fangs of privatization dig deeper into Medicaid and the prison industrial complex; in addition, the elimination of 8,500 state jobs, a $1.75 billion cut in the public school budget, and new mandates requiring 600,000 government workers to pinch 5% toward their retirement.

The school board of Providence, Rhodes Island, had a better idea—ship pink slips to all of its nearly 2,000 teachers, forewarning possible termination at school year’s end. This would help in the arena of budget cuts, officials said, especially since next year’s $308 million school budget is expected to fall short $40 million.

Over in Indiana, Republican state representatives were shoving through a bill to bar unions and companies from negotiating better agreements, to strip out collective bargaining rights. They had been inspired by the inept county executive elected governor in Wisconsin who dreamt one night that he was Reagan’s illegitimate heir, and history was standing still on his behalf. So to plug his state’s $137 million budget deficit, Scott Walker decided to hit hard against public-sector unions and public schools and public universities, all the while swearing no nefarious motives.

Perhaps he felt a certain security having seen the alleged socialist president strut his stuff earlier in February, slicing in half a home-heating aid program for poor people, potentially impacting 3 million families nationwide. And as if to snicker in the faces of the Professional Left, the proposal called for an end to the Bush-era tax cuts, two months after his administration had bullied Democrat legislators into extending it.

Ohio Republicans knew, too, their time had come, and in due time a bill was rammed through the state House and Senate to stop binding arbitration and strip the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public workers. But by now this simple scheme had grown stale, so to send bells tolling, the bill also included a ban on strikes — punishable by hanging? “Unionized workers could negotiate wages, hours and certain work conditions but not health care, sick time or pension benefits,” reported The Associated Press. “The measure would do away with automatic pay raises and base future wage increases on merit.”

Michigan’s Tea Party governor dared to dream bigger. His bill would grant him power to declare towns in financial emergency, at which point an Emergency Financial Manager would be endowed with infallible authority to  “reject, modify, or terminate” contracts, suspend or dismiss elected officials, delete union rights, and hand power over to corporations. The sky is falling, he’s been bleating lately, though ever alert against mentioning the $1.7 billion in tax breaks extorted from the poor and elderly and swiftly transferred to big corporations as $1.8 billion in tax cuts.

Like his comrade in Pennsylvania, who hopes to anoint an anti-regulation energy company executive with “supreme” authority over environmental regulations, and his other comrade in Wisconsin, who plots to hand over state public utilities to titans like Koch Industries, Rick Snyder of Michigan is forging toward a more perfect tomorrow — where budgets are balanced, public workers know their place, poor school kids drop out of existence, the elderly rejoin a shrinking workforce, and corporations own cities, even states, leading to the privatization of entire societies, entire cultures. And with Romney or Santorum shepherded into office come November 2012, perhaps this would become the world’s first truly, and proud, privatized nation.

When fascism would sail to these shores, many have warned for decades, there would be no marching bands or mass rallies, no mustache trimming, no mass murders — preferably a more sophisticated form, more subtle, more agreeable to the average, burdened worker forced to juggle three jobs and four kids while watching Mexicans trampling across town in their capacity-defying mobiles. Fascism would come with mindless commercials pushing a thousand products per break; it would come with a twitchy maniac on a popular entertainment news network who sees blood written on every wall; it would come with a systematic dumbing down of the multitude, with a perennial circus that invites the public to choose between political Siamese twins who play the part of opponents for nine months. It would come with a slow death that renders millions upon millions dead among the living — eternal zombies roaming the streets, unable to connect their private pains with public policies. Fascism would not feature a megalomaniac villain the world would love to hate; it would feature cheerful corporations openly buying off politicians and setting social agenda, unconcerned with the hurt feelings of the masses whose voices would never reach high enough on cable news media to pierce public consciousness and rally strong against the marauders walking off with their children’s futures.

Henry Giroux’s latest text, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, accounts for a society whose members seem gleefully invested in their own undoing without knowing it. “Rather than being forced to adhere to a particular state ideology,” he writes, “the general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education, and other cultural apparatuses.”

Nowadays reading is a bore, so for cheap information, fast food style, most rely on television; incidentally all the major news networks are owned by corporations involved in everything from weapon manufacturing to sweat shops and slave labor, so the news commonly drives dangerously close to a 24-hour commercial marathon, a propaganda model built on product-pushing for whichever agenda rules the day. Viewers are asked to judge between the opinions of two dimwits pitted against each other like pugilists, to choose whose opinion flatters more. And once the segment ends, the baton is passed to the latest pill or pad without which life is not worth living — all in one chorus insisting, as Giroux notes, that the only way “to define ourselves is to shop and consume in an orgy of private pursuits.”

Against the backdrop of escalating homelessness, rampant joblessness, mass poverty, hunger, and hopelessness, the call to consume has only ratcheted, increasingly through the lips of kids too young to understand the values being promulgated. In a recent “Best Buy Buy Back Program” commercial, which touts the glories of ever-new products rendering one-month-old ancestors obsolete, a young girl no more than five runs around a front yard before reproaching her dad, who is dragging in a 3-D plasma TV right when a truck appears outside announcing 4D HDTV coming soon, “You got the wrong TV, silly head!” Toyota had a better idea, employing an 8-year-old Donald Trump to champion its new line, the Highlander, which everyone wants to ride in, the kid says, because “it’s got mad style”; and in a series of commercials featuring “embarrassing” parents wheeling their children around in “the old family hauler,” the kid prescribes to his peers the Highlander, which “comes with a sweet, rear-seat entertainment system.” His final counsel seems reasonable enough: “Just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean you have to be lame.” E*Trade figured out a more haunting strategy: move the lips of diapered toddlers in cribs and call it marketing genius. The series of commercials run from the senseless to the raunchy; toddlers announcing stock tips, extolling E*Trade’s superiorities, and even employing sexual innuendo in their bits. Adults, in these worlds, remain either out of touch, embarrassingly arcane, or entirely irrelevant. Perhaps this explains why a popular weekly show on FOX Television tries to restore some stolen dignity as grown men and women get to pound their chests hard and screech for joy if at the end they best their opponents—5th graders.

Lives are being swallowed alive by greedy pythons who front big insurance firms and corporate banks, but breaking news on CNN must pause the world over to announce Lindsay Lohan has just arrived in court for her latest hearing, or a dad says his boy is floating toward the heavens in a gas balloon. Henry Giroux’s Zombie Politics sees this sort of routine idiocy as a trick to keep a terribly under-educated electorate further narcotized into sizzling stupor while the real rulers hold power forever:

Not only is the issue of the good life and the conditions that make it possible often lost in the babble of the infotainment state, but the market values that produced the economic crisis have so devalued the concept and practice of democracy that Americans find it hard to even define its meaning outside of the sham of money-driven elections and the freedom to shop.

Power is insecure, he also notes. Power must be cuddled by media through which mass audiences can be counseled against their interests, which explains Walker’s thrill over the New York Times’ February 21 article capturing snippets of everyday, blue-collar private employees who scorned their public-sector counterparts for demanding too much. “Power does not work simply through the control and influence of wealth, income, and resources,” Giroux writes. “It also has to legitimate itself, and for that it needs to create a pedagogical culture through which it can promote its ideologies and values.”

Of course, Orwell knew language travels ahead to prepare proper ground for action. Or as Toni Morrison reflected in 1993, “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” Language is commodified and sanitized, drained of its deadly implications, refined and dressed up nice; then becomes acceptable to those who should be warring against it. Words like “Austerity” and “Deficit” and “Shortfall” and “Burden” and “Freeloader” and “Ingrate” and “Entitlement” stalk the day, seizing the souls of those who’ve never fallen short of the good life — the pay-your-taxes, go-to-church, vote-Eisenhower life — yet now find themselves the victims of measures by governors who hear Reagan in their heads screaming, The time is now! This is language of a different sort, as Giroux notes: “Zombie language, with its appeal to the living dead, erases the social as it privatizes it and can only imagine freedom through the narrow lens of self-interest, exchange values, and profit margins.”

This is language which often destroys the truth, turning facts into casualties all in the name of making a point. It is now chic for politicians to simply lie about everything — from whom they sleep with, to where their funding comes from, to what perks the funding brings, to who writes their bills, who pays their lunch, who sways their vote. And for the entertainers masquerading as talk show hosts or commentators, lying becomes a necessity, second nature — a quality without which frenzy cannot be whipped up among the die-hard fan base taught to believe everything it’s told.

The smart even know lying draws flies—lying creates controversy, which creates coverage; and for as long as the liar can claim strong commitment to proving the lie true, TV cameras would forever be at the ready, on the edge to nab the first scoop. The idiot ex-governor of Alaska can, for instance, wake up one morning depressed the world has passed her over and climb back to national notoriety with a lie so seismic (thanks to the bots who run cable news) that it does well in sinking mainstream support for the health care reform bill in its original form. Another idiot who CNN has fallen in love with can manufacture lies out of a tape recording and set off a national storm against the honor of a woman accused of saying the exact opposite of her recorded remarks.

Meanwhile, large swaths of the public are being abandoned to stable a ship whose captains refuse to throw the real Jonahs off into the deep end—yelping about budget deficits while desperately ignoring the corporations blessed with billions in tax cuts, the multi-millionaire and billionaire CEOs whose average workers can barely scrape together a family meal while working two jobs. “At least 46 states plus the District of Columbia have enacted budget cuts that will affect services for children, the elderly, the disabled, and families, as well as the quality of education and access to higher education,” reported the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities early February this year.

The young of color, especially, don’t count. Through “policies of punishment” and a commercial culture that ranks its members based on those who buy more, many are either drugged up or locked up, “excommunicated from the sphere of human concern,” as Giroux writes. In Detroit public schools, their fate seems sealed. State officials have ordered the emergency financial manager to close half its schools, a plan to feature, come next year, up to 60 students per class. The kids would have to shut up and shoulder the burden of a $327 million district deficit they somehow must have contributed to.

The young, the poor, and the old are excess in this strange world where “we’re all interconnected.” In Arizona, 98 low-income patients approved for organ transplants can be abruptly flung off the list due to state budget cuts. In rural Tennessee, firefighters can stop by a house while it burns to the ground, snickering now and then, refusing to lift a finger on their hoses because the family had failed to pay the annual homeowner protection fee: $75. Three dogs, a cat, and many memories died that day. One day later, a primate trained to talk on the radio told his millions of listeners the deaths were justified: “If you don’t pay your $75, then that hurts the fire department. They can’t use those resources and you would be sponging off of your neighbor.” No wonder the Right-wing shook violently when former Rep. Alan Grayson exposed its wishes that the burdens of society simply “die quickly.”

The excess are to be overlooked and forgotten, shut out of mainstream awareness, left to rot and decompose in “tent cities found under bridges and located in other invisible landscapes—used in the past to get rid of waste products, but now used to dump poor working-class and middle-class families.”

Yet these conditions, however grim, stand amenable, even if the Wisconsin and Ohio uprisings boast no strong validations. Across the landscape, splotches of resistance seem to be spreading, especially among corners long-docile in the face of injustice—as a great wave gathered with enough fervor to turn over traditions seemingly etched into eternity. But if children would inhabit a world where corporations and elected representatives hold separate functions, due action must be taken before entire towns bear the logos of merchants who survey the world through a prism in which only profit matters. Giroux insists it’s time to “fight for the formative culture and modes of thought and agency that are the very foundations of democracy”; time to “mobilize a militant, far-reaching social movement to challenge the false claims that equate democracy and capitalism.” Those willing would have to beat back against the creeping forces of authoritarianism whose values “embrace death rather than life, fear rather than hope, insularity rather than solidarity.”

Turn on FOX News, tune into any of the several dozen radio frequencies broadcasting from Right of the field, and wonder at millions around the country beholden to a bobblehead from Alaska who finds troubling the concept of Africa as a continent, millions more at the feet of a bloated buffoon paid in the hundreds of millions to invalidate the mental superiority of humankind. “It’s time to bury the dead,” Giroux instructs, “and let the living once again inhabit the regions of government, the media, the economy, and other crucial spheres of power.” Amen.

1. Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 32.
2. Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, p. 33.

There are basically two kinds of mass protest overseas. Those that are orchestrated by America, as rigged by our CIA, or those that are supposedly against us. I say supposedly because a protest or coup d’etat against one of our dictators may usher in yet another one of our dictators.

America has so many dictators up her sleeve. Whichever shell she flips over, there’s a dictator underneath. Though America always trumpets democracy, she always, and I mean always, prefers dictators for her client states. A dictator guarantees “stability,” which is good for (American) businesses. He can also be bought. This tyrant will enrich himself while selling out his country to the USA. To wipe out domestic dissent, this evil “strong man” will send his soldiers to America to learn how to torture and conduct “counter insurgency.”

The year I was born, the CIA orchestrated a coup against South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, whom it had propped up in the first place. That same year, Abdul Karim Kassem of Iraq was killed in a Ba’athist coup engineered by — guess whom? — the CIA. Out of that mess would rise CIA asset, Saddam Hussein. Ruling Iraq for 24 years, he was one of America’s favorite sumbitches, until he got a few ideas of his own, like trading oil for Euros, for example. That’s when we had to invade his country and string him up. John F. Kennedy was also killed in 1963, but, ah, the CIA is not to be blamed here. Kennedy was simply blown away by a lone, supernaturally gifted sniper.

Our domestic leaders are similarly homogeneous. Our so-called Presidents are remarkably uniform in how they deal, or rather, not deal, with the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Israel, etc, with how they never disturb that awful moloch, our military industrial complex.

The job of White House Press Secretary is rather superfluous, don’t you think? I mean, the President is already a voluble spokesman for the power that be. Our President is a White House Press Secretary. He doesn’t lead or decide so much as talk, talk, and talk. Every four years we throw out the bum, to bring in another hobo. (My apologies to actual bums and hobos everywhere.) We expend so much energy and hope into this merry-go-round that there’s nothing left for real changes, not that we’re really inclined. Life is good as long as Kobe is running back and forth, the corn syrup overflows, and there’s some jive meat in our tacos.

There are six political parties represented in the French Parliament. In the Italian one, there are seven. In the Japanese diet, there are eight parties. These numbers are typical of democracies worldwide, but in the United States, supposedly the beacon of democracy, only two parties dominate all political power and discourse. Moreover, these two parties are two faces of the same corrupt, by now more than worthless coin.

Sharing the same rotten substance, Obama and Bush are both apologists for endless war, torture and massive corruption. Bush found the Department of Homeland Security. Obama increased its budget. Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, fired missiles into Pakistan. In two years, Obama has killed more Afghans and Pakistanis than Bush in five. Obama has increased Bush’s war budget. The only differences between Obama and Bush are their faces and diction, yet when Obama was elected, even our radicals wept tears of joy. Is there any specimen more pitiful, clueless and impotent than the American so-called progressive?

On a California campus long known for its supposed radicalism, I talked to a highly regarded young professor. “You can talk about Fascism nowadays, but if you criticize Communism, people still cringe,” I observed. “Who’s talking about Fascism?!” she responded.

We watch the foreign protests and think, Damn, that’s dangerous! People actually get killed! Our protests, by contrast, are civil displays of brief durations. They threaten and disturb nothing. We ask permission beforehand to be allowed to parade down the street, carrying cute signs. Our protestors vie with each others to come up with the cleverest signs. Though seen by almost no one, they are dutifully photographed by their makers to be posted on FaceBook.

Recently, some of our leading progressive thinkers chained themselves to the White House fence for an hour or so. Though no one noticed, it was considered a success by the organizers. The protestors were demanding that our White House Press Secretary cum President withdraw all American troops from Iraq. Of course, no one expected our military occupation to end simply because two dozen Americans briefly detained themselves, so this action was strictly symbolic.

In fact, all of our protests are strictly symbolic these days. Since we’re reluctant to threaten or even inconvenience the system, or even ourselves, for that matter, nothing can come of our dissent. To press our demands, we don’t even dare to call for a general strike. It’s true that with little union activity, it’s difficult to organize workers, but since our factories are mostly gone, the unions are kaput.

Nowadays, Americans are constantly urged to be vigilant of suspicious activities. Even taking photos in a public place can draw attention from the authorities. I myself have been harassed in several states. Citing the Patriot Act, a bike-riding private security guard threatened to arrest me in Kansas City, KS. In Cleveland, a Greyhound bus driver kicked me off his bus because I refused to store my expensive camera and lenses in the luggage hold. Stories like these abound. With so much hysteria drummed up by Homeland Security, one would think that bombs are constantly being planted all over America, but, in fact, the exact opposite is true. When a bomb plot is actually discovered, more often than not it is the work of the FBI!

In 1969, 93 bombs exploded in New York City. Half were politically motivated. Even in Seattle, 33 bombs went off. Back then, radical Americans targeted military recruiting offices, police stations, government buildings, homes of officials and sometimes banks. Most of these explosives only blew out windows, knocked a few doors of their hinges, but on May 11, 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission in Rocky Flats, CO was bombed, causing $45 million in damage. Rocky Flats was where they made components for nuclear weapons. Now Americans no longer bomb symbols of militarism or crooked finance. We only try to torch and blow up abortion clinics.

Most Americans, left or right, are now opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet our troops are still there, and will remain for a long time. Most Americans opposed the bank bailouts, yet our government bailed them out anyway. After Americans became enraged by the invasive airport scanners, Washington ordered more of these privacy violating, cancer inducing machines. The sex abuse airport groping also continued. When the Pentagon failed to account for $2.3 trillion, that’s right, when $2.3 trillion have been stolen in full view, our political leadership didn’t bat an eye. Our President can now declare anyone a terrorist, and order him locked up without trial or even shot, without anyone knowing. If that isn’t Fascism, stupid professor, what is?!

These televised revolutions are already becoming old hat. What do these pissed off people have to do with us? Where’s that remote control? Let’s switch channels.

King told the New York Times that the inquiry is his response “to what he has described as frequent concerns raised by law enforcement officials that Muslim leaders have been uncooperative in terror investigations.” A vocal opponent of the “Ground Zero Mosque” back when it was a hot-button issue (“it is very offensive and wrong”), King harbours clear and controversial sentiments regarding Muslims in the U.S. — to put it very mildly. Citing cases where Muslim imams are slow to co-operate with law enforcement, King apparently is worried that Muslims in America are not taking the good old “War on Terror” seriously enough.

Indicative of where this new Congress is headed, the hearing/inquiry set to take place makes a number of troubling fundamental assumptions. First, following classic post-9/11 fear mongering, King has decided to isolate “radicalization” in the American Muslim community as the major problem in terms of national security. He ignores the fact that most terrorism in the U.S. is conducted by white supremacists, and that a third of suspicious activity in American Muslim communities are tipped off by Muslims. Second, King’s concern that Muslim leaders are slow to cooperate with law enforcement conveniently overlooks the fact that the past decade has been characterized by a meta-narrative of fear/demonization vis a vis Muslims. Under this climate, how enthusiastic does King expect those who adhere to Islam to be when the FBI comes knocking on their doors?

Regarding whether terrorism of the al-Qaeda kind is a major problem in the United States, it is useful to listen to what Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Centre, has to say:

It has been only a tiny, tiny percentage of Americans — increasingly more this year, but still a tiny percentage of Muslim Americans — who have for a variety of reasons found appeal in this al- Qaeda ideology.

In other words, there has been a slight increase in sentiment aligned with al-Qaeda-like ideology, but nothing that would prompt an actual Congressional hearing. Unfortunately, King seems to have already made up his mind, which is not surprising given that King is not exactly heading into the new year free of pre-concieved notions regarding American Muslim communities. Appearing on FOX’s Sean Hannity’s show in 2004, King has suggested that “80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists,” and that “This is an enemy living amongst us.” With such a framework of mind, one wonders why King is even bothering with an “inquiry” in the first place.

In fact, if by now those in the U.S. political establishment are still wondering why a tiny fringe of Muslims (domestic or not) are still antagonizing America, they need not look very far. Here is what Faisal Shahzad, the “Times Square Bomber” had to say in court:

“They don’t understand my side of the story, where the Muslim life of is no value…So decree whatever you desire to decree, for you can only decree regarding the life of this world. The crusading U.S. and NATO forces who have occupied the Muslim lands under the pretext of democracy and freedom for the last nine years and are saying with their mouths that they are fighting terrorism. I say to them: we don’t accept your democracy nor your freedom, because we already have Sharia law and freedom. Furthermore, brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun. Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me.”

It should by now be obvious that the colossal military footprint the United States has created in the Middle East is having unintended consequences. The U.S. is on its way in obliterating the dam that holds back the flood that Shahzad speaks of. However, we should not give into such hyperbole just yet. There are, estimated by Leon Panetta (Head of the CIA), around 100 Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Given this reality, President Obama and General Patraeus’s decisions to escalate the war in Afghanistan can be for nothing but extraneous political reasons.

On the one hand, it is not impossible for individuals like Shahzad to exist. Anger can become a toxic elixir, especially in the face of immense injustice. Nevertheless, according to actual empirical data, the likes of Shahzad do not exist in large numbers in the United States, despite a somewhat significant rise in the disapproval of Obama’s foreign policy. In the face of all of this, Peter King still wants to hold hearings on “radicalization”, as if nothing under his purview required more immediate attention.

The rise in hatred of Muslims after 9/11 is not the result of a random collection of individual spasms. According to investigative journalist, Max Blumenthal, a veteran of covering the cultic elements of right-wing America, “it’s the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era.”

Behind the scenes are millionaire and billionaire barons like Aubrey Chernick and the Koch Brothers, who fund right-wing thinks tanks as well as pro-Israeli outfits. More “intellectual” operatives like Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer feed off of the funding provided by Chernick’s ilk, and use their poisonous pens to spread the fears of an “Islamist takeover”. Then there are the media clowns like Pamela Geller, who, after inheriting millions from her dead husband, spends her time blogging about how Barack Obama is Malcolm X’s love child. All of these elements have, over the years, come together in a discursive process to produce a system of mass hatred. They, and those who ally with them, bring together the causes of crazed Christian Reconstructionists, fanatical right-wing Zionists, and even neo-Nazi parties in Europe.

Capitalizing on a disenfranchised America with a crippled economy and an embittered citizenship, those who seek to incite hatred have sought to use Muslims has a scapegoat for America’s problems. Retreating into absolute infantilism, a shocked and largely decieved citizenry searches for moral renewal. Whether this renewal will be achieved through a blind following of those who seek to deceive, or through a realistic recognition of where America is actually headed, has yet to be decided.

There have always been enough incriminating evidences to fill several Pentagons and CIA headquarters. It takes no dick or hacker to know that the U.S. government is duplicitous and sadistic. It lies and kills compulsively. Though hardly alone, America’s unique in her reach and influence. As an empire, our sick tendencies become everybody else’s problems. Without our “leadership,” would Poles and Ukrainians kill and be killed in Iraq? Would Germans patrol Afghanistan? Would Georgia pick a fight with Russia, only to have its ass kicked? We don’t just commit evils, we train many others to do it. We graduated thousands of torturers from The School of the Americas. After some bad press, it was niftily re-christened as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. (Similarly, Blackwater is now Xe.) Our tactics haven’t changed, and waterboarding, openly admitted to by our cynically sinister capos, is the very least of it. No criminal confesses to everything. “Ah, I only do some shoplifting on the side, Your Honor. No beating or rape or nothing.”

Our elected leaders, our bald, shiny faces to the rest of the world, are shameless hypocrites. During the Georgia-Russia conflict, George Bush was indignant that Russia had “invaded a sovereign neighboring state,” while John McCain declared, “In the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.”

Was March 20th, 2003 in the 21st century? I’m not talking about March Madness, of course, but the start of our invasion of Iraq. Sated with college hoops, Americans could switch channel for some cool, live snuff action. Soon after, George W. Bush announced at the Boeing F-18 Production Facility in St. Louis, “Two weeks ago, the Iraqi regime operated a gulag for dissidents, and incredibly enough, a prison for young children. Now the gates to that prison have been thrown wide open, and we are putting the dictators, political prisons, and torture chambers out of business.” (Applause.) A mere year later, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, revealing America to be in charge of Saddam’s torture chambers.

Not so incredibly, we also imprisoned children in Abu Ghraib. Its commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, spoke of visiting the youngest inmates, including a boy who “looked like he was 8-years-old.” Maybe this kid was just undersized from all those years of economic sanctions? Maybe he was actually 11 or 12? By 2008, the Pentagon would admit to jailing 600 Iraqi juveniles. From a supposedly feel-good story in Stars and Stripes: “The U.S. military in Iraq is holding some 600 juvenile detainees—ranging in age from 11 to 17—and is building educational programs to address their special needs.”

In any case, no evidence could be more damning than what happened at Abu Ghraib, yet there were no consequences, really. We went on with our occupation, which has continued to this day, and only one officer was ever court-martialed. The conviction of Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan was even overturned, resulting in merely an “administrative reprimand” on his record. Torture, American style, is an administrative procedure.

The photos themselves often show our troops casually moving about in the background. It was business as usual to punch, slap and kick prisoners; to jump on their naked feet; to videotape and photograph naked male and female prisoners; to forcibly arrange prisoners in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; to force prisoners to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; to force naked male prisoners to wear women’s underwear; to force groups of male prisoners to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; to arrange naked male prisoners in a pile and then jumping on them; to position a naked prisoner on a box, with a sandbag on his head, and attach wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture.

On and on the various means for inflicting pain and humiliation on helpless human beings. Oh, the casual or gleeful sadism, often sexual, of our conquering heroes! These all-American men and women will go home, marry, raise children and become realtors, policemen, accountants and teachers. We freak out when a sexual predator moves into the neighborhood, but how many honorably discharged and decorated torturers and mass murderers are chummying up among us?

“Dad, what did you do in the Iraq?”

“Oh, nothing much, I broke chemical lights and poured the phosphoric liquid on prisoners; beat prisoners with a broom handle and a chair; threatened male prisoners with rape; sodomized a prisoner with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick. Now, what would you like for Christmas, Son?”

General Antonio M. Taguba’s list of Abu Ghraib abuses, summarized above, was leaked to the press by an unknown source. Though not a whistleblower per se, Taguba did not flinch from accusing his own comrades, and he didn’t scapegoat but pointed his finger at the very top. In 2008, Taguba wrote: “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

For showing courage and integrity, Taguba was forced into retirement, but Bradley Manning, a mere private, is already paying a much heavier price for exposing yet more crimes by the U.S. Army. Kept in solitary confinement for seven months now, Manning faces up to 52 years in prison, with many, including Congressman Mike Rogers, calling for his execution.

Manning’s physical and psychological conditions are deteriorating rapidly. He turned 23 just yesterday. Friends who have visited Manning in prison are being intimidated by our government from speaking out, according to the Guardian. People are being stalked, computers seized without warrants. A staple of Fascism, extra-judicial harassment should never be tolerated in any genuinely free society.

So after decades of appalling disclosures by human rights organizations, the media and even the government itself, nothing has changed. We have enough evidence to convict just about everybody and everything inside that Beltway, save a potted plant or two, perhaps, so what’s missing is not more information, but an ability to deduce and to synthesize, that is, to think, and, even more importantly, some semblance of moral clarity.

The same scene that outrages one person will titillate another. To a Nazi, photos of Dachau and Bruchenwald are a turn on. Atrocity and torture images also confirm the status quo, since they illustrate most vividly who has the power, who can do what to whom, who can be stripped naked, bloodied and blown to bits.

Susan Sontag rightly compared the Abu Ghraib images to trophies. Proud of our bloody trophies, and not just photos but ears, fingers and whatnot, many Americans still subscribe to our full spectrum domination, ass-kicking aspirations, so protests or no, Wikileaks or no, the American Empire will not be shamed or persuaded into changing its ways. It will not reform itself. Cornered, it’s likely to become even more vicious. Evil will bare its fangs most nakedly.

Obey orders and torture and the worst that can happen to you is an administrative reprimand, whatever that means, but if you follow your conscience, be prepared to be locked up, tortured or even killed. It’s already in the book.

It is no coincidence that concerns about fascism have emerged during a time of crises. War, likely global depression, and the turmoil in their wake present an opportunity and need for refuge to people who have fear of uncertainty in their genes and their personality make-up (authoritarianism either as followers or leaders), if not outright social dominance (social dominance orientation personality dimension). Fear makes most people acquiescent, and many become obedient, in a growing vortex of authoritarian leaders and followers who become mutually emboldened – bullies who smell the opportunity to control their world or close their group and protect each other. Both Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority research illustrate what some (many) of us can do when fear and control become institutionalised. Theodor Adorno called this the ‘authoritarian embrace’. Outright authoritarians (right wing authoritarianism; RWA) are few, perhaps around ten percent of the population, and those whose authoritarian genes can be switched on during times of crisis and fear represent around twenty percent more. That is no more than a third of the population primed to bring fascism into being, but this minority make themselves heard, and felt, visciously, intuitively and infectiously.

How can I assert the above percentages so confidently? Well, I have watched the psychology of authoritarianism for almost two decades now, but don’t take my word for it. The authoritarian personality, or its present title Right Wing Authoritarian, has been studied since Theodor Adorno began to look for the roots of fascism after WW2. The mantle is now carried by Dr Bob Altemeyer (U. Manitoba). He is concerned enough that he published a book detailing the history of his and others’ research on the topic free online, The Authoritarians, along with a forward by Sen. John Dean whose concerns about fascism have led him to champion Altemeyer’s work. Altemeyer also recently published an addendum assessing the authoritarian personality in terms of its influence in the Tea Party movement, including reference to social dominance oriented personality which has strong links with authoritarianism.

The following is a very brief outline of Altemeyer’s findings about the enemy of humanity residing within our societies. It is a pared down quote of Bob Altemeyer’s words from his addendum to The Authoritarians - “Comment on the Tea Party Movement.” The twelve traits (and the SDO personality) form an apposite description of the RWA and SDO in terms of Tea Partiers that most can easily relate to ‘…you can hardly miss the authoritarian follower tendencies in the behavior of the Tea Partiers’ (Altemeyer). It also serves as rule of thumb that can be applied to the social world and institutions around us more generally. I write this article as a European, and I see the same traits within our own movements and institutions here. This is not solely an American problem, indeed it was in the twentieth century a genocidal European problem, and has blown up at various times globally throughout history, and even though we in Europe have no dictators and brown/black shirts at the moment we are still subtly attuned to watch for their emergence.

Twelve key traits:¹

1. ‘Authoritarian submission. Authoritarian followers submit to the people they consider authorities much more than non-authoritarians do. In this context, Tea Partiers seem to believe without question whatever their chosen authorities say […] The followers don’t find out for themselves what the Democratic leader truly said, what is really in a bill, what a treaty actually specifies, or whether taxes have really gone up. They are happy to let Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin do their thinking for them. It has gotten so bad that their leaders casually say preposterous things that are easily refuted, because they know their audience will never believe the truth, or even hear about it.’

2. ‘Fear. Fear constantly pulses through authoritarian followers, and Tea Partiers are mightily frightened. They believe President Obama is a dictator. […] The people who orchestrate the Tea Party movement know well what button to push first and hardest among social conservatives, and they work it overtime. And they know spreading fear “works” with others as well. Sometimes it seems they are all trying to out-boogie-man each other.’

3. ‘Self-righteousness. Self-righteousness runs very strongly in authoritarian followers, and combines with fear to unleash aggression in them. The Tea Partiers commonly describe themselves as “the good Americans,” “the true Americans,” “the people,” and “the American Patriots.” They could hardly wrap themselves in the flag more thoroughly or more often than they do. Theirs is the holy cause. They believe they are the only ones who can save the country.’

4. ‘Hostility. Authoritarian aggression is one of the defining characteristics of authoritarian followers. Do Tea Partiers seem particularly aggressive? […] They angrily called people who disagreed with them at the town halls “Liars,” “Communists,” and “Traitors.” They booed and booed until opposing speakers simply gave up. They lashed out at elected representatives who tried to engage in dialogue. If you look at some of the videos of last August’s protests, you can see veins bulging in the necks of some of the Tea Partiers as they vented their fury.’

5. ‘A lack of critical thinking. Authoritarian followers have more trouble thinking logically than most people do. In particular, they tend to agree with sayings and slogans, even contradictory ones, because they have heard them a lot. Thus Tea Partiers reflexively, patriotically thump that the United States is the best country on earth, but as well that it is now an Obama dictatorship. They also have extra trouble applying logic to false reasoning when they like the conclusion. A ready example can be found in Tea Partiers‟ assertion that Obama is a socialist. They have heard this over and over again from Rush Limbaugh, etcetera, and “so it must be true.” But Obama has never advocated state ownership of an industry. He certainly did not advocate state ownership of health insurance, and eventually even backed away from the “public option” (that most Americans wanted) which would have let the government as well as private companies offer health insurance.’

6. ‘Our “biggest problem.” Authoritarian followers will readily believe that lots of things are our “biggest problem.” It can be drugs, the decline of religion, the breakdown of the family, you name it. Thus it was not hard to get Tea Partiers worked up about, of all things, a plan to improve health care to the levels found in other industrialized countries. Yet Tea Partiers believe the passage of the health care bill marks the end of liberty. But they could just as easily have been led to believe that climate change legislation, nuclear disarmament, gay marriage, or taking “In God we trust” off the money would sound the death knell for America. In earlier eras it could have been sex education, Sunday shopping, the 40-hour week, or a Catholic president that would lead to our doom.’

7. ‘Compartmentalized thinking. Authoritarian followers can have so many contradictory beliefs and “biggest problems” because their thinking is highly compartmentalized. Ideas exist independently of the other ideas in their head. Their thinking is so unintegrated because they have spent their lives copying what their authorities say, without examining whether the ideas fit together sensibly. And Tea Partiers say over and over that the Democrats are installing a dictatorship, but they demonstrate every time they demonstrate that Americans still have all the freedom of speech they ever had. And one notes the health care reforms bear a striking resemblance to Social Security and Medicare—which many of the protestors happily enjoy and would never give up.’

8. ‘Double Standards. Highly compartmentalized thinking makes it easy for authoritarian followers to employ double standards in their judgments. One finds many examples of this among the Tea Partiers. […] Tea Partiers also protested about the federal deficit growing by unprecedented leaps and bounds under Obama. But it grew by unprecedented leaps and bounds during George W. Bush‟s presidency, and demonstrations against that were few and far between. […] It’s pretty clear that many, many Tea Partiers aren’t really against the things they say they’re against. For them, it‟s OK when Republicans do these things. But that is pure hypocrisy, which one finds in abundance among authoritarian followers. And in their leaders, such as the various governors who condemned the stimulus package, said they would refuse such funds, but then accepted them and had their picture taken at project announcements that followed.’

9. ‘Feeling empowered when in groups. Authoritarian followers seem to want to disappear as individuals. They‟re not comfortable taking stands on their own, or acting alone. Instead they seem fulfilled simply by being part of a large, powerful movement on the march. Thus the insult-hurling Tea Partiers probably would have been quiet, even deferential, had they met with their member of the House one-on-one last August. But experiments have shown that authoritarian followers are highly conforming. When they are in a group of like-minded persons they are much more likely to do things, especially aggressive things, that they would not do alone. They make a good mob, winding each other up by hearing each other yell.’

10. ‘Dogmatism. We also know that authoritarian followers lead the league in being dogmatic. When their leaders set their opinions for them, those opinions are set in stone. Experiments show that nothing (aside from their authorities) can convince them they are wrong. If overwhelmed by logic and evidence, they simply “castle” into dogmatism. This is probably because they don‟t really know why they believe what they believe. They didn‟t figure it out for themselves; they Xeroxed what their authorities said.’

11. ‘Ethnocentrism. Authoritarian followers are notably ethnocentric, constantly judging others and events through “Us versus Them” lenses. They largely choose their friends according to their beliefs. They stick to news outlets that tell them what they want to hear. They live in a polarized world, divided into their in-group, and out-groups consisting of everybody else. They stress in-group loyalty, and try to keep their distance from the out-groups. […] This fierce in-group orientation, along with the followers‟ need for external confirmation of their beliefs, explains why Fox News has such a big audience compared with other outlets, why Sarah Palin‟s, Glenn Beck‟s, and Ann Coulter‟s books leap to the top of the best sellers lists, and why “hate radio” is so popular. Authoritarian followers have to get their ideas “validated” by others more than most people do. So they constantly seek out sources of information that will tell them they‟re right. It amounts to in-group in-breeding of the intellect. Research shows that less authoritarian people are more likely to consider different sides of an issue, and figure things out more for themselves.’

12. Prejudice. Studies have found that authoritarian followers are among the most prejudiced people in society. It is the nastiest aspect of their ethnocentrism, and one they insistently deny—to others and to themselves. And they really do not realize how prejudiced they are, compared with others, because they associate so much with other prejudiced people. So their prejudices seem normal and perfectly justified to them.

Racial prejudice appeared at many of the Tea Party demonstrations, in the form of signs, banners, and tee-shirts—just as it did during the 2008 campaign after Sarah Palin energized the social conservatives.

Social Dominance Orientation (also Altemeyer’s words)

‘Because the Tea Partiers display so many “classic” signs of authoritarian followers, I think it‟s safe to conclude that a lot of the members have such personalities. But another sizeable group swells the ranks who would seem to have little tendency to follow anyone: libertarians. And while the two contingents may agree on many economic issues, they appear to have fundamentally different views of government and liberty.

[…]

Poor people are poor, they say, simply because they are lazy. We should not extend unemployment benefits to the people laid off now because it will just encourage them to watch TV instead of looking for work. The poor people who accepted the banks’ invitation to buy nice houses for their families at low interest rates were “reaching beyond their class” and deserved to lose them. The rich are rich simply because they worked harder than everybody else, and deserve their wealth. Obama is taking money from those who work hard to buy votes from people demanding hand-outs.

These attitudes come right out of the catechism of the other authoritarian personality that research has discovered, the social dominators. Their defining characteristic is opposition to equality. They believe instead in dominance, both personal (if they can pull it off) and in their group dominating other groups. They endorse using intimidation, threats, and power to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This is the natural order of things, they believe. “It is a mistake to interfere with the law of the jungle,‟ they argue. “Some people were meant to dominate others.” “It’s a dog eat dog world in which the superior people get to the top.”

Such people may want government to stick to running fire departments so they can rise/stay above others unimpeded. Research shows that social dominators are power-hungry, mean, amoral, and even more prejudiced than the authoritarian followers described earlier. They want unfairness throughout society. Barack Obama, and the ludicrous perception that he is going to lead African-Americans in “taking over America” would be their worst nightmare. So the hypothesis that the Tea Party movement has more than its fair share of social dominators may have merit.’

The authoritarian and social dominance personality types and fascism

The above descriptions of personality in the Tea Party by Dr Bob Altemeyer, the leader in his social science field, show us how personality can define a social movement. I would have confidence in the conjecture that the rise of the Nazis and many other fascist totalitarian empires probably started with a similar spectrum of personality traits coming together and forming a movement which through its emotive force became unstoppable. The sheer power of a movement comprised of a mass of aggressive people who do not think for themselves and simply follow their saviour, combined with a leadership that knows only too well how to push their buttons, this should give us all pause. It is the reason I try to inform people about the very real dangers of fascism taking hold in a time of uncertainty. Fear and the need for self protection and selfish opportunism is probably the core driver in the nexus of publicly organised RWA and SDO behaviour, and we are now in an age where this emotion can easily be set running in the population much more widely. We need to be aware of what the politics of fear is doing in our institutions in order to find ways of countering it.

Want to help spread the word? See Bob Altemeyer’s website, there is an email discussion list for those interested in RWA psychology, and a Facebook group Authoritarian Watch.

1. All quotes from “Comment on the Tea Party Movement,” Altemeyer.

Soros is unequivocally far from a humanitarian, and — judging from his behavior in the economic and political arena — not whatsoever a nice guy. He’s known as the man who took down the Bank of England, he was convicted of insider trading in France, he’s enriched himself off of the rapacious practice of speculating on national currencies, and he even once told former Mayalasian leader Dr. Mahathir Mohamad that he was a menace to his own country, because he implemented taboo, at the time; capital controls — a practice that has now been accepted, by even many on the right. But controlling the country via the organizations and non-profits that he supports and donates to? No, that is just absurd.

Beck is “harmless” insofar as he makes scurrilous attacks on anyone left of Cleon Skousen, and so long as he does not take his racial hatred — and hatred of most minority groups — too far outside the lines. It matters not, though apparently, that he’s on a purported news channel and thousands, if not millions, would seem to hang on his every word. And not to mention, of course, that they would seem to be at his predilection to rally in support of neofascism. The FDA is currently banning alcoholic energy drinks in the fifty states in this country, but Glenn Beck’s hokum doesn’t come with any kind of a black box or a warning?

If Glenn Beck came out tomorrow and said he would no longer support the apartheid state of Israel, that would be it. Forget Beck even engaging in such a statement that is that black and white — or “too far” to one side. If he said the United States needs to be an independent broker in the peace process; instead of the lawyer for Israel, it would be curtains for Beck! He’d collect his severance package, and; God-willing, be on to a different venue. Beck can seemingly; however, continue to propagate the most vicious, unsubstantiated and scurrilous kind of attacks upon George Soros, and apparently; continues to clock in — just the same. Who will be the next controllers of America, according to Glenn Beck’s crack investigative “journalism”? There’s an army of groups and people that can be scapegoated, just as Beck has shamefully promoted toward one wealthy Jew.

Fox News, obviously continues in its slide toward oblivion, but make no mistake; however — no matter how far the rhetoric falls down into the gutter — we can continue to be assured that the AIPAC/Likudnik position on Israel will remain unassailed. To question that particular orthodoxy is a far worse faux pas to make, than to project the kind of stuff of Father Coughlin and virulent hate speech on to national television. We already knew that most of these fundamentalist Christian so-called Zionists care nothing for the Jewish people, and now we can unequivocally say that we know the same about the loathsome Murdoch “news” channel. According to their ideology/mythos, of course, the Jews will be engulfed in the Rapture, or converted to worship their God.

The latest target of the Canadian Jewish Congress is Adbusters magazine, a counter-culture alternative to the pro-business, pro-Israel mainstream media. Publisher Kalle Lasn ran an article and a single pair of photos comparing the Nazi persecution of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the Zionist persecution of native Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. The parallel is not perfect, but it’s very close and politically relevant.

In response, the CJC mobilized against Shoppers Drug Mart to have it pull Adbusters from its 515 stores nationwide. A spokeswoman for Shoppers denied any connection, but such a pro forma denial cannot be taken seriously, especially when it is demonstrably false:

“Two weeks ago Shoppers told us they were pulling Adbusters off their shelves because of customer complaints about our Gaza/Warsaw comparison,” wrote Kalle Lasn in the comments to the article. “But after stories appeared about this in the National Post and Globe & Mail it seems they have had a change of heart. We should all be calling out Shoppers’ CEO Jürgen Schreiber, not just for pulling Adbusters, but for then blatantly lying about why he did it…”

Nobody expected the CJC to like the article. Nobody should care because a constitutionally guaranteed right to free expression does not depend on the political machinations of a pressure group. Sounds highly undemocratic. Sounds, well, fascist, doesn’t it?

If Adbusters can be persecuted and smeared for dissenting from official Zionist dogma, what does that say about the state of Canada?

The CJC, like all the Zionist organizations in Canada, needs to sabotage any and all rational, open discussion of Israel, and to do that it must undermine the rule of law and constitutional freedoms. Yet, as is often the case, the CJC has done more to enhance Adbusters reputation than harm it.

Speaking of reputations, Canadian organizers of the Boycott Divest Sanction movement are now considering adding Shoppers Drug Mart to its list of businesses to be boycotted. That, and being caught lying about its role in the CJC’s censorship, can’t be good for business.

Ironically, the article that caused all the fuss was relatively innocuous, and given Adbusters relatively small circulation and readership demographic, it’s doubtful that anyone in the general public would have paid much attention.

To give an idea how inane the attack on Adbusters is, Dr. Norman Finkelstein has for the last 23 months featured on his website 84 pairs of photos that depict the horrific parallel between Nazi and zionist fascism. Thanks to the CJC, The Canadian Charger has the perfect reason to share it with its readers.

The Adbusters episode should be kept alive as long as possible to make the Israeli lobby as uncomfortable as possible and to remind us to ask ourselves: “Why do companies and governments so readily capitulate to the Israel lobby’s dictates?”

In Ottawa recently, pressure from B’nai Brith compelled the RCMP, our national police force to reconsider its decision to join the Canadian Islamic Congress at an Ottawa conference. Zionists routinely defame the CIC as extremist, but that doesn’t mean the RCMP should take its orders from them.

A bully only has as much power as his victim is willing to give him. When a victim stands and fights, the bully will often back down because all bullies are cowards.

You, reader, can help stop the zionist bullying of Canada by subscribing to Adbusters and writing to Jürgen Schreiber [requires javascript] and the Canadian Jewish Congress [requires javascript] to remind them that censorship belongs to a fascist state, not Canada.

•  This article first appeared here.

Capitalism does not empower people; it gives primacy to capital. Like the corporation, money is a legal fiction that allows bankers and financial institutions to create phantom wealth from nothing. It gives rise to privatized banking cartels and to the Federal Reserve which controls the money supply and loans it at interest to the government and to people. In effect, this gives bankers control of the government and our cultural institutions.

Free market fundamentalism was elevated to the status of religion decades ago by Milton Friedman and his disciples at the Chicago School of Economics. Its adherents regard the market as a holy oracle that takes precedence over man and nature, the diviner of social and economic status, a force more primal than the laws that govern the motion of planetary bodies and the formation of distant nebulae.

But like the phantom wealth it engenders, the existence of free markets is utter fiction. Not only are the precepts of market fundamentalism contradicted by nature; they are restrained by her. With a hunger for god-like power, capitalism and free market fundamentalism are, in fact, puny forces that are dwarfed by those of nature to which they will ultimately succumb.

Due in part to its infatuation with a particularly virulent form of capitalism, the U.S. has been descending toward fascism for decades. The persistent stream of neoconservative statesmen, stateswomen, and corporatists are the product of a corporate-funded counter-revolution that gained ascendancy during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, if not before. The counter-revolution is undoing all of the social and economic gains won through popular struggle and resistance.

Every social program that does not promote the religion of market fundamentalism is under siege: social security, pensions, public education, unemployment benefits, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the public infrastructure, are in danger of eradication or privatization.

This is the agenda of the right-wing extremists of the two major political parties who have ascended to power by adhering to, and promulgating, the theocracy of free market fundamentalism. Traditional liberalism has always acted as a bulwark against this and other regressive ideologies. But now it is politically extinct. Traditional liberalism has given way to the ultra-conservative philosophy of neoliberalism.

As a result of the ascendancy of neoliberalism, enlightened people can no longer associate traditional liberalism with the Democratic Party. The majority of democrats are only moderately less extreme than their republican counterparts. For instance, Hillary Clinton, a neoliberal, is a passionate supporter of Zionism. She advocates imperial war and occupation. Clinton is a free market fundamentalist, as is virtually every member of Congress. Her political philosophy is practically indistinguishable from that of Barack Obama and Karl Rove.

Preoccupied with the procurement of corporate funds, politicians are oblivious to the plight of struggling workers, the chronically unemployed, and the under-employed. No legislator holding high office acknowledges the existence of an underclass that is condemned to exist in despair and poverty. The underclass has no voice, no representation, and no power. It is too preoccupied with survival to rebel.

In contrast to the specter of the underclass, the 2010 mid-term elections saw more than a billion dollars invested in it. That figure is only going to increase as political favors are auctioned to the highest bidder. With each election the nation moves further to the right and a step closer to fascism. The system does not offer a means of turning back.

As long as capital drives the electoral process, liberal influence will continue to wane. It has been so long since the American public has seen a genuine liberal that they have forgotten what one looks like. It is absurd for anyone to associate Barack Obama with progressive politics, much less call him a socialist. As his record demonstrates, President Obama is a devout capitalist, a disciple of Milton Friedman, and a pious free market fundamentalist. He is Ronald Reagan incarnate. Those who were hypnotized by his hyperbole should have known better.

The corporations that finance political campaigns will not permit reform. Fortunes are made by maintaining the status quo, by promoting war, and by curtailing civil liberties in the name of national defense. They are made by imposing austerity upon working class people and by privatizing the public domain. This is the final frontier open to capitalist exploitation.

Like capitalism itself, the electoral system perpetuates social and economic disparity; it advocates imperial war and colonization; it fosters the privatization of the public domain; and it promotes economic serfdom and debt peonage as free market democracy.

Government-imposed austerity on working people has set the stage for the emergence of radical fascists. Aggressively promoted by the commercial media, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Christine Donnelly in Delaware, and Sarah Palin in Alaska provide recent examples of emerging American fascism. These kooks and simpletons are an expression of right-wing corporatism masquerading as working class populism. Their deferential followers are not wise enough to know the difference. They are only the beginning of far worse things to come.

The legendary free market, the Holy Grail of capitalism, is wrongly equated with democracy. It liberates people from their souls and transforms them into serfs. Market fundamentalism is reified and exalted by the commercial media and the corporate state. Far from benefiting working people, the spread of this belligerent ideology will ensure the demise of the American Republic, and it will take down much of the world with it in violent military conflagration.

While operating within the capitalist system, liberals have traditionally sought to hold corporations in check and to diminish their power through regulation. By contrast, conservatives, neoconservatives, civil libertarians, and neoliberals are working to increase corporate influence because they have a financial stake in the outcome.

The working class people who have created this nation’s wealth used to be associated with liberalism, often in the form of Socialism and Communism, which rightly sought to end capitalism. Traditional liberals recognize that working people are not commodities. They are not corporate property. They have more to offer than their labor and their blood.

Contrary to the maxims of market fundamentalism, money and the political power it buys is not of divine origin. Neither is it just or humane. Social capital, investing in people and human networks, provides the means of our salvation. But it must be organized and it must act in solidarity with all working class interests in all parts of the world at all times.

This comes very close to the Wobbly’s notion of “One Big Union” that was once a powerful organizing force here and abroad. Global worker solidarity, the public ownership of capital, and revolutionary unionism is a rational response to corporate globalization and market fundamentalism. This affords the best way to create equal opportunity, provide full employment, and to promote peace. Moneyless economies must evolve to serve the needs of all people, and they should operate in harmony with nature. Local currencies that are based on barter should replace the dollar.

No working man or woman should fall to their knees and worship at the blood-soaked altar of capitalism. This is where false populism and its regressive ideology of market fundamentalism inevitably lead. History provides countless examples, but we must be able to learn from them. America is not the first nation to go down this path.

If the citizenry wants a representative government, one that safeguards human welfare from corporate depredation, we must recognize that the state and federal electoral system does not provide the means of meeting our needs. Saturated in corporate money, it can only carry us toward fascism and a Gestapo state of violent extremism.

Despite the absurd proclamations of the Supreme Court, money is not free speech, and corporations are not people. Free markets do not exist; they are always manipulated by insiders seeking unfair advantage. History attests that capitalism is kept afloat by raiding the public treasure. The elite adore capitalism because it provides them enormous wealth and political power without having to produce anything of value. It puts them in charge of the global plantation. It makes them masters of working class people because too many of us cannot distinguish between fascism and class-conscious populism.

It was Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, who, along with 27 other most influential Jews, first warned of the danger of the rise of fascism in Israel. In a letter to the Editor of the New York Times published on 4 December 1948, when Menachem Begin was soliciting support in America, they said this:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement. The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

More than six decades on, under the headline Weimar in Jerusalem: The rise of fascism in Israel, Uri Avnery wrote: “Throughout the years, we were careful not to mention the word fascism in public discourse. It raises memories which are too monstrous. Now this taboo has been broken.”

Avnery recalled that Yitzhak Herzog, the minister of welfare in the Netanyahu government, a member of the Labour party, the grandson of a chief rabbi and the son of a president, had said a few days previously that “fascism is touching the margins of our society”. He was wrong, Avnery declared. “Fascism is not only touching the margins, it is touching the government in which he is serving, and the Knesset, of which he is a member.”

Einstein-like, Avnery warned that “fascism will overwhelm Israel” unless progressive forces “awake from the coma, understand what is happening and where it is leading to.”

On 3 September, under the Ha’aretz headline “Fascism is already here“, Yossi Sarid wrote that “Israeli democracy is mainly for decoration, like a tree grown for its beauty, not to bear fruit.”

Sarid asked what a citizen could do when his or her soul “is fed up with occupation.” And this was his answer:

If he participates in the popular struggle against the separation fence, he will be buried outside the fence of the cemetery; if he demonstrates in Sheikh Jarrah, he will feel the heavy hand of the police; if he is a university lecturer, they’ll send the watchdogs after him in the name of Zionism; if he belongs to a theatre troupe, someone who can still see the Green Line in his mind’s eye, they will threaten the source of his income; if he is a school principal who tries not just to support settlements, they will look for a different institution for him because that is not how we do things; if he is a judge who dares deny that security is of the utmost importance, they will blame him for bloodshed; if he is a journalist who refuses to join in the chorus, there will be cries to boycott his newspaper; if he is a citizen who wishes to protect a child being threatened with expulsion from the country, he too will be blacklisted as an enemy of the people; and a long list remains.

In a special investigation for Ynetnews on 21 October, Uri Misgav reported that “experts were divided on whether nationalistic trends in Israel were tantamount to fascism.”

He pointed out that over the years leftist demonstrators had chanted “Fascism won’t pass!” but the Left, he added, “keeps on declining, while fascism is increasingly gaining a foothold here. Significant parts of the Jewish public endorse blatant nationalistic and fascist principles, as shown by the Yedioth Ahronoth and Dr. Mina Tzemach poll published last week, including limited freedom of expression and association as well as limiting voting rights to Jews only.”

As Misgav noted, there are scholars who are warning against using the term “fascism” too lightly and cheapening it. Tel Aviv University Professor, Yossi Shain. was quoted as saying, “The question is whether a threat to democracy exists.”

Among those who think there is such a threat were several hundred youth group members who held rallies across Israel to condemn the government’s loyalty oath decision as racist and anti-democratic. This was after actors and authors had protested in Tel Aviv, read out the Declaration of Independence and published a new document entitled “Declaration of Independence from Fascism.”

One of that protest’s initiators, author and journalist, Sefi Rachlevsky, said: “This successful and miserable people, which experienced persecution and a holocaust, deserves independence, democracy and a life free of fascism. The real struggle today is not between leftists and rightists, but rather, between democrats and fascists.”

Misgav also noted that some religious figures are losing sleep over the latest trends. He quoted Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman as saying:

We saw the emergence of a new Jew in Israel; this does not include Lieberman alone, but rather, anyone who voted for the loyalty oath law, including religious parties. This Jew is no longer interested in religion or in Jewish values, but rather, uses his Jewishness to produce hatred and nationalism. The discourse around the loyalty oath gives rise to a corrupt situation: Instead of Judaism being used to criticize nationalism… it turns into a means that leads to fascism.

As Einstein observed all those years ago, the American public “must” be informed about what is really happening in Israel. But there’s no chance that it will be as long as the mainstream media is unwilling to give voice to those Israeli Jews who can see fascism coming.