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| Another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, the woman's placard as apt now as in October 2011, when her smile reflected the joy and optimism that was all too soon crushed by USian governments at all levels. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013 (Click on image to view it full size.) |
*
(Note: Vital medical procedures
consumed so much of my time during the past seven days,
this essay is again unavoidably late, and I again apologize for my
tardiness. But the news is good. Contrary to what was first
suspected, my eyes are free of glaucoma. Moreover,
the latest surgical techniques bypass unrelated conditions
that would have prohibited cataract surgery. Thus my
eyesight – and therefore my ability to photograph – can
be surgically restored, for which I am grateful beyond
words.)
***
THE TOTAL-SURVEILLANCE STATE is
undoubtedly the most terrifying governmental application of modern
technology that has yet been revealed to us. Its terror exceeds that
of thermonuclear weapons or nuclear melt-downs, which we can always
convince ourselves will only be inflicted elsewhere upon others.
Unlike The Bomb, which save in Hiroshima or Nagasaki has not yet been
dropped, or the homicidal reactor, which – at least so far as we're
allowed to know – has run amok only at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl
and Fukushima – the total-surveillance state murders us all by
killing our ability to think and speak freely. It thereby makes us
less-than-human. In other words, it reverses evolution, reducing us
to the mind-crushed state of slaves or prisoners. And as we grasp
what it does to us in the context of the
additional fear generated by organized assaults
against specific groups and individuals
– women; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamp
recipients; organized labor; members of the working press;
photographers whether professional or amateur; any other social
critics whose disclosures or protests dare expose the unapologetic
savagery of the new paradigm of USian governance – it should already be
provoking massive, nationwide anger. The very concept of what
it meant to be “American” has not only been ruthlessly violated
but maliciously abandoned, as if the government itself has officially
torn down our flag, burned it, urinated on the ashes and stomped them
into filth. Might there then soon be the same public outpouring of
humanistic, patriotic rage as followed the sinking of the Lusitania,
the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the massacre of innocents symbolized by
the numbers 9/11? Apparently not. The vast majority of the USian
people are sullenly silent – and in all probability will remain so.
Yet what is inflicted upon us is not,
of course, really a new paradigm of governance at all, and that –
especially the associated guilt – may be one of the reasons we are
thus far so submissive. To the aboriginal inhabitants of North
America, to the subjects of the colonial empire the United States
seized from Spain, sought to expand into Asiatic Russia
and imposed elsewhere including Africa and other parts of Asia,
the sadism and brutality that now characterizes USian governance of its homeland is an old and
ugly story. All that has changed is such imperial malevolence has now
become the domestic policy of the dominant political parties (or,
more correctly, the One Ruling Class Party of Two Names), which means
it is now enforced by the entire federal government (especially by
the secret-police apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security),
as well as by all the state and local governments. But it has always
been the policy of the State Department, the Central Intelligence
Agency, the Defense Department and the various other overseas
extensions of the USian empire whether official (as in Vietnam),
capitalist (as at Bhopal and Bangladesh) or mercenary
(as in Iraq, Afghanistan and
New Orleans). It also means
we of the USian 99 Percent are now potentially no better off than the
Iraqis or even the First Nations people our ancestors genocidally
displaced – perhaps the true meaning of Barack Obama's “change
we can believe in.”
The only difference is we have yet to suffer our own Trail
of Tears,
our own Wounded Knee. But we can be certain of one thing: equal horrors – or
probably events far more horrible – are looming, and they are not
on a comfortably distant horizon, which means they will occur within
many of our own lifetimes. For that is the hideous truth of the
total-surveillance state: it has no other purpose
than to facilitate maximum zero-tolerance tyranny. And the fact we
have not already taken to the streets in massive resistance
suggests we have already been conditioned to the reflexive
submissiveness required of a conquered people.
However there is one
flame-bright exception to this dismaying
acceptance of what seems ever more likely to be our unavoidable
reduction to permanent serfdom and slavery: a
growing number of USian women, whose liberation movements I once
believed might at last force this nation to be true to its
stated principles, are again rising up angry. More than any other
force within the 99 Percent – certainly more than we males whose
identities are occupational rather than biological and have therefore
been hopelessly shattered by permanent unemployment – these women
seem closest to recognizing that the United States has been cunningly
turned into the human equivalent of a Skinner Box. Though they have
yet to connect the proverbial dots, I have no doubt they will soon
understand how the dramatic increase in oppression – the atrocities
summarized above – exemplifies the new Ruling Class methodology of
forceful behavior modification even as the all-seeing god's-eye of
total-surveillance enables the overseers to monitor and refine their
techniques with a speed and efficiency hitherto imagined only by
villains of the same Ted Bundy arrogance that characterized Adolf
Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and let us not forget our own
Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In this
repugnant context – especially given that history shows the
grievances of women are often the hinge-issues in successful
revolutions, the methodical assaults on women's hard-won sexual
freedom – the avowedly misogynistic political efforts
and the growing epidemic of
physical attacks combined with the institutionalized protection of
the attackers
– reveal how the Ruling Class views the suppression of female
independence as the key to the abolition of liberty and justice for
all. Damning enough in its own right, the revelation is underscored
by the associated treachery of the Obama Administration, typical
Obama the Orator ploys of eloquently endorsing women's demands while
Barack the Betrayer sneakily back-stabs
the very measures he falsely claims to support. The common
denominator in all these outrages – just as the would-be victims
themselves proclaim – is a concerted effort to force women and
girls back into the de facto slavery demanded by patriarchy,
explicitly by its Abrahamic religious offspring (Judaism,
Christianity and Islam), implicitly by its economic fulfillment in
capitalism's final transformation to fascism. Every time a woman is
imprisoned by the (very rational) fear she will not only be raped but
her assailant will be officially protected, the intended behavior
modification has achieved its goal. Factor in the similar barriers
and prohibitions inflicted on social critics, journalists,
photographers, labor activists, anyone else of either gender who
might be inclined to resist the blitzkrieg by which Ayn Rand fascism
is conquering the United States, and our portrait of a nation ruled
like a Skinnerian rat-maze is complete and undeniable. B.
F. Skinner himself stated in 1972 what is obviously the key precept
of USian governance today: "The issue is to improve the
way in which (humanity) is controlled." To which women are responding with increasingly public defiance.
The question, of course, is what they will do when the state
confronts them with the same combination of economic retaliation
bolstered by truncheon-and-pepper-gas barbarism that has already
hammered us men into submission.
***
Nevertheless it is by viewing the war
against women as a carefully scripted campaign of
behavior-modification we gain our most sharply focused picture of
capitalism's thrust toward Christian theocracy as its primary
modality for controlling the USian 99 Percent. But the Left is as
powerless as the Right to combat it. The secular and/or libertarian
Right is of course nullified by the fact the imposition of theocracy
is a major objective of the Right's capitalist financiers. The Left
however is paralyzed by its own insistence on political
“correctness,” in this instance its refusal to recognize Islam's
history of imposing its own brand of theocracy – including the most
virulent forms of misogyny characteristic of human societies today –
wherever it ascends to power. To denounce theocracy is therefore –
at least obliquely – to denounce Islam, something the doctrinaire
Left and even the pseudo-Left cannot bear to do. Though it is
something of an aside, no doubt the associated taboos explain why
Socialist Worker refused to publish the following letter, my
response to its (above-linked) report on how President Obama
backstabbed women even on the hitherto (seemingly) long-settled issue
of access to contraception:
While Ms. Schulte's reporting on how
President Obama enabled the Religious Right to gain the tactical and
strategic high ground in the reproductive-rights struggle is the best
such work I have seen anywhere, it nevertheless omits a vital fact:
the extent to which (even) Democratic Party politicians are
(clandestinely) committed to the imposition of Christian theocracy on
the United States.
Though it is fashionable for
socialists of all sorts to underestimate the importance of
Christianity (and Abrahamic religion generally) in USian life, a
majority of at least 63 percent of the U.S. population is already
fundamentalist as defined by belief in the Bible as "literally
true" (see http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm),
which itself indicates a looming danger to secular governance.
Combine that with capitalism's historical preference for
zero-tolerance theocracy as the most efficient means of ensuring a
submissive, slave-minded Working Class, and the probable motive
behind Obama's serial betrayals of reproductive freedom come into
sharp and terrifying focus.
As for documentation of the
Democrats' clandestine role in the imposition of theocracy, one
source is especially useful. This is Jeff Sharlet's The
Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,
(HarperCollins: 2008), which exposes Hillary Clinton's
behind-the-scenes collaboration with Sam Brownback "for
legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and
state than to tunneling beneath it" (pg. 275). The same sort of
"tunneling" is precisely what was accomplished by the Obama
“compromise” that added to the USian definition of religious
liberty the alleged “right” of believers to impose their
doctrines on non-believers, as for example in the case of Christian
pharmacists who arbitrarily deny contraception to unmarried women.
Given the president's oft-demonstrated Machiavellian skill, this
staggering blow to church-state separation is clearly no accident.
Another excellent albeit more
generalized book on the threat of theocracy is Chris Hedges' American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon
& Schuster: 2006). But in most of the United States, the danger
is already reality. The Bible Belt South has been a de facto
theocracy since the Civil War: note the colloquial name for the Ku
Klux Klan – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” –
which denotes its function as a Christian equivalent of the lslamic
Morality Police. And – as proven by worsening restrictions on
contraception and the near-total destruction of abortion facilities –
the remainder of the midlands are not far behind. It is a risk we
ignore at our own huge peril – a dire hazard that indeed we have
already ignored far too long.
***
It is perhaps worthwhile to note at
this point that beyond history's seemingly endless series of isms,
there are only two alternative forms of human governance. One
alternative is tyranny: rule by a dictator, or dictators, whether
overt (as in Nazi Germany or the theocracy of Iran), or from behind
various pseudo-democratic facades (as in today's United States). The
other alternative is liberty – the never-fully realized theory
embodied in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People
of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union,
establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the
common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings
of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish
this constitution for the United States of America.” During my
elementary-school days, 1946 through 1951, all third graders not only
learned to recite the Preamble from memory, but to give simple
examples of its meaning, a requirement long ago repealed as dangerous
to capitalism and deleterious to its objectives. But the Preamble is
not as unique as we USians were typically taught, back in those
halcyon days when fledgling minds were still entrusted with
libertarian ideals. Similar sentiments are expressed somewhat more
bluntly in the concluding lines of The Communist Manifesto:
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have
a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!” Thus the greatest
fear of the USian Ruling Class has always been that Communism (or
some other form of socialism) would prevail here – a perfect fit
with the purposes and principles of “we the people” as elicited
by the Preamble and the Constitution itself. But in the Skinner Box
United States, monitored as it is by total surveillance, all such
potential is obliterated forever.
The limitless tyranny of the
total-surveillance state is, perhaps ironically, the final result of
the so-called “revolution” brought about by computers, which have
given the global Ruling Class the godlike omnipotence it has
consciously sought for at least two thousand years. The computer is
thus irrefutable proof of the One Percent's defining purpose – the
unspeakable lust for the zero-tolerance subjugation and total
enslavement of all the rest of us, which it is now after 20 centuries
of effort achieving via technologies against which there is no
effective defense save re-adoption of seemingly obsolete
machinery.
Meanwhile the popularization of the computer is the result of the
most elaborate snake-oil scam in human history. It and its offshoots
are peddled to the public as the apex of modern necessity even as
society is methodically restructured to make all such gadgets
essential – and damn those who cannot afford to keep up. Yet all
the while, and from the very beginning, the profits so amassed are
focused on perfecting the computer as the ultimate weapon of
oppression. Nor could this story have ended in any other way; the
computer as we know it grew not from humanitarian objectives but from
the profiteering instincts of the capitalists
and the deadly necessities of modern warfare.
Indeed the computer and the manner in which it was thrust upon us is an
object lesson in pure capitalism – the moral imbecility of infinite
greed elevated to maximum virtue, and therefore the closest
approximation to absolute Evil our species has yet evoked. The
computer, given its vital role in creation of the global slave
state, is perhaps capitalism's most definitive product. It is surely
capitalism's most pivotal tool. For without the computer, the Ruling
Class would never have been able to shrink all human society to a
Skinner Box, with ourselves reduced to nothing more than laboratory
rats in the One Percent's frantic, apocalypse-driven quest for wealth
and power.
LB/13-14 July 2013
-30-
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