(Note: TypePad, the primary publisher of Outside Agitator's Notebook, has been shut down by an ongoing denial of service attack and has been offline since Friday 18 April. Thus until further notice this will be OAN's only edition.)
*
MOST OF US have already noted the apparent paradox of how U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry, the former antiwar-activist and
Democratic presidential (peace) candidate, has become a frighteningly
aggressive, propaganda-spouting war-monger.
(Updated 14:56 Monday 21 April with a new Robert Parry dispatch on the Ukrainian Crisis, for which see "Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative," below.)
But even the most Leftward-leaning of the big-time pundits has not dared point out the bitter lesson – another irrefutable proof USian “democracy” is a naught but a cunning charade – implicit in Kerry's (apparent) transformation.
Stupefied as we are by the so-called “mainstream media” and its dire fulfillment of Josef Goebbels' plan to create the most hypnotically effective propaganda machine in human history, the majority of us have not heard of Kerry's murderous record in Vietnam. We do not know his riverine operations reveal a penchant for inflicting death on civilians that would have earned him a hearty, Zieg Heil welcome into the most kill-hardened units of the Schutzstaffel, the Nazis' dread SS.
Jeffrey St. Clair, the author of the above-linked Counterpunch report, says the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. revealed that Kerry's murderousness created a great many problems for Vietnam commanders. Zumwalt, himself a warrior of international renown, is quoted in the 2013 exposé as saying, “we had virtually to straitjacket (Kerry) to keep him under control.”
Thus in the context provided by St. Clair's disclosures last year and Kerry's conduct today, the 2004 election becomes a perfect, textbook example of how the One Percent defrauds the USian public with the Big Lie of “free elections.” The Democrats ran “peace candidate” Kerry as the antithesis of “war-criminal” George Bush, but also emphasized Kerry's Vietnam combat record, thereby appealing to Democratic warhawks. The Republicans then reinforced Kerry's “peace candidate” image by attacking him for his anti-Vietnam War activities, by questioning the validity of his medals – three Purple Hearts for wounds plus the Bronze Star and Silver Star for bravery under fire – finally labeling him “unfit for command” and implicitly suggesting he was a coward.
It's a classic example of how the two halves of the One Party of Two Names perfectly fulfill the functions assigned them by the One Percent.
The same pattern, obvious once we have learned to recognize it, is apparent in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In the former, the One Percent allowed the Democrats a victory to preserve the deception of a functional representative democracy. Obama raised the electorates' hopes by promising “change we can believe in,” and the Republicans ensured the outcome, first by selecting a terrifyingly ignorant candidate for vice president, then by rabidly denouncing the proposed “change” as “socialist” conspiracy, thereby convincing desperate voters Obama's promises were surely more than rhetoric. In 2012, after Obama the Orator was clearly revealed as Barack the Betrayer, the Republicans again served the Democrats with the “accidental” revelation of Romney's contempt for 47 percent of the U.S. population.
Meanwhile Warmaster Kerry, whose belligerence on behalf the violently greedy One Percent may well trigger World War III, is merely fulfilling the role for which he, like Obama himself, was obviously trained and scripted long ago.
******
In Case You Missed It (and
apropos the fulfillment of assigned roles), “The Plot to
Overthrow FDR: How the New Deal Sent Conservatives Into a Rage,”
implicitly defines the imposition of fascism on the United States
as a multi-generational
project. But as I said on the comment thread, Moyers and
Company narrator Joshua Holland tells the story wrong – or very
differently from how I heard it as a child and a young man.
Firstly, the coup was known as "the
Bankers' Plot," under which search-engine entry you will find
the most complete information.
Secondly, it was organized by Hitler
and Mussolini. Its goal was to make the American Legion an SS
equivalent; the objective was to make the U.S. part of the Axis. (The
U.S. One Percent was already the prime financier of world fascism;
now the U.S. would also be the primary source of food, natural
resources and materiel for global conquest.)
Thirdly, the plot was exposed by Soviet
agents. Despite Gen. Butler's efforts, it first became public
knowledge only via the Communist and Communist-influenced alternative
press.
What indicates these assertions are
probably true is how they solve at least three riddles of history.
They explain why FDR trusted Stalin (his agents literally saved FDR's
presidency and USian democracy too); why the postwar U.S. harbored
Nazi war criminals (back-door fulfillment of the plotters' intent);
and why the postwar U.S. so savagely purged Communists, socialists
and intellectuals (fear these elements would obstruct further efforts
to impose fascism).
Obviously the plotters and their
descendants have won. The results – the death of the “American
Dream,” the imposition of capitalist governance (absolute power and
unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the
rest of us) – are obvious.
******
In Case You Missed It, Robert
Parry of Consortium News is continuing to slay the Big Lies
spewed by the USian propaganda machine and courageously filter out
the truth about the Ukraine Crisis. I did not comment on “The Dangerous Neocon Role in Ukraine,”
linked here. But I said a few words about its sequel, “Ukraine's
Neo-Nazi Imperative,” where I pointed out U.S. aggression is forcing the Russians to see themselves as the modern-day equivalent of the Spartans at Thermopylae or their own grandfathers at Fortress Brest. I also had a bit to say
about the media issues
raised by “Ukraine,
Through the US Looking Glass,” in which Parry describes
the current coverage of the crisis as “utterly Orwellian...including accusing others of 'propaganda' when their accounts
– though surely not perfect – are much more honest and more
accurate than what the U.S. press corps has been producing.”
Parry reiterates the warning that
– had we USians not been numbed by lies and disinformation –
should rightfully terrify us all: “There’s also the added risk
that this latest failure by the U.S. press corps is occurring on the
border of Russia, a nuclear-armed state that – along with the
United States – could exterminate all life on the planet. The
biased U.S. news coverage is now feeding into political demands to
send U.S. military aid to Ukraine’s coup regime.”
As another poster on this thread said
in very different words, our submissive response does indeed demonstrate the
terrifying reality of Moron Nation – we the people imprisoned in
ignorance by decades of deliberate moronation, so dumbed-down we
like the most abjectly broken slaves instantly believe everything our
masters tell us – even when it is filled with obvious
contradictions.
But what to me as a
long-ago-blacklisted professional journalist is far worse is the
relentless, never-challenged deluge of false information that proves
how the One Percent – by subsuming the nation's formerly
independent media into a half-dozen monopolies – have created a
one-voice propaganda machine far more formidable than the
ground-breaking model for all such apparatuses Joseph Goebbels built
for Nazi Germany.
As a result the USian Empire has the
most hypnotically effective propaganda in our species' history. And
because the machine that produces it is disguised as a civilian
business rather than a government bureaucracy, its tyranny and the
diabolical cleverness by which we are brainwashed into submission
remains forever unrecognized.
Once again we see capitalist governance
in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent,
total subjugation for all the rest of us. Thus does capitalism
fulfill its moral imbecility: not just as fascism, but as fascism
sustained by modern technology and therefore more inescapably evil
than anything our species has ever before encountered.
******
Meanwhile the fact it took a formal academic project and its 20-year collection of data to prove what our ancestors recognized at least a century ago – that the United States is an oligarchy in which the rich are omnipotent and the rest of us are impotent – prompts me to lapse into parody on the Hartmann comment thread:
Five axioms concerning capitalist governance:
Definitions: The One Percent is the hereditary capitalist aristocracy that owns the nation's wealth. The Ruling Class consists of the politicians, bureaucrats, police commanders, military officers and business executives who serve the One Percent. The purpose of capitalist governance is absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else.
Hence:
(1)-The non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class to the popular will is directly proportionate to the extent the Ruling Class is indebted to – and therefore effectively owned by – the One Percent.
(2)-The probability of revolution is directly proportionate to the non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class.
(3)-The probability of successful revolution is based on the presence of four historically proven prerequisites. These are (A)-a unifying ideology; (B)-effective leadership and disciplined organization; (C)-mastery of extant technologies; (D)-support by one or more foreign powers.
(4)-The probability of violent revolution is directly proportionate to the Ruling Class capability of violently suppressing non-violent revolution.
(5)-The negative consequences of violent revolution – death, famine, disease, destruction – are directly proportionate to the refusal of the One Percent and its Ruling Class to yield to the popular will.
(In other words, no matter who wins, life in a post-revolutionary United States would be no more or less wretched than life in a land that combines the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima and the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti. Which is why I am so very glad I'm old – so old I probably won't be alive when the revolution happens.)
***
My next entry on the thread, in response to another poster,
dropped the academic affectations: The unified ideology described by axiom (3)-(A) is already taking shape amidst the grassroots. It is beyond the domain of the two Ruling Class parties (actually one Ruling Class party with two names), and even beyond the Tea Party and its various overtly fascist subsets, (i.e., the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the other such groups whose banners are part of the international fascist solidarity demonstrations now taking place in Kiev). It is also beyond the domain of any specific organization of the Left, which is why this new unified ideology has yet to acquire a name and formal structure.
Nevertheless it is a hybrid of democratic socialism (cooperative and/or public ownership of vital services and the means of production); Marxism (recognition of the historical truth of class struggle and the necessity of disciplined Working Class solidarity); traditional anarchism (healthy distrust of hierarchal organizations) and classical Jeffersonian populist democracy (one person/one vote, fostered by the Internet).
It has already made itself apparent in innumerable small ways, particularly as the (failed) Occupy movement and its more localized successes, including the relief efforts of Occupy Sandy in and around New York City, the rapidly growing popularity of the Socialist Alternative Party in Seattle and Minneapolis, and the brushfire-fast nationwide spread of SA's $15 Now! campaign to raise the minimum wage to livable-income levels.
When and if this incipient movement coalesces and comes to power, it would be absolutely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and would in fact be its fulfillment.
The vital questions are therefore how and when its self-recognition will progress to the point of formalization, and whether it will have the solidarity (strength) and courage to withstand the inconceivably violent reaction by which the One Percent and the Ruling Class will try to suppress it, the forces for which are already in place.
Apropos a civil war, I too see that, but probably not as you do. Assuming a successful revolution – note again its four prerequisites – a situation would probably evolve similar to what obtained in the old Russian Empire after 1917, with the One Percent trying (with the support of various overseas allies) to regain power, and the revolutionaries equally determined to hang on to the "liberated" parts of the U.S.
The One Percent, in keeping with the lavish funding it is pouring into establishment of theocratic governance, would no doubt declare its territories ruled by Biblical Law, thereby ensuring the fealty of the South and the Midwestern interior, but both coasts and no doubt Alaska too would side with the revolution. The nation as we know it would cease to exist (as it nearly has anyway), and the land would be sundered in such ways that, combined with terminal climate change, would probably take at least a thousand years for recovery. Hence my vision of "the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima (as the One Percent would not hesitate to nuke rebellious cities), the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti."
As a result, the global power center would of course shift far eastward: China unquestionably, Russia more than likely. As to what remained of the former United States, part of it would be absorbed by expansions of Mexico and Canada and probable Russian reclamation of its former Pacific Northwest possessions; the remainder would either be uninhabitable due to the lingering toxicity inflicted by CBR (chemical, biological, radiological) warfare or so impoverished by isolation its habitable lands would be realms of famine and disease.
Were the One Percent to win – and I believe the odds are 50-50 – most if not all of the same conditions would apply save that the residents of lands under One Percent control would have it far worse: they would be de facto slaves...which is of course what the One Percent already intends for all of us in the Working Class anyway.
As I said, I'm damn glad I'm old.
***
Then when another poster seemed to romanticize revolution, I added
this:Make no mistake: there is nothing desirable about violent revolution – which would leave the lands wherein it is fought looking, at best, like Europe in 1945 and, at worst, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the Bomb.
Yet given how quickly the One Percent now resorts to violence – note again the example of the brutal suppression of Occupy, also the Gestapo-like disregard of neighborhood civil rights that characterized the search for the Boston Marathon bomber – I fear an eventual violent reaction by the citizenry is inevitable.
(Indeed, provoking a rebellion may be the clandestine purpose behind such tactics – the creation of an incident that will give the Ruling Class an excuse for exterminating large segments of the U.S. population, the Final Solution to the problems of unemployment, poverty and homelessness.)
And the mercilessness of the Ruling Class response has already been made clear: it was demonstrated in Vietnam: “we had to destroy the village to save it.”
Remember too that morally there is not one scintilla of difference between the USian policy of exterminating an entire village for harboring alleged "terrorists" and the Nazi German policy of imposing exactly the same reprisals for harboring partisans. That the USian (Fourth) Reich does the extermination from afar with drones, while the German (Third) Reich did it up-close-and-personal with machine guns, rifles, bayonets and pistols, does not alter the moral depravity or karmic malignancy of the event itself. In fact it is at least arguable the drone-exterminations are more reprehensible merely by how they protect the drone operators from being splattered with blood and gore – and how that bloodlessness is then diabolically used to assure the drone operators they are without sin.
As to your notion of a coordinated revolutionary effort by socialist countries – Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam etc. – that capability perished with the Soviet Union, and it is already clear the USian Empire will do anything it can to prevent its resurrection. China, meanwhile, has been totally co-opted (and totally corrupted) by capitalism; the USian Empire has achieved with money precisely what its British Empire antecedent sought in the 19th Century to accomplish with opium. The one remaining wild-card is Russia, where the Communist Party remains the second largest (and by far the best organized) political party in the nation – so much so it is at least arguable it was only by Putin's New Deal-like repeal of the most viciously capitalist Ayn Rand “reforms” imposed under Yeltsin the country was steered away from another Communist revolution.
(This is no doubt one of the reasons why the USian Imperial One Percent – the oberfuehrers of fascism's Global New Order – are now trying to provoke a war with Russia: they are terrified by what might happen should that vast nation again go Communist.)
LB/20 April 2014
-30-
