Atrocities and Accomplishments That Tell Us Who We Are

THE WANTON TORTURING of an innocent young white woman by two Department of Homeland Security border guards may have at long last awakened the nation's major media to the dangerous extent the United States of America has degenerated into a de facto Fourth Reich.

First reported by The Watertown Daily Times, then covered in depth by Reason and The Atlantic, the atrocity in question has momentarily united three diverse elements of the mainstream media in a national outpouring of journalistic outrage. The Watertown paper, the flagship of an Upstate New York conglomerate of dailies and weeklies, is the trio's closest approximation of old-time independent media. But the two magazines make no pretense of being anything other than mouthpieces of the One Percent. Reason is the voice of the Ayn Rand Right,  though in this instance its libertarian opposition to government has trumped its Randite moral imbecility to produce the most informative of the three cited reports. The Atlantic is an instrument of the Bill Gates mentality, a carefully closeted form of fascism that seems to (correctly) recognize Randism as a new expression of Nazism and therefore – no doubt to avoid the associated odium – tacitly encourages Randites to self-identify as “New Democrats” or anti-union “progressives.”

Apart from the atrocity itself, the pivotal issue from the OAN perspective is the extensive coverage these three publications have given the incident. Their detailed reportage – particularly the excellent legal analysis provided by Reason – stands in stark contrast to how the mainstream media covers the ongoing war of attrition waged by the feds and federally militarized local police against blacks and Hispanics. Had the victim been a black or Hispanic woman, the incident would have almost certainly gone unreported. Such a story is deliberately suppressed unless it provokes a neighborhood rebellion, which is then denounced as an uprising of “welfare recipients” or “gangbangers” or “thugs.”

Given the geographic and sociopolitical exclusivities of its publishers, I probably would not have seen this story had Reader Supported News Editor-in-Chief Marc Ash not selected it for republication on his website.  I do not know what motivated his choice. I suspect part of his intent was to call attention, as the story surely does, to the racial discrepancies that define mainstream media's coverage of the skyrocketing incidence of police brutality.

No doubt Ash also recognizes the savaging of an unarmed and therefore defenseless white woman who dared assert her legal rights as yet another escalation in the policies that are methodically reducing U.S. citizens to captive people in a conquered land. Similar escalations occurred in post-Katrina New Orleans  and post-bombing Boston. 

But this newest incident is unique in that it was rationalized neither by disaster nor terrorism. In fact the video makes it clear the border guards' sole motive for victimizing Jessica Cooke was their obvious glee at inflicting suffering on a defenseless person.

Hence my remarks on the associated RSN comment thread:

And yet there are many idiots here amongst us who do not believe we live in the de facto Fourth Reich...

(This woman will of course be convicted and imprisoned and her life thereby ruined merely because she dared assert her rights in protest to the new Gestapo...who now claim jurisdiction over a “border” that in some places is 150 or 200 miles deep. Which means atrocities like this – albeit mostly suppressed by our Josef Goebbels media – are probably commonplace. Frankly I am astounded the video has not already been disappeared.)

(Note too the sadistic malice obvious in the border guard's voice – here as in Nazi Germany, sadism is now part of the job description for such thugs.)

Responding to another poster, I said:

Psychologically speaking, she WAS raped, a reality underscored by the obviously gloating response of the male Border Patrol thug.

(I'd bet he treats his wife or girlfriend and any children with exactly the same smirking brutality.)

And as I later added:

Alas, here in the Fourth Reich, there is no more “law.” There is only the malevolence of the authorities,which in turn is the malevolence of capitalism underscored by the Supreme Court. Now and forever the ultimate instrument of the One Percent, the court has already proven it will uphold all the brutality of capitalist governance no matter how savage or (previously) unlawful.

(Definitions: capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth; capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.)

***

MEANWHILE PROTEST DEMONSTRATIONS – and counter-demonstrations by neo-Nazis whom credible witnesses describe as “disturbingly cozy with the local police” – continue in Olympia, Washington state, where cops shot two unarmed black men on 21 May. 

The two, Andre Thompson, 24, and Bryson Chaplin, 21, are stepbrothers. Both are hospitalized. One is in critical condition with chest wounds.

They were initially accused of shoplifting beer from a Safeway supermarket. But two Olympia sources say the cops shot innocent men – that video tapes from store security cameras prove the two shooting victims were not the shoplifters – though this had seemingly not been confirmed by mainstream media as of this writing (31 May).

Because coverage of the incident has been typically spotty – once again we see that in the newsrooms of U.S. mainstream media, black lives do not matter – I am including this link  to an electronic bulletin board that attempts to provide up-to-date information on the shooting and its aftermath.

The reports and photographs thereon are posted by people who are outraged by the shootings. As is often true of the alternative press, these dispatches are typically more detailed and accurate than the trickle-down (piss-on-the-99-Percent) coverage begrudgingly provided by the media monopolies.

My own sources tell me the apparent alliance of the neo-Nazis with the police is profoundly disturbing. Such alliances were commonplace in the U.S. South during the Civil Rights Movement era, where police and sheriff's deputies were often also members of the Ku Klux Klan. But no such arrangements had hitherto been suspected in modern-day Washington state.

However, the ongoing refusal of the federal government to prosecute the armed militiamen who resisted its officials in the Bundy Ranch incident  suggests the encouragement of alliances between police and armed reactionaries may already be an un-publicized (and probably top secret) federal policy (scroll down).

***

THE EPIDEMIC OF young, often (understandably) defiant but invariably unarmed black youths murdered or severely injured by local cops has become a defining characteristic of the United States in the second decade of the 21st Century.

But few (if any) commentators have dared speculate on why – apart from racism – these atrocities are occurring so frequently.

Like soldiers, cops are trained to follow orders. Like their military counterparts, these orders allow individual officers almost no initiative.

Thus the frequency and geographic distribution of the killings suggests they are not coincidental – that they are in obedience to some (top secret) extermination order that has been handed down through police chains-of-command.

Given the federalization of local police by the Department of Homeland Security and the concurrent militarization of local police by joint DHS/Department of Defense agreements, the probable source of such an order is obvious.

The harshest critics of DHS whether on the Left or the Right say it is literally a U.S. recreation of the Third Reich's dread SS/Reichssicherheitshauptamt. 

Though three solid hours of Internet research failed to turn up a credible source for that particular claim, it revealed a somewhat more subtle bit of supportive evidence that is surely equally disturbing. The Nazi German acronym for its security department was RSHA. The originally proposed name for DHS was National Homeland Security Agency; its acronym was therefore to have been NHSA.

Coincidence? Or is there really a phantom chorus of “zieg heils” in the background? Scroll down to page viii of “Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change.” 

Note also this federal document's date: 15 February 2001. In other words, what many critics have damned as the Nazification of the United States  was underway eight months before the 9/11 attacks provided the government with an enabling equivalent of the Reichstag Fire.

Other vitally informative reads on DHS and its role in turning the U.S. into the Fourth Reich are here,  here,  here,  here and here.

(Yes, it is true many of the above links are to Libertarian [conservative] websites. That's because, when the issue is tyrannical governance, the [alleged] U.S. Left – obligated as it so frequently is to government-employee unions – is too often submissively silent.)

*** *** ***

DESPITE THE WIDELY publicized reports of a slight decline in the number of U.S. Christians, there is surely no decline in their ability to inflict their tyrannies on the U.S. population.

Among the most relentless of these theocratic despots are the Catholic bishops. They are trying to impose their misogynistic dogmas and deliberately cruel end-of-life “redemptive-suffering” doctrines on all of us via their expanding control of Catholic hospitals and medical systems. Because these institutions are heavily financed by taxpayer dollars, the bishops have access to vast sums of federal, state and local revenues with which to fund seemingly endless maneuvering through constitutional loopholes. The result is community after community inflicted by the anti-sexual and pro-agony strictures of de facto theocracy.

In Washington state, the situation is especially dire. The following is from Catholic Watch,  an on-line organization that tracks the church's methodical conquest of the nation's health care facilities:

“Almost half of the acute care hospital beds (a proxy for the health care system more broadly) are now subject to the 'moral authority' of three Catholic bishops. These bishops oversee medical policy and employment practices for all Catholic 'health care ministries,' which now include hospitals, labs, physician practices, hospices, and even insurance companies.”

The Catholic takeover of health-care facilities is fueled by missionary zeal – specifically the church's fanatical opposition to same-sex marriage, birth control, fertility treatments, abortion (even to save the life of the mother) and Death with Dignity.  By imposing the church's zero-tolerance dogmas via the marketplace – where capitalist doctrines of “economic freedom” are routinely cited to justify even the most egregious acts of oppression – the bishops are cleverly sidestepping the constitutional prohibitions that hitherto protected the U.S. from theocracy.

Predictably, the Republican Party – which with its anti-sex hatemongering often appears to be the bishops' executive-action agency – is reacting with panic  to the tiny decline in Christian membership.

***

BUT CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY is not only a defining characteristic of the U.S. Right. It was the closeted homophobia of Democrats, many of them self-proclaimed “progressives,” that terminated the 19-year career of David Olio, who just recently had been honored as one of the best high school English teachers in the nation. 

Olio's alleged sin? He dared read an outspokenly gay Allen Ginsberg poem in an advanced class for college-bound seniors.

As I said on the comment thread:

This appalling destruction of a teacher's life shows us all that is wrong with the United States.

It reveals the hypocrisy that underlies the self-proclaimed "progressive" label. It shows us that beneath the self-righteous rhetoric, a “progressive” is as anti-union, anti-First Amendment, racist, homophobic, misogynistic and reflexively fascist as any conservative, especially in the fear and loathing of sexuality.

I do not remember who it was – maybe Anais Nin or her lover Henry Miller – who noted the U.S. was the only nation on Earth to have made the Christian hatred of sexuality into a definitive national trait.

But that – though it alone explains how the U.S. population was reduced to Moron Nation, and how Moron Nation has been shaped into the Fourth Reich – is only half the tyrannical dynamic evidenced here.

The other half – "Olio refused to be interviewed for this story" – is exemplified by the teacher himself.

Thus it seems the final lesson he would teach us is in the slavish submission that has quashed forever the U.S. experiment in liberty. Why else would one whose life is irremediably ruined and who therefore has nothing left to lose refuse to fight back?

I hope of course I am wrong – that Olio is silent not because he is a coward but because he is preparing an epic lawsuit that will destroy the South Windsor School District.

Though hope, as Barack Obama has already so memorably taught us, expresses not audacity but futility.

***

Footnote: In these times, the only rational definition of our politics is provided by our socioeconomic class. We are thus either Working Class (the 99 Percent) or Ruling Class, the One Percent and its vassals.

Marx and Engels make it even clearer. We are either proletarians and peasants or we are part of the bourgeoisie.

It is the latter that includes the Ayn-Randimated status seekers that make up today's petit bourgeoisie – those who so often hide their greed and selfishness behind the self-proclaimed label of “progressive.”

How do I see this so clearly? As in Connecticut, so in “progressive” Washington state – where the fascists (in the form of the Republican Senate) already control the state government.

Next year the voters will again ride the rising wave of bourgeois hatred for the poor and shift yet further right, no doubt making Washington the newest Wisconsin – after which there will be many more cases like Olio's.

***

As a journalist – blogger, former editor-in-chief , news editor, city editor, investigative reporter etc. – I am frustrated by the many elements missing from this story.

For example:

It was reportedly a student who ratted out Olio and so began the process that destroyed his life.

From the ninth graf of the story linked above: “...the controversy began when one student in the class begged off a test in a different class the next day, claiming he (or she) couldn’t concentrate due the reading of the poem.”

The identity of this student should be published. Teens are routinely tried as adults when they they murder someone, and since this teen has maliciously murdered Olio professionally, he or she should by exposed accordingly. (I'd bet the rat is either a practicing Christian, a disciple of Ayn Rand or both.)

There is also the matter of a newspaper campaigning against the First Amendment. (Seventh graf: “The local newspaper denounced him in editorials.”)

As there at least two newspapers that serve South Windsor, the anti-Olio publication should be identified by name.

One of these papers is The Hartford Courant, which is owned by Tribune Publishing, the nation's third largest media corporation. If this is indeed the anti-Olio journal – its pay-wall prohibits the requisite archive search – hat in itself is a major news story.

Why? Because it would show us yet another dimension of mainstream media's shift toward Josef Goebbels propagandization.

*** *** ***

THE GOOD NEWS the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has tossed out an entire coda of Idaho anti-abortion laws  is also bad news as the decision will surely be appealed to the Supreme Court. And just as surely SCOTUS will toss out Roe v. Wade and affirm Christianity's hatred of women and sexuality by making abortion illegal again.

*** *** ***

THOM HARTMANN HAS written a breakthrough piece entitled “Capitalism Could Kill All Life on Earth,” for which he is to be commended. 

I responded accordingly:

Clearly Mr. Hartmann has at last realized that capitalism is literally the enemy of all life on earth – that if we are to survive, capitalism must be recognized as the cancer it is and removed accordingly.

Many of us already know this as the ultimate, pivotal truth of this the darkest most hopeless era in all the 200,000 years of our species' experience.

Verily then we are challenged by three questions:  (1)- how are the capitalists to be overthrown?  (2)- how is capitalist governance to be eliminated?  (3)-what eradication measures will ensure capitalism is never again able to threaten our rights to life and liberty? 

However, if we are to find effective answers to these terminal questions. we must first recognize the absolute evil at the core of capitalism. Stripped of its seductive rhetoric, capitalism is in fact the ultimate malevolence of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – literally  the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth. 

Once we have acknowledged that fact and its terrifying corollary – that our Earth is now ruled by moral imbeciles whose sole purpose is fulfillment of their own serial-killer fantasies of limitless wealth and power – then at last  we will have positioned ourselves  to rationally evolve the answers to the above questions.

And these answers – or rather their effectiveness – will then determine whether our species lives or dies. 

Later, I addressed a slyly pro-capitalist poster:

Chuckle8: Argue as you will, nothing changes the ugly truth that all our previous efforts to liberate ourselves from capitalism have failed. Period. End of sentence.

In this context, suggesting the New Deal could again become a vehicle of liberation makes about as much sense as suggesting a horsewhip could be used to re-start a stalled automobile.

“The best tools available” – including the electoral process that enabled the New Deal – are all nullified by hopeless corruption. The fact of the matter – I say again FACT – is the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is dead. Its fatal weakness was its failure to recognize that without  economic democracy, political democracy is meaningless. 

Thus we are imprisoned by circumstances from which there is no apparent exit. 

That's why, if we are to liberate ourselves from capitalism, we must first acknowledge the bitter truth of our abject powerlessness. 

Only then – when we have at last set aside our selfish, self-pampering  Norman Vincent Peal conformity and its attendant opiate of PollyAnna optimism – will we be sufficiently grounded in reality to (perhaps) begin to evolve an effective response to the present crisis.   

I had believed that would end our exchange. Alas, it did not. So I wrote one more rejoinder:

Wake up, chuckle8: forget all the deceptive definitions you learned elsewhere. Capitalism reduced to its essence is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. Capitalism is therefore manifest moral imbecility – the mindset of the serial killer expressed in economic terms. That is why it cannot be reformed. As to the distribution of our (increasingly scarce) resources, nothing says it better than this: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” 

*** *** ***

KATE DAVIES OF Tikkun  has written a thought-provoking essay on “hope”  that prompted me to write a respectfully contradictory response:

Ms. Davies makes valid, useful points.

Too bad the term “hope” has been so severely besmirched by Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. Too bad “hope” was reduced to a cynical joke by the most malicious liar in U.S. presidential history, the man who conned us by asserting “the audacity of hope” and then by his wanton agenda of betrayals and deceptions schooled us instead in the utter futility of hope – the most bitter truth of our species' existence.

Thus “hope” stands revealed as the ultimate expression of powerlessness, the last desperate emotion of the slave and the slave's mandatory passivity – “all I can do is hope Massa won't whip me again today.” Such is the “hope” that – exactly as the Betrayer and his One Percent masters so obviously intend – proclaims our helplessness and thereby perpetuates our hopelessness.

(Yes, the punishing contrast between “audacity” and “futility” is surely a deliberately imposed trauma – as if the true purpose of the Obama Administration is to put us all in our [disempowered] place and teach us to never again dare aspire to rise above it. And yes, do not doubt for an instant Madison Avenue is possessed of the requisite skill. It is the most diabolically skilled psychological warfare agency on this planet.)

Is there, then, an antidote to the hopelessness manifest in ideologies of hope?

There is indeed such an antidote, and its name is “defiance.”

Defiance is the fuel that fires resistance movements even when there is no hope, even when all reasons for hopefulness have been exterminated. Though itself formless, defiance is expressed in an infinity of forms. Yesteryear's defiance is what prompted my Celtic ancestors to fight their Roman and Christian oppressors when there was no possibility of victory. Today's defiance is the (now) revolutionary assertion of our species' right to survival and liberty. It is recognition that in this time of unprecedented Evil, ruled as we are by serial-killer-minded overlords, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance – the core defiance within which all lesser acts of revolutionary defiance are mothered into being.

By contrast, hope is at best a pacifier, an unguent for dreamers, a noun that even as a verb (“I hope”) reveals its crippling taint of passivity. But defiance as a verb (“I defy”) is implicitly a summons to action, to resistance, to rebellion...and perhaps even to triumphs we cannot yet recognize or envision.

*** *** ***

SOME OF THE best analytical reporting I have thus far seen on the Ukraine crisis focuses on the propaganda war with which the United States and its vassals continue to obscure who killed 298 people by shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 last year.

One of the story's most important revelations is additional proof of the extent to which U.S. and allied mainstream media function as a uniquely privatized governmental propaganda apparatus (scroll down to “Glenn Greenwald's Exposé”). Thus we are given yet another reason Josef Goebbels would be proud to claim the MSM as his own:

“If nothing else (and with this story there is plenty 'else'), the MH-17 fallout was emblematic of the MSM’s long, well (if not fully) documented, and not so illustrious history of venal complicity in blindly validating Western governments’ approved narratives, along with sanctioning their official agendas and, whether through sins of omission or commission, suppressing their secret ones.”

*** *** ***

WASHINGTON STATE BUREAUCRATS have always pandered to the rich. But now they are granting the moneyed aristocrats exclusive rights to formerly public Washington state wilderness lands – this to facilitate Marie-Antoinette-style “glamor camping”  in $220-per-night luxury tents.

Actually it's the newest development in an old and embittering story. Ask the hunters and fishers who were forever locked out of the state's wilderness areas by the pro-equestrian road closures imposed during the early 1990s.

Precisely as they were intended to do, these closures severely restrict back-country access. They exclude everybody but those rich enough to afford extended weekends with horses and wranglers or those in good enough physical condition to mountain-bike 15 or 20 miles to reach the hunting grounds or fishing waters that are now rendered inaccessible to everybody else.

The immediate result was a staggering decrease in sales of hunting and fishing licenses – a drop so huge and sudden, officials of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife still refuse to disclose its magnitude.

To compensate for the revenue loss, the bureaucrats jacked up resident license fees to the highest in the nation,  now $117.50 plus sales tax for a hunting license and $54.25 for a combination freshwater/saltwater fishing license. Resident license fees in many states including Alaska are less than half what Washington charges,  and the lucky license-holders typically have access to vastly larger tracts of unrestricted land and water.

By the end of the '90s, the road closures had made inaccessible every place in Washington state I had ever fished or hunted. (That is one of the main reasons I so dislike this state. I had intended to spend a reasonable portion of my retirement years fishing its trout streams. But the economic and physical discrimination implicit in the closures made that impossible.) Given the democratically accessible trout waters of Upstate New York and rural New Jersey, I would literally be better off had I remained in Manhattan.

Hence it would not be stretching the point to say that the Evergreen State's embrace of glamor-camping is merely another expansion of its long-established policies of brazenly catering to the One Percent while maliciously brutalizing lower-income people with the most savagely regressive tax structure  in the entire United States.

***

THAT THESE INEQUALITIES are now as evident in the back country as they are in the cities probably explains why the graffiti vandals have suddenly begun spray-painting their fuck-you rage on convenient surfaces in state and national parks and forests. 

Whether graffiti is high art – and some of it most assuredly is – should not distract us from its semiotic message, which is “I am denied any stake in this property or place, so I will trash it.” In the wilderness as everywhere else, graffiti is thus embittered protest, the human equivalent of the animal habit of marking territory with splurts of urine, often a last desperate attempt to reclaim formerly public domains that are increasingly pay-walled or privatized into prohibitive exclusiveness.

As the advent of increasingly unaffordable fares provoked the graffiti attacks on the New York City subway system, so now does increasing exclusivity provoke graffiti and other forms of vandalism in the (formerly public) realms of rural recreation land. Illegal dumpers in these realms are merely vandals who are too stupid to employ other means of protest.

(Disclosure: I was 18 years into a photographic study of urban and rural graffiti when it was destroyed by the 1983 fire. Like everything else photographic in the wake of that life-changing disaster, I have never been able to put my heart enough back into it to resume the work.)

*** *** ***

LET US NOT FORGET that the malevolent malcontents who deface, vandalize and otherwise trash the wilderness are also expressing the Abrahamic hatred and contempt for nature that is the cornerstone of capitalism. Let us also remember that same Judaic, Christian or Islamic arrogance is what motivates the climate-change deniers whose obstructionism is jeopardizing our species' survival and threatening to kill our entire planet.

It is to those of us who battle these fanatical morons I dedicate this concluding dispatch:

“Following an abnormally warm winter, spring temperatures exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit across a broad swath of interior Alaska in May, breaking records for the earliest day with temperatures that high.”

Read the rest of it here  – and in our grief for our wounded Mother Earth, let us find the defiance we need to persevere.

LB/25-31 May 2015

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