USian Ukraine's Nazi-Jihadi Pact Ups World War III Risk

BECAUSE THE CONSEQUENCES of U.S. aggression in Ukraine may well determine whether our species lives or dies, its most disturbing chapter thus far – the USian vassal-government's back-to-the-future renewal of Adolf Hitler's Nazi-Jihadi alliance  – leads this week's OAN though the story was broken on 7 July by Robert Parry via his Consortiumnews.com.

Astute readers will also note I added its link to last week's blog, replacing the earlier Ukraine report I had initially referenced. But I did not comment at any length on the U.S. puppet regime's resurrection of the Nazi-Jihadi alliance until Parry's newest disclosure was republished by Reader Supported News the next day:

Both the Wehrmacht and the SS had specifically Muslim units.

Moreover, the Mufti of Jerusalem – the Muslim equivalent of an archbishop or cardinal – was the prime recruiter for these units. The present-day politics of the Middle East cannot be understood without inclusion of this historical fact.

By forbidding the practice of Abrahamic religion (though not paganism or shamanism), Communist governments whether in Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union effectively outlawed the defining hatefulness of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Centuries of religious violence were thereby ended.

But the U.S., a de facto Christian Crusader-state (see Sharlett, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power), has always relied on religious hatreds to advance its schemes of global conquest.

Thus, in addition to capitalism's abject fear of economic democracy, U.S. hatred of Communism, socialism and intellectualism has always included primary religious motives. To be Christian, for example, is not just to "love your (Christian) neighbors," but to murderously hate everyone else.

Had the Soviet and Yugoslav governments lasted longer – say for perhaps another century – the religious warfare that now again characterizes Eastern Europe would have no doubt ended forever.

But the U.S., like Nazi Germany before it, could never abide such peacefulness.

*** *** ***

Greece as a Proving Ground for Militarization of U.S. Local Police

WRITING ABOUT THE recent, often tragic history of Greece, RSN's Steve Weissman touched, perhaps inadvertently, on an obscure but obvious connection  between the U.S.-organized military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 through 1974 and the federally militarized local police who are killing and terrorizing U.S. residents today.

Back in the closing days of World War II, wrote Weissman, the British government of Winston Churchill moved brutally against the Greek Communists, who had led the resistance to German and Italian occupation. To oppose them, the Brits created Greek special forces...which pointedly recruited fascists who had dominated the Greek military and police ever since the 1930s...When the US declared its Truman Doctrine in 1947, Washington took on London’s imperial role in Greece and gave military backing to these same fascists...

In other words, the USian Empire – now that its capitalist overlords have reduced the U.S. Working Class to slave wages, perpetual unemployment and ever-worsening poverty – is now employing the same deliberately sadistic methods of control here in the homeland as it has hitherto employed in its overseas satrapies and vassal-states. Hence the skyrocketing incidence of killings by cops.  which, already at an all-time high, is beginning to disturb even the nominally pro-cop Right.  (Scroll down to “The Post report seems to suggest...”).

Nevertheless, the white-black divide on attitudes toward police brutality remain one of the best indices to the magnitude of U.S. white racism, however carefully closeted it might be.

An earlier but equally accurate index is the refusal by fully four-fifths of the white population to acknowledge the blatant racism  that characterized government policies toward the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (Scroll down to “As to the breadth and depth of white racism...”)

*** *** ***

Republicans Fear Trump's Outspoken Racism Is Too Revealing

WHEN RSN REPUBLISHED a Washington Post story reporting the Republican Party inner circle is worried Donald Trump's outspokenness is tarnishing their reputation, I could not resist the opportunity to point out that Trump was merely revealing the ideological truth the party usually hides behind a screen of code-words:

What is really embarrassing the Republican Party is that Trump is appealing to the same hatefully racist element in U.S. politics as Hitler appealed to in German politics.

This element in today's United States is huge and bottomlessly venomous – much larger and more malevolent than the Ruling Class dares publicly admit.

But if Trump wins the Republican nomination – and if the Teabagger grassroots retains control of the party apparatus, he surely will – the GOP will no longer be able to deny the fact it became the primary U.S. vessel of fascism during the 1920s and has remained so ever since.

Moreover, if Sanders manages to win the Democratic nomination, there is little question he will also take the presidency.

Candidate Trump's Teabaggers – the modern equivalent of Hitler's stormtroopers – would then almost certainly plunge the U.S. into a second civil war.

It is this – the (again) growing threat from the militant Right – that is finally awakening parts of the U.S. Left to the deadly danger implicit in forcible civilian disarmament – the same lesson that mobilized the Deacons for Defense at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

*** *** ***

Charleston Sparks (Some) Acknowledgment of U.S. Racism

IF THE CHARLESTON atrocity prompts even a small segment of the white majority population in the United States to acknowledge its often-instinctive, culturally inbred racism, the deaths of the nine Charleston victims  will not be squandered, as so many other such deaths have been, by the nation's subsequent history.

Let us then say the names of the Charleston dead – Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson – for it is by such roll-calls of the slain that we the living who did not personally know them when they themselves were alive might now sense our kinship with them, our late brotherhood and sisterhood implicit in the fact they like each of us each had their own experience of self and world that is now lost forever. Quoth John Donne: ...therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Meanwhile, the reality of U.S. racism remains painfully evident not just in the South, the region that is conveniently scapegoated for what in truth is a national phenomenon, but throughout the imperial homeland.

To those of us who regardless of our color know how to recognize it, it is especially obvious in the Pacific Northwest. For example, I cannot readily count the number of times during the past 33 years I have written of the white racism that underlies the maliciously inflicted and deliberately maintained wretchedness of mass transit in Pugetopolis, the colloquial name for the 5,872 square-mile (15,209 square kilometer) metropolitan area of nearly 4 million persons that's centered on the seaport cities of Seattle and Tacoma.

But I do know that – until the post-Charleston now – any such disclosure by any writer however accomplished was either suppressed or (if it somehow managed to get into print) was immediately and harshly denounced as untrue, never mind the obvious racism that repeatedly surfaced  during public debates over (usually unsuccessful) efforts to improve mass transit. (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)

Proportionally speaking – that is, in comparison to comparable metropolitan areas – Pugetopolis has the worst, most deliberately inadequate mass transit in the United States. Because the U.S. has the worst mass transit in the industrial world, this makes Pugetopolis mass transit the worst of the worst. Likewise, because the U.S. is the most outspokenly anti-mass-transit nation in the world, Pugetopolis is therefore the most anti-mass-transit (and anti-transit-user) realm on the entire planet. Only in Pugetopolis is mass transit openly defined as “welfare,”  a code-word that in the white racist vocabulary is merely a politically correct way of saying “used by niggers.”

But on 22 June, Knute Berger, a columnist for the Seattle on-line daily Crosscut, finally began chipping away at the taboo of silence that has prevented the region's mainstream media from acknowledging the 800-pound gorilla – or, more appropriately, the Ku Klux Klan klavern – that's right there in the Pugetopolis living room.

On 6 July, Crosscut Guest Columnist Christopher Eide took the process of acknowledgment a lot further  by asking, “What about NW's shortcomings on race.”

Then on 7 June, Politico swooped in from Washington D.C. to scoop the world on a blistering exposé of regional racism  the mainstream Pugetpolis press has deliberately suppressed for years – “Want to Meet America's Worst Racists? Come to the Pacific Northwest.”

Now reduced to playing catch-up, the next day Crosscut published Berger's much more detailed report on Northwest Front and its call for forcible racial cleansing of the entire Pacific Northwest: not just Washington state and Oregon, but also Montana (and maybe Alaska and Idaho as well).

Berger's 8 July piece was so thorough it prompted me to applaud via its comment thread:

Well done, Mr. Berger, with kudos to you, Christoper Eide (6 July) and Crosscut in general for at long last discarding the taboo against admission of Pacific Northwest racism. Now let's hope (1)-someone (besides me) has the journalistic courage to expose its direct connection to the wretched state of Pugetopolis mass transit, and (2)-that such journalistic bravery doesn't trigger an advertising boycott to kill Crosscut just as The Seattle Sun (1974-1982) and the original Seattle Magazine (1963-1970) were slain...

Given how the (hitherto-denied) racism of Pugetopolis has produced the transit crisis  that reveals the region's signature claim of environmental enlightenment to be nothing more than a particularly breathtaking brand of political hypocrisy, I cannot but wonder whether and to what extent unacknowledged racism is the hidden determinant of all U.S. environmental policy.

Meanwhile even Hillary Clinton now admits USian racism is a helluva lot more widespread than just “kooks and Klansmen.” 

*** *** ***

 

Some Long Overdue Truth about Racism's Economic Origins
 

BRYAN STEVENSON HAS described during an interview with The Marshall Project  an historically accurate how-and-why narrative of racism's economic origins, linking it to both religion and class-struggle while simultaneously explaining its malevolent persistence.

Here from an on-line text of the interview are some of the highlights of Stevenson's analysis:

The whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of slavery. It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel comfortable with their ownership of other human beings. And we created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North...

Lots of countries had slaves, but they were mostly societies with slaves. We became something different, we became a slave society. We created a narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery...so I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced...

And so we are very confused when we start talking about race in this country because we think that things are “of the past” because we don’t understand what these things really are, that narrative of racial difference that was created during slavery that resulted in terrorism and lynching, that humiliated, belittled and burdened African Americans throughout most of the 20th century. The same narrative of racial difference that got Michael Brown killed, got Eric Garner killed and got Tamir Rice killed. That got these thousands of others — of African Americans — wrongly accused, convicted and condemned. It is the same narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions of people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led to the executions in Charleston...

Stevenson has also launched an initiative to mark where lynchings took place in the U.S.,  which is explained by another of his statements in the Marshall interview:

“You can’t go to Germany, to Berlin, and walk 100 meters without seeing a marker or a stone or a monument to mark the places where Jewish families were abducted from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” said Stevenson in an. “Four thousand African Americans were lynched between 1870 and WWII and none of us know anything about it. We don’t mark these places where these lynchings took place. Most of them took place on courthouse lawns that are now adorned with monuments to the Confederacy.”

Perhaps I am being overly optimistic, but I believe Stevenson has given us the core ingredients for a desperately needed antidote to the racist toxins with which we whites are so relentlessly poisoned – particularly by constant repetition of propaganda that deliberately omits from our official national histories any discussion of racism's Machiavellian, pre-Nazi, pre-Orwellian and most definitively capitalist origins.

***   ***   ***

Surprise -- Supremes Rule against Economic Segregation

NOTING TODAY'S U.S. is ever more segregated by income, Robert Reich says a Supreme Court decision – its impact unfortunately obscured by the mainstream media's focus on the marriage equality and health care rulings – has substantially bolstered our protections against discrimination. 

In a 5-4 ruling, Reich reported, the Court found that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 requires plaintiffs to show only that the effect of a policy is discriminatory, not that defendants intended to discriminate....The decision is likely to affect everything from bank lending practices whose effect is to harm low-income non-white borrowers, to zoning laws that favor higher-income white homebuyers.

This from the court that with its Citizens United  judgment knowingly destroyed the last vestiges of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is perplexing indeed.

My immediate reaction is the justices are merely throwing us a bone, perhaps modeled after the Affordable Care Act –  which cleverly – and obviously for international propaganda purposes – creates the illusion of near-universal health insurance. But it simultaneously imposes such exorbitant co-payments and fees, only the rich can afford to use it, thereby fulfilling ACA's ultimate purpose – that of perpetuating the USian policy, unique in the industrial world, of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

*** *** ***

Good News for LGBT Seniors in Court's Marriage Decision

THE SUPREME COURT'S legalization of same-sex marriage means that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual couples can now access the legal benefits of marriage no matter where in the United States they live, says the Alliance for Retired Americans “Friday Alert”  issued 10 July.

Elderly LGBT couples living in states where marriage equality was formerly outlawed now have the same rights granted heterosexual couples including Social Security spousal survival payments and state and federal tax benefits, the ARA reports. 

*** *** ***

Have the USian Secret Police Marked Snowden for Death?

A FORMER OFFICIAL of the Carter Administration wondered during an interview if one or more of the federal secret police agencies will try to kill Edward Snowden,  a courageous speculation that proves again the malevolent, Fourth Reich nature of the USian Empire.

*** *** ***

A Link to the Best New Writing I've Read Since the 1960s


HIGH POETRY DISGUISED as prose – that's Ta-Nehisi Coates' “Letter to My Son,”  a piece as poignantly angry as Ginsberg's “Howl” but infinitely more lyrical, as eloquently defiant as the concluding lines of Yeats' “Wanderings of Oisin” yet appropriately, even forcefully secular; as emotionally compelling as Kavi's “Black Marigolds.” Originally published by The Atlantic and republished by RSN, it is unquestionably the most powerful new writing I have seen in maybe the past 45 years. To read it is to relish it...and to want to read it again.


LB/6-13 July 2015

-30-

Food Stamps: Dems, Repubs Vote to Kill Poor People

Obama Says Cuts Ensure 'America's Children Don't Go Hungry'

THE FINAL VOTE against food-stamp recipients was a revealing 68-32, with only nine Senate Democrats opposing the cuts; that plus the president's enthusiastic approval of a decade of downsizing the government now admits will total at least $8.7 billion is tantamount to official notice from the Democratic Party it too wants the nation's poor people dead – that the only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is over the forcefulness with which this genocide is to be accomplished. The Republicans wanted to slash the program by $40 billion,  which would have begun killing off lower-income people almost immediately. But the Democrats apparently feared the GOP's proposal would be too obviously murderous – almost as embarrassing as public endorsement of death camps – which is no doubt why the One Party of Two Names finally opted for the less dramatic, easier-to-obfuscate reduction that will short 850,000 food-stamp-dependent households a starvation-inflicting average of $90 per month.  

Meanwhile, with the Democrats ever more worried by the growing popularity of revolutionary socialism, they've intensified their efforts to hide their Ayn Rand malevolence behind classic, Josef Goebbels-type Big Lies, most recently President Obama's astonishing claim the food-stamp cutbacks will “make sure America's children don't go hungry.”  Though the “public integrity” Barack the Betrayer promised us in 2008 was long ago recognized as no less a deception than “change we can believe in,” portrayal of the deliberate imposition of hunger as a humanitarian act is a new low, a falsehood in comparison to which most of the president's other lies dwindle to insignificance. It is also in the mind-wrenching mode of “freedom is slavery,” a proclamation that characterized the (formerly) fictional tyranny described in George Orwell's prophetic 1984. Now we are implicitly shown its entirely non-fictional equivalent: “hunger is nourishment.” 

And for the 47.2 million USians who now depend on food stamps  to keep themselves and their children fed, the associated pangs will only intensify: as a prescient headline writer at Seattle's excellent on-line daily Crosscut has already implied, this is undoubtedly the beginning of the end  of the entire food stamp program, the formal name of which is S.N.A.P., the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Perhaps now the acronym will become a sardonic joke: Starvation Neutralizing America's Poor, as in “with a SNAP of its fingers, the Ruling Class has fucked us again.”

Hunger as nourishment? Verily, such is the quintessence of absolute evil.

*****

 

Outside Agitation on the Comment Threads of Other Relevant Reports

“50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst From Fukushima” Harvey Wasserman of EcoWatch exposes the apocalyptic reality of the Fukushima debacle. I quote a Cheyenne Ghost-Dance chant: “The white man's god/ has forsaken him/ Let us go and/ look for our Mother...” Then I add a nightmare notion that should especially bug the UFOs-have-landed folks: what if “the alleged 'divine revelations' that spawned patriarchy – Moses' Burning Bush, Ezekiel's fiery wheel, etc. ad nauseam -- were intergalactic equivalents of the smallpox-infested blankets by which Europeans exterminated First Nations peoples. Thus the ultimate purpose of patriarchy and its maturation over the centuries into capitalism and now finally into ecocidal fascism is to make Earth too toxic for life as we know it – precisely as is happening. Our final, dying clue as to who the Global Ruling Class serves by its relentless moral imbecility (and who – or rather what – will inherit the planet as a result), is found in the fact that of all earthly species, only the cockroach is totally immune to radiation and can within a single generation evolve immunity to any other toxin.”

***

“The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous - And for All of Us” Gabriella Coleman of Wired reports on the government's zero-tolerance, maximum-sentence prosecution of on-line civil disobedience, but then inexplicably claims such draconian measures are applied only to cyber-activists – that “physical tactics such as trespass or vandalism of property rarely result in serious criminal consequences for participants and tend to be minor civil infractions instead of federal crimes.” I imply she's either ignorant or in denial: obviously, “the new USian Empire norm – note the felonies for which the Oak Ridge 3 were convicted – is going to be maximum charges and maximum sentences in retaliation for ANY act of civil disobedience.” 

***

“Helping homeless students stay in school”  Joseph Sutton-Holcomb describes the valiant efforts of the specialists employed by local school districts to ensure the Seattle area's many homeless students are able to remain in school. A major challenge, he writes, is arranging the students' transportation to and from classes. I use the story as a teachable moment to point out the only way to end homelessness is to end capitalism.

Only now – too late for the comment thread – did I focus on the fact Sutton-Holcomb failed to report the specialists' tasks are made profoundly more difficult by the region's notorious hostility to mass transit,  with a growing number of local voters rejecting buses, trolleys and even commuter rail service as welfare that encourages laziness by pampering minorities and lower-income people in general. (Note: my OAN piece on the anti-transit-user hatefulness that defines Washington state politics was written nearly four years ago, but the bigotry it describes intensifies each time there is a transit vote,  as in Tacoma during the 2012 general election. Though the local transit authority was not forced to shut down, all that saved it was a small, unanticipated, post-2012 increase in sales tax revenues. Its service remains minimal, the nation's worst amongst comparable cities, with its 37 bus routes so radically downsized, their operations end as early as 5:20 p.m. daily. Meanwhile its minimized schedules inflict extreme hardship on anyone who does not have an automobile, while the refusal of even self-proclaimed “progressive” politicians to take ameliorative action again demonstrates the malice toward lower-income people that increasingly characterizes USian governance at every level.) 

***

“What does Al Jazeera America see in the Northwest?” Olivia Weitz reports on Al Jazeera's new Pacific Northwest bureau but notes that despite the news agency's reputation for accurate reporting, its U.S. viewership remains tiny. I point out it's no doubt “the (very rational) fear of being placed on one or more secret-police watch lists that keeps the Al Jazeera America audience so small. Thus the USian Empire's total surveillance regime fulfills another of its definitive purposes: ensuring that we the people remain imprisoned in ignorance.” 

***

“Whose Radical Jesus? The Story of a Literary Success” Truthout's Paul Buhle reviews Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House: 2013).  I point out that regardless of the truth or falsehood of Aslan's hypothesis, its ultimate function is to serve the Ruling Class by re-legitimizing the murderous and ecocidal religion of a god that failed. A far more genuinely revolutionary interpretation of the Jesus story, I add, “was written nearly 70 years ago by Robert Graves in King Jesus, which argues that while Jesus was indeed a rebel zealot, his primary purpose was to extinguish the last lingering remnants of the old goddess-centered religions. The 'money quote' -- morbid pun intended -- in Graves' telling of the story sums up the entire history of patriarchy, from its origins in Moses' burning bush and Ezekiel's fiery wheel to its final manifestations today as capitalism fulfills itself by morphing into terminal fascism. 'I am released from the jurisdiction of the Female,' says Jesus, 'I have come to destroy Her works' (King Jesus; Minerva Press, London: 1946, p. 256). The 'Female' of whom Jesus spoke was the goddess who is the variously titled Mother of All Being, Gaea, the Mother Nature whose act of creation was to give birth to the entire cosmos. Especially if we consider the Gaia Hypothesis -- that Earth (and perhaps by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating -- what Jesus said two thousand years ago is precisely what the capitalists are saying today: that they are released from Nature's jurisdiction; that they have come to destroy all her works.” 

LB/9 February 2014 

-30-

Terribly Sick, I Can Only Link to Outside Agitation Off-Site

WOKE UP THIS morning sick as the proverbial dog: fever of 102F, entire body an uncooperative mass of aches, brain too fuzzy to focus  on anything but the most mundane tasks, no other symptoms yet. Hence, with my apologies,  this collection of my earlier posts on the comment threads of other sites: 

*

“Pentagon & NSA Officials: Assassinate Edward Snowden”  David Sirota of PandoDaily exposes the murderousness at the core of the USian Empire. I link Sirota's courageous work to a report on the extent to which the empire is ruled by white racism  and argue its combination of racism and murder proves it's the de facto Fourth Reich. As Sirota's disclosures imply, “the only relevant question now is when will the government – which is disguising its broader genocidal intentions as cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment compensation – begin openly murdering not just dissidents but all of us it and its One Percent masters want dead.”

*****

“Why is Washington paying Catholic hospitals to take away healthcare?”Monica Harrington of Catholic Watch reports on how the eternally misogynistic Catholic Church is using taxpayer dollars to buy up Washington state's healthcare system and prohibit end-of-life, contraception and maternity care. The usual cadre of Christian zealots denounce her reporting as “hatred,” but I – late to the fair – post a bibliography of texts and links that support her work by documenting even more of the hideous truth about the USian Empire's rush toward theocracy.

*****

“Westlake businesses hold the city's bike plan hostage” Eric Scigliano exposes another example of the Ayn Rand selfishness and political cowardice that lurks beneath the Big Lie of “progressive” Seattle. I point out the associated thread is a perfect example of the reactionary, malevolently auto-centric hatefulness that -- in Seattle as in Tacoma -- invariably rises to the surface of Pugetopolis political cesspool to obstruct any and all improvements in public transport.

*****

“Steubenville Rapist Released After 10 Months, While Activist Who Exposed Him Faces 10 Year Sentence”  Jodie Gummow of AlterNet updates the atrocity story. I point out it is the One Party of Two Names -- the fact the president and all the other Democrats and Republicans are, in reality, members of a single party representing only the One Percent -- that makes our nation the fascist despotism it is. The FBI – part of the massive secret police apparatus that protects the Ruling Class and sustains its fascist tyranny – is merely following orders.

*****

Divide between Governor, Republicans Paralyzes Washington State. This was not the title of John Stang's informative report on state government, but it should have been. As I said last year, the Republican coup in the Senate kills any remaining hope of humanitarian policy-making in Washington state. It also – cunningly (and exactly as intended) – gives the Democrats the ability to muddy the political waters by spouting humanitarian rhetoric. The Ruling Class allows it because there's not the slightest chance any of it will ever be enacted. Moreover, the Democrats' Big Lie re-emergence as a (bogus) party of the people serves the Ruling Class by weakening the voter-appeal of genuine humanitarians -- that is, Kshama Sawant and other socialists. Thus, by discrediting government, the One Percent prevails.

LB/19 January 2014 

-30-

Electronic Surveillance Is the End of All Human Potential

The personal computer: despite its apparent homeyness, an electronic ball and chain. A picture made while I was adjusting the focus on my M2 Leica. Kodak BW400CN, no other data; colorization and posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

(A conceptual prelude to this essay appeared as my contribution to the comment thread of Truthout's republication  of Chris Hedges' “The Sparks of Rebellion,” 30 September 2013.)

*

PREDICTABLY, NO ONE DARES articulate the three most bitter truths revealed by Edward Snowden's courageous disclosures about the National Security Agency and its total surveillance state. Firstly, Snowden's revelations make it clear the political revolution that was allegedly to have been facilitated by computers and other digital technologies was never more than delusion. Secondly, he has laid bare the fact the United States of America is no longer anything like yesteryear's “sweet land of liberty” – that it is instead the most aggressively merciless empire in human history, potentially as murderous at home as it already is abroad. Thirdly – and this is by far the most painful truth of all – there is no longer any doubt we are now and forever stripped naked by the relentlessly probing electronic fingers of the state. We have been robbed of the privacy that was the wellspring of not just our personal freedom but of all human aspirations, and it is now becoming ever more obvious there is not one fucking thing any or all of us can do to regain what has been stolen from us. It is literally as if we have been conquered by some alien race of super-tyrants from outer space.

Our stunned silence in the face of this self-inflicted and most likely fatal turning-point in our species' evolutionary history – the fact it obliterates any and all possibility for the sorts of individual innovation that has hitherto been our collective salvation – is attributable to the Moron Nation ignorance fostered by the censorship and disinformation necessary to perpetuate capitalism, with capitalism here defined as I always define it – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue. Thus we have been conditioned to adopt the self-defeating belief liberty is not an inherent human right protected by law but is merely a privilege awarded only by possession of certain products, specifically computers, cell phones and other devices of information technology.

Now though we are discovering these instruments we were falsely taught were the epitome of liberation are instead the cornerstone devices of the total-surveillance state and are therefore mechanisms of self-enslavement. Our resultant mental paralysis is yet another proof of our cradle-to-grave conditioning in a society cunningly restructured into a global Skinner Box, the notorious rat-race prison beloved of the behavior-modification psychologists whose incipiently fascist theories underly so much of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Whether we admit it or not – and most of us cannot stand the pain of such honesty -- we are reduced to the terrorized consciousness of laboratory animals for whom certain maneuvers previously brought rewards and an illusion of security but now yield only painful electric shocks.

Meanwhile the absolute refusal of mass media to acknowledge what obtains is merely another example of the obscene selfishness that is capitalism in action. Computer sales alone generated revenue of $85.5 billion in 2011,  the last year for which complete data is available, with sales of wireless devices adding another $169.8 billion.  The combined totals, $255.3 billion, amount to 15 percent of 2011's retail and wholesale gross domesticproduct. In other words, our induced compulsion to squander skyrocketing sums of money on our own ever-more-inescapable electronic shackles generates an income vast enough to bribe every paycheck journalist in the nation and yet allow for the unimaginably lavish profits demanded by our One Percent overlords.

Perhaps in part because I am a grandson of Amos R. Bliss, the Canadian engineer who in 1901 invented theautomotive dynamo  and thereby made possible the motorcar as we know it, I know something about the research and contemplation that precedes creativity whether practical or artistic. I therefore recognize how the bottomless pathos of our now-eternal nakedness is the death of all such effort. From now hence, the omnipresence of the total surveillance state denies us the privacy essential to human initiative and guarantees our ingenuity can be realized only within the vindictively conformist and therefore relentlessly oppressive limits of the corporate hierarchy.

We already know the results. An earlier example was the zomboid stultification of the Medieval schoolmen, imprisoned by doctrines that, on pain of being burned alive, allowed no metaphysical speculation beyond how many angels might occupy the head of a pin. Today we have the corporate and governmental aristocracies similarly straitjacketed by the dogma of ever-expanding profit and thereby denied the measures that might (yet) save our species from extinction and our planet from reduction to a cockroach-infested midden. Tomorrow, thanks to the electronic rapists of the NSA and how they have violated even our contemplative space, we are allowed no creativity whatsoever.

That fictional production-line art factory in which each sweaty member of a minimum-wage workforce uniformed in smocks and berets repetitively applies a single one-color brush-stroke to each canvas as it speeds past on a conveyor belt may be more prophecy than fantasy. Go to school; study art; indenture yourself for life with student loans; don the black beret and white polyester smock of Picasso Products or the blue beret and gray denim smock of Matisse Manufacturing -- that or paint yourself an artsy placard saying “will work for food”: it's the new American Dream. 

Surely it is no coincidence the U.S. government with all its spies and assassins and surveillance technology and weapons from which there is now no sanctuary anywhere on this planet is the exact duplicate of the all-seeing, endlessly vengeful, infinitely sadistic god of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Republican Party, from its inception the voice of the financial and industrial One Percent, now officially claims the U.S. as a Christian empire, “one nation under god,” which of course means all the enemies of that god – Nature, women, a long litany of “deviants” that includes gays, lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuals, unbelievers, nonconformists and of course writers and artists – are now (or soon will be) enemies of the state. In the previous century, such tyrannies were sometimes overthrown by revolutions, witness the events in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba. But now, given the eternal invincibility guaranteed the government by its technology, our only hope of liberation is the death-dealing paradox of Mother Nature's apocalyptic rage against the very infrastructures upon which our lives depend.

Nevertheless I still hear many people, and not all of them young, who in their abyssal ignorance of realpolitik fantasize some basement-bound hacker – the modern equivalent of the attic-dwelling anarchist – will cobble together a digital device capable of defeating the machines by which we are oppressed and enslaved. Obviously this is the newest most delusional manifestation of the clinical condition known as magical thinking – believing in something that is simply not possible. To repeat what I noted above, such invention demands privacy, and that is precisely what we are no longer allowed, nor will we ever be allowed such privacy again. It also demands vast sums of capital – the imperial necessity that underlies our staggeringly huge military research budgets – and most of all what it requires is access to supportive technology of a caliber no revolution-minded hacktivist could ever possibly afford. Thus the evil genius of the One Percent in making access to such knowledge and facilities dependent on education so impossibly expensive it is available only to the trust-funded spawn of the corporate aristocracy or to those willing to indenture themselves for life – in either case the ultimate guarantee of political reliability under capitalist governance.

I have argued earlier variants of these points since the personal computer craze began in the late 1970s, when the earliest forms of digital technology were fervently embraced by the nation's (pretend) Left – bourgeois elitists who were too anti-intellectual to comprehend class struggle and too slothful for the hard work of organizing but had enough disposable income to decorate their homes with electro-baubles by Hewlett-Packard, Radio Shack, Apple and a half dozen other manufactures. The owners of these new machines instantly proclaimed possession of a computer an essential demonstration of one's revolutionary zeal. They defined the virtual way as the only true path to “people's revolution” – ironically the very sort of uprising their other activities, such as spiking trees to maim or kill forest workers, proved they secretly but profoundly (and hypocritically) feared. Most of all they sneered whenever I pointed out to them that any medium dependent on public utilities or corporate and government communications networks was only “free” until some bureaucrat or executive felt threatened enough to flip the master-switch and turn it off. And – of course – they haughtily dismissed those of us who did not own computers (typically because we could not afford them), as hopelessly reactionary.

Hence, eerily like the ever-formidable Russian intelligence operatives who recognized a mechanicaltypewriter can never be hacked,  I long ago chose to retain the 1935 Royal Standard I now routinely use for addressing envelopes or filling out forms and as my writing machine during power outages. I likewise kept the 1940s vintage Royal Portable that has accompanied me on various journeys since I was in my late 20s and now lives in semi-retirement under my desk. But my lingering fondness for typewriters was dictated by economics rather than foresight. I had no computer at all until 1999, and that was a used machine given me by a dear friend. Even I – a proud cynic all my adult life – did not recognize the ultimate capitalist scam of disguising electronic shackles as vital personal and household tools and thereby convincing us to build, with our own hard-earned money, the digital slave pens in which we are now inescapably imprisoned.

Now though thanks to Edward Snowden and thanks even more to Audre Lorde, a woman about whom I unfortunately remained in total ignorance until only days ago, I at long last have far better words to describe the ultimate truth of our electronic circumstances. Indeed they are Ms. Lorde's own words,  written in 1984 as the title of an essay, and I cannot possibly improve on them: “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.”

LB/13 October 2013

-30-