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Occupy Tacoma demonstrators, 4
November 2011. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.)
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*
IN THE MOST disturbing demonstration
yet of the magnitude of President Barack Obama's promise-breaking
war on the public's right to know, its campaigns of fear and
intimidation have been expanded into the affairs of local
governments.
But the USian Left has, as of today (21
June 2013), remained stubbornly silent about the significance of
federal entry into the Steubenville case. Not even ThinkProgress
(linked above) had dared report on its broader meaning – that
Obama's effort to suppress public scrutiny of government has no
jurisdictional limits. Nor have the two petition sites that rallied
to Lostutter's defense, UltraViolet.org and Watchdog.net.
The perplexing silence in response to
this newest expansion of anti-First-Amendment warfare is almost
certainly a measure of how the so-called Left – which ideologically
would be considered middle-Right anywhere else in the industrial
world – is still gagged by its lingering sense of obligation to
protect the Democrat who is also the nation's first African-American
president. Never mind notably Left-leaning constitutional experts
already label Obama “worse than Nixon.”
Meanwhile two of the Steubenville
rapists – high school football stars whose arrogance reflected the
cultoid view athletes are above the law – have each gotten
two-year sentences in juvenile penitentiaries.
But Lostutter – if the FBI continues
to prosecute him – is facing 10 years in adult federal prison. For
a male without prior criminal experience, this is probably a death
sentence. Without Mafia affiliation or gang protection he would be
repeatedly raped and most likely infected with AIDS. Thus,
ironically, the hero in the Steubenville case is confronted by
horrors infinitely worse than those suffered by the victim he
protected.
There's another irony too. While
feminists have tried for years to make rape a federal crime – thus
to bypass misogynistic local governments in much the same way
federal civil rights legislation bypassed the racist governments of a
half century ago – they have failed abysmally. Meanwhile, under
Obama, it has become a federal felony to make a rapist's crimes
public or to expose a local government's efforts to cover them up.
The message is clear: Lostutter – or
any other citizen activist or official who courageously exposes
secret wrongdoing – can expect the same merciless treatment
Barack's federales are meting out to John Kiriakou, Julian
Assange, Edward Snowdon and PFC Bradley Manning.
Nor are the victims of Obama's
anti-First-Amendment blitzkrieg limited to government officials,
soldiers and citizen activists. Working journalists are now also
under attack, not just in the Associated Press and Fox News incidents
but on a much broader front. New assaults are reported almost every
day by the website Photography Is Not A Crime
or PINAC. As I posted there on 14 June:
I speak from experience when I say
it cannot be an accident this sort of thing is happening throughout
the United States. I covered cops during a journalism career that
spanned half a century -- police officers and detectives in New York
City and New Jersey as well as in Tennessee and Washington state.
While there are probably a few malfeasants in any given
department, most cops are dedicated civil servants performing a
dangerous, difficult job in obedience to established law and
departmental regulations. The key word here is of course "obedience"
-- specifically the fact the cops would not be waging war on
photographers (and on the working press in general) had they not been
ordered to do so.
Moreover, the nation-wide character of this
war against public scrutiny of police activities -- and a war is
precisely what it is -- indicates the existence of a nation-wide (and
probably secret) directive mandating the suppression of all such
scrutiny. This would be a logical precursor to the imposition of the
zero-tolerance dictatorship long feared by political dissidents of
both Rightist and Leftist persuasions...
That I was immediately denounced as
“tinfoil behatted” by another poster suggests the site has
already been infiltrated by government operatives, which should
surprise no one in the maximum-surveillance despotism the U.S. had
become. Quoth the late Lev Bronstein: “In any gathering of three
revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”
And whether we are dissidents exercising our (former) constitutional
right to protest or members of the Working Press merely trying to do
the jobs we were hired to do, the government now considers all of us
to be revolutionaries – or in the parlance of the Department of
Homeland Security, “terrorists.”
Such is – how many times must I say
it? – the new paradigm of USian governance: absolute power and
unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the
rest of us.
*****
Longtime readers who suspect they
detect in the above text a subtle but profound change in my attitude
toward current events are indeed correct. I am back, as it were,
from a harrowing of hell, though whether I will prove stronger for
the experience remains to be seen.
Two years of dreadful events had
reduced me to a nadir of political and socioeconomic despair such as
I have never known. It was so deep – “the darkness here under the
Obama Bush,” as I many times described it – it had prompted me
to begin turning this blog into little more than a journal of
geriatric musings.
Wretchedness seemed the order of the
day. I had ridden with Occupy in its skyrocketing autumnal ascent to
defiant resistance and its equally sudden late-winter collapse into
factionalism and submission. I had allowed myself to be frightened
away from alternative presidential candidates by the One Percent's
brandishing of its Romney-Ryan assault gun and the Republican threats
to Social Security, Medicare and women's reproductive freedom. I had
been reduced to wallowing once more in the imbecility of hope and
squandering my ballot on a Democrat who had already proven himself
nearly as fascistic as his opponent. I had then watched his
predictable but nevertheless breathtakingly malicious post-electoral
re-transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer. No, I
was not surprised; I had long ago acknowledged the (now-obvious)
seizure of our former “government by the people” by a malevolent
plutocracy bent on suppressing all opposition to its Ayn Rand variant
of fascism. And now it seemed I was emotionally and intellectually
paralyzed by the resultant combination of sadness, anger and disgust.
There was guilt, too, and a profound
sense of failure as well. Newspapers, for my generation, were a base
from which those of us who were of Working Class or déclassé
origins and thus denied the privileges of caste and credentials
might nevertheless occasionally succeed in improving the human
condition. It was the old traditional Boy Scout mandate – leave the
campsite in better condition than you found it – borne into the
adult world of politics and economics. And I dare say it was a
powerful motive shared in those days by nearly all of of us who took
up the craft of journalism – surely all of us who stayed with it
after we learned journalism is not just a job but a (very demanding)
way of life. Yet now it seemed it had been all for nothing. We failed
– I failed – and the proof for our failures was everywhere we
looked, in collapsed bridges and closed libraries and shut-down
transit systems and boarded-up schools, but most of all in the
reproachful eyes of people who were jobless and foreclosed and
evicted and homeless and unjustly imprisoned.
As if that were not depressing enough,
now in the outrages committed by the National Security Agency I saw
confirmed beyond argument the plutocracy's glaring rule-the-world
ambition, the terrible truth revealed by exposure of NSA's global
surveillance network. The conquest-driven mandates for the military
and police to have immediately actionable intelligence leave no doubt
as to the network's aggressive purpose. It is the vital precursor to
imposition and perpetuation of an empire literally as big as the
planet – more ambitious, more powerful than anything in any former
conqueror's dreams. It is therefore already the most oppressive
apparatus in human experience.
In all probability this new imperialism
is the ultimate expression of “the secret (Christian)
fundamentalism at the heart of American power” (for which see Jeff
Sharlet's The Family). It is thus already an empire
deliberately shaped, as man himself is said to be, in the
patriarchal, zero-tolerance image of the god of eternal damnation,
the most sadistic deity ever conceived. Already it is imposing
theocracy at home.
And already it possesses powers hitherto reckoned as divine,
including a Sodom-and-Gomorrah, “destroy-the-village-to-save-it”
vengefulness that literally has no limit. Speak out against it,
you're forever in its book of the damned; speak out effectively,
you're dead. (That clearly was what befell Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King Jr., Fred Hampton and Karen Silkwood. It was probably the doom
of Sen. Paul Wellstone and his entire family. Hence I cannot but
wonder if Michael Hastings
met a similar fate.)
I've also had plenty of personal
troubles during the past two years. Indeed it often seemed I was
being stripped of all the (few) remnants of my selfhood. The most
recent such trauma was the discovery I am going blind – and the
cataract surgery that could restore my vision may be proscribed by
other medical conditions. The question will not be resolved until
mid-July – and I am not good at coping with prolonged uncertainty.
Hence, whether personally or politically, I have learned to assume
the worst. It is the only defense against the anguish of shattered
optimism. That was the great lesson taught me in 1983, when the
strong likelihood my book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” would at
last achieve mainstream publication had raised my expectations to
their all-time high just before a house-fire brought them to their
all-time low, not only destroying the manuscript and all the rest of
my life's work but obliterating all my journalistic ambitions. Now at
age 73 what mattered was not recognition (which to be blunt is
meaningful only when you're young enough it gets you laid) – but
rather the quest for some comforting sense of having made a positive
difference, however small, in the human condition: that is, of having
not lived entirely in vain and to no meaningful purpose. As I
admitted in a letter to a friend on the night of 15 June, “it seems
the one psychological constant of my old age is acceptance of my
worthlessness, recognition of the infinitely bitter truth that nearly
all my dreams, all my goals and aspirations and wishes, were never
more than grandiosities.”
Then the very next day I read a
Truthout book review entitled “The Structural Genocide That
Is Capitalism.” When I posted a comment on the associated thread,
I was still caught in the mental miasma that had been mine since the
end of Occupy:
Mr. (Garry) Leech (the author of
Capitalism: a Structural
Genocide) argues much as I have for the past five years.
Though I wonder if – caught up as he is in legalistic debates –
he has allowed himself to see the (to me clear and obvious)
progression from patriarchy to male gods to the one male god of
Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), thence to
capitalism and finally to capitalism's logical fulfillment in
fascism, our Führer who art in heaven or on the chief executive
officer's throne, whether as expounded by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco,
Pinochet or Ayn Rand.
In this context, the alleged
excesses of socialism -- including the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat (which is better stated as dictatorship by
and of the proletariat) -- make perfect sense. It is the
vital surgery necessary to excise individual greed and moral
imbecility, the psychological cancers that ensure capitalism's
continuity and most especially fulfillment of its genocidal mandate.
Indeed what has killed socialism,
probably forever, is not any intrinsic ideological or conceptual
weakness. It is rather the inability of socialist governments to
adequately defend their constituents against the ultimate incentives
to greed and moral imbecility provided by capitalist propaganda.
These incentives not only destroyed the Soviet Union and co-opted
China; they are also ensuring the destruction of our own species (and
most life on this planet) in the now-looming apocalypse of nuclear
war and/or environmental collapse.
Given these givens, perhaps the most
useful metaphor is to think of patriarchy, and thus of its direct
descendant capitalism, as the global equivalent of the
smallpox-infected blankets by which Europeans weakened the First
Nations people of North America to prepare them for genocidal
conquest.
A few hours later, I responded to a
relevant question by another thread-contributor:
As far as I know, the only
qualitative difference between Asiatic capitalism and Occidental
capitalism is how the latter variety requires its local Ruling Class
to manufacture illusions of consent. This (rapidly vanishing)
pseudo-democratic process is seemingly a relic of lingering
traditions that apparently date from the earliest, presumably
matrifocal (if not actually matriarchal) tribal societies. Like
charity and justice, these are among the ancient mores patriarchal
religion was unable to co-opt or suppress, but which advertising has
now effectively nullified. With or without religion, both types of
capitalism are ultimately dependent on patriarchy – that is, on
the class hierarchies and definitions of property and success unique
to patriarchy. Thus the rejection of patriarchal religion is not, by
itself, indicative of real change; what must be rejected is the
entire ideology of male supremacy.
Feminism has amassed compelling
evidence that – just as capitalism is a logical extension of
patriarchy, so was what might be termed tribal proto-communism a
logical extension of matriarchy. Unfortunately all such information
and evidence is methodically suppressed in the United States, where
feminism has tragically acquired the same Ayn Rand taint that infects
the broader society. But elsewhere there is growing recognition the
world-wide dispersion of various ancient trade goods suggests the
existence of one or more genuinely global trading commonwealths that
apparently functioned for almost unimaginably long periods of time –
a thousand years or more – without the slavery and genocide
necessitated by capitalism or its patriarchal forebears.
Returning for a moment to the
Occidental necessity for the illusion of democratic process, the
original fascists' rejection of that need was perhaps the real
underlying issue in why the Western allies declared war on the Axis.
Nazism, and to a slightly lesser degree fascism in Italy and Spain,
discarded all pretense of humanitarianism and revealed capitalism
for the infinite savagery it truly is, a development that was
probably fully understood only by a few Soviet intellectuals. (Indeed
– particularly given the interest in ancient societies exhibited
by Engels – it is at least arguable modern-day communism was an
effort to restore our species' collective sanity by re-establishing
the communal ethos of the tribal world.) In any case, the Western
allies were not ready for the glaring revelations implicit in fascism
merely because their populations, ourselves included, had not yet
been sufficiently conditioned in the requisite slave mentality.
It was
commentary of an intensity I had not been able to write for some
time. (In retrospect, my chief self-criticism is I did not note how
the tacit support of
fascism in Spain
by the U.S. and its allies proves the point I made in its closing
paragraph.) In any case, by the next day my subconscious had
finished digesting the significance of Leech's message – at least
his message as understood by book-reviewer Javier Sethness – and
again I wrote to my friend, this time with a very different tone:
“There has been a rather strange and
entirely unexpected turn of events apropos what I said about
(worthlessness)...That a mainstream Leftist author has written
a book on (the genocidal consequences of capitalism) and thus
achieved intellectual immortality by its publication – never
mind I am not credited in the bibliography – confirms and
vindicates what has been my main point of argument since at least
2008, essentially that Nazism (and fascism in general) is not an
aberration of capitalism but is instead its logical fulfillment...Now
though by this book, Capitalism: a Structural Genocide, I am
not just vindicated but absolved of my despair...The book proves what
I was doing IS important. Hence, and instead of the recent acts of
abandonment to which my blog bears witness, I will take up the fight
again, first by abjuring my own acts of hopelessness, next by reading
the book, finally by resuming the verbal warfare for which I seem,
after all, to yet have some proven talent.”
Thus in one sense I am restored, though
in nearly every other sense I remain the same. I still doubt our
species' capacity to survive its self-inflicted apocalypse – verily
our patriarchal hatred and contempt of Nature has brought down upon
us the implacable wrath of Gaia, the Goddess, the one deity (if
indeed there are any deities at all), the denial of whom is not just
death but extinction. I still believe the present-day Ruling Class is
omnipotent, protected by its technology from any possibility of
overthrow or even reform. But I also recognize what a huge conceptual
breakthrough Leech has made – a breakthrough without which, as I
recognized years ago, any effort to build a sustaining human society
is doomed. In this context, the fact I am prohibited by caste from
ever sharing in his intellectual triumph is irrelevant. Perhaps best
of all, Leech has ended my rejection of what might be termed the
wild-card factor – history's penchant for sometimes dealing
improbable hands – which until now I believed had been nullified
forever by the One Percent's technological superiority. But now again
I think of Petrograd, 1917, where so-called “conventional (Ruling
Class) wisdom” yet supposed Tsardom was forever – until a
demonstration by the women of the Lesnoy Trextile Works grew into the
February Revolution (8 March by today's calendar). I also think of
Paris on 14 July 1789, the storming of the Bastille. Most of all I
think of Concord, Massachusetts on 19 April 1775, and an event of
which there has been no better reporter than Ralph Waldo Emerson:
By the rude bridge that arched the
flood,
Their flag unfurled to April's breeze,
Here once the
embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the
world.
Make no mistake; I am not advocating
violent revolution. Indeed I believe it would be suicide. The fate of
Occupy proves the government will mercilessly suppress any revolution
whether peaceful or violent, the only difference being the weapons it
will use: truncheons and pepper gas against the former; small-arms
ammunition, napalm, white phosphorous and possibly even tactical
nukes against the latter. And of course I am afraid; I already fear I
have spoken too critically. In these terrible hard times, anyone who
is not afraid is a fool. Given the dreadful reality of government by,
for and of the One Percent and its lethal hostility toward all of us
who dwell below the salt – survival itself has become a
revolutionary act.
LB/19-21 June 2013
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