Reflections on Despair and Hope; Ukraine Crisis Anthology; Hitler Lives: How U.S. Funds and Facilitates Re-Nazifaction; Obama's Choice of Bigot for Federal Judgeship Is Another of His Ever-More-Defiant Betrayals

DANCING IN THE RAIN – A child whose parents were attending the $15 Now rally on 3 May at People's Park in Tacoma celebrates her own private May Day festivities. She was joined immediately afterwards by two other kids who also danced in the rain, but by then I was out of film. The rally was part of an ongoing national campaign to raise the local, state and federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Click on image to view it full size. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014.)

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TO ACKNOWLEDGE DESPAIR is not the same as surrendering to it. The above photograph is implicitly and explicitly hopeful. It refutes those obnoxious disciples of compulsory positive thinking who self-righteously nag me with their dogmatic diatribes – who falsely denounce acknowledgment of despair as aid and comfort to the subjugators of our nation and the rapists of our land. The mere fact I can make such a photograph proves the PollyAnnas of both genders are idiots or hypocrites or pathological deniers and are in every instance beneath contempt because they, like the propagandists of the One Percent, would blind us to our true circumstances. Yet until we understand just how hopeless those circumstances are, we will never evolve the means to transcend our hopelessness.

Despite how children such as the rain dancer bear witness to the necessity of hope, in this time and place I have every right and reason to despair. I watch the relentless imposition of fascism and fascist governance that characterizes modern U.S. history, definitively since 22 November 1963  and arguably since 12 April 1945.  I threw away the New York Times potential of my journalism career when I went to jail for the Civil Rights Movement in 1963. Yet now 51 years later I witness the widespread re-emergence of the same racial bigotry I had foolishly believed might be permanently exorcised from U.S. society. My willing sacrifice – which later denied me my life's most promising job with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and therefore an opportunity for Canadian citizenship as well – was utterly pointless. Bigots, I know now, are truly ineducable; they cannot be reformed; yet their bigotry must somehow be culled from our species' mentality lest it embroil us in ever-more-suicidal extremes.  

But the deepest most wrenching source of my despair is the U.S. emergence of a new, carefully manufactured, neo-Nazi-intense hatred of lower income people. It is literally as if we the elderly and disabled and chronically unemployed and yes too all our children and grandchildren are being pre-positioned to be, in this beastly Fourth Reich that now slouches toward its official birth, the methodically scapegoated victims the Jews were in the Third Reich. Ayn Rand, who gave capitalism its modern equivalent of Mein Kampf, called openly for our extermination, and because death camps are not yet again fashionable, her genocidal policies are everywhere imposed as “austerity” and already whole families go hungry as a result.

So of course I despair. No knowledgeable person, no sane person, could possibly do otherwise.

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, it is despair that denies me the ability to surrender. 

And it is my inability to surrender that prompts me to make photographs like the one above.

I have reached a point wherein I would rather write of almost anything but politics. Sometimes I think I would even go back to the stultifying boredom of covering sporting events as I did in my youth to earn my passage into real journalism. I would especially prefer to write of the startling and sometimes poignant humanity I so often witness while riding mass transit, or to share the many inspiring dog stories I learned in my years as a reporter and collect even now in the company of other dog lovers.

Most of all I would rather say fuck it and go fishing, spend the best hours of my final years losing my self in the back-country satori of clear and troutly water and the Zen of working the slow green depths of some wild river with a seven-foot ultra-light-action rod and a Number 1 Mepps spinner and that uniquely wordless anticipation that wells up like invisible mist from the recognizable habitats of big cutthroats and lunker-size native rainbows.

But even in the wilderness, despair invariably intervenes like a sudden invasion of a dozen cast-off beer cans borne into a supposedly pristine canyon by a swift and allegedly unspoiled current. Damnit, I love this nation for its former potential and I love this land for the exquisiteness that is being ripped and gouged away in the name of profit and – fool that I am – some small part of me believes both the nation and the land can yet be restored. My despair is therefore the despair of an exile or a refugee, and it compels me to fight on in the only ways I can: by writing about the very politics I have come to deplore; by occasionally making icons of hope such as the photograph above, by serving such causes – for example the quest for a $15 minimum wage – as my geriatric disabilities yet allow, and most of all by acknowledging that in such times as these, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.

And if neither nation nor land can be restored, at least the future – if indeed our species has any future at all – may know a few of us in this o-so-stealthily inflicted miasma of Moron Nation remained conscious of what was being done and how we were being methodically disempowered and enslaved.

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In Case You Missed It, the fact there is no breaking news this week from Ukraine is good news, perhaps the best news of all. Recommended (the first report is from Reader Supported News, the others from Consortium News), are the following: “Secret Cable Reveals Russia Warned US in 2008 Meddling in Ukraine Could Split Country,” here; “How NATO Jabs Russia on Ukraine,” here;  “Cold Water on the Neo-Cold War Hysteria,” here; “Ethnic Russians Are People Too,” here. and “Ukraine's Dueling Elections,” here.

Vital backgrounders on how the U.S. finances global re-Nazification – as relevant to the Ukraine Crisis as it is to present-day Latin American politics – are “How Wall Street Bailed Out the Nazis,” here; “Hitler's Shadow Reaches toward Today,” here; and a der Spiegel exclusive, “Nazi Veterans Created Illegal Army,” here. 

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Again this month President Obama has shown his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) colors, this time by nominating Michael Boggs, a self-described “conservative Christian” who is notably anti-woman and anti-gay, for a lifetime federal judgeship.

The White House announcement immediately generated on-line opposition including a petition  by the usually staunchly pro-Obama People for the American Way. Then Ian Millhiser's ThinkProgress exposé, “Obama Judicial Nominee Ran Anti-Gay Political Campaign Touting His 'Conservative Christian Values,'” revealed additional details of Boggs' politics, provoking no reaction at all from the ever-more-defiantly Republican Obama but doubtlessly evoking cheers and klapping maybe even a celebratory kross-burning or two from Ku Kluxers throughout Georgia and elsewhere in the former Klanfederacy.

An outraged poster on the Millhiser comment-thread bitterly noted Senate Democrats now must either vote against a Democratic president's judicial choice  or approve a nominee “who might as well have been chosen by the Tea Party.”

“How,” the poster asked, “did we get to this pathetic point?”

I answered with a burst of Outside Agitation:

(1)-The U.S. experiment in representative democracy ended 22 November 1963. Ever afterward, the nation is increasingly ruled by One Party of Two Names.

(2)-The collapse of the Soviet Union and the permanent co-optation of China remove all global restraints to capitalist savagery. Capitalism accelerates its inevitable transformation to fascism and thence to economic neo-Nazism (genocide against all “non-profitable” elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished people in accordance with Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf).

(3)-The two pseudo-parties within the One (Ruling Class) Party of Two Names become distinguishable only by rhetoric. The Republicans are overtly fascist; the Democrats are equally fascist but hide their fascism behind Big Lies, e.g. “change we can believe in.”

(4)-Now, with the 99 percent ever more afflicted by capitalist predation and therefore ever more rebellious, the Ruling Class abandons bipartisanship and the slow-boiled-frog imposition of fascism and adopts ever-harsher measures, e.g., total surveillance, the National Defense Appropriations Act of 2012 and its nullification of the Bill of Rights.

(5)-Obama reveals his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) political identity: first the Rick Warren appointment, now Boggs, also killing net neutrality, single-payer/public option, Employee Free Choice, etc. ad nauseam.

In the context of all Barack the Betrayer's other about-faces and back-stabbings, the Boggs nomination should eliminate any lingering doubts the president was in fact a Manchurian candidate – the ultimate false-flag operative thoroughly trained in the arts of deception by his One Percent masters, then imposed on us via those Manchurias known as Wall Street and mainstream media.

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Photo data: The film is Kodak Professional BW400CN (black-and-white for development by C41 color processing machinery), its kill date 12/2010. This was the remnant of a much larger lot of film I used on a commissioned job c. 2006-2008, and I had kept the last two rolls in my refrigerator ever since. Kodak rated the film's SAE (ISO) at 400, which I found to be correct for indoor work, though its daylight speed is closer to 600. The camera was one of my ancient Pentax MXs, the lens an equally geriatric 70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom at maximum (210mm) extension. Exposure was 1/250th of a second at f/5.6.

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Back to the beginning: do I really believe there is still any hope? Not so much. In fact what I believe is “the imbecility of hope,” which parodies the phrase coined by our false-flag president, who has intensified our hopelessness to infinity by proving himself to be the most brazen liar in U.S. political history. Hope seems imbecilic because I know the four historical prerequisites of change – none of which appear to be achievable in today's United States. Hope seems especially imbecilic when I think of someone like Cecily McMillan spending seven years in prison and know – because it is the dirty business of a journalist to know such things – it will destroy her no matter how strong and brave her resistance. But occasionally – as when I photographed that child dancing so joyfully in the rain – it seems to me we have no choice but to be hopeful...even if it's only the hope of learning to live well despite chronic hopelessness.

LB/18 May 2014

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Quit Smoking to Get Healthy, Get Fat and Sick Instead

THE ORDEAL OF preparing my apartment for its quarterly premises inspection while I am afflicted by plantar fasciitis  in my left foot – which means I'm much more crippled than usual – has stolen my writing time. This week's OAN is thus limited to material I've posted on other sites.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not (because excess weight is among the chief causes of plantar fasciitis) – one of those posts was about the methodically suppressed connection between quitting smoking and inexplicable, uncontrollable and frighteningly fast weight-gain. It is a condition with which my post-smoking self is intimately, bitterly, god-cursingly familiar. But the facts about it – especially the hideousness it inescapably imposes on about 35 percent of former smokers, especially males – are carefully concealed by USian doctors, lest the dreadful knowledge encourage nicotine addicts to keep smoking.

Hence the following, an expanded version of the reply I posted two days ago on the comment thread of “5 Reasons Americans Are Getting Fatter: It's Not Just the Food,” an AlterNet report reprinted by Reader Supported News. 

While reporter Martha Rosenberg did an excellent job of rounding up the usual obesity-epidemic suspects – the long litany of for-profit additives and artificial sweeteners by which the capitalists poison our food – she wrote not a single word about the plague of post-smoking weight-gain. 

In this context it is important to understand the national quit-smoking campaign did not originate from any real public health concern. What began it is a condition unique to the USian Homeland: the fact the Ayn Rand doctrine that is the basis of USian economic policy defines health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. The anti-smoking drive was therefore launched in response to for-profit insurors' anger over how tobacco-related deaths were reducing their obscene profits. In other words, the USian war on tobacco smoking started as a manifestation of capitalist greed – which is precisely why it has been conducted so relentlessly and therefore with such success. Contrast the totality of the USian anti-smoking effort with the USian effort to eradicate communicable childhood diseases. The latter is a program increasingly abandoned, with predictably catastrophic results, due to deliberately genocidal neglect of the poor combined with the ailments spread by Christian fanatics who are now granted theocratic exemptions that allow them to legally ignore formerly mandatory inoculation requirements. The difference between the anti-smoking and childhood-health programs undoubtedly lies in the bottom-line: apparently payouts for smoking deaths reduce insurors' profits far more than payouts for the deaths of children.

Though I intended my response to Rosenberg to be corrective rather than confessional, my fury at the cosmic unfairness and sadism of my post-smoking circumstances – the fact I quit smoking to get healthy but instead got grotesquely fat – made parts of my contribution uncomfortably Oprah-ish. Normally I would have deleted such lapses as inappropriate emotionalism. But on second thought, it seemed the disclosures might help others who, like myself, are now after quitting smoking forever entrapped in the mortification inflicted by balloon-sized flesh. Besides, I have nothing to lose: I am who I am, and in this instance what I am – that is, horrendously obese – combines with abject poverty, physical disability and age to ensure the female gender will never again look at me with anything other than indifference, if not outright disgust. 

The associated negative emotions – which slap me in the face whenever I look in a mirror – are intensified by the fact USian doctors generally insist you're cheating anytime you gain weight on post-smoking diets. Whether calling you a liar is prompted by ignorance or is mandatory protocol, the psychological devastation is the same. The only exception I ever encountered amongst USian medical personnel was the nutritionist I consulted through Washington state's Group Health Cooperative. She said the stress of nicotine withdrawal – which is now recognized as the longest and most wrenching drug withdrawal  known to humans – throws the body into what she called “concentration-camp mode.” Thus the body begins turning all food into the fat essential to protect muscles and bones from absorption during starvation. If this is indeed what happens – and the explanation seems as good as any I've heard – the implication is that nicotine withdrawal truly ends only at death, especially for those of us who suffer the lifelong post-smoking tendency to become circus obese. 

Unfortunately, my case is typical. I weighed 158 pounds in 1985, when, at age 45, rising blood pressure and occasional bouts of cardiac arrhythmia prompted me to begin what became a ten-year fight to quit smoking. I was in good shape, an attractive and reasonably successful middle-aged journalist, the editor-in-chief of Art Direction, an international advertising-industry trade journal. As a Manhattanite I routinely walked five miles a day – Gotham-dwellers average more miles afoot than any other USians – and my 158 pounds with its 31-inch waistline was only 10 pounds and two inches more than my best condition ever, this in the Regular Army c. 1962. But my first week off cigarettes I gained 12 pounds, my first month a total of 24.5 pounds – gains I would have dismissed as impossible but for the irrefutable testimony of my trousers, which I could no longer button, and the corroborative witness borne by my belt, which was soon extended to its maximum length. 

Within weeks I went back to smoking – mainly because I knew the fast-encroaching ugliness would end my romantic and sexual prospects forever. Then my blood pressure again soared, and I again tried quitting. Once more I tried cold turkey; then I tried Smokers Anonymous (which is where I first heard of the British studies linking nicotine withdrawal to radical obesity). I tried hypnosis; I tried gradual reduction of my daily cigarette-count; I tried various over-the-counter medications that promised to help me quit. But it seemed nothing could get the nicotine monkey off my back. 

Meanwhile I had discovered a new and even more formidable complex of barriers to quitting: without nicotine, I could not function as a journalist. I could still edit copy, but I could not converse intelligently, think clearly or write a coherent sentence. I am dyslexic; soon I came to realize it was nicotine's function as a neurotransmitter – and not any innate talent – that had enabled all my intellectual acumen and indeed my entire reporting career. 

Of my communication skills, only my photographic ability was enhanced by not smoking – this because of the vast improvement in peripheral vision and tonal sense that results from the absence of vaso-constricting nicotine in one's bloodstream.

There was no triumph in my gradually-winning battle against nicotine addiction because it was equally a forever-losing battle against becoming monstrously obese. I grew fat and fatter – ever uglier, ever more embarrassed to be seen in public, ever more inescapably lonely. I had gained weight even on the unspeakable misery of a two-week, 1000-calorie-per-day diet. Tests proved the gain was not related to metabolic deficiencies. And the failure of that diet proved the weight gain was so uncontrollable not even starvation would stop it. 

When I finally managed to quit smoking permanently – this via a combination of nicotine patches and prescription medication – I was 55 years old. I weighed 195 pounds. By then, I had learned to accept my post-smoking obesity – repugnant though it was – with the same bitter resignation with which one accepts other physical handicaps. Moreover, being grossly fat was no longer the pivotal disaster of my life. My career had been destroyed by the odium of the post-traumatic clinical depression that eventually befell me after all my life's works were obliterated in a 1983 fire, and that alone left me too impoverished to ever again be attractive to any woman. Thus my physical appearance no longer mattered – precisely the realization that finally enabled me to swear off tobacco permanently. My first day without cigarettes forever was 23 September 1995. I used my last nicotine patch sometime in January 1996. Since then I have never had nicotine in any form. Within a year I had blubbered up to 235 pounds.

It would take me nearly a decade to teach myself to write again; I will never be the fast, self-assured writer I was as a smoker. And it would be a dozen years before I could again comfortably socialize. 

But even without the obesity, quitting smoking would have destroyed my physical condition. For most of my adult life I worked out regularly: jogging, walking, the long-distance hiking associated with back-country trout fishing, the day-long exertion of upland bird hunting, various self-administered physical training programs including nearly a decade with the Royal Canadian Air Force Basic Exercise Program. Then after my spine was permanently injured by one of Washington state's defiantly habitual drunken drivers, I was prescribed a combination of physical therapy and yoga that gave me enough flexibility to work a season as engineer/deckhand on a commercial fishing vessel and kept me ambulatory until – you guessed it – I began my quit-smoking effort. 

Another of the deliberately downplayed effects of nicotine withdrawal is total disruption of sleep patterns, the result of which is a profound state of exhaustion – precisely the condition that discourages exercise of any kind. And in my case – as in many such cases (or so I am repeatedly told) – the sleep disruption has never gone away. I used to sleep like the proverbial log, but I have not gotten an uninterrupted night's sleep since I smoked my last cigarette, and now after 18 years and six months, it is obvious I will never know the comfort of a full night's sleep again in this lifetime. Exhaustion – sometimes mild, more often severe – is now my normal condition. With it comes a loathing of unnecessary exertion so intense no amount of will power – at least none I am able to muster – will overcome it enough to foster regular exercise.

I know now that without cigarettes, I will always be fat – which is to say I will always be ugly. In my years off nicotine, I've weighed as much as 275 pounds. As a result I've come to regard food as my enemy, to fear and despise it and hate myself for how it obsesses my mind and deforms my body. By constant struggle, I (mostly) manage to keep my weight in the vicinity of an (only) (moderately) repulsive 225. Like the vampires of legend, I avoid mirrors; I go out in public only when I have no choice, and never for pleasure. Such is my lot as a former smoker.

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The documentation on the weight-gain/post-smoking connection, which I first heard of through a British acquaintance in 1986, took me years to ferret out. It surfaced, albeit in much later forms, via two papers unearthed in 2010 by the skills of a talented reference librarian at the Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library, a woman I knew only as Sarah and that only by telephone. In this instance she outdid even her colleagues at the main (Fifth Avenue) branch of the New York City Public Library, who repeatedly told me there was no such material, never mind NYPL is ostensibly the finest such institution in the nation.

Here are the two references Sarah found for me:

“Smoke-Free and Fat: the Health Hazards of Kicking the Habit”; Kent Sepkowitz, Slate: 2008. Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat. 

“Smoking as a Modifable Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes in Middle-Aged Men”; S. Goya Wannamethee, A. Gerald Shaper, Ivan J. Perry, Diabetes Care, Sept. 2001 v24 i9 p1590. (No link available.) Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat, thereby increasing your diabetes risk.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere: It's All About the Ukrainian Crisis

Most of this material is focused on the Ukrainian Crisis because of its terrifying threat of a thermonuclear World War III. As I have said before, to me it is scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis because in 1962 I trusted President John F. Kennedy. But now in 2014 I have learned the hard way – that is, by voting for him twice – not to trust President Barack Obama at all.

However, thanks largely to an astute journalist named Robert Parry, the debate is beginning to focus on whether Obama has been betrayed by his own advisors or whether he is (once again) demonstrating his formidable skills at deception and manipulation by minimizing his culpability in provoking the crisis.

Predictably, I argue for the latter – that Obama the Orator is merely showing another aspect of his true Barack the Betrayer self, most likely to improve the Democratic Party's abominable prospects in the November elections. The relevant links – those on which I contributed to discussion threads – are here  and here. 

Medea Benjamin's disturbing account of how she was savaged by the Egyptian secret police – obviously on orders of someone in the USian government if not in the White House itself – is also relevant. It, like the atrocities committed against the Occupy Movement, shows us the true nature of the imperial mind: all the more reason to fear the U.S. will escalate the Ukraine Crisis into World War III. 

LB/16 March 2014 

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Challenging Russia in Ukraine Could Trigger World War III

I FEAR KIEV could become – like Sarajevo of the century past – an international flashpoint. Just as the Slavic minority in Sarajevo despised the city's Austro-Hungarian overlords, so is the Russian minority in Kiev afraid of the allegedly neo-Nazi rulers of the Ukraine.  And given the new regime's alleged USian sponsors, the jeopardy in which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry puts himself and world peace by his visit to Kiev  could therefore be extreme. Let us prayerfully hope 4 March 2014 does not acquire infamy comparable to – or possibly far worse than – 28 June 1914.

Even the politically moderate European press – though it flinches from calling the new Ukranian government neo-Nazi – is alarmed by the hard-Right Svoboda party. “(A)nti-Semitism,” says a der Spiegel report,  “is part of the extremist party's platform; until 2004, they called themselves the Social-National Party of Ukraine in an intentional reference to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party. Just last summer, a prominent leader of party youth was distributing texts from (material) Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels translated into Ukrainian. Without the nationalists' tight organization, the revolt on Maidan Square would long since have collapsed.” The more Left-leaning Guardian now reports Svoboda appointees control the new government's most powerful ministries.  To those who are familiar with the combination of means by which Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party took over the Weimar Republic, Svoboda's swiftly rising power is justifiably frightening.

As I presciently said last Monday (24 February) on a Reader Supported News comment thread, Russia – especially given its experiences during World War II – will not tolerate  the presence of a fascist state, USian surrogate or not, on its western frontier. Hence I cited three reasons this could start World War III:

(1)-Nazism has an ugly history in the Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler's Wehrmacht, then gleefully aided the SS in rounding up, deporting and killing Jews. This history imposes huge obstacles to the present-day Ukrainian quest for national identity.

(2)-Russia's strategic interest is threefold. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe – as vital to the Russian economy as the grain fields of the Middle West are to the U.S.; it is an invasion route to the Russian interior, hence vital to the defense strategies of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and today's Russian Federation. It controls access to the Black Sea, an objective of Russian and Soviet policy since the time of the earliest Tsars.

(3)-The USian Empire's apperent Ukranian strategy is a variant of Hitler's plans for eastward conquest. Its purpose seems to be imposition of a militarily friendly neo-Nazi state on Russia's frontier, for-profit seizure of Ukrainian agricultural and natural resources and obstruction of Russian Black Sea access.

To imagine Russia will tolerate this de facto invasion is to imagine the U.S. would tolerate foreign conquest of its Middle Western states. This time the neocons, with their dreams of a global Fourth Reich, may have made the same mistake their secret hero Hitler made: they have goaded the Bear in his own den.

In other words, the events in Ukraine embody what the Russians perceive as a direct threat to Rodina – their beloved Motherland. For a hypothetical parallel, imagine Mexico taken over by a coup organized by the People's Republic of China. How would the USian Empire react?

But that's only one reason this looming confrontation scares me more than the Cuban Missile Crisis did. There is also a glaring difference between the quality of U.S. leadership in 1962 and today, specifically in the caliber of the presidents. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was popular, respected and already assured of his role in history. Barack Hussein Obama is unpopular, scorned as vehemently by the Left as by the Right. A few days ago his disapproval-rate polled as high as 56 percent, an omen of sure defeat for his Democratic Party in the fall congressional elections. At the very least, Obama remains a president in search of a positive legacy. And his increasingly authoritarian demeanor – manifest in unrestricted drone warfare,  extra-judicial presidential death warrants  and ever more aggressive foreign policy  – suggests he intends that legacy to be akin to Octavian's, who declared himself the first Roman emperor.

Apropos the Cuban Missile Crisis, when its story broke in 1962, I was only days out of the Regular Army. I had served the three active-duty years of my six-year enlistment, more than half of that in Korea, but I was obligated for three more years in the reserves. The troop transport in which I returned stateside with some 3,500 other soldiers, the U.S.N.S. Sultan,  was shadowed from Hawaii nearly to San Francisco Bay by a Soviet submarine, no doubt as part of the Cuban preliminaries. Had the crisis led to war while we were at sea, we'd no doubt have been torpedoed and sunk. And had the war begun after I was a civilian, I'd have been yanked back into uniform minutes after the first shot was fired. I knew that, and as a 22-year-old man with a 19-year-old wife and my first full-time job in journalism, a sportswriter for The Knoxville Journal, I was understandably worried. Given the grotesque realities of nuclear warfare, I was also gravely concerned for the wellbeing of my wife and other family members, especially those in and around Knoxville, Tennessee – a critical target due to its proximity to Oak Ridge. 

But I trusted President Kennedy. I thought of him as “our” president, even “my” president despite the fact I had not been old enough to vote in the 1960 election. He was a president who had campaigned honestly and whom We the People had rightfully elected to office.

Now though as I approach my 74^th birthday, I have no such trust in our leaders, least of all President Obama. He lied his way into office by promising “change we can believe in.” He shape-shifted from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer and immediately escalated George Bush's war against the Constitution. He betrayed his supporters in organized labor and in the movement for single-payer/public-option health care. He declared genocidal war on lower-income peoples of all ages by slashing food stamps, downsizing Medicare and attempting to cut Social Security. He is not my president, he is not “our” president (unless you are part of the One Percent or its corps of factotums), and it is most assuredly not We the People whose interests he serves.

Indeed I cannot but wonder if he seeks to provoke a war merely to boost his popularity and silence his critics, either by herding us into concentration camps or by unleashing his death squads with the extra-judicial extermination warrants he claims the right to issue at will.

At the very least – or so says Robert Perry in “Neocons and the Ukranian Coup,” the piece on which I posted the comments boldfaced above – he's abdicated control of the government (or more likely knowingly granted it) to a neo-conservative (i.e., neo-fascist) cabal that has been the real power behind the Oval Office at least since the Reagan years. “American neocons,” says Perry, “helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its elected government, a 'regime change'...(with) neo-Nazi militias at the forefront.” (The link to Perry's analysis, also in the lead-in to the boldfaced paragraphs, is repeated here for readers' convenience.)

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My original intention this week was to post comment-thread contributions as I usually do – that is, by summarizing the article and my Outside Agitator's response. But now I think the threat of war makes my comments on two of these threads relevant in their entirety. Hence the following, which the sharp-eyed reader will note is ever-so-slightly edited from the original texts:

“The 'Deep State' - How Much Does It Explain?” Mike Lofgren of Moyers and Company writes at length on what he calls the “Deep State,” portraying it as “a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state...out of control and unconstrained... (the perpetrator of) deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war.” I reply that from a socialist perspective, the term “deep state” is nothing more than another deliberately anti-Marxist euphemism to avoid such terms as “Ruling Class,” “capitalist aristocracy,” “the bourgeoisie” or “the One Percent.”

The behavior of the “deep state” is therefore typical of all ruling classes.

But the power of the “deep state” has no counterpart in human history. It is literally omnipotent, made so by a combination of three factors. The first of these is technology, which gives it capabilities hitherto accorded only gods – and only the most sadistic gods at that. The second factor is the ethos by which it is driven: capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate, typically malicious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated. The third is the new Mein Kampf by which the One Percent rules, Ayn Rand's expansion of economic theory into a formal doctrine of statehood, governance and intention: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

(A fourth factor that previously constrained even the most tyrannical states – the need to placate the masses – has been rendered irrelevant by weaponry that makes resistance not only futile but suicidal. We the people, we the 99 Percent, we the peasants and proletarians who do all the work – we no longer matter save in terms of our exploitability for profit. We are already prisoners, inescapably trapped in electronic slave pens.)

For the first time in our collective experience, our species has been subdued by conquerors so evil – that is, so hostile to human liberty and planetary life – the only metaphors to adequately describe their vileness come from mythology, religion and science fiction. Indeed they are the quintessence of evil; their triumph is the equivalent of conquest by demons or demonic creatures from outer space. And only a very few of our best writers – Chris Hedges, for example – have awakened to the bottomless horror of their moral imbecility.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lofgren's plea for a leader – someone with the “serene self-confidence” to lead us in rebellion – is nothing less than a call for voluntary human sacrifice, for yet another victim to walk the fatal paths of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. All were potentially such leaders. Each was murdered – decades before the state followed the pattern set by Hitler's Third Reich and publicly claimed, as it does now, the right to slaughter at will. Today our only certainty is that any true defender of freedom who arises to genuine leadership will be slain by the ever-eager assassins commanded by the One Percent.

What then, as Vladimir Lenin asked so presciently in 1902, is to be done? I have no satisfactory answer. Nor, seemingly, does anyone else. Hedges suggests our only recourse is the turning to art and spirituality that has been the opiate of slaves since the advent of slavery. History – specifically the fact there is no earthly precedent for the obscene might and toxic darkness of that which oppresses us today – tells me he is probably right, that we have no other alternatives.

As I ponder this unspeakable dismal future I remember a chant of the Cheyenne Ghost Dance – “the white man's god has forsaken him, let us go and look for our Mother.” My genes -- Scythian, Celtic, Norse, Iroquoian, others of which I know not – urge me to embrace the life and consciousness reasserted by the Gaia Hypothesis, to prepare myself for her vengeance on those who would knowingly destroy her. I do not imagine many of us will survive her fury. I am thankful I am old.

*

Later a poster on the same thread questioned my understanding of Hedges' stance. I replied by citing the Hedges essay entitled “A Time for Sublime Madness.” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_time_for_sublime_madness_20130120 In it he says, “To endure what lies ahead we will have to harness the human imagination,” which he then defines as both art and religion, with strong emphasis on the latter. (“Art” as used here includes not just visual work but music, poetry, dance, etc.)

What makes this particular Hedges essay so significant – it appeared on 20 January 2013 – is it is to my knowledge the first time he has acknowledged the true totality of our powerlessness. In so doing, he cites how other powerless groups sustained themselves. “It was the human imagination,” he wrote, “that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized and their cultures were broken. And it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred. It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence.”

Unfortunately – as we see in the de facto Christofascist theocracy of the USian South (and in the increasingly theocratic midlands as well) – religious imagination typically functions as opiate rather than agitation. This is true even in the case of non-Abrahamic religions. Note for example the stridently apolitical, even anti-political stance taken by so many Wiccans, who in every other sense are acutely aware of what is happening both politically and environmentally, yet cling to the New Age nonsense that collective transformation is impossible unless it is preceded by personal transformation.

To further clarify, while I believe Hedges is correct – that  “imagination” is our only recourse (simply because the genocidal technological superiority of the Ruling Class will not be defeated until it is overthrown by Gaian apocalypse) – I also regard it as a dreadful admission of defeat. Apart from the truly savage USian compulsion to religious conformity (which afflicts neo-Pagans as much as the Christofascists and the JesuNazis), our imagination has been withered to nonexistence by the slave mentality methodically imposed by the nation's public schools. One cannot make – or even comprehend – truly meaningful art when one's creative instincts have been deliberately starved to death by aesthetic ignorance. Thus we are robbed – perhaps permanently (because the only culture that can arise from ignorance is a culture of ignorance) – of even the one sanctuary Hedges suggested we might have left. Such is the totality of Evil by which we are now ruled. 

       

***

“Our Military: Fighting to Keep Its Culture of Abuse” Sarah L. Blum of Truthout reports on how the sexual and psychological abuse of women within the U.S. military not only continues unabated but – based on new statistics – is intensifying every year. I point out what I consider a major failure by mass media, the fact no widely published writer dares reveal the intimate connection between rape and the Christian fanaticism that now dominates the U.S. officer corps.

In the fanatical Christian worldview, which incidentally is shared by all Abrahamic fundamentalists, women are the (innately evil) daughters of Eve. As punishment for their alleged sinfulness, they are not only to be subservient to men, they are to be imprisoned in the homes of their fathers and husbands, their duties limited to housekeeping and child-rearing. Rape – the atrocity itself and the chain-of-command's diligent protection of the rapists -- is therefore part of “god's divine plan” to re-subjugate the entire female gender: that is, to drive women out of the military and out of the workforce in general and eventually “put woman back in her divinely ordained place.”

The troubling fact this horror-story is not being covered despite the abundant topical evidence -- the persecution of non-believers at the Air Force Academy, less-well-publicized reports of similar outrages at the other service academies, theocratic pronouncements by various general officers, major publications of at least four books discussing the theocratic threat to constitutional governance etc. ad nauseam – suggests even alternative mainstream media is now subject to theocratic censorship.

If this is not so -- if the Christian theocrats are not already so powerful they are muffling even allegedly alternative media -- then why is this story being suppressed?

(I ask not merely as a regular reader but as formerly award-winning print journalist, mostly a newspaper reporter, retired after a career spanning a half-century. Given only the publicly available sources, I could put together a basic report -- “Rape and the Christianization of the U.S. Military” -- in no more than a week. With time to cultivate inside sources and otherwise properly investigate the matter, a competent reporter could easily produce a Pulitzer-class story in two or three months.)

That this story has not already been broken is the most damning indictment yet of our allegedly "free" press.

*

In response to another poster on the “Culture of Abuse” thread, I point out I have written many times of rape and the Christianization of the military: access the TypePad edition of OAN, go to archives, then type in "theocracy" (no quotation marks).

For the record, the four books cited above are: The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008); American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges, Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.: 2006); American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Kevin Phillips, Viking: 2006); The Age of American Unreason, especially Chapter 8 (Susan Jacoby, Pantheon Books: 2008).

The best of these is Sharlet's work. Phillips' text is interesting because he is a conservative but nevertheless is appalled by the theocratic threat, while Jacoby's work is a general exposé on the Moron Nation (as I sometimes call it) that has resulted from capitalism's methodical “moronation” (my term for “dumbing down”) of the national mentality. 

Other reliable sources on the theocratic threat include Americans United for Separation of Church and State; Theocracy Watch; Catholic Watch and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. AU's role is explained by its name. Theocracy Watch is an encyclopaedic source on the effort to impose Biblical Law on the United States, but in its fealty to the Democratic Party is blind to the Democrats' pro-theocracy efforts, for example Hillary Clinton's secret, pro-Biblical-Law  collaboration with Sam Brownback as exposed on pages 272-277 of Sharlet's book. Catholic Watch monitors the efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to buy up all U.S. health-care facilities and thereby impose total bans on contraception and legally assisted suicide, while the Military Religious Freedom Foundation fights the forcible Christianization of the armed forces. 

I think there are two reasons the predatory nature of Christianity is suppressed by publications on the USian Left. The first is elitist arrogance, which since the 1960s has been the Left's downfall, in this instance the assumption religion is irrelevant (never mind the fact the U.S. is the most fanatically religious nation in the industrial world). The second reason is political correctness: to acknowledge Christian fanaticism is to acknowledge the fanaticism of Abrahamic religion in general, which of necessity would include acknowledgement of Islamic fanaticism – which political correctness forbids – and acknowledgement of Jewish fanaticism as well.  

That said, the last and best word of this week's column comes from a dear friend's reaction to the Ukraine crisis (and Goddess grant her foresight is better than mine): “I don't think we'll get into a land war with Russia over some peninsula in the the Black Sea – strategic to others, but not to us – and I'm very sick of our continuing to clean up the messes created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the imperial ambitions of Europe!”

LB/2 March 2014

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Obama's Enactment of NDAA, Forcible Disarmament of Medical Marijuana Patients, New Schemes to Censor Twitter Highlight U.S. Transition to Unabashed Fascism

*****

NOTE: Though I have been invited back to TypePad (lorenbliss.typepad.com) and am again blogging there, I will continue to post Outside Agitator's Notebook here also as it seems TypePad does not circulate as widely in Europe and elsewhere outside the United States as Blogger aka Blog Spot does. The essay below was posted on TypePad two days ago (9 January 2012). Hence my apology to my overseas readers for not identifying this circulation problem sooner.

*****

OCCUPY TACOMA MARCHERS, 4 November 2011: because we can't afford to bribe the politicians, peaceful protest is our last remaining option.  Click on image to view it full size. Photograph  by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. 

*****

Jungians believe dreams are sometimes prophetic messages from our collective subconscious – hence for example the otherwise inexplicable nightmares reported by Carl Jung's earliest therapands, which today are understood as warnings of the previously unimaginable horrors that characterized the 20th Century.

It is in this context I glumly report that now since the President has finalized his transition from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer by signing away our constitutional rights via the National Defense Authorization Act, I have thrice dreamt of being arrested without charge or trial and hauled off to lifetime internment merely because I am an outspoken opponent of capitalism.

This is significant because I have never had such dreams before, not ever – this despite a lifetime of risky political activism including false arrest and attempts on my life by the Ku Klux Klan in retaliation for my journalistic involvement with the Civil Rights Movement c. 1963-1965.

Nor am I alone in these new and disturbing nightmares. A friend describes having similar dreams, and I cannot but wonder how many others are likewise afflicted.

Which – if the Jungian hypothesis is accurate – suggests the proverbial road ahead is a very hard road indeed.

Not that the road behind us has been all that much easier.

If indeed there is any long-term human tomorrow – a prospect made increasingly doubtful by the capitalists' ecocidal greed – future historians will undoubtedly select 22 November 1963 as the true date for the death of the American Dream and the murder of its underlying experiment in constitutional democracy.

That date – the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy – will live in infamy far longer than 7 December 1941, when Imperial Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. For Pearl Harbor was merely a lost battle, the opening fight in a victorious war, while the assassination of President Kennedy was a coup, a conquest, the death of a nation.

Its hideous truth, that we are a people conquered and reduced to slavery, is the now-undeniable message-thread that ties together all the atrocities of the following years: murder and mayhem inflicted by needless wars – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, 9/11, Iraq again, Afghanistan again; the murders of Malcolm X, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy; the murders at Kent State and Jackson State; the murders of Fred Hampton and Karen Silkwood and the suspected murders of Paul Wellstone and John F. Kennedy Jr.; the torture-murders committed by Augusto Pinochet and all the other dictators supported by Wall Street and therefore bankrolled and protected by the U.S. government; now finally the horrors of capitalism brought home and imposed on us by the murder of the U.S. economy, downsizing and outsourcing and foreclosure and the deliberately murderous destruction of government services; and now too at home as abroad the psychological and often physical murder of capitalism's innumerable victims, our minds killed by deliberately shrunken schools and maliciously untruthful media, our bodies slain by the methodical denial of medical care or the inescapable horrors of post-industrial poverty and/or post-eviction homelessness – this unprecedented plague of murder and murderousness for profit the defining characteristic of our era.

All of these consequences of 22 November 1963 are either spelled out or implied in JFK and the Unspeakable, subtitled Why He Died and Why It Matters as if in apt anticipation of Warren Commission objections arising from the useful idiots of Moron Nation. 

 

Written by the avowedly pacifist author James W. Douglass (Orbis Books, 2008), JFK and the Unspeakable employs the classic technique of investigative reporting, following the money and power to show us who got ruined and who got paid off. It is not conspiranoid dreck but hard-edged historical analysis, available online for $14.28 or $9.99 as a Kindle download.

Yet despite its ready availability JFK and the Unspeakable remains obscure, marketed mostly by word of mouth, the victim of methodical marginalization by a Ruling Class Media blackout unlike anything I have ever seen, a campaign of silence so relentless it confirms all our terrible suspicions about the reality of censorship here in the alleged “land of the free.”

Not that we should be surprised. Ours has been the original realm of the Big Lie for many more than my nearly 72 years. Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels made no secret of the fact he learned his techniques from Madison Avenue. A few even say Goebbels learned his techniques on Madison Avenue, a story I would love to report, though I have never been able to find confirmation Goebbels actually worked in a U.S. advertising agency.

In any case it is only fair to point out the Nazi war criminals absorbed by the U.S. government after World War II added nothing new to the Big Lie arsenal but merely brought the technique back home.

The truth of the Big Lie's homecoming is underscored by the postwar Big Lie that blames the Soviets for originating the tactic of “disinformation” – a long-standing U.S. claim accepted with typically ignorant submissiveness here in Moron Nation despite the ironically contrary fact the Russian word for disinformation is dezinformatsiya, a term obviously of English-language origin.

Nor does the post-war welcome given the Nazis by the U.S. Ruling Class surprise any of us who understand that beyond all the deceptive euphemisms of academic economics, capitalism is merely infinite greed exalted as maximum virtue, just as capitalist governance can only mean absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us: in other words, fascism. Or as Il Duce himself defined it, absolute rule by the corporate One Percent.

Thus we recognize fascism and its still-more-sadistic twin Nazism as capitalism's ultimate form – Wall Street's only logical evolutionary fulfillment – which in turn enables us to know World War II for what it truly was: a war between rival factions of capitalists: the jackboot-and-deathcamp-capitalists who ran Italy, Germany and Japan versus the velvet-glove capitalists who ruled the United States, Great Britain and France.

Thus too the far more accurate Soviet name for World War II, “the Great Patriotic War against Fascism,” which from the viewpoint of the 170 nationalities of the Soviet Union it most assuredly was.

All of which is prefatory to the four reports linked below, each vital if belated New Years reading. The first report tells us the Obama Administration has quietly and without public announcement decreed any firearms owner who uses medical marijuana is guilty of a felony punishable by ten years in prison. The second, from the Electronic Freedom Foundation and forwarded to me by a reader, exposes the U.S. campaign to censor Twitter. The next two look at the National Defense Authorization Act and its role in facilitating the (inevitable) progression of the United States from the velvet-gloved fascism of the World War II era and my boyhood years (1940-1958) to the bare-knuckled truncheon-and-Tazer fascism of today. In which context the semioticians amongst us will also note the Nazi-style helmets the U.S., its allies (and many domestic police departments) adopted after the Vietnam Era.

Once again, the medium is the message.

Yes. that frightening sound you hear at the edge of your mind may well be an 80-year-old echo of snare drums.

And just because the U.S. military doesn't goose-step (yet) is no guarantee it isn't already dominated by fascists – especially now that Barack the Betrayer has given it full-fledged Gestapo powers by signing NDAA.

Indeed the one unanswered question is whether the military can delegate its new authority to mercenary organizations like Xe, aka Blackwater, already infamous for its presence during the forcible disarmament of New Orleans after Katrina – so much for the notion the (Ruling Class) GOPorkers are any different from the (Ruling Class) DemocRats in opposition to a citizenry armed for self-defense. 

In this instance the GOPigs are merely the better liars. Just ask the citizens of Lousiana.

*****

Feds Impose Mandatory Pacifism, Compulsory Victimhood on Medical Marijuana Users

I read Rightist websites because they're sometimes sources of information the (pseudo) Left here in Moron Nation maliciously suppresses.

That was how I discovered the following – a stunning report the Obamanoid Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has administratively decreed  obtaining a medical marijuana prescription forcibly disarms you forever, no exemptions, no appeal. I found this information when I was searching the admittedly hard-Right Gun Owners of America website to refresh my memory on the attempted disarmament of New Orleans and its environs, an atrocity on which GOA alone provided adequate reporting.

“With the stroke of a pen, the U.S. Justice Department has just subjected hundreds of thousands of Americans to a lifetime gun ban,” says the GOA report, by John Velleco of NewsWithViews.com.

“In an open letter to all licensed firearms dealers, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) unilaterally decided that any person who is prescribed marijuana for medical purposes is prohibited from possessing a firearm,” the report continues.

“That means over 300,000 people in the states that allow medical marijuana suddenly cannot buy or possess a gun. Oh yeah, and for the many who already own firearms, watch out. They are now felons and could be subject to lengthy prison terms of up to ten years.”

Because many states deny all rights of self-defense to anyone who is prohibited firearms ownership, the BATFE's decree is exactly as my headline states: mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood for medical marijuana users.

*****

U.S. Officials, Ruling Class Politicians Seek to Censor Twitter

A new disclosure by the Electronic Frontier Foundation forwarded to me by a reader describes federal efforts to censor Twitter.

The report – alarming in its own right – acquires additional significance given last fall's test of cell-phone censorship in San Francisco, for which see “San Francisco's BART Turns Off Cell Phones to Suppress Protests” (Outside Agitator's Notebook, 14 August 2011). Together these episodes provide additional proof of the national transition that's moving us ever closer to a stars-and-stripes variant of Nazism.

“EFF has witnessed a growing number of calls in recent weeks for Twitter to ban certain accounts of alleged terrorists,” the report says.

“In a December 14th article in The New York Times, anonymous U.S. officials claimed they 'may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close' a Twitter account associated with the militant Somali group Al-Shabaab. A week later, The Telegraph reported that Sen. Joe Lieberman contacted Twitter to remove two 'propaganda' accounts allegedly run by the Taliban. More recently, an Israeli law firm threatened to sue Twitter if they did not remove accounts run by Hezbollah.”

“Twitter,” EFF concludes, “is right to resist.  If the U.S. were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organizations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in the name of 'national security.'”

The only quibble I have with the EFF report is that in the United States – as for example the BART incident and real but difficult-to-document ousters from Facebook – online speech is already being censored. Nevertheless EFF is our one effective guardian of online First Amendment rights, which means it should have not just our universal applause but donations from anyone who still has any discretionary income.

*****

Naomi Wolf Says NDAA Could Foster Military Coup, Arrest of President and Congress

The newly imposed National Defense Appropriations Act, specifically its Amendment 1031, allows the military to round up U.S. citizens without formal charges and detain us without trial literally for the rest of our lives, presumably in Guantanamo-like concentration camps or worse.

But author/journalist Naomi Wolf points out another atrocity the rest of us missed – that it also facilitates a military coup. She originally published her analysis on December 12, 2011, but it took on new relevance when Barack the Betrayer hid behind the holiday media blackout to quietly sign the bill during his Hawaii vacation – literally as if he were engineering his own overthrow. Hence Reader Supported News thoughtfully resurrected Ms. Wolf's text. 

Congress and the President, she wrote, “may have supported this bill because - although it's hard to believe - they think the military will only arrest active members of Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that 'at most', low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon be subject to arrest themselves.”

“The moment this bill becomes law,” she explained, “the power roles will reverse: Congress will no longer be directing and in charge of the military: rather, the military will be directing and in charge of individual Congressional leaders, as well as in charge of everyone else - as any Parliamentarian in any society who handed this power over to the military can attest.”

“Perhaps Congress assumes that it will always only be 'they' who are targeted for arrest and military detention,” Ms. Wolf speculated. “But sadly, parliamentary leaders are the first to face pressure, threats, arrest and even violence when the military obtains the power to make civilian arrests and hold civilians in military facilities without due process.”

*****

Citing 2012 Parallels to 1932, a British Journalist Asks If the Future Is Fascism 

 

“The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition, of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But,” wrote Dominic Sandbrook of The Daily Mail, “it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread...For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932.”

Redistributed by Reader Supported News, Sandbrook's piece laments “there seems little point in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover, beleaguered by rising unemployment and tumbling ratings, flailed and floundered towards election defeat...Barack Obama cuts a similarly impotent, indecisive and isolationist figure. The difference is that in 1932, one of the greatest statesmen of the century, the Democratic politician Franklin D. Roosevelt, was waiting in the wings.”

“Today, American voters looking for alternatives are confronted only with a bizarre gaggle of has-beens, inadequates and weirdos, otherwise known as the Republican presidential field. And to anybody who cares about the future of the Western world, the prospect of President Ron Paul or President Newt Gingrich is frankly spine-chilling.”

Not that Mitt Romney is any less frightening – especially now that Barack the Betrayer has signed NDAA, thereby ensuring Romney or any other U.S. president will never again be more than a tool of the military – and of course the military-industrial complex.

Happy New Year!

LB/9 January 2012

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