USian Empire Now the Planet's Primary Source of Evil

 

Again this image reveals its iconic nature: originally about the quest for world peace rendered fruitless by the USian Empire's relentless aggression, it now becomes a symbol of afflicted Nature and therefore of oft-thwarted Clotho, Spinner of the threads of life, to whom the late Tim Buckley once sang, “If you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 1971: Nikon F, 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor, Tri-X in D-76 for 800 ASA. (Permission granted for non-commercial use with photo credit and attribution to Outside Agitator's Notebook.) Click on image to view it full size. 

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(Yes, there is another damnable OAN schedule change implicit in this text. Rather than post once per month, as I had proposed, or once per week, as I did for at least a year, I am now going to post randomly – that is, whenever I have a photograph to show or something to say and the time in which to show or say it. My apology for any inconvenience.)

 

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THE REALITY OF EVIL, nominally a theological question, has again been snatched out of the protective obscurity of that comfortably abstract realm of monasteries and convents and dumped like a steaming, butthole-reeking pile of shit onto our dinner-tables in the real (and really injurious world) of realpolitik, and this time the dumper-in-chief is not some conquest-hungry foreign despot (Kaiser Wilhelm II as in 1914) or even three such despots (Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo as in 1941). The people who are shitting all over us are instead (and far more ominously) a tiny clique of our own fellow citizens – that semi-invisible circle of inconceivably wealthy, obscenely powerful plutocrats who own and/or control the United States and all its governments at all levels and ever-more-openly use its bureaucrats and generals and police chiefs and judges and politicians, whom they also own, to facilitate their own morally imbecilic pursuits.

There is general agreement the consequences are evil – ask for example any of the innumerable homeless youth who five years ago were normal kids part of a normal working family living in a normal and normally mortgaged suburban house until the Great Wall Street Ripoff of 2007-2009 outsourced Dad's job and abolished Mom's job and foreclosed the house and flung Mom and Dad and their two offspring into the streets and destroyed their family. Now the kids are throw-away children thrown away to survive by their own wits because under capitalism (and beyond all the pseudo-romantic bullshit peddled by Madison Avenue), capitalist marriage and therefore capitalist family is merely another profit-seeking, profit-centered capitalist relationship, which means when there is no more profit to be extracted, the relationship naturally disintegrates. But here amidst all this manifest evil, seemingly nobody but the (intellectually shackled and therefore increasingly irrelevant) Abrahamic clergy dares think about what evil is or where it comes from or whether it should be spelled “Evil,” proper-noun cap “E,” or minimized as a lower-case common noun, merely “evil” and therefore of no greater significance than bad weather, the societal equivalent of a hurricane or a tsunami.

That's why, when I describe the consequences of capitalism as “evil” – and especially when I capitalize it as “Evil” (as below in “the U.S. has become the primary source of Evil on this planet”) – a lot of secularists are offended. They (legitimately) fear some Abrahamic subversive is at work, subtly jihading for patriarchy.

But as it says in the Porgy and Bess song, “It ain't necessarily so.”  Yes, I admit the tendency to cite “evil” or “Evil” is often a defining characteristic of obnoxiously crusading Christians, Muslims and Jews. But I am none of the above. I regard evil and Evil as purely human byproducts spawned not by talking serpents but by the genetic flaws in the tyrannosauric bipeds one finds in board rooms and executive offices. Moreover, Webster's third definition of evil – “causing harm” – neatly severs it from religious dogmatism. And if you want to deduce my beliefs, merely read the sidebar to OAN; then reflect on how, over the years, I have repeatedly portrayed myself as an agnostic influenced by Zen, Taoism and First Nations beliefs but mostly leaning toward paganism – specifically Goddess-centered paganism. I outed my spiritual self most recently in a minor dispute with an avowed Christian in a Reader Supported News discussion thread that touched on how USian Empire's methodical destabilization of human society is one if its primary weapons of global conquest.  Deliberately engineering the collapse of human society to suppress our collective ability to oppose enslavement is indeed Evil, and it is Evil in the same sense the term was used to describe the depredations of Hitler. No other label adequately describes the horrors the capitalists – the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals – are knowingly and with malice aforethought inflicting on us and our planet.  As I said on the same RSN thread, “capitalism IS corruption – the bribery of the masses with the bright baubles of trinket materialism, all to free the One Percent so they can amass obscene profit by murdering us and raping our planet.” And what is corruption but another of the subsets of Evil?

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RSN'S MOST RECENT discussions on the empire's global destabilization campaign was probably triggered by an original William Boardman piece that ran a couple of days earlier about the destabilization of Ukraine.

But Boardman, who is by far the best of RSN's staff reporters, neglected to explore the darker aspects of the probable motives for the empire's ongoing provocation of Russia. Hence my response, here somewhat revised from its original published form:

Absent from Boardman's otherwise brilliant analysis of the ever-escalating U.S. provocation of Russia is the probability its ultimate psychological driver is the One Percent's truly bottomless terror not just of Communism but of socialism in any form. While the associated fanaticism is repeatedly demonstrated by the blank-check support the U.S. reflexively grants any tyrant who pledges to exterminate socialists – note again the abysmal human-rights records of the USian satropies – it is nevertheless difficult to quantify, which is probably why Boardman omitted it from his text.

Meanwhile the empire's relentless drive toward war with Russia remains incomprehensible until we recognize the implications of the fact the Russian population has, within its living memory, experienced the differences between capitalism and socialism. And though today the Russian people tolerate capitalism as a necessary evil, there is no question they remain fiercely committed to the humanitarian benefits of socialism. That is why they rejected the “economic genocide” of Wall-Street-ally Yeltsin's disaster capitalism  for Putinism,  which has been as dramatic a change for post-Soviet Russia as the New Deal was for the depression-crippled United States. That is also why the Communist Party – in recognition of its economic doctrine of “from each according to ability, to each according to need” – remains the nation's second largest political organization.

Were the Russian preference for socialism to again become the pivotal element in Russian policy, as it was during the Soviet era, such a development – particularly given the exemplar of capitalist malevolence that is global austerity – could easily expand into an unprecedented drive for international revolution. The ever-worsening misery the capitalists' insatiable greed is deliberately inflicting on workers everywhere is the one truly irrefutable argument for socialism. Were there still a Soviet Union to evoke it, the ultimate global victory of socialism – if not of Marxist-Leninist Communism per se – would be assured.

Hence we can be sure the greatest fear of the USan Empire is the resurrection inside Russia of a state consciousness comparable to that of the Soviet Union, but – especially since capitalist psychological warfare has not yet robbed the Russians of their ability to learn from experience – without the U.S.S.R.'s ideological and administrative handicaps that made it relatively easy prey to Wall Street's economic warriors. Hence too the U.S. response: not only destabilization of the Russian state, but – via a third world war – the extermination of all those Russian people whose lives bear witness to the humanitarian superiority of socialism. Which, surely not coincidentally, is exactly the response proposed by Hitler, whose colleagues, through their One Percent connections, became the paramount influences in shaping postwar USian foreign policy. And the Russians, politically astute as they are, are surely aware of what intentions now obtain in the wholly owned Wall Street subsidiary of Washington D.C.

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THE EMPIRE'S GLOBAL campaign of deliberate destabilization was also the core topic of a Robert Parry report RSN reprinted from Parry's Consortium News. But Parry – superb reporter that he normally is – nevertheless deftly dismisses this geopolitical “madness” as if it were merely an anomaly rather than the new national norm of world conquest it has become. Hence my reply, this too revised from its original form:

Despite my huge respect for Parry's reportorial and analytical skills, I fear he remains in bondage to his original notions about the (allegedly) benevolent nature of United States, a captivity proven by his failure to recognize the irremediable magnitude of the Nazi-like malevolence that has become its defining quality. Nor does he see the broader truth of U.S. capabilities and intentions as demonstrated by the intentional destabilization first of the Middle East, now of Europe and eventually of all human society.

To arrive at this admittedly horrendous view of USian capabilities and intentions, we must consider five facts, which inevitably lead us to three (obvious and therefore undeniable) conclusions:

The facts are (1)-the breathtakingly manipulative, astoundingly long-range planning capability demonstrated by capitalism in controlling and predicting human behavior; (2)-the obvious application of this capability to global politics; (3)-the ideology of the One Percent, particularly as expressed by Ayn Rand and Adolph Hitler, in which politics and economics are mutually sustaining endeavors; (4)-the exposed intentions of the One Percent, which include the imposition of “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein) and the radical reduction of the human population (Paul and Anne Ehrlich; and (5)- the One Percent's total ownership of government and mass media, by which it exercises hitherto unimaginable control over every aspect of USian life and, increasingly, over every aspect of human life everywhere on this planet.

Thus – and here is where Parry seems blinded by the residue of a no-longer-sustainable patriotism – it is only logical to conclude what was formerly considered unthinkable: that (6)-the destabilization inflicted on the Middle East and now on Europe was foreseen (much as the psychological consequences of marketing are foreseen); that (7)-the resultant chaos, especially the resurrection of European fascism, was also foreseen and is itself intentional, and that (8)-its long-range purposes – in compliance with the internationalization of Nazi foreign policy achieved by Ayn Rand economics – are threefold. Reasoning from events already underway, these are (A)-forcible population reduction (whenever possible in a “coincidental” manner intentionally rendered difficult to document as genocide), of which the drowned corpse of little Alan Kurdi is surely an ultimate archetype; (B)-imposition of “disaster capitalism” – that is, the de facto fascism of zero-tolerance One Percent rule – on the entire planet, Europe most assuredly included and, as a result, (3)-the imposition of an Ayn Rand (Neocon) version of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich to ensure the One Percent and its descendants survive the forthcoming environmental apocalypse with sufficient slaves to maintain the obscene comforts to which they have long been accustomed.

When one factors in all the variables – especially the USian repetition of destabilizations – no other hypothesis is plausible. As I said at the beginning, the U.S. has become the primary source of Evil on this planet. And it is still acting out the policy of economic jihad first publicly acknowledged during the Vietnam War: “we had to destroy the village (or the planet) to save it (from socialism).”

LB/8-14 September 2015

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Capitalism Requires an Endless Succession of Big Lies

CAPITALISM, OF NECESSITY, requires constant use of the Big Lie.  That's because, when capitalism is reduced to its lowest common denominator, it is ultimately moral imbecility – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. The same is true of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and for the same reason. Neither capitalism nor capitalist governance can exploit its victims without a perpetual smokescreen of lies and evasions to conceal its quintessential savagery.

While the lies of our capitalist masters are typically blatant – for example President Obama's knowingly false assertions the Russians are to blame for the Ukraine Crisis  – sometimes their deceptions are more subtle. One example is the methodical destruction of the career and ultimately the life of the journalist Gary Webb,  detailed by Robert Parry in “The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up.” Another is the lie-by-omission at the core of the Democratic Party's pre-election effort to make us forget how Democrats joined hands with Republicans to try to slash our already inadequate Social Security stipends. Thus a recent Truthout piece, “The GOP Social Security Deception Game Is On - Here's How to Fight Back,” dutifully disseminates the propaganda the Democrats desperately hope will enable them to retain control of the U.S. Senate. Its story-line is the Big Lie that Democrats are eternal fighters for the Working Class, and with Sen. Elizabeth Warren  arguing the case, it's an easy lie to believe – especially for those of us foolish enough to still have faith in the possibility of obtaining redress from our hopelessly corrupted political system.

But lest we forget the truth – which Truthout does reliably publish save when the its election-year fealty to the Democratic Party overrides its journalistic ethics – here is an AlterNet report, “Sell-Out Alert: 9 Democrats Already Caving to GOP On Social Security Cuts,” to remind us what really happened.  As it says, “...the biggest Democrat of all – and the one not drawing a line in the sand but possibly leading a historic sellout – is President Obama.” In other words, Barack the Betrayer strikes again, targeting Medicare as well as Social Security – and now he's got Sen. Warren, the alleged defender of the 99 Percent, to cover for him. Equally ironic is the role Washington state Sen. Patty Murray – a Democrat who likes to brag about her feminist credentials – played in proposing cuts which (see below) would have been especially devastating to women.

For those who still doubt the Democratic and Republican parties are nothing more than deceptively named factions of a single party of plutocrats, there's the fact 43 of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus voted just last February to help President Obama impose an $8.5 billion food-stamp cut.  Note the Democratic numbers: 43 of 55 is 78 percent. And when you eliminate the two independents and count only the actual Democrats, you have 43 of 53 or 81 percent – which gives us the real percentage of Democratic politicians who are indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts in hatred and contempt for us, We the People of the 99 Percent. As Washington state Senator Maria Cantwell put it (scroll down the linked text), “it's time that we move forward” – never mind the vast majority of the cutback's victims are women and children. 

Cantwell is considered one of the Democrats' leading liberals and feminists. But it is her Marie Antoinette indifference to the deliberately genocidal consequences of radically downsizing the food-stamp program that underscores another of the Democrats' Big Lies – their now obviously false claim they can at least be counted on to protect the wellbeing of women.  It was Democratic President Jimmy Carter's signature  on the Hyde Amendment that robbed lower-income women of their abortion rights. It was Democratic President Bill Clinton's expansion of free trade  that took away so many jobs – and so many health-insurance policies – that were the sole sources of reproductive choice for working women who were not independently wealthy. (Rich women, Ruling Class women, always have reproductive freedom; it's one of the innumerable privileges the plutocrats are ensured by their obscene wealth.) More recently it was Obama the Orator's initial shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – the irremediable betrayal that forever defined Usian health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right – that opened the door to Hobby Lobby  and all the other looming theocratic restrictions on abortion and contraception. And don't forget the deadly damage  the Democrats' proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts would have done to women.

What, therefore, will change if the Republicans – as expected – win a majority of seats in the Senate? Not much; arcane, pro-plutocracy Senate rules already give the Republicans de facto control,  so all that will happen is the nation's march toward overt fascism and Christian theocracy and its simultaneous descent to the total wretchedness of de facto slavery for the 99 Percent will merely accelerate a bit. Besides – just as the Social Security and food-stamp issues demonstrate – the only real difference between the two parties is rhetoric. The Republicans are already unapologetic Christofascists. The Democrats meanwhile have become breathtakingly skilled at hiding their fascism behind legislative sleight-of-hand and election-time declarations of humanitarian principles in which they no longer believe. The latter have therefore become Big Lies in their own right: the classic example is Obama's 2008 campaign slogan: “change we can believe in.”

The bitter truth is we are governed by one Ruling Class party of two names. Thus government at every level in the United States, federal, state and local, is by, for and of the capitalists, with the rest of us – despite the Big Lie of “democracy” – methodically excluded.  But when oh when will we awaken to the awful truth?

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As I said above, Truthout can be counted on to tell the truth about anything save the Democratic Party. Hence the relevance of two unusually insightful reports that explain exactly how capitalism works. One, which describes how New York City perfected a mode of zero-tolerance policing that helps force lower-income people out of neighborhoods targeted for gentrification,  is entitled “Policing for Wealth.” The other – a timely essay on how private charity preserves capitalism  and thereby facilitates its oppression of lower-income people – is headlined “The Charitable Society or 'How to Avoid the Poor and Perpetuate the Wealth Gap.” It's money quote – no pun intended – lays bare a perfect example of the systemic dishonesty essential to capitalism's survival: “...corporate charity becomes a kind of self-rewarding capitalist enterprise because it is able both to maximize profit through tax breaks, and subtly cement capitalist economic, social and political policies that reflect the interests of the super-rich – from monopolization to privatization of public goods and institutions. So, it turns out that much of the giving involved here is not giving for the sake of promoting the common welfare, but philanthropy for private profit and corporate self-interest at the expense of long-term public good” (italics as in original).

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At various times I have pissed off many of my more politically naive comrades in the USian Left by proclaiming that the so-called “revolution of the 1960s” never happened. Yes, it was a potentially revolutionary time – so much so Soviet intelligence scrutinized the era's people and events in a meticulous search for revolutionary potential. But the Soviet analysts, who (let us not forget) were themselves professional revolutionaries, concluded that only the USian minority communities had the requisite combination of grievances, leadership, anger and determination. And even these qualities, the analysts found, were nullified by the communities' relative smallness and the exclusionary bigotry of the Caucasian majority. The rebellious whites were meanwhile dismissed as mostly bourgeois faddists who had merely seized upon revolutionary rhetoric as a means of rationalizing ultimately selfish demands. Hence no Soviet advisers were ever dispatched. The analysis, by the Committee for State Security, Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or KGB, came to light after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. By then, the accuracy and indeed the prescience of the analysts' work had been confirmed by how quickly anti-war dissent and a plethora of other seemingly “revolutionary” activities were terminated by the end of the military draft in 1972. Hence my “no revolution” argument is – at least in a limited sense – validated by world-class experts.

Not all whites, of course, were faddists. Many were in fact genuine revolutionaries. But their revolution – manifest in feminism, environmentalism, the back-to-the-land movement, the alternative press, the resurrection of paganism and most of all in music and art – was no more or less than what the late Walter Bowart called it in a conversation with me in 1967, “a revolution in consciousness” rather than in political or socioeconomic terms. This was the revolution I described in the forever lost work “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which argued on the basis of a 24-year collection of evidence that the epicenteral rebellion of the 1960s was the first wave of a spontaneous global uprising against patriarchy.  (As many of you know already, “Dancer” was destroyed by fire just as it seemed destined for mainstream publication.) But other relics of that era fortunately live on, albeit sometimes only in the contents of academic papers. One of these is a carefully researched, tautly reasoned, competently written masters-degree thesis, a brief history of the feminist back-to-the-land movement,  “Country Women: Back-to-the-Land Feminism and Radical Feminist Praxis in the Women's Liberation Movement,” that despite its somewhat awkward title is useful far beyond the realm of women's studies. It contains the most complete back-to-the-land-movement bibliography I have yet encountered. Not withstanding its singular focus, it provides what is probably our best-ever portrait of the attitudes and yearnings that brought the entire back-to-the-land movement, feminist or otherwise, into being.

In this latter context, perhaps my own back-to-the-land piece, a prose elegy to an ill-fated commune,  is again relevant.

Unfortunately our understanding of the era in question remains limited by the label – “the '60s” – which the Ruling Class insists we use to describe it. But it was not merely the phenomenon of a single decade. A more accurate chronology would mark its beginning with two events in 1955. One was Rosa Parks'  infinitely courageous protest against Southern segregation; the other was Allen Ginsberg's completion of the epic poem Howl.  What followed those two seemingly disparate events was an astounding symbiosis of political and aesthetic rebelliousness that not only gave birth to a half-dozen identifiable movements – civil rights, anti-war, feminist, environmentalist, back-to-the-land, alternative press – but evolved its own signature musical and artistic forms. It also legitimized quests in realms of hitherto-forbidden spirituality including Buddhism, First Nations wisdom and goddess-centered paganism. The associated metaphysical rebellion – particularly the evolution of modern Wicca  – was especially important in adding spiritual dimensions to feminism and environmentalism.

However, from the bourgeois (and therefore culturally dominant) perspective of Caucasian university students, the era's significant rebelliousness was mostly political and is assumed to have begun with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement,  which seemed to end triumphantly and thereby raised false hopes that would eventually be forever shattered as the capitalists fought back with a slow but inexorable vengeance, turning the United States into an electronic concentration camp  and relentlessly shackling the population in the same sort of economic and political slavery that has always characterized the lives of USian minorities. Now, 50 years later, Barbara Garson, who was one of the original FSM activists, poignantly wonders what the hell happened: “Who Really Won the Battle of Berkeley.” As if in reply, an analysis by Marlene Dixon, another activist of the era, provides the best explanation  I have yet read, never mind “The Rise and Demise of Women's Liberation: A Class Analysis”was written in 1977. Dixon argues – correctly I believe – the era's political and economic revolutionary potential was nullified by widespread refusal to acknowledge the reality of class warfare and by wholesale rejection of ideology and ideological discipline – all of which failings were legacies of the reflexive anti-intellectuality drilled into the nation by the sweeping anti-Leftist purges that followed World War II. While Dixon's work focuses on Women's Liberation, it is, like much feminist writing, a microcosmic portrait of the internal conflicts that characterized the entire spectrum of the era's political movements.

As to when the era ended, that too remains in dispute. But if I were to select an arbitrary date, I'd pick 4 November 1980, national election day, when fully 55 percent of the post-World-War-II baby-boom generation  voted their bourgeois, white-racist values and elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Thus the same generation that opposed the Vietnam War and claimed to be “revolutionary” later set the United States on the counter-revolutionary path to overt fascism along which it has relentlessly marched ever since. Hence, as it turns out, the aforementioned Soviet analysis was not nearly negative enough. Too many of the bourgeois whites who claimed to be revolutionaries were not just faddists; they were also fascists at heart – a perplexing condition indeed until you factor in the soaring popularity of Ayn Rand's work, particularly Atlas Shrugged,  which, when it was published in 1957, even conservative reviewers damned as a fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf. But  Atlas Shrugged's  promoters claim it sold an average of 73,400 copies per year during the 1980s and now, they say, it sells at an annual rate nearly 4.1 times that. If these figures are accurate, what they tell us is there is no likelihood at all of diverting the already global USian Empire from its ever-more-obvious goal of becoming the de facto Fourth Reich. Exactly as history demonstrates, what is fascism but the mature form of capitalism?

Nor is there any rational likelihood of a movement arising to somehow ameliorate capitalism's ever-escalating brutality. Quoth one of its victims, the activist Cicely McMillan, speaking via a recent interview by Anna Lekas Miller entitled “On Being a Woman Inside and Outside of the Criminal Justice System”: “I don’t see a movement coming unless it is led by women, cross-class, cross-culture, cross-race. I think this has got to be a highly collaborative movement. I think women are the only ones who have been socialized with a certain experience to be able to do that. If we can work on behalf of women, on behalf of families, on behalf of communities collaboratively then we will see a movement of the 99 Percent, and the only way we will get at that is through the inter-workings of the people who are the community leaders and those are still women.” McMillan is obviously correct. As Vladimir Lenin noted in 1918,  “the experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much women take part in it.”

As to what really happened to the USian revolutionary potential, whether from 1955 through 1980 or now, it seems neither Garson nor Dixon – nor for that matter McMillan – are familiar with the works of Sun Tzu.  Hence they each overlook the simple fact even the most competent of the nation's would-be revolutionaries committed the always-fatal sin of underestimating the enemy. They failed to recognize the USian Imperial Ruling Class is the most all-powerful, most malevolently cunning ruling class in human history. The Occupy Movement, in which McMillan played a key role, was undone by the same failure. Thus were squandered what were undoubtedly our species' last opportunities to escape the slave-world horrors of capitalism matured to fascism – the aforementioned electronic concentration-camp. More to the point, the rebelliousness associated with the '60s was also probably our last chance to avoid self-inflicted extinction. Already the Ruling Class is moving to ensure a fully indoctrinated, relentlessly ecocidal fascist future: Atlas Shrugged is now required reading in many of the nation's colleges universities. Other Ayn Rand diatribes have been required reading in USian high schools and middle schools since the mid-1960s. Josef Goebbels – who sought to achieve universal German readership for Mein Kampf – is no doubt smirking in his grave. 

 

Meanwhile the terrifying totality of the secret-police operations by which we are already oppressed becomes ever more evident thanks to a few die-hard journalists and civil libertarians – daring men and women who will undoubtedly be among the first persons disappeared when the Ruling Class decides it's had enough dissent and protest and orders the Last Roundup. The following is from “Police Sign Gag Order Before Getting FBI Spy Equipment,” a MuckRock report:“Advanced cell phone tracking devices known as StingRays allow police nationwide to home in on suspects or to log individuals present at a given location. But before acquiring a StingRay, state and local police must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI, documents released last week reveal. The document released by the Tacoma Police Department is heavily redacted — four of its six pages are completely blacked out — but two unredacted paragraphs confirm the FBI’s intimate involvement with StingRay deployment.”

Yes, dear readers, that's the same Tacoma in which I now reside.

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For those of us who recognize the course toward overt fascism the U.S. has been steering since 22 November 1963 – and for those who do not, a superb primer is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (James W. Douglass; Orbis Books: 2008) – it is no accident an unprecedented campaign for forcible civilian disarmament has emerged just as the 99 percent has begun awakening to the fact the American Dream is dead beyond resurrection. With the nation's socioeconomic conditions in a permanent nosedive  and even members of the Ruling Class now openly predicting revolution,  the forcible disarmament of the civilian population is merely another (logical) element on the Ruling Class list of measures to ensure we will never escape the electronic concentration camp in which we are already imprisoned. (Yes, it's true a hunting rifle is no defense against a tank or a drone. But a hunting rifle can surely be used to acquire weapons that are – which is why, for example, Hitler began disarming his opponents as soon as he took power.)

However, the USian Ruling Class – bolstered by its mastery of psychology and its manipulative subsets in marketing and behavior modification – is infinitely more sophisticated in its application of the techniques of oppression than ever the Nazis were. That's why, here in the land of the Second Amendment, forcible disarmament is invariably cloaked with a Big Lie, always in the form of deceptions, often by censorship as well. Thus the enormous relevance of a censorship-defying report  by Charles E. Cobb, “Guns and the Southern Freedom Struggle: What’s Missing When We Teach About Nonviolence.” Cobb, a former field secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is the author of This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). As I said on the comment thread when CommonDreams, which is often painfully politically correct, dared circulate the aforementioned text:

Thank you for publishing Mr. Cobb's oh-so-relevant report. Especially thank you for  having the incredible (and incredibly rare) courage  to defy the venomous, maliciously dishonest and sometimes violent hatefulness of the forcible disarmament cult -- the hysterically anti-gun fanatics who, in clandestine alliance with the One Percent, are reducing us all to compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood. (Yes, there really are some of us on the Left – far more than the forcible-disarmament cultists dare admit – who support the Second Amendment in its broadest interpretations. And Mr. Cobb's report illustrates one of the reasons why.) 

     

Soon afterward, perhaps fearful of being outdone by one of its rivals, Truthout published a report that refutes one of the forcible-disarmament movement's most oft-repeated Big Lies.  Entitled “Fact-Checking Feinstein on the Assault Weapons Ban,” it notes how throughout the 10 years since the federal assault-weapons ban expired, its originator, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), continues to claim the ban reduced crime and saved lives. “But gun violence experts,” the report states, “say the exact opposite.” In other words, Feinstein – like most of her colleagues in the forcible disarmament movement – knowingly lies.

The proponents of anti-gunowner Initiative 594 in Washington state are using the same tactics. They bill their initiative as a “simple” measure to tighten the restrictions that presumably keep felons and dangerously mentally ill persons from acquiring firearms. But its oppressively complex, turgidly written text is laden with prohibitions intended to criminalize many legal and commonplace uses  of shotguns, rifles and handguns – including shared usage amongst family members. And it is being promoted by some of the slickest anti-gun propaganda  I have yet witnessed. Once again, just as the late Watergate felon John Ehrlichman acknowledged in his 1974 testimony, it seems Washington state is being used as a national proving ground  for techniques of oppression.

 

Nationally the ultimate firearms-related question would now seem to be whether the Left is at long last awakening to the need for an armed Working Class to discourage capitalist savagery. Locally the question is whether the I-594 proponents' Big Lie tactics will prevail in a state the electorate of which – albeit nominally progressive – is nevertheless noted for its skepticism toward any measures that expand the authority of government. The answers will undoubtedly be vital in shaping our national future.

LB/27 September-5 October 2014

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Kerry's Contradictions – Peace-Candidate Big Lie versus Warhawk Reality – Exemplify How the Two Parties Collaborate to Dupe Voters, Sustain Sham 'Democracy'

(Note: TypePad, the primary publisher of Outside Agitator's Notebook, has been shut down by an ongoing denial of service attack and has been offline since Friday 18 April. Thus until further notice this will be OAN's only edition.)

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(Updated 14:56 Monday 21 April with a new Robert Parry dispatch on the Ukrainian Crisis, for which see "Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative," below.)

 

MOST OF US have already noted the apparent paradox of how U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the former antiwar-activist and Democratic presidential (peace) candidate, has become a frighteningly aggressive, propaganda-spouting war-monger. 

But even the most Leftward-leaning of the big-time pundits has not dared point out the bitter lesson – another irrefutable proof USian “democracy” is a naught but a cunning charade – implicit in Kerry's (apparent) transformation.

Stupefied as we are by the so-called “mainstream media” and its dire fulfillment of Josef Goebbels' plan to create the most hypnotically effective propaganda machine in human history, the majority of us have not heard of Kerry's murderous record in Vietnam.  We do not know his riverine operations reveal a penchant for inflicting death on civilians that would have earned him a hearty, Zieg Heil welcome into the most kill-hardened units of the Schutzstaffel, the Nazis' dread SS. 

Jeffrey St. Clair, the author of the above-linked Counterpunch report, says the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. revealed that Kerry's murderousness created a great many problems for Vietnam commanders. Zumwalt, himself a warrior of international renown, is quoted in the 2013 exposé as saying, “we had virtually to straitjacket (Kerry) to keep him under control.”

Thus in the context provided by St. Clair's disclosures last year and Kerry's conduct today, the 2004 election becomes a perfect, textbook example of how the One Percent defrauds the USian public with the Big Lie of “free elections.” The Democrats ran “peace candidate” Kerry as the antithesis of “war-criminal” George Bush, but also emphasized Kerry's Vietnam combat record, thereby appealing to Democratic warhawks. The Republicans then reinforced Kerry's “peace candidate” image  by attacking him for his anti-Vietnam War activities, by questioning the validity of his medals – three Purple Hearts for wounds plus the Bronze Star and Silver Star for bravery under fire – finally labeling him “unfit for command” and implicitly suggesting he was a coward.

It's a classic example of how the two halves of the One Party of Two Names perfectly fulfill the functions assigned them by the One Percent.

The same pattern, obvious once we have learned to recognize it, is apparent in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In the former, the One Percent allowed the Democrats a victory to preserve the deception of a functional representative democracy. Obama raised the electorates' hopes by promising “change we can believe in,” and the Republicans ensured the outcome, first by selecting a terrifyingly ignorant candidate for vice president, then by rabidly denouncing the proposed “change” as “socialist” conspiracy, thereby convincing desperate voters Obama's promises were surely more than rhetoric. In 2012, after Obama the Orator was clearly revealed as Barack the Betrayer, the Republicans again served the Democrats with the “accidental” revelation of Romney's contempt for 47 percent of the U.S. population. 
 
Meanwhile Warmaster Kerry, whose belligerence on behalf the violently greedy One Percent may well trigger World War III, is merely fulfilling the role for which he, like Obama himself, was obviously trained and scripted long ago.
 

****** 

In Case You Missed It (and apropos the fulfillment of assigned roles), “The Plot to Overthrow FDR: How the New Deal Sent Conservatives Into a Rage,” implicitly defines the imposition of fascism on the United States  as a multi-generational project. But as I said on the comment thread, Moyers and Company narrator Joshua Holland tells the story wrong – or very differently from how I heard it as a child and a young man.

Firstly, the coup was known as "the Bankers' Plot," under which search-engine entry you will find the most complete information.

Secondly, it was organized by Hitler and Mussolini. Its goal was to make the American Legion an SS equivalent; the objective was to make the U.S. part of the Axis. (The U.S. One Percent was already the prime financier of world fascism; now the U.S. would also be the primary source of food, natural resources and materiel for global conquest.)

Thirdly, the plot was exposed by Soviet agents. Despite Gen. Butler's efforts, it first became public knowledge only via the Communist and Communist-influenced alternative press.

What indicates these assertions are probably true is how they solve at least three riddles of history. They explain why FDR trusted Stalin (his agents literally saved FDR's presidency and USian democracy too); why the postwar U.S. harbored Nazi war criminals (back-door fulfillment of the plotters' intent); and why the postwar U.S. so savagely purged Communists, socialists and intellectuals (fear these elements would obstruct further efforts to impose fascism).

Obviously the plotters and their descendants have won. The results – the death of the “American Dream,” the imposition of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us) – are obvious.

******

In Case You Missed It, Robert Parry of Consortium News is continuing to slay the Big Lies spewed by the USian propaganda machine and courageously filter out the truth about the Ukraine Crisis. I did not comment on “The Dangerous Neocon Role in Ukraine,” linked here. But I said a few words about its sequel, “Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative,” where I pointed out U.S. aggression is forcing the Russians to see themselves as the modern-day equivalent of the Spartans at Thermopylae or their own grandfathers at Fortress Brest. I also had a bit to say about the media issues raised by “Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass,” in which Parry describes the current coverage of the crisis as “utterly Orwellian...including accusing others of 'propaganda' when their accounts – though surely not perfect – are much more honest and more accurate than what the U.S. press corps has been producing.”

Parry reiterates the warning that – had we USians not been numbed by lies and disinformation – should rightfully terrify us all: “There’s also the added risk that this latest failure by the U.S. press corps is occurring on the border of Russia, a nuclear-armed state that – along with the United States – could exterminate all life on the planet. The biased U.S. news coverage is now feeding into political demands to send U.S. military aid to Ukraine’s coup regime.”

As another poster on this thread said in very different words, our submissive response does indeed demonstrate the terrifying reality of Moron Nation – we the people imprisoned in ignorance by decades of deliberate moronation, so dumbed-down we like the most abjectly broken slaves instantly believe everything our masters tell us – even when it is filled with obvious contradictions.

But what to me as a long-ago-blacklisted professional journalist is far worse is the relentless, never-challenged deluge of false information that proves how the One Percent – by subsuming the nation's formerly independent media into a half-dozen monopolies – have created a one-voice propaganda machine far more formidable than the ground-breaking model for all such apparatuses Joseph Goebbels built for Nazi Germany.

As a result the USian Empire has the most hypnotically effective propaganda in our species' history. And because the machine that produces it is disguised as a civilian business rather than a government bureaucracy, its tyranny and the diabolical cleverness by which we are brainwashed into submission remains forever unrecognized.

Once again we see capitalist governance in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Thus does capitalism fulfill its moral imbecility: not just as fascism, but as fascism sustained by modern technology and therefore more inescapably evil than anything our species has ever before encountered.

******

In Case You Missed It, Thom Hartmann has decided “American Democracy No Longer Works,” in support of which he cites a newly released study  that shows We the People are We the Powerless when it comes to influencing public policy. (Unfortunately, Hartmann does not provide us a link to a more detailed summary of the study's findings, an omission I correct here.) 
 
Meanwhile the fact it took a formal academic project and its 20-year collection of data to prove what our ancestors recognized at least a century ago – that the United States is an oligarchy in which the rich are omnipotent and the rest of us are impotent – prompts me to lapse into parody on the Hartmann comment thread: 

Five axioms concerning capitalist governance:
   
Definitions: The One Percent is the hereditary capitalist aristocracy that owns the nation's wealth. The Ruling Class consists of the politicians, bureaucrats, police commanders, military officers and business executives who serve the One Percent. The purpose of capitalist governance is absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else.

Hence: 
    
(1)-The non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class to the popular will is directly proportionate to the extent the Ruling Class is indebted to – and therefore effectively owned by – the One Percent.
   
(2)-The probability of revolution is directly proportionate to the non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class.

(3)-The probability of successful revolution is based on the presence of four historically proven prerequisites. These are (A)-a unifying ideology; (B)-effective leadership and disciplined organization; (C)-mastery of extant technologies; (D)-support by one or more foreign powers.

(4)-The probability of violent revolution is directly proportionate to the Ruling Class capability of violently suppressing non-violent revolution.

(5)-The negative consequences of violent revolution – death, famine, disease, destruction – are directly proportionate to the refusal of the One Percent and its Ruling Class to yield to the popular will.

(In other words, no matter who wins, life in a post-revolutionary United States would be no more or less wretched than life in a land that combines the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima and the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti. Which is why I am so very glad I'm old – so old I probably won't be alive when the revolution happens.)

***

My next entry on the thread, in response to another poster, dropped the academic affectations: 

The unified ideology described by axiom (3)-(A) is already taking shape amidst the grassroots. It is beyond the domain of the two Ruling Class parties (actually one Ruling Class party with two names), and even beyond the Tea Party and its various overtly fascist subsets, (i.e., the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the other such groups whose banners are part of the international fascist solidarity demonstrations now taking place in Kiev). It is also beyond the domain of any specific organization of the Left, which is why this new unified ideology has yet to acquire a name and formal structure.

Nevertheless it is a hybrid of democratic socialism (cooperative and/or public ownership of vital services and the means of production); Marxism (recognition of the historical truth of class struggle and the necessity of disciplined Working Class solidarity); traditional anarchism (healthy distrust of hierarchal organizations) and classical Jeffersonian populist democracy (one person/one vote, fostered by the Internet). 

It has already made itself apparent in innumerable small ways, particularly as the (failed) Occupy movement and its  more localized successes, including the relief efforts of Occupy Sandy in and around New York City, the rapidly growing popularity of the Socialist Alternative Party in Seattle and Minneapolis, and the brushfire-fast nationwide spread of SA's $15 Now! campaign to raise the minimum wage to livable-income levels.
 
When and if this incipient movement coalesces and comes to power, it would be absolutely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and would in fact be its fulfillment. 

The vital questions are therefore how and when its self-recognition will progress to the point of formalization, and whether it will have the solidarity (strength) and courage to withstand the inconceivably violent reaction by which the One Percent and the Ruling Class will try to suppress it, the forces for which are already in place. 

Apropos a civil war, I too see that, but probably not as you do. Assuming a successful revolution – note again its four prerequisites – a situation would probably evolve similar to what obtained in the old Russian Empire after 1917, with the One Percent trying (with the support of various overseas allies) to regain power, and the revolutionaries equally determined to hang on to the "liberated" parts of the U.S. 

The One Percent, in keeping with the lavish funding it is pouring into establishment of theocratic governance, would no doubt declare its territories ruled by Biblical Law, thereby ensuring the fealty of the South and the Midwestern interior, but both coasts and no doubt Alaska too would side with the revolution. The nation as we know it would cease to exist (as it nearly has anyway), and the land would be sundered in such ways that, combined with terminal climate change, would probably take at least a thousand years for recovery. Hence my vision of "the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima (as the One Percent would not hesitate to nuke rebellious cities), the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti."
 
As a result, the global power center would of course shift far eastward: China unquestionably, Russia more than likely. As to what remained of the former United States, part of it would be absorbed by expansions of Mexico and Canada and probable Russian reclamation of its former Pacific Northwest possessions; the remainder would either be uninhabitable due to the lingering toxicity inflicted by CBR (chemical, biological, radiological) warfare or so impoverished by isolation its habitable lands would be realms of famine and disease. 

Were the One Percent to win – and I believe the odds are 50-50 – most if not all of the same conditions would apply save that the residents of lands under One Percent control would have it far worse: they would be de facto slaves...which is of course what the One Percent already intends for all of us in the Working Class anyway.

As I said, I'm damn glad I'm old.

***

Then when another poster seemed to romanticize revolution, I added this:

Make no mistake: there is nothing desirable about violent revolution – which would leave the lands wherein it is fought looking, at best, like Europe in 1945 and, at worst, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the Bomb. 

Yet given how quickly the One Percent now resorts to violence – note again the example of the brutal suppression of Occupy, also the Gestapo-like disregard of neighborhood civil rights that characterized the search for the Boston Marathon bomber –   I fear an eventual violent reaction by the citizenry is inevitable. 

(Indeed, provoking a rebellion may be the clandestine purpose behind such tactics – the creation of an incident that will give the Ruling Class an excuse for exterminating large segments of the U.S. population, the Final Solution to the problems of unemployment,  poverty and homelessness.) 

And the mercilessness of the Ruling Class response has already been made clear: it was demonstrated in Vietnam: “we had to destroy the village to save it.” 

Remember too that morally there is not one scintilla of difference between the USian policy of exterminating an entire village for harboring alleged "terrorists" and the Nazi German policy of imposing exactly the same reprisals for harboring partisans. That the USian (Fourth) Reich does the extermination from afar with drones, while the German (Third) Reich did it up-close-and-personal with machine guns, rifles, bayonets and pistols, does not alter the moral depravity or karmic malignancy of the event itself.  In fact it is at least arguable the drone-exterminations are more reprehensible merely by how they protect the drone operators from being splattered with blood and gore – and how that bloodlessness is then diabolically used to assure the drone operators they are without sin.
  
As to your notion of a coordinated revolutionary effort by socialist countries – Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam etc. – that capability perished with the Soviet Union, and it is already clear the USian Empire will do anything it can to prevent its resurrection.  China, meanwhile, has been totally co-opted (and totally corrupted) by capitalism; the USian Empire has achieved with money precisely what its British Empire antecedent sought in the 19th Century to accomplish with opium. The one remaining wild-card is Russia, where the Communist Party remains the second largest (and by far the best organized) political party in the nation – so much so it is at least arguable it was only by Putin's New Deal-like repeal of the most viciously capitalist Ayn Rand “reforms” imposed under Yeltsin the country was steered away from another Communist revolution.

(This is no doubt one of the reasons why the USian Imperial One Percent – the oberfuehrers of fascism's Global New Order – are now trying to provoke a war with Russia: they are terrified by what might happen should that vast nation again go Communist.)

LB/20 April 2014

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