Are Ruling-Class Feminists Out to Kill 99% Solidarity?

(Note to readers on Blogger: a much more graphically sophisticated version of this blog -- identical text, slightly different headline due to format spacing -- is available at http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/. The TypePad version also includes several portfolios of my photography, much of it previously published, some of it dating back to the 1960s.)

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NORMALLY I AM uncomfortable writing about feminism because, being male, I can never have an insider's appreciation of its dynamics. Moreover I believe the blessing (or curse) of a womb – and with it the implicit responsibility for mothering (or not) – creates in every female a perspective we males might approach intellectually but cannot possibly comprehend emotionally. Hence my usual response to feminism is akin to the respectfully inquisitive silence with which a hopelessly left-brained student might approach a Zen master. I know I will never achieve enlightenment – at least not in this lifetime – though I am unquestionably willing to learn whatever wisdom the master deigns to impart.

But twice this year already, the lily-white exponents of a uniquely USian brand of feminism – the “material girl” ideology so antagonistically antithetical to feminism's socialist roots I am compelled to label it “Ayn Rand Feminism” – have sunk their incipiently fascist fangs into progressive people and causes, first by public repudiation of reproductive-rights heroine Sandra Fluke  in retaliation for her progressive economic views, now more recently by denouncing the hacker-collective Anonymous and the women's-equality collective UltraViolet as “white-knight vigilantes” for their courageous defense of rape victims. Thus the Ayn Rand feminists have begun to brandish their fealty to the Ruling Class much as the Teabag Party asserts its lockstep adoration of the One Percent, which means these particular feminists are now – like any other organ of capitalist governance – a legitimate target of socialist criticism regardless of the critic's gender.

What therefore follows is a much-enlarged version of a commentary I posted two weeks ago on Reader Supported News in response to a startling piece of gender-war invective entitled “Brad Pitt's New Movie on the Steubenville Rape Case Has the Wrong Protagonist,” the text cited in the second of the above links. By Tara Culp-Ressler, it offers an updated version of the old gender-warrior doctrine that no man should ever be allowed to help the women's movement lest his good deeds reinforce not only his (despicable) male ego but strengthen the shackles of patriarchy as well – and that any woman who disagrees is a hopeless reactionary, part of the problem rather than the solution.

I ran afoul of that uniquely white-bourgeois dogma nearly 40 years ago, when I was an investigative reporter, and its resurrection renews a sense of shame that prompts me to reveal now a fact I should have disclosed then. Here is the whole story:

An assertively Christian hospital that served a large and populous suburb of a major city refused to treat rape victims lest the association with sex and violence taint its godly image. Despite the fact an executive of the local rape-relief organization was my lover, I got the story not from her but because in those days I had the best cop sources in the area, probably in the entire state, and the cops complained to me about the hospital after one of their fellow officers ran afoul of its atrocious policy while seeking emergency-room care for an especially distraught rape victim. The cops, who in that era still believed their job was to protect and serve the citizenry rather than to serve the One Percent as its army of occupation, were genuinely furious. Several officers correctly likened the hospital's coldly enforced anti-rape-victim policy to psychologically re-assaulting the victim. After my usual telephone-and-shoe-leather effort unearthed an extended pattern of such abuses, I confronted the perpetrators and wrote my report, a blistering story that ran atop Page One.

But to my lingering shame, I omitted from follow-up stories how the local rape-relief group had known of the problem for years but had deliberately kept it secret – apparently for two reasons: they hoped to get sole credit for negotiating a solution, and they feared some (male) “do-gooders” might discover the problem, forcefully solve it (exactly as the cops and I did), and thereby – or so these gender-warriors reasoned – perpetuate male supremacy. In other words, the white, petit bourgeois feminists who ran the rape-relief organization believed it was better for rape victims to be denied proper care at their local Christian hospital (and thus be forced to travel as much as 50 crow-miles to a secular hospital), than for anyone other than the feminist movement – and better yet this specific rape-relief organization – to get credit for solving the problem.

Again to my shame, I half-assedly rationalized my act of self-censorship by telling myself my inside knowledge of the group's operations and policies was off-the-record information. Now nearly five decades after the fact and with the unforgiving, pre-graveyard clarity of old age, I confess my rationalization was total bullshit. The truth is I suppressed that vital detail merely to sustain my relationship with the rape-relief executive; I was living with her in her own house, and the alternative would have been instant homelessness. In any other circumstances, such a deliberate cover-up of atrocities would have either been in my lead or in my second and third grafs. Given a time machine to go back to the where and when, here is how I would write the story now:

Rape victims in Gastropoda County are thrice victimized – first by the rapist, then by Gastropoda Christian Hospital, finally by the very rape-relief organization that claims to be the victims' advocate and protector.

These circumstances came to light after police sources described the chilling ouster of a distraught rape victim from the GCH emergency room two weeks ago. Subsequent investigation brought to light at least a half dozen other such incidents.

Now GCH executives reluctantly admit it bars rape victims from its emergency room and has forcibly ejected the few who have managed to get past its gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, Gastropoda County Rape Relief officials just-as-reluctantly admitted they've known about the problem for years but have kept it secret. They claim the secrecy was essential to what they describe as an “ongoing” effort to negotiate with hospital management to change its anti-rape-victim policy.

But no such negotiations, spokespersons for both organizations concede, have ever taken place.

Moreover, the hospital's executive director insists he and his managerial colleagues were never asked to undertake such talks.

The hospital's longstanding opposition to treating rape victims – which inside sources say grows out of its owners' fear any association with sex and violence will besmirch the institution's image of “Christian godliness” – is confirmed by records in...

(The anonymity with which I am now cloaking this report is in response to three facts: [1]-my clips of the original story, and therefore my ability to confirm its published details, were destroyed by the same fire that in 1983 obliterated all my life's work, and I cannot replace the clips as the newspaper's morgue of bound copies did not survive corporate bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, nor – for reasons I am unable to determine (especially since it was the local paper of record) – were its editions ever microfilmed by the local library; [2]-the hospital long ago changed hands and is now under secular ownership; [3]-the sources and perpetrators are either retired, dead or otherwise unable to defend themselves.)

Significantly, my lover had made it clear she was uncomfortable with the story from the moment I told her what I was working on. But we never had time to discuss the details of her discomfort. Hence I did not foresee her anger, much less its intensity. When I with my bottle of celebratory wine arrived at our dwelling the night after the story broke, I expected a joyful and exuberant welcome – at the very least a thank-you embrace and a “well done” in recognition of the quality of the work. Instead I was greeted with an unprecedented outpouring of anger and contempt. My reporting, she said, had damn near gotten her fired; some of the members of her board of directors accused her of using her relationship with me to foster publication of the story, thereby perpetuating the sex-for-favors dynamic of patriarchy; others condemned her for allowing a male to “invade” a realm of advocacy they believed should be exclusively female – never mind at least 10 percent of all rape victims are male; still others insisted she should have clandestinely pressured my editor and even my publisher to reassign the story to a woman. When the board voted on her proposed firing, she said, the termination motion failed by only one vote.

To say I was shocked is an understatement, but mostly I was enraged by the indifference to victims that to me had suddenly emerged as the common stance of everyone but the cops and had therefore become the core issue of the entire story. Finally I responded accordingly: “You of all people know how good a reporter I am; you know I'd have found out about it even if you and I had never met – and what I should do now, what I fucking-A-tweet would do right this minute if our circumstances were different, is write a new story revealing everything you told me tonight.” What I did not say, not only because it was too painfully embarrassing for me to verbalize but because both of us clearly knew it already, is that she could goddamn well thank her lucky stars I was living in her house, which meant there was no way I could write the rest of the story without condemning myself to instant eviction. Needless to say, the confrontation killed the relationship, though the process of breaking up would consume another month or two. It also tossed a huge bucket of cold water on my journalistic pride.

Nevertheless the story made a helluva big wave – big enough the hospital's management was forced to reverse their anti-rape-victim policy literally hours after the paper hit the street. They were also forced to pay for their emergency-room personnel to get the medical and psychological training necessary to provide proper care for rape victims of both genders. As ashamed as I am of my act of self-censorship, I remain fiercely proud of what my story accomplished.

(I should note here that journalism of that era – at least as it used to be practiced on a good many local newspapers here in the pre-global-economy United States – was mostly a Working-Class calling. It drew from blue-collar families the same sorts of aggressively bright kids who might otherwise have gone into the cops or the priesthood or maybe the military. Sometimes it even enabled a declassé proletarian like myself to actually better people's lives, which to me was always its biggest attraction.)

Apropos the malice directed at males accused of poaching in political or conceptual territory certain feminists believe should be theirs alone, that hospital story was not my first encounter with it. A few years earlier, when I was an undergraduate, it hamstrung a major research project of mine, part of the work that would become the forever-lost book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which was destroyed with all its research notes and most of its photography in the 1983 fire. “Dancer,” an investigative reporter's 24-year probe of the origins and significance of the '60s Countercultural Rebellion, concluded the rebels were resurrecting a modern variant of the ancient matriarchal or at least pre-patriarchal consciousness. My findings were based on the Counterculture's music, poetry, journalism, ritual, social structures, economics and the expression of its values in environmentalism, feminism, the back-to-the-land movement and the neo-pagan renaissance. (It is an aside, but the Jungian Edward Whitmont reached a similar conclusion from very different data. But Whitmont's work, unlike my own, was carefully apolitical and therefore achieved significant publication, for which see The Return of the Goddess, Crossroad: 1982.)

While working on “Dancer,” I had foolishly imagined, exactly as I had while putting together the hospital story, that feminists would applaud my disclosures. After all, the pioneers in the “Dancer”-relevant fields of folklore and myth were themselves males. But by the early '70s, the gender-war feminists believed they had appropriated these realms as their own, and they defended their conquests with the passive-aggressive nastiness and backstabbing that characterizes academic ferocity whether male or female. Meanwhile the males associated with my project, an undergraduate thesis, seemed to regard me as a traitor to my gender. Hence though I got enough credit for the research and writing to win my bachelor's degree, my thesis itself was rejected.

And now, decades later, Culp-Ressler has resurrected the same hateful doctrine of gender-exclusivity not just to belittle Anonymous and its breathtakingly courageous defiance of draconian prison terms, but to denounce UltraViolet, which unlike its (white bourgeois) sister organizations defends oppressed women without (ironically) discriminating on the basis of caste, ethnicity or the presence of male allies.

In this same context, the Emily's List endorsement of “fiscal conservatism” – a euphemism for the genocidal savagery of Ayn Rand economics – is typical of the feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation and redirection of the USian second-wave feminist movement. (See again the first of the above links.) Because Second Wave Feminism was a daughter of the New Left of the 1960s, its dominant vision was overwhelmingly petit bourgeois and often fiercely anti-intellectual; therefore, despite its “women's liberation” label and its use of socialist rhetoric, it was frequently hostile not just to the historical truth of class struggle,  but to any analysis based on the revolutionary traditions of socialism and Marxism. Stripped of socialist armor, it was therefore easy prey for infiltrators and agents provocateur. That's why the USian feminism of the so-called “mainstream” remains indifferent to the outsourcing of jobs and downsizing of paychecks characteristic of the capitalist (Ayn Rand) moral imbecility that subjugates the USian 99 Percent. It does not acknowledge the fact that for a Working-Class woman, the loss of health insurance inflicted by global-economy outsourcing is often the total loss of reproductive freedom, an ugly reality carefully suppressed by Emily's List and the (Free Trade) Democrats in general. Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – is there any guarantee of rescue from the theocratic Christian effort to prohibit Obamacare from providing any satisfactory alternative.  Meanwhile, Rand herself has become an USian feminist heroine,  which explains not just the Emily's List stance, but bourgeois white USian feminism's unabashed support of capitalism itself, particularly as exemplified by the all the women who define themselves as “anti-union progressives.”

Could it then be a coincidence such divisiveness reappears just as we in the USian Imperial Homeland seem to be making genuine progress toward proletarian solidarity? Surely not, as every available indication points to the Ruling Class mustering all its resources to suppress what it fears is looming revolution. This mustering includes not only the obvious efforts – for example the attempt by the Democratic Party to co-opt (and thereby betray) Socialist Alternative's demand for a $15-per-hour minimum wage – but the newly exposed program under which secret-police agents accompany the military into overseas combat (for which see “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” below). Obviously, such a program has only one objective: to ensure the agents are kill-hardened enough to reliably follow orders when they are commanded to exterminate suspected revolutionaries at home. In this oppressive context, I am not surprised by the anti-99 Percent treachery of the feminism discussed above. In truth it is an old story, so old we should expect nothing else from a movement that was in too-large measure co-opted by the One Percent  from about 1970 onward, with the result its exclusion of impoverished women and women of color has long been infamous.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere: The big news is the ongoing neo-Nazification of the United States, the result of capitalism maturing into fascism, thereby not only fulfilling the predictions of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin but validating Marxism itself. (Aside: what the founders of Marxism called “imperialism,” we today know as fascism or Nazism.) Here are two links, with brief expositions of outside agitation on each of the comment threads: “Now We Know What's Being Done in Our Name,” in which Esquire's Charles Pierce writes about the leaked torture-memo scandal,  and “FBI Agents Were Deployed in Hundreds of JSOC Raids Conducted in Iraq & Afghanistan,” which describes how the USian equivalent of the Okhrana (or maybe the Gestapo) is being trained to suppress  the inevitable uprising against capitalism that is bound to occur here in the post-American-Dream wastelands.

LB/13 April 2014

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Shitdown, New Betrayals, Hacktivists vs. Theocrats

“PATTY MURRAY LISTEN TO US! No cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits or education...” That's Kristiné M. Reeves, right, the South Sound Regional Director of Sen. Murray's staff, as she was confronted by Occupy Tacoma activists Francesca Carreras-Velez, left, and Joy Bonney, center, on 16 November 2011 during a demonstration that braved cold, relentless and often torrential rains. Bonney is the editor and publisher of the pop-culture magazine Wake Up 253, which is named after the local telephone area-code. This picture – relevant in 2013 given Murray's repeat role in the renewed effort to impose even harsher austerity measures on the subjects of the USian oligarchy – was originally published by Reader Supported News as part of my Occupy Tacoma coverage. Pentax K1000, SMCP 28mm f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.) 

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“SHITDOWN” WAS ORIGINALLY a typing error, the geezerly and perhaps Freudian slip of arthritic fingers. But I left it uncorrected after I realized it is the perfect name for the U.S. governmental shutdown, which is the piss-on-the-99-Percent policy of trickle-down economics expressed in solid rather than liquid form. Thus the childhood euphemisms for urination (Number One) and defecation (Number Two) become useful additions to the vocabulary of toilet-bowl capitalism. Now we can accurately describe how the One Percent and its Ruling Class support-staff of politicians, bureaucrats and thugs first hosed us into submission with decades of Number One and now assault us with Number Two, legions of assholes spewing projectile diarrhea intended to imprison us in the ever-expanding cesspool of wage slavery and indentured servitude.

I write of this fecal onslaught in the present tense because the shitdown was merely the most recent deposit of turds into the reeking effluent of the USian economy. Since President Nixon's 1973 declaration of war against the 99 Percent, nearly half the population has been reduced to lower-income status if not official poverty.  Now with the immediate crisis ended and the Big Lie of the Democrats' so-called “victory” over the Republicans, the ringmasters of the One Party of Two Names  have set the stage for (another) imposition of genocidal austerity  disguised as another bipartisan “grand bargain.” Meanwhile all we are witnessing is a temporary cessation in the One Percent's offensive. Nor is there any letup in the murderous campaign of fear and anxiety by which the Wall Street aristocrats hope to reduce the numbers of those of us who are dependent on Social Security, Medicare, food stamps or any other life-sustaining government subsidies. The only real unknown is how much more deeply we of the 99 Percent will be buried in shit once the bargaining resumes. 

To understand what is being done to us, we need to fight off our conditioned “American Dreamer” obliviousness  enough to recognize that if we are not actually part of the One Percent, we are all Working Class. That and the reality of class-struggle are the most important lessons of our time. Through them we see the core truths of our individual and collective existence. We understand that all the political tantrums and financial brinkmanship around the budget and the debt ceiling are nothing more than manifestations of the most maliciously dishonest strategy of governance in all USian history. We see how the plutocrats and their henchmen are methodically imposing a genuinely murderous depth of austerity, and we know they regard us as too hopelessly dumbed down to ever catch on to their scam. Verily, we are up the proverbial Shit Creek. Not only do we lack the metaphorical paddle; we have already been cast overboard from the requisite lifeboat.

But beyond the banks of that infamous creek there are a few glimmers of genuinely promising alternatives. They are barely more than flickers – and in the methane darkness of the septic-tank existence to which we have been condemned, they could prove either fatally implosive or explosively liberating. We of the USian proletariat, like the too-often-unacknowledged USian peasantry that lives on the First Nations reservations and in the migrant labor camps, are beginning to awaken.  That's why it is time to resurrect the forbidden revolutionary labels of proletariat and peasantry with all their former ferocity and pride. We are starting to understand the vital truth we are all sisters and brothers of the Working Class regardless of gender or race or any of the other apparent differences by which our overlords seek to shatter our implicit solidarity. We are glimpsing the almost inconceivable power inherent in our unified resistance resistance to the punishing realities of proletarian-and-peasant existence. As a result, we are also awakening to the hideous truth the greed and sadism of our plutocratic masters has no limit this side of our individual deaths and our collective extinction. Hence we are now asking of ourselves the same question Vladimir Lenin – a man some of us are beginning to suspect may have been more hero than villain – famously asked in 1902: “What Is to Be Done?”
 

Am I again falling prey to another example of what I have so often denounced as “the imbecility of hope?” Maybe yes, maybe no. Proud cynic that I am, my inclination is to point once more to “change we can believe in,” the biggest single Big Lie in USian political history, and to again sneer at how the alleged “audacity of hope” – the one emotion allowed the powerless – was proven to be the nadir of gullibility. But a tiny voice from my subconscious urges me to remember the eventual aftermath of the original Bloody Sunday.  Then I think of a song I have known at least since my earliest childhood, a now-taboo and mostly forgotten anthem of resistance translated by Paul Robeson into words that for reasons I will probably never fully understand made such an impact on my mind and spirit I cannot possibly forget them: “Far and away the road goes winding/Look and see how merrily the road goes.”

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Advent of Obamacare Reveals Another of Barack's Betrayals

An authoritative Kaiser Family Foundation report details yet another of Obama the Orator's Big Lies about health care “reform,” specifically that under Obamacare, people who like their present health insurance policies will be allowed to keep them.

The truth, however, is that hundreds of thousands USian who were taken in by the Obamascam are now being slapped with cancellation notices – and the stunning, often ruinous reality of skyrocketing premiums. Once again, the only winners – exactly as the nation's most dishonest president intended – are the capitalist pigs of the insurance industry. 

Kaiser Foundation, by the way, is a nonprofit think-tank and research organization not aligned with any of the so-called “stake-holders” or (in reference to the caduceus) “snake-holders”of the uniquely USian business of profiteering on sickness. Indeed Kaiser is considered the best independent source of health insurance information in the entire USian Empire. 

Which puts a spotlight of relevance on a recent Truthout discussion-thread wherein a writer who steadfastly denies he is an undercover Democratic Party activist implicitly calls me a liar by asserting that I “cannot honestly believe” both parties have been equally deceptive about the so-called Affordable Care Act. The truth, of course, is that no law in the nation's history has ever been so effectively smokescreened by falsehoods, disinformation and the deliberate withholding of facts – a carefully scripted campaign of obfuscation in which both parties are equally culpable. (Click on “Show Comments,” then scroll down for my several contributions to an unusually civilized on-line debate.) 

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Theocracy: a 'Good Christian Town' Virtually Lynches a Rape Victim

In Maryville, Missouri, where church attendance fills the local A&G Restaurant after Sunday services, the misogyny at the core of Christian doctrine has again become evident in the USian cult of the divine athlete and how it inspired the Internet lynching of Daisy Coleman, a formerly popular Maryville High School cheerleader who dared complain she had been raped by Matthew Barnett, one of the school's football stars. Nor was the girl the only target of the town's vindictive fury. Her entire family was persecuted. Her brothers were threatened and otherwise harassed, her mother was thrown out of work – and when they continued to fight back, their house was burned to the ground, a traditional tactic of the Ku Klux Klan and other Christian vigilante groups throughout the USian homeland. 

As is typical in such cases, the Maryville victim has not been allowed to confront her accused assailants in court. The charges against Barnett and other suspects were dropped under questionable circumstances. Moreover, Barnett is the grandson of Rex Barnett, a politically influential former legislator and Southern Baptist deacon. The inexplicable refusal to prosecute the cases plus the magnitude and viciousness of the retaliatory hate-campaign against Ms. Coleman and her family suggests – but certainly does not prove – an organized effort clandestinely driven by people who are members of the local Ruling Class if not of the actual One Percent. 

Though no other journalist has thus far dared link the Maryville atrocities with the town's ideology  – its above average number of avowed Christians, its overwhelming Teabagger Republicanism that repeatedly re-elects U.S. Rep. Sam Graves  and thus its implicit part in the thrust toward biblical-law theocracy that's sweeping the old Confederacy and the USian interior states – the connection should be obvious to anyone who knows the sociological underbelly of such locales. An on-line satirist who writes under the nomme de guerre Foster Disbelief understands it well enough to describe Maryville as “a good Christian town.”  And having spent nearly two-thirds of my boyhood and teenage years in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan  is colloquially called “the Saturday night men's Bible-study class,” I too know the relevant psychodynamics. 

Anyone foolish enough to regard the threat of Klannish hatefulness as remote should note the KKK still publicly claims to be “a Christian organization” and is again expanding its ranks,  not just in the South but throughout the nation.  The most recent (2012) edition of the Southern Poverty Law Center's “Hate Map” lists 21 such groups active in Missouri, though none are headquartered in Maryville.

 

Yet despite the apparent absence of any obvious Klan-type connections to the Maryville atrocities, the town is nevertheless behaving as if it were under the domination of a Christian version of the vicious Islamic Morality Police – and this is precisely one of the functions the KKK and other hate groups traditionally fulfill in the more rural districts of the USian interior. It's a terrain with which I am enough familiar to be profoundly thankful I live in a city on a distant seacoast and am despite being old and crippled yet able to maintain a few vital self-defense skills. But not even the alleged bastions of secularity are truly safe from these fanatics, as shown by frightening reports about the nationwide nature of the Christian war against female sexuality.  Similarly tyrannical Christian dogmas  that fueled the recent shutdown of the federal government. In this context, the relentless persecution of Daisy Coleman and her closest kin is a terrifying microcosm of the theocratic assault on all the rest of us. A recent essay by Chris Hedges summarizes the dangers quite succinctly. 

Meanwhile the anarchist hacker-collective Anonymous has announced it is targeting Maryville to avenge the attacks on Ms. Coleman and her family. Anonymous is also organizing an anti-rape protest demonstration scheduled for 6 p.m. on Tuesday (22 October). Not surprisingly, it already has the town fathers in a call-out-the-garrison panic.  

But the story's newest and potentially most controversial development is that the Anonymous announcement, which includes an implicit threat of hacking all the electronic files associated with the Maryville case, might be taken as a direct challenge to the Obama Administration Justice Department. That's because Obama Justice is effectively siding with the Steubenville rapists by investigating the hacktivist whose work exposed the town's protect-the-sacred-jocks coverup and compelled the prosecution of two of the rapists. Thus there is no doubt where the administration stands in the global struggle against patriarchy and its religious and political descendants – a revelation that should make feminists and all other civil libertarians profoundly wary. 

LB/20 October 2013

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Total Surveillance: Absolute Proof We the People Are Nothing More Than Lab Rats in a Capitalist Skinner Box

Another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, the woman's placard as apt now as in October 2011, when her smile reflected the joy and optimism that was all too soon crushed by USian governments at all levels. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013 (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(Note: Vital medical procedures consumed so much of my time during the past seven days, this essay is again unavoidably late, and I again apologize for my tardiness. But the news is good. Contrary to what was first suspected, my eyes are free of glaucoma. Moreover, the latest surgical techniques bypass unrelated conditions that would have prohibited cataract surgery. Thus my eyesight – and therefore my ability to photograph – can be surgically restored, for which I am grateful beyond words.)

 

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THE TOTAL-SURVEILLANCE STATE is undoubtedly the most terrifying governmental application of modern technology that has yet been revealed to us. Its terror exceeds that of thermonuclear weapons or nuclear melt-downs, which we can always convince ourselves will only be inflicted elsewhere upon others. Unlike The Bomb, which save in Hiroshima or Nagasaki has not yet been dropped, or the homicidal reactor, which – at least so far as we're allowed to know – has run amok only at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – the total-surveillance state murders us all by killing our ability to think and speak freely. It thereby makes us less-than-human. In other words, it reverses evolution, reducing us to the mind-crushed state of slaves or prisoners. And as we grasp what it does to us in the context of the additional fear generated by organized assaults against specific groups and individuals  – women; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamp recipients; organized labor; members of the working press; photographers whether professional or amateur; any other social critics whose disclosures or protests dare expose the unapologetic savagery of the new paradigm of USian governance – it should already be provoking massive, nationwide anger. The very concept of what it meant to be “American” has not only been ruthlessly violated but maliciously abandoned, as if the government itself has officially torn down our flag, burned it, urinated on the ashes and stomped them into filth. Might there then soon be the same public outpouring of humanistic, patriotic rage as followed the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the massacre of innocents symbolized by the numbers 9/11? Apparently not. The vast majority of the USian people are sullenly silent – and in all probability will remain so.

Yet what is inflicted upon us is not, of course, really a new paradigm of governance at all, and that – especially the associated guilt – may be one of the reasons we are thus far so submissive. To the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, to the subjects of the colonial empire the United States seized from Spain, sought to expand into Asiatic Russia  and imposed elsewhere including Africa and other parts of Asia, the sadism and brutality that now characterizes USian governance of its homeland is an old and ugly story. All that has changed is such imperial malevolence has now become the domestic policy of the dominant political parties (or, more correctly, the One Ruling Class Party of Two Names), which means it is now enforced by the entire federal government (especially by the secret-police apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security), as well as by all the state and local governments. But it has always been the policy of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department and the various other overseas extensions of the USian empire whether official (as in Vietnam), capitalist (as at Bhopal and Bangladesh) or mercenary  (as in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans). It also means we of the USian 99 Percent are now potentially no better off than the Iraqis or even the First Nations people our ancestors genocidally displaced – perhaps the true meaning of Barack Obama's “change we can believe in.”  The only difference is we have yet to suffer our own Trail of Tears,  our own Wounded Knee. But we can be certain of one thing: equal horrors – or probably events far more horrible – are looming, and they are not on a comfortably distant horizon, which means they will occur within many of our own lifetimes. For that is the hideous truth of the total-surveillance state: it has no other purpose  than to facilitate maximum zero-tolerance tyranny. And the fact we have not already taken to the streets in massive resistance suggests we have already been conditioned to the reflexive submissiveness required of a conquered people.

However there is one flame-bright exception to this dismaying acceptance of what seems ever more likely to be our unavoidable reduction to permanent serfdom and slavery: a growing number of USian women, whose liberation movements I once believed might at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles, are again rising up angry. More than any other force within the 99 Percent – certainly more than we males whose identities are occupational rather than biological and have therefore been hopelessly shattered by permanent unemployment – these women seem closest to recognizing that the United States has been cunningly turned into the human equivalent of a Skinner Box. Though they have yet to connect the proverbial dots, I have no doubt they will soon understand how the dramatic increase in oppression – the atrocities summarized above – exemplifies the new Ruling Class methodology of forceful behavior modification even as the all-seeing god's-eye of total-surveillance enables the overseers to monitor and refine their techniques with a speed and efficiency hitherto imagined only by villains of the same Ted Bundy arrogance that characterized Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and let us not forget our own Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In this repugnant context – especially given that history shows the grievances of women are often the hinge-issues in successful revolutions, the methodical assaults on women's hard-won sexual freedom – the avowedly misogynistic political efforts  and the growing epidemic of physical attacks combined with the institutionalized protection of the attackers  – reveal how the Ruling Class views the suppression of female independence as the key to the abolition of liberty and justice for all. Damning enough in its own right, the revelation is underscored by the associated treachery of the Obama Administration, typical Obama the Orator ploys of eloquently endorsing women's demands while Barack the Betrayer sneakily back-stabs  the very measures he falsely claims to support. The common denominator in all these outrages – just as the would-be victims themselves proclaim – is a concerted effort to force women and girls back into the de facto slavery demanded by patriarchy, explicitly by its Abrahamic religious offspring (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), implicitly by its economic fulfillment in capitalism's final transformation to fascism. Every time a woman is imprisoned by the (very rational) fear she will not only be raped but her assailant will be officially protected, the intended behavior modification has achieved its goal. Factor in the similar barriers and prohibitions inflicted on social critics, journalists, photographers, labor activists, anyone else of either gender who might be inclined to resist the blitzkrieg by which Ayn Rand fascism is conquering the United States, and our portrait of a nation ruled like a Skinnerian rat-maze is complete and undeniable. B. F. Skinner himself stated in 1972 what is obviously the key precept of USian governance today: "The issue is to improve the way in which (humanity) is controlled." To which women are responding with increasingly public defiance.  The question, of course, is what they will do when the state confronts them with the same combination of economic retaliation bolstered by truncheon-and-pepper-gas barbarism that has already hammered us men into submission.

*** 

Nevertheless it is by viewing the war against women as a carefully scripted campaign of behavior-modification we gain our most sharply focused picture of capitalism's thrust toward Christian theocracy as its primary modality for controlling the USian 99 Percent. But the Left is as powerless as the Right to combat it. The secular and/or libertarian Right is of course nullified by the fact the imposition of theocracy is a major objective of the Right's capitalist financiers. The Left however is paralyzed by its own insistence on political “correctness,” in this instance its refusal to recognize Islam's history of imposing its own brand of theocracy – including the most virulent forms of misogyny characteristic of human societies today – wherever it ascends to power. To denounce theocracy is therefore – at least obliquely – to denounce Islam, something the doctrinaire Left and even the pseudo-Left cannot bear to do. Though it is something of an aside, no doubt the associated taboos explain why Socialist Worker refused to publish the following letter, my response to its (above-linked) report on how President Obama backstabbed women even on the hitherto (seemingly) long-settled issue of access to contraception: 

While Ms. Schulte's reporting on how President Obama enabled the Religious Right to gain the tactical and strategic high ground in the reproductive-rights struggle is the best such work I have seen anywhere, it nevertheless omits a vital fact: the extent to which (even) Democratic Party politicians are (clandestinely) committed to the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

 

Though it is fashionable for socialists of all sorts to underestimate the importance of Christianity (and Abrahamic religion generally) in USian life, a majority of at least 63 percent of the U.S. population is already fundamentalist as defined by belief in the Bible as "literally true" (see http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm), which itself indicates a looming danger to secular governance. Combine that with capitalism's historical preference for zero-tolerance theocracy as the most efficient means of ensuring a submissive, slave-minded Working Class, and the probable motive behind Obama's serial betrayals of reproductive freedom come into sharp and terrifying focus.

 

As for documentation of the Democrats' clandestine role in the imposition of theocracy, one source is especially useful. This is Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, (HarperCollins: 2008), which exposes Hillary Clinton's behind-the-scenes collaboration with Sam Brownback "for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it" (pg. 275). The same sort of "tunneling" is precisely what was accomplished by the Obama “compromise” that added to the USian definition of religious liberty the alleged “right” of believers to impose their doctrines on non-believers, as for example in the case of Christian pharmacists who arbitrarily deny contraception to unmarried women. Given the president's oft-demonstrated Machiavellian skill, this staggering blow to church-state separation is clearly no accident.

 

Another excellent albeit more generalized book on the threat of theocracy is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon & Schuster: 2006). But in most of the United States, the danger is already reality. The Bible Belt South has been a de facto theocracy since the Civil War: note the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” – which denotes its function as a Christian equivalent of the lslamic Morality Police. And – as proven by worsening restrictions on contraception and the near-total destruction of abortion facilities – the remainder of the midlands are not far behind. It is a risk we ignore at our own huge peril – a dire hazard that indeed we have already ignored far too long.

 

***

 

It is perhaps worthwhile to note at this point that beyond history's seemingly endless series of isms, there are only two alternative forms of human governance. One alternative is tyranny: rule by a dictator, or dictators, whether overt (as in Nazi Germany or the theocracy of Iran), or from behind various pseudo-democratic facades (as in today's United States). The other alternative is liberty – the never-fully realized theory embodied in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” During my elementary-school days, 1946 through 1951, all third graders not only learned to recite the Preamble from memory, but to give simple examples of its meaning, a requirement long ago repealed as dangerous to capitalism and deleterious to its objectives. But the Preamble is not as unique as we USians were typically taught, back in those halcyon days when fledgling minds were still entrusted with libertarian ideals. Similar sentiments are expressed somewhat more bluntly in the concluding lines of The Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!” Thus the greatest fear of the USian Ruling Class has always been that Communism (or some other form of socialism) would prevail here – a perfect fit with the purposes and principles of “we the people” as elicited by the Preamble and the Constitution itself. But in the Skinner Box United States, monitored as it is by total surveillance, all such potential is obliterated forever. 

The limitless tyranny of the total-surveillance state is, perhaps ironically, the final result of the so-called “revolution” brought about by computers, which have given the global Ruling Class the godlike omnipotence it has consciously sought for at least two thousand years. The computer is thus irrefutable proof of the One Percent's defining purpose – the unspeakable lust for the zero-tolerance subjugation and total enslavement of all the rest of us, which it is now after 20 centuries of effort achieving via technologies against which there is no effective defense save re-adoption of seemingly obsolete machinery.  Meanwhile the popularization of the computer is the result of the most elaborate snake-oil scam in human history. It and its offshoots are peddled to the public as the apex of modern necessity even as society is methodically restructured to make all such gadgets essential – and damn those who cannot afford to keep up. Yet all the while, and from the very beginning, the profits so amassed are focused on perfecting the computer as the ultimate weapon of oppression. Nor could this story have ended in any other way; the computer as we know it grew not from humanitarian objectives but from the profiteering instincts of the capitalists  and the deadly necessities of modern warfare.  Indeed the computer and the manner in which it was thrust upon us is an object lesson in pure capitalism – the moral imbecility of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, and therefore the closest approximation to absolute Evil our species has yet evoked. The computer, given its vital role in creation of the global slave state, is perhaps capitalism's most definitive product. It is surely capitalism's most pivotal tool. For without the computer, the Ruling Class would never have been able to shrink all human society to a Skinner Box, with ourselves reduced to nothing more than laboratory rats in the One Percent's frantic, apocalypse-driven quest for wealth and power. 

LB/13-14 July 2013 

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Wisconsin: 78 Years Later, Nazi-Wall Street Alliance Wins

FAR TOO FEW of us realize the Republican victory in Wisconsin heralds a  blitzkrieg that will undeniably overwhelm us in November. 

Fewer still understand the Wisconsin debacle portends the ultimate triumph of fascism the One Percent has sought since Wall Street and Berlin collaborated in the 1934 Bankers Plot (for which Google) -- a nearly successful scheme to turn the United States into the fourth member of the old Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis.

But once we acknowledge the new paradigm of U.S. governance demonstrated by the Republicans in Wisconsin – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us – we're also able to recognize the unspeakably treacherous role of the Democrats as the deliberate facilitators of Republican victory.

That's the only possible strategy underlying Obama the Orator's self-transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

It's also the only possible purpose behind the Democrats' (deliberate) loss of the Wisconsin recall – see "True Wisconsin: How and Why the Democrats (Deliberately) Lost." 

Likewise note the landslide losses the Democrats suffered in the 2010 Congressional election, the direct result of an embittered electorate awakening to the ugly truth "change we can believe in" was a Big Lie from the beginning. 

And all this makes perfect sense when we recognize the bitter truth We the People have been totally disenfranchised – that, exactly as Bill Moyers says – U.S. "democracy" has become nothing more than a charade.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the two parties collaborate to impose the tyrannical will of the global One Percent: note the unanimous or nearly unanimous Congressional votes that have downsized our paychecks and abolished our constitutional rights: GATT, NAFTA, Patriot Act, NDAA, etc. ad nauseum. So descends the newest darkness of fascism, guarded and expanded by the United States and its imperial military machine – complete with Nazi-style helmets that subtly proclaim the dread reality of a de facto Fourth Reich.

Be very afraid. The forthcoming fascist victory in the November elections means those of us who are no longer exploitable for profit – seniors, disabled people, others who are chronically impoverished – will be targeted by a "final solution" of deliberate genocide. Not in death camps – that would be too internationally embarrassing – but by termination of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment compensation and any other life-sustaining socioeconomic program.

Exactly as some Teabaggers already publicly acknowledge, that's the real purpose – extermination of those of us adjudged to be burdensome – behind the definitively murderous Paul Ryan Budget: the maliciously forcible redistribution of wealth President-to-Be Romney has already enthusiastically endorsed.

(An earlier version of this essay was published in the comment thread generated by “Snap out of it Obama,” in Crosscut, Seattle's excellent on-line daily.)

*****

Weaponized Rape: Another Preview of Post-Wisconsin Realpolitik 

NAOMI WOLF'S REVIEW of a documentary film entitled The Invisible War, a daring exposé of the “systemic rape of women in the (U.S.) military and the retaliations and coverups” by which the victims are then repeatedly savaged, is more of the superbly informative prose we have come to expect from this notably courageous Guardian headliner.

 

But the review nevertheless suffers from Ms. Wolf's obvious unfamiliarity with the military itself.

As a Regular Army veteran (six-year enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty including extended service in Korea, three years reserve, honorably discharged), I know the military does nothing by accident – that its collective behavior is always purposefully commanded. I also know enough history to recognize chain-of-command purposefulness is especially characteristic of the military of a fascist empire. The classic example is how the Axis – particularly the Nazi Germans – used the Spanish Civil War to kill-harden their soldiers in preparation for the atrocities Hitler would soon unleash against other Europeans, particularly the citizens of the Soviet Union.

Thus the U.S. military high command's outrageous tolerance of rape proves these attacks are not only tacitly encouraged but are in fact purposeful expressions of some dire agenda of malevolence that, at present, remains hidden.

In this context it is useful to contrast the U.S. military's response to males who rape their fellow service personnel with what was done to the (very few) such rapists in the Red Army, where women served on the front lines both during the Russian Civil War (1918-1923) and during the Great Patriotic War Against Fascism (what we call World War II).

The U.S. rapists are, as Ms. Wolf notes, outrageously protected, even pampered. But in the Red Army and other Soviet forces – where women were among the best most daring combat pilots (Google "Night Witches") and among the deadliest snipers in military history (Google Lyudmila Pavlichenko) – such rapists were properly recognized as soldiers who had turned against their comrades and were summarily shot as traitors.

While the Soviet response is belittled by misogynists as a “wartime measure,” the fact remains the pandemic of rape in the U.S. armed forces is itself occurring in a time of war. Hence the U.S. rapists are as much enemy combatants as any (other) terrorist.

Why then are these rapists not prosecuted accordingly?

Given that sexual assault is a hate crime – an expression of the infinite contempt with which patriarchal males regard anyone they adjudge to be weaker, given too that such violent hatred for the powerless is the defining characteristic of a conqueror – it is obvious the high command by its tolerance of rape is training its male soldiers in the brutal and sadistic techniques by which conquered populations are traditionally subdued.

Women in the military – despised as they are by the males the fanatically Christian-fundamentalist commanders have methodically proselytized to maximum misogyny – have thus been made surrogates for more broadly defined “enemy” populations. 

Viewed in the context of present-day U.S. politics, the eventual intended target is obviously the U.S. civilian population, especially the Left, a preponderance of which is not only female but avowedly feminist -- intolerable to the JesuNazi zealotry that is increasingly the Moron Nation state religion.

     

(An earlier version of this essay appeared on the comment thread of Wolf's “Rape in the Military a Culture of Coverup,” Guardian via Reader Supported News.)

LB/17 June 2012

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