Inspection, Police Atrocities, Unhealthy Care, Iraq, Guns

THE INSPECTION THAT prompted me to pen a genuine rant last week is now behind me, and of course I passed – I always do – but the physical cost of preparing for two inspections in three weeks is such that my normal 24/7 pain has doubled.

This comes from various long-ago injuries inflamed by geriatric osteoarthritis, and its normal 2-3 range has doubled to a relentless 4-6 I can only hope will eventually abate.

The numbers refer to the medical profession's 1-to-10 discomfort scale, with my 10 – since as a male I have obviously never experienced childbirth – a wisdom tooth that simultaneously impacted and abscessed on a Friday at the beginning of a seemingly endless four-day holiday weekend, which meant no treatment was available until the following Tuesday. The pain was so intense that when I finally got to a dentist, I was lapsing in and out of unconsciousness.

Meanwhile, back in the present, the time these accursed inspections have stolen from my life – essentially 14 days counting preparation and aftermath – has effectively killed OAN for another week.

So again there will be no Cassandra column today, as I was once more too limited by opportunity and energy to do anything more than respond to other writers' work. Goddess grant by next week I'll be recovered enough to again do some original writing.

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In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

The Associated Press reported the angry response of an oppressed urban citizenry that for the past four years has been targeted by some of the most murderously brazen police brutality in the USian imperial homeland. Reader Supported News aptly headlined the AP story “Albuquerque Protesters Put Police Chief 'On Trial'.” I used its comment thread to reveal one of my darker suspicions – that the national epidemic of atrocities being inflicted on us by our federalized, militarized, Gestapo-ized local police is a top-level, One Percent-mandated experiment in which we the people are the lab rats – its purpose to determine how much we will suffer before our obedience and submission turns to rebellion.

This entire sequence of events – the police violence, the federal response – needs to be understood in its probable context:

(1)-Some federal agency or agencies responsible for the defense of capitalism – that is, the suppression of the Working Class – wondered how far the USian public can be pushed before it will revolt.

(2)-The federally militarized police were therefore ordered to behave in Albuquerque as an army of occupation.

(3)-After years of murderous brutality, the people rose up.

 

(4)-The federal government ordered an investigation.

(5)-The killing (maybe) stopped, not because the federal government stands for justice (just ask Edward Snowden), but because the feds now have a laboratory-tested yardstick of the intensity of oppression at which rebellion becomes likely.

Such is life – and death – under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

 

Such is capitalism itself: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth.

Such is our Ayn Rand future: posh, impregnable palaces for the One Percenters and their politicians, bureaucrats, military officers and police commanders; for all of us, the slave world of the electronic concentration camp and the darkest Dark Age our species has ever known.

Wake up, people: Cassandra columnists like Chris Hedges are speaking naught but the hideous truth.

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Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress bared some nauseating facts about the one industrialized nation on this dying planet in which health care remains a privilege of wealth, a genocidal condition intentionally perpetuated by Barack the Betrayer's so-called “Affordable Care Act,” the name of which is itself a Big Lie so outrageous it would make Josef Goebbels proud. Culp-Ressler's damning report, “The US Has the Most Expensive and Least Effective Health Care in the Developed World,” thus prompted a good deal of applause and agreement, some of which was mine:

Absolutely. The health-care difference between the civilized world and the United States is that in the civilized world, health care is intended to genuinely care for the people. But in the U.S., what is deceptively labeled “health care” actually has an antithetical purpose. It exists (A)-to make the obscenely wealthy aristocracy wealthier and (B)-to exterminate lower-income people by defining health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a basic human right.

Moreover, the Affordable Care Act – so-called “Obamacare” – does nothing to change the U.S. system's genocidal Ayn Rand dynamics. In fact it locks them in place forever.

By making health insurance mandatory, it enables USian propagandists to generate the Big Lie of near-universal insurance. But its profit-boosting co-pays and deductibles still make health care prohibitively expensive. Hence its victims – and that is precisely what we are – are now forced to pay for insurance we can never afford to use. The result is the huge windfall with which Barack the Betrayer gifted the insurance barons.

It is also a classic example of the miasma of lies, disinformation and murder by which capitalism perpetuates its bottomless evil – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever expressed.

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Apropos health care and capitalism, a Crosscut piece entitled “Is the NW a breeding ground for a new kind of capitalism?” prompted a discussion-thread that enabled me to protest how upper management is converting my beloved Group Health Cooperative into a personal profit center for predatory business-school graduates:

(T)hough (Group Health) remains officially a cooperative, nearly all the old socialist spirit that back in the '70s prompted me to become a permanent voting member of the co-op has been extinguished.

Meanwhile the greed of its MBA-brandishing, Ayn-Rand-minded management is methodically revising Group Health's policies to make it indistinguishable from any for-profit insurance company, and it is apparently up-scaling (gentrifying) its customer base accordingly.

Given the moral imbecility at the core of the MBA ethos, such focus on managerial profiteering is now as likely to occur in allegedly “non-profit” contexts as it is in conventional capitalism.

Thus to boost revenues Group Health has done what only a few years ago would have been unthinkable. It has suppressed its members' reproductive and end-of-life rights by subcontracting with the viciously theocratic Franciscan (Roman Catholic) Health System for lowest-bid hospital care.

While the Franciscan arrangement is objectionable for many reasons, its significance here is its proof that boosting revenues, which is essential to boost managerial compensation packages, has taken precedence over patients' physical and emotional wellbeing.

Predictably, as if to declare its new pro-managerial orientation, a recent Group Health document, “Patient Financial Responsibility ('Rev. Date 2014112'),” omits the term “cooperative” entirely and describes the organization as “your insurance company.”

***

What is destroying Group Health is of course capitalism:

Even camouflaged by euphemisms and lies, the core value of capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue. Capitalism is therefore, exactly as described by its disciple Ayn Rand, the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever put forth – human history's closest approximation to absolute evil.

 

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Anyone who seeks to understand what is happening in Iraq should read “Who Are Iraq's Sunni Arabs and What Did We Do to Them?,” a superb backgrounder by Juan Cole of Informed Comment. My contribution to the comment thread thus appropriately started with an expression of gratitude:

Thank you, RSN and Mr. Cole, for this vital background.

But then I focused on what – perhaps even more than petroleum lust – I'm sure prompted the folly of what will no doubt soon be known as the First Iraq War:

As to what truly motivated Bush and still motivates his henchmen (including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton), Mr. Cole's last paragraph says it all:

“Sunni Iraqis had been in the 20th century cosmopolitan and often modernists. Many were liberals yearning for democracy. From 1968 they turned to more of a Soviet model, a strongly secular one.”

Thus again we witness the bottomless savagery of USian imperialism – In Vietnam, “we had to destroy the village to save it” (from Communism). Now it's the destruction of a whole nation to “save” it from Communist influences. Next will be the entire planet.

Such is the absolute evil of capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the violently malicious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth.

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Unfinished Dirty Business: Antivenin for an Anti-Gun Snakebite

Scatterbrained and hurting as I was with the preparation for the quarterly premises inspection, I failed to notice how a poster who hides behind the screen-name Billy Bob had slandered me in the comment-thread hissy provoked by a significant truth – that Civil Rights Movement non-violence was empowered by armed African-American citizens – a definitive reality the forcible-disarmament fanatics have been desperately trying to flush down the Orwell hole for six decades.

As I noted last week, Charles E. Cobb Jr.'s forthcoming book boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis” – yes, literally. Reader Supported News published Cobb's important essay about the book, but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted its title, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014).

Meanwhile, Billy Bob's antagonism toward me had shown that where firearms are concerned, the Left – at least the pseudo-Left that won't rest until the Working Class is totally disarmed – has its own equivalent of the Hard Right's corps of Big Liars and Ku Klux demagogues.

I replied appropriately:

Billy: I'm sorry I was too preoccupied with the demands of survival to note earlier the personal venomousness of your response.

If you'd bothered to learn anything about me, you'd know I'm a 74-year-old semi-retired journalist, a former Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam-War, back-to-the-land, alternative-press and Occupy activist. A declared socialist, I currently serve on a 15 Now organizing committee.

Hence for you to try – as you did above – to maliciously equate me with the Republican Sharron Angle (whose name you misspelled), merely puts you at one with those fanatically anti-gun Democrats and anti-union “progressives” who hysterically slander all supporters of the Second Amendment as “Nazis.”

I thank you for that disclosure. I will keep it in mind anytime I read anything else of yours – if indeed I bother. I will also remember the craven cowardice of hiding behind screen-name anonymity to insult a person who posts under his or her own name.

 

That said, never in my life have I advocated political violence. Nor will I. Though the death of the Soviet Union has forever doomed non-violent resistance to capitalism – that's why “hope” is idiocy rather than “audacity” – I have also glimpsed the face of war, and that alone mandates my lifelong commitment to political non-violence.

Meanwhile your nasty effort to associate me with “Second Amendment remedies” is surely reminiscent of the defining tactics of agents-provocateur.

LB/22 June 2014

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How Stealth Attacks by Christian Theocrats Are Killing Reproductive Rights, Overruling End-of-Life Choices

Election day in Everson, Washington. This was sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s,  close enough to the fire I was still distraught over the death of my career, hence  didn't bother taking notes or keeping records. But I remember the tech data. The camera was my Olympus RC – the best pocket camera I ever owned – loaded with Kodak 400 ASA color negative film. It was rainy and windy and cold, typical winter weather on the Pacific Northwest coast, near noon, yet so dark I was working at the lower limit of the RC's electronic shutter and lens, probably 1/15 of a second at f/2.8. Posterization with Gimp software adds an illusory sharpening to an image blurred by inadvertent camera motion. Click on image to view it full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.

 

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AMONG THE GREATER IRONIES of present-day politics is the fact those of us whose rights are most jeopardized by the One Percent's lavishly financed  efforts to impose Christian theocracy  on the United States are often the least likely to recognize the threat.

 

Whether because of misinformation, denial, fears of being labeled “politically incorrect” or some combination of all of the above, we who identify ourselves as secular-minded or spiritually independent tend to ignore or dismiss any openly religious assault against our hard-won freedoms of conscience. Though we instantly mobilize against identical attacks by seemingly secular politicians and political groups, we are profoundly reluctant to resist or even acknowledge the equally egregious threats that emanate directly from – and often in the name of – organized religions.

 

The fact so many of these these assaults happen far away – on the other side of the globe, in the former Confederacy or in some flyover state – makes it easy for us to brush them off as isolated events of no personal consequence, the random deeds of distant extremists. Particularly if we live in a great city, we can readily convince ourselves such fanatics could not possibly impinge on the liberties we enjoy in our island of civilization.

 

But our indifference is ultimately our defeat. It measures the success of our enemies' most perfect strategy – their skill at convincing us they are too intellectually remote or geographically far away to hurt us. That's how the Christian theocrats have already managed to deny abortion providers to the women who live in in 87 percent of the USian counties. 

 

Similarly we pooh-pooh Christianity's escalating assault on our right to dictate our own end-of-life circumstances. Yet Christian zealots do not hesitate to defy assisted-suicide laws or do-not-resuscitate orders and thereby condemn victims of permanently debilitating accidents or medical crises to years of “redemptive” suffering  – misery that, not coincidentally, pumps windfall wealth into the already overflowing coffers of church-owned hospitals.

 

We tell ourselves how happy we are to be exempt from such barbarism and dispel all further thoughts of what it might be like to endure such physical and psychological abuse. “It will never happen here,” we say.

 

But it is already happening. The barbarians are already inside the gates. Our islands of civilization are already being overrun.

 

And we are bringing our downfall on ourselves. It is happening because our secular-minded smugness has blinded us to the toxic reality of the theocratic incursion. We have failed to comprehend the awful strength and implacable dynamics of fanatical religion. We deny the totality by which it both shapes its adherents and is itself shaped by their fanaticism, how it shapes or reshapes the societies in which they live, how it is the ultimate historical proof of the ancient adage “ideas have consequences.”

 

Even now we remain blind to the stranglehold Christianity has on the USian population. Nor do we comprehend the savagery – real and potential – implicit in a people 63 percent of whom are fanatics by definition:  that is, they believe the Bible is not only the word of god but is literally, word-for-word true.

 

Many who claim to be Christians vehemently object to characterization of their religion as founded on the hatred of women, sexuality and Nature. Yet history proves that to be the quintessential doctrine of all the Abrahamic religions. In the case of Christianity, it is confirmed by a two-thousand year litany of victims. The contrary examples of the Christian Bodhisattvas – St. Francis of Assisi, St. Theresa of Avila, Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, Fr. William Bischel, others of their kind – are rare exceptions indeed. Their humanitarianism is like a frail scatter of bright blossoms on a dark and bloody tide, its tsunami of carnage ironic fulfillment of the precept given us by St. Matthew, the fruit by which Christianity makes its true self known. As a dear friend and leading pagan scholar was wont to say before her untimely death in 1994, “the goodness of the saints is in spite of Christianity, not because of it.”

 

Moreover, the failure of the so-called mainstream churches to publicly denounce the fanatics who have emerged as the most powerful, influential and well-funded members of the USian Christian clergy proves – if only by default – such hatefulness whether Protestant or Catholic is as much the “true Christianity” today as it was at the height of the Burning Times.

 

The fanaticism-supporting silence of mainstream Christianity is no doubt among the primary influences that prompt too many secular-minded or independently spiritual folk to reject all notions of a theocratic conspiracy to overthrow constitutional governance in the United States. “Religion is just not that important anymore,” say the secularists. “Only morons still believe in that sort of thing.”

 

Alas, as documented by Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason, it is Moron Nation in which we reside. Read Chris Hedges' American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America; read Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy; then pull it all together by reading Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, which tells how Christians – Catholic and Protestant alike – have been working at least since the 1930s to subvert the constitution and replace it with Biblical law, the Christian counterpart of Sharia.

 

Also there are at least three websites vital to building an understanding of the magnitude of the theocratic threat. These are http://www.mergerwatch.org/, which probes the Catholic war against reproductive freedom and end-of-life rights as manifest in the church's leveraged purchases of the nation's secular hospitals; http://www.au.org/, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which documents the inroads Christian theocrats are making on government and USian society in general; and http://www.theocracywatch.org/, which exposes the doctrines and doctrinal interpretations upon which the thrust toward theocracy is based.

 

My sole criticism of these on-line resources is that Americans United and Theocracy Watch too often sidestep the bipartisan nature of the theocratic threat. TheocracyWatch – otherwise a veritable encyclopaedia on Christian subversion of constitutional governance – is especially misleading in this regard. It focuses on “the rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party” but steadfastly ignores the identical danger within the Democratic Party, which keeps its collaboration with the theocrats carefully hidden beneath a deceptive cover of (apparent) secularism. As Sharlet reports in The Family, “Hillary (Clinton) fights side-by-side with (Sen. Sam) Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it” (first edition, Harper, New York: 2008; p. 275).

 

Note also President Obama's dramatic expansion  of the Bush Administration's Faith-Based Initiatives,  which facilitate the privatization of social services and give religious organizations control – often zero-tolerance control – over who receives aid. It is especially telling how Obama applauds such (theocratic) programs as “a force for good greater than government.”

 

In terms of actually working to impose theocracy, the only meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the extent to which the latter have thus far managed to conceal their commitment to an officially Christian United States – a point frighteningly demonstrated by Sharlet's research. 

***

While I have long recognized  and many times warned against  the theocratic threat, I was unaware of how the Catholic Church is using its near-infinite wealth to buy or affiliate with secular health care organizations as a means of terminating reproductive freedom and limiting end-of-life alternatives.

 

But then two Seattle news outlets, The Stranger and the on-line daily Crosscut, bravely published stories exposing the alarming local impact of this (typically devious) theocratic scheme.

 

One of these reports, “Faith Healers,” describes in general terms the attack on all such freedoms.  The other focuses mostly on the prohibitive threat to end-of-life choices.  Both are well worth reading.

 

Group Health Cooperative, the non-profit, single-payer organization I joined as a political statement when I was in Washington state during the 1970s and which now administers my Medicare program, sends its Tacoma patients to a local Catholic hospital whenever they need such services. The hospital is St. Joseph, part of the Franciscan Medical Group that operates in the Puget Sound area. Hence I immediately telephoned GHC's customer service department and asked whether St. Joseph would honor documented end-of-life wishes that conflicted with Catholic doctrine.

 

The response was anything but reassuring: “Since that is not one of our hospitals, we do not know what they would honor.”

 

A Catholic source who has personal experience coping with end-of-life issues says the situation is not as bad as the two articles portrayed – that the Franciscan hospitals will at least honor a do-not-resuscitate order. The source, a dissident who openly rejects the church's opposition to contraception, abortion and homosexuality yet regularly attends Mass, is therefore especially credible.

 

But the mere fact such questions now arise demonstrates the extent to which even avowedly secular Group Health – originally perhaps the most staunchly patient-rights-oriented medical institution in the Pacific Northwest and certainly amongst the most outspoken such organizations in the nation – is being trampled by the stampede toward theocracy.

 

The Stranger's Cienna Madrid reports the Catholic Church now owns 12 percent of the hospitals nationwide and a staggering 44 percent of the hospitals in Washington state, the latter a rapidly growing monopoly that already includes all the hospitals in three very large counties. It is an unprecedented – and unprecedentedly sneaky – assault on reproductive rights in the state that was first in the nation to vote for legalized abortion.

 

Anyone who has read the relevant works by Hedges, Phillips and Sharlet will recognize immediately how the dramatic expansion of Catholic hospital ownership is yet another manifestation of the obscenely well-funded corporate campaign to impose theocracy, via Christian fanaticism whether Catholic or Protestant, on the entire United States.

 

Its long-range objective is to subjugate us all beneath local variants of the theocratic ethos that rules the Bible-thumping (and often virulently anti-Catholic) South. As I know from the school years I (involuntarily) spent there c. 1950-1959, also from the years I worked for daily newspapers there (1962-1965) and my summer there in the Civil Rights Movement (1963), the South is a realm of Christian fanatics whether Protestant, as in Appalachia and the cotton-belt, or Catholic, as in the jungles of the Louisiana bayou country.

 

Imagine, if you will, a United States in which possession of Alan Ginsberg's Howl is a felony and the teaching of evolution is a gross misdemeanor, a realm where behavioral codes are enforced by Christian counterparts of the Islamic morality police. Such was the South – the land to which I was exiled by familial dysfunction. Yes, the copy of Howl lent me by a Knoxville woman in 1959 could have subjected either of us to five-year prison sentences. As for morality police, this function in Protestant communities was (and likely still is) fulfilled by the Ku Klux Klan, hence its colloquial name: "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class." Rumor attributed a similar clandestine purpose to the Knights of Columbus in Louisiana and in Catholic communities elsewhere in the South.

 

(Though it begs the question, I should probably explain why I returned to Tennessee after I completed the three-year active duty portion of my six-year U.S. Army obligation. Because I had been a stringer for The Knoxville Journal and two community weeklies during my last year of high school and the 18 months between graduation and enlistment, Knoxville was the one sure place I could get work as a journalist – and thus begin building a viable résumé to get me back home to New York City as soon as possible. I have returned to the South only twice since then – in 1967 with Adrienne just after our marriage and in 1969 on a photo assignment that coincided with a younger sister's wedding.)

 

That said, why would morally imbecilic capitalists – especially given their enthusiastic adoption of Ayn Rand's principle of infinite greed as ultimate virtue – prefer rule by Biblical law? While the anti-environmentalist implications of Christian doctrine are obvious – see again the first item linked in my opening paragraph – the Southern brand of Christianity-protected capitalism predates the environmental movement by nearly a century. What did the the Southern One Percent discover after the Civil War that bound the Bible so inseparably to capitalism? 

In the first place, the core ideologies of capitalism – the hierarchy of the rich over the poor; the ruthless exploitation of underlings and Nature; male supremacy and/or the supremacy of patriarchal values and methods – all originate from Biblical principles. (Those who doubt this should read not just Max Weber [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism] but the works of Barbara Mor [The Great Cosmic Mother] and Rianne Eisler [The Chalice and the Blade]).

 

More to the present-day point, innumerable studies in what used to be called “industrial psychology,” all of which seem to have been carefully removed from public circulation, long ago concluded the combination of divine-right management, sexual taboos, misogyny and psychological terror implicit in all Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) makes for the most obedient, most productive, hence most profitable workforce possible. Abrahamic theocracy thus effectively reduces “human capital” to its original antebellum meaning, a euphemism for slaves and enslavement.

 

Studying the slavishly religious South, the industrial psychologists realized its practice of elevating the boss to the equivalent of a divine-right monarch and anointing him god's representative on earth ensures the unquestioning obedience of all believers in the workforce. The Christian Prosperity Gospel  reinforces managerial authority by defining poverty as divine punishment. Collective bargaining is thus implicitly condemned as wanton defiance of god's will – a deadly or mortal sin.

 

The counterparts of these Christian principles in the other Abrahamic religions structure their respective societies in recognizably similar ways. The rich and powerful are portrayed as god's chosen; the poor and/or the non-believer as his rejects; males as made in the image of god and therefore superior to females; structures of gender, class and caste as divinely ordained and therefore inescapable; Nature as god's gift to man to be exploited however man chooses. Replace “fear of the Lord” with der führerprinzip and you have Nazism – particularly its core concept of übermenschen and üntermenschen – hence the intimate connection between Abrahamic religion, fascism and imperialism.

 

Borrowing from Freud and again studying the South, industrial psychologists also discovered the bottomless frustration resulting from strictly enforced prohibitions of sexual expression outside  heterosexual marriage is typically sublimated  into frantic productivity and endless frenzies of trinket materialism. Later events – most notably the expansion of the USian empire – proved the result is the same whether the workers are Christian, Islamic or Jewish. For the One Percent, theocracy thus means more profit at less expense. 

The notorious oppression of Southern women – best illustrated by the South's intense opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment –  reflects another defining characteristic of Abrahamic theocracy. But denial of female personhood – though obviously prompted by the Jewish/Christian/Islamic patriarchy's envious fear and hatred of women's sexuality – also seems to have economic motives. In today's world it is apparently yet another expression of the One Percent's infinitely despotic intent, an especially vivid example of the new paradigm of global governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else. 

Semiotics gives us our most important clue as to why the One Percent so relentlessly supports theocratic male supremacy. Throughout Occidental history, liberty is invariably personified as female, no doubt in (mostly unconscious) tribute to the central but oft ignored role of women in innumerable revolutions. The history so symbolized begins at least with Boudicca's rebellion against Imperial Rome c. 60-61 CE; it may have originated 1500 years earlier in the Minoan resistance to Mycenaean conquest. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 was triggered by the women of Paris protesting the price of bread. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was sparked by the women of the Lesnoy Textile Works, who boiled into the streets of Petrograd to protest the firing of five organizers. The fierce activism of women in New York City after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire gave the U.S. labor movement one of its greatest and most pivotal victories.

These histories and others like them suggest women may be notably quicker than men both to develop revolutionary consciousness and to evolve the cooperative solidarity essential to successful radical action. If true – and you can assume industrial psychologists and intelligence analysts alike have had this matter under investigation for years if not decades – it gives the One Percent an obvious motive for excluding women from the workforce and methodically reducing them to the abject powerlessness so horrifically prophesied by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale. 

Once again, we witness how the oppressive functions of Abrahamic theocracy provide capitalism with profitable mechanisms of oppression: not just opiate, but brain police as well. 

The imposition of Islamic theocracy on Iraq and its seemingly permanent disempowerment of women is therefore probably no accident. Likewise the theocratic takeovers that followed the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya. Indeed the USian military is relentlessly drilled in Christian-crusader ideology.   Its ultimate proverb – “kill 'em all; let god sort 'em out” – is the perfect facilitator of the imperial war machine's true function as the One Percent's international goon-squad.

 

Sectarian warfare over which fundamentalists will control the power structure of a given state – Protestant versus Catholic, Shiite versus Sunni, one Hasidim versus another – ensures the disunity that perpetuates the power of the One Percent even as  theocracy subjugates the workforce. Whomever wins, once the fundamentalists rule,  the quest for progressive change becomes blasphemy if not heresy, just as it was in the time of the Inquisition, in the time of the Sultanate, in the times of Franco and Pinochet, just as it is now in Saudi Arabia and Iran and much of Israel and in the 87 percent of the United States where women are already denied local access to abortion. God is watching. The intelligentsia are silenced; the masses are shackled by cradle-to-grave orthodoxy; in some realms the disobedient are publicly tortured to death and they are everywhere cursed with eternal damnation. “God remembers how you vote.”  

Can it be coincidence the model societies of the Bible and the Qur'an so closely approximate the burgeoning reality of the USian surveillance state?

 

Verily, we are ever more a conquered people. When O when will we awaken?

 

LB/16-25 April 2013

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