He’s pretty reasonable, but he’s not one of us. … He’s not there for political reasons. He’s just trying to get something done. … He’s not a, he’s not conservative. He’s just a pragmatist.” (Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, speaking to a caller he believed to be billionaire David Koch regarding Democratic state senator Tim Cullen)

Paul Fallon pulled off a great stunt in punking Scott Walker that day, but that’s about the extent of it. Good comedy. The above words, however, have stuck in my craw since that time. It’s an odd way of talking.

First, let’s set aside the obvious: Scott Walker and David Koch did not know each other, and had never spoken before that time. So if Koch is manipulating Walker from behind the scenes, it’s a pretty stealthy operation he’s running. Far more likely, Scott Walker is just the useful idiot. He really believes he’s on a noble mission as he works to destroy the lives of working class people. Ayn Rand has that effect on lower minds. Would that he had read two books instead of just the one!

Genuine, sincere, honest, highly motivated: A useful idiot

Something here is so obvious, so easy to do – why do people assume it is not done? Forget about the parties, and think about the underlying goals – suppose someone wants to advance the right wing agenda from Democratic side of the spectrum? What stops them? Only appearances. All that person has to do is say the right things in campaigns. The party faithful will eat it up. For rank-and-file Democrats, it is only about winning elections. Governing philosophy is secondary. “Centrist*” Democrats get lots of financial support. The media usually likes them, since they are “thoughtful” rather than an “extremist**”.

There are many, many Democrats who have pulled this off. Stuttering Max Baucus is one, and, as it turns out, so is Jon Tester. It requires some guile, as speaking the words when one does not feel the music is a very hard way to live. It takes a real douche to be able to pull this off for years on end. This sort of public vs private self has reduced Baucus to a stuttering fool when in public. He has to say so many things he does not believe. (I remember the day that he had single-payer protesters arrested in Washington … did you notice? He spoke clearly, induced laughter among his fellows on the panel. He was smooth! That was genuine Max!)

"Centrist*"

Of course many, even if not most, Democrats are sincere and some of them are genuine progressives. Yeah, I like pwoggies. They are a minority within the party, and the party leadership hates them. So as candidate selection time rolls around, more “centrist” candidates usually receive more financial support, are less likely to encounter “centrist” opponents, and are more likely to be tagged as “reasonable” by media pundits. If a true pwoggie pulls off a victory, he’ll be abandoned or short-changed in the general.

This appears to be going on now in the race for Dennis Rehberg’s house seat in Montana, now that Rehberg is running for Senate against Jon Tester. There are several pwoggies running, one of whom I know to be genuine, others perhaps just faking it, as Jon Tester did in 2006. But the candidate of interest to me is Kim Gillan, the only “centrist” in the race. If a Democrat is to win that seat, it will be her. (Perhaps Scott Walker will call her to congratulate her, but Kim, be wary. It might not be Scott. It might be Mr. Fallon.)

At last, he speaks freely!

There’s more to it, however, another prejudice – Antisemitism. I’m not talking about being anti-Israel, which is how that term is currently defined. In the post-war era, Americans in power did not want European Jews to come here, which is why the UN decided to give them half of Palestine instead. Jews were not liked, were not welcome here, and certainly not in the Northeast protestant Republican establishment. Consequently, most Jews of that region today are Democrats, and most Jews in high office are Democrats. Some, like Bernie Sanders, are genuinely progressive. Most, like Diane Feinstein and Joe Lieberman, are (were) Democrats because their traditional party allegiance goes back to the post-war era when they were not welcome on the other side.

So the makeup of our two parties has very little to do with philosophies of governance, and more about racism, prejudice and opportunism. To be a “Democrat” often means supporting stealth right wing candidates. Party Democrats are no brighter than Party Republicans in this regard.

Is she a closet smart person?

Consequently, it appears to pwoggies and Democrats that the whole of the Republican Party is just plain nuts. Not so. Not so at all. Men and women of good will and high intellect are in that party – former Montana Governor Marc Racicot is one, as is Montana Lieutenant Governor John Bohlinger. In DC, Republicans have to pretend to be crazy to stay in office, but I suspect there are some stealthy reasonable people there – perhaps Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Richard Lugar and Lisa Murkowski … just to name a few. I could be wrong. They lean conservative, I know, and I would not vote for them if I voted. But they do not appear to be stupid people, might even be people of good will. (I don’t mean to condemn others by only mentioning a few, by the way.)

That’s our state of affairs, the true state of the union. Belonging to one party or the other means nothing, so I don’t much care about it. It takes only forty right-wing senators to control the legislative branch, and there appear to be about eighty on hand. My peeps, my pwoggies, are free to run as D’s and I’m happy to cast a vote for them. But in the end, the real function of the Democratic Party is to prevent us from ever having a second party. So attempts to take over that party from the left are futile. Lefties can belong, but they have to shut up and support the party’s right wing – otherwise, they work the fields, and not in the house.

For myself, I choose to live off the plantation.
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*A “Centrist” is often nothing more than a right winger who supports legal abortion.
**An “Extremist” is someone who supports programs like Social Security, socialized medicine and free public education and progressive taxation, or supports the idea of a United Nations as arbiter disputes and wants to end our wars of aggression – majority positions that the minorities who run the two parties do not like. The majority of the American public is marginalized by the two parties.
***Scott Brown, MA – jury is out. He’s from a liberal state and so has to play it close to the vest.

And that is why I am writing this – not because I know the answers, as I do not. I am addressing the various reactions that people have when they come across the same anomalies. It’s understandable. I get it. I was there at one time.

I remember well the moment that I finally faced the ugly fact that my country had killed three million innocent people in Southeast Asia. I had choices. I could turn away and think about other stuff. I could blame the victims, demonizing them. I could buy into the larger lie, that we were involved in a global war against an evil force with those countries merely collateral damage.

Or I could face reality – my country did really nasty shit for unstated reasons. Figuring out the reasons became a quest. I am so arrogant now that I think I understand the reasons. We attacked Vietnam for the same reason we attacked tiny Grenada* – no one is allowed to escape.

So as over time the official 9/11 story disintegrates, I don’t have the cognitive dissonance that most people are dealing with. I’ve already paid my dues. People will say “I don’t want to live in a country that does things like that.” Tough. You do. “I have to believe that our leaders would not deliberately harm their own citizens.” No you don’t. “That kind of evil does not exist here.” It does. It’s everywhere. We are not the exception to the rule.

Most often people who are in cognitive dissonance react with ridicule and anger. They use the word “debunk” to mean “someone has given me some bullshit comfort, and I’m easy that way.”

It’s not wishful thinking so much as fear – this inner turmoil you feel, the urge to strike out at people … I don’t feel it. I solved that problem long ago. My country is not different from others in history that found themselves in dominating positions. Power must be restrained. When it is not (as when the USSR no longer (mildly) restrained the US in its global ambitions), it seeks to conquer everything it can by every means available. Murder of 3,000 Americans is not the worst crime committed. It’s fairly modest by American standards. We’ve butchered millions upon millions in other places. 9/11 is not a big deal.

Deal with that.
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*It’s also why we have tormented and terrorized Cuba for 50 years.

Whatever you do, avoid H&R Block.

If your taxes are more complicated, you are self-employed, itemize deductions, have doubts about whether or not you are entitled to exemptions, buy a tax program. TurboTax will get you through it. They will rip you off to piggy-back a state return, which is a big profit center for them, and maybe even charge to e-file, which costs them virtually nothing. But you are still better off than you would be visiting an expensive preparer.

Whatever you do, avoid H&R Block.

If you have tax issues beyond the norm – sale of assets or residences, passive investments, minimum IRA withdrawals, audits, rental units, LLC’s and S-Corps and K-1′s, then it would not hurt to visit either a CPA or an enrolled agent. Avoid the shingle-hangers, tax preparers who are neither of those, as they are usually strictly reliant on the software and often turn out shoddy work. CPA’s and enrolled agents must undergo rigorous training. It’s not easy to become either. Do ask your preparer how he/she bills, as many of them, like auto mechanics, work off a schedule and charge $X for this form, $X for that form, without regard to actual time. Those who charge by actual time are usually more reasonably priced.

Whatever you do, avoid H&R Block.

It’s probably wise to avoid the big firms, the well-established CPA’s in town, and I mean them no disrespect. Quite the opposite – usually these are people who deal in complicated issues, audits and court cases. Using them for a fairly normal return is a waste of your money and their resources. They are there to serve a different clientele.

Now, H&R Block: They will do a good job for you on all of the above except very complicated returns. However, they are wildly over-priced. The bulk of the work in tax preparation these days is done by the software firms who prepare the programs that we tax preparers use. Consequently, H&R Block will do a ridiculously simple return and charge an outrageous fee. Where they invest at best 15 minutes of time, they will charge $150-300. They get away with this nonsense because people are intimidated by taxes and think there is some special magic behind the curtain.

And they have another angle: All of their employees have to push, and push hard to sell you a tax refund loan. These days e-filed refunds arrive in your bank account within 7-10 days, but Block will push to advance you the refund nonetheless. There is not enough time involved for real interest to be earned, but they will nail you with fees. It has become a major profit center for them.

H&R Block is running adds on the radio now, probably TV as well, urging people who file 1040EZ’s to come in and have them done for “free.” At the very end of the ad, the fast talker says “extra fees for state returns and earned income credit.” That’s almost everyone who files a 1040EZ! (But take a place like Wyoming, that has no income tax, and I’m betting that ad is not running there.) It’s bait and switch.

It’s reprehensible, and sleazy. Whatever you do, avoid H&R Block.

I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career. We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.

Those are the words of George Soros, speaking to Newsweek recently, or so my link says. The billionaire financier who is so feared by the right wing, known to finance such subversive undertakings as Wikipedia and Adbusters. As perhaps the only billionaire who is engaged in proactive movement politics, he is naturally demonized, thought to sleep every day under the bed of Ingamar Johansen before venturing out on moonless nights to destroy capitalism, turn women into lesbians, and promote witchcraft.

“The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.

Except that so many people on the margins do realize what’s going on. We are re-inflating the bubble, overextending the military, encircling ourselves with enemies of our own making. Collapse is not only imminent, but for rest of the planet, perhaps welcome.

For Americans, Soros predicts riots and civil unrest, and that as a result it

… will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.

In the wake of the Obama-supported NDAA, which allows willy-nilly disappearance of American citizens (not kidding here – the act actually uses the expression “willy-nilly”), Sen Joe Lieberman and Rep Charles Dent are pushing the Enemy Expatriation Act through Congress. Under this act, the executive will also be able to willy-nilly revoke citizenship without trial, removing constitutional protections from anyone that the executive might think a threat.

Taxing the rich “…shouldn’t be a difficult argument for Obama to make,” according to Soros, but he oddly could not make that argument, even when he had full control of Congress behind him. Sure, he’ll talk the talk now that he’s in campaign mode, but past is prologue. This guy is not our friend.

Optimism!

In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible. The European Union could regain its luster. I’m hopeful that the United States, as a political entity, will pass a very severe test and actually strengthen the institution.

Seven percent of Americans now live below half of the poverty line, and there are four unemployed Americans for each job. As Ed Tom Bell might say, if this ain’t a depression, it’ll do till one gets here.

The things that informed me most were my experiences in fighting for freedom of the press, freedom to communicate knowledge – which, in the end, is freedom from ignorance. Secondly, [were] my experiences in understanding how the military-intelligence complex works at a practical level. I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.

I just got back from a trip, and in the mail was a Rolling Stone magazine. So typical, it is part pop culture, trying to stay in touch with young people and at the same time wanting to connect with older generations too. So on the cover is David Bowie (John Lennon has the week off), and inside is a full length interview with Julian Assange. Oh yeah – did I also say that Rolling Stone* is one of the few publications in the United States that does actual journalism?**

I set the magazine by my chair, but elected not to read the interview last night as I did not want to become agitated before sleepy time. I read it this morning. I’m not agitated. It’s more depressing than infuriating. The power of the United States National Security State (NSS) is so impressive that it cannot be well-described. It is felt via Assange and Bradley Manning as ominous, far-reaching and oppressive. We are not a free country. I knew that, but did not feel the weight of the oppression in totality until I read his words.

It’s one thing to see him destroyed – he knows that what he was told by a “Western intelligence source,” that he is “fucked,” is true. Whether he is nabbed by Karl Rove’s buddy Carl Bildt in Sweden, or whether the US brings him home via British extradition laws, he’ll likely never experience freedom again. Obama*** intends to fry him, and he has at his disposal the full weight of the military-industrial complex. Companies that have attempted to help him lose clients, individuals lose their jobs. The US media is assassinating his character – there are over twenty million links to him and “rape” now on the Google. MasterCard, Visa and PayPal have conspired against him and yet there are no legal proceedings against the companies in their conspiracy against him – not a good sign. There is complicity, top to bottom, among the corporate, military, media and government wings of the NSS.

Assange is just a man, and he knows that. He knows that journalism is more important than him, and so seems resigned to his personal fate even as he is optimistic about he larger movement he founded. I read his words knowing that there is no “left” in the US that will help him; that no “journalist” will try to help him. I understand that the NSS has tentacles that reach out to every news outlet every politician to keep them in line. Assange estimates that there are over four million people in the US with national security clearance – that is, more than the population of New Zealand, whose job is not to defend us but rather to spy on us. The US public is, as Chomsky reminds us, the “domestic enemy.” If we are kept ignorant we are rendered impotent. He tells those few remaining journalists to use the old-fashioned ways. No electronic devices … “we are now in a situation where countries are recording billions of hours of conversations, and proudly proclaiming that you don’t have to select which telephone call you’re intercepting, because you intercept every telephone call.”

In the Bradley Manning case, Obama is trying to expand the bounds of what is considered “espionage.” Manning may or may not be compos mentis, as his psychological torture was severe. But Obama is using that case as a means to establish a legal precedent that for a journalist merely to ask an inside source for information is a criminal offense. Sy Hersh is known to have a wide array of people inside the Pentagon who are willing to talk to him – Hersh will be imprisoned if he continues to do this. That is Obama’s goal.

I’ve linked to the interview above, and it is open to the public so there is no need to cite Assange here. But one phrase that he uses sticks with me – we have a right to be “free of ignorance.” That is at the bottom of this – Americans are ignorant, even smart Americans. The “journalists” who anchor the Sunday talk shows, supposedly our best, are extraordinarily ignorant fools. People I’ve met through this blog who think that Bradley Manning has committed some real offense are ignorant even if not fools. Ignorance is the prime quality of American life. I know maybe three people who are aware of the true state of American politics. There are thousands of people using the Internet to smuggle information to us. (Ergo, PIPA and SOFA – they are trying to bring the Internet under control of the NSS.)

Smugglers of truth are now targeted. Assange and Manning will never breathe free again. Others must step in to fill their shoes, and if history is a lesson, they will. It is not America now on the front lines in the battle for human freedom. Our day came and went.
_______________________
*Rolling Stone is a powerful tool in that it reaches youth with a subversive message, luring them in with pop culture and hitting them with real journalism at once. An odd feature of American culture – our best journalism is in a pop culture magazine, our best television news on basic cable comedy shows.
**The goal of “journalism” is, as I define it, to investigate activities of the powerful and report back to us. American journalists are taught in their famous schools that they are to report in an unbiased fashion each (of only two) sides of every story without personal opinion or involvement. The fact that most of them do not have strong opinions is testimony to their eunuch states of mind.
***Use of the word “Obama” is shorthand for “the executive branch.” Obama himself has little control over that branch, much less the military over which he is supposedly CnC.

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” (Winston Churchill, 1937)

There’s a word for passing judgment on people who lived long before us based on current moral standards – presentism. But the British were (allegedly*) the first to use poison gas on Kurds of northern Iraq, so present standards have not changed much. A long view of history indicates that being Churchill’s dog in the manger is perhaps the most vulnerable position one can be in. To put it another way, he meant to have wealth without power to defend that wealth. That is where American Natives found themselves after the European migration, French aristocrats in the 1790′s, European Jews during the Nazi regime, and now Arabs and Persians of the Middle East who sit atop vast reserves of oil.

Projection accompanies plunder and murder, as we must justify our behavior. So those who we attack exemplify our own worst traits. American natives became savages, French nobility leaches, while Jews “poisoned” and “contaminated” the Aryan race. These days Arabs, Muslims, Persians, all the same to us, are violent people agaisnt whom we must “defend” ourselves and who are “terrorists.” We are, in fact, the most violent force on the planet, the world’s premier terrorists.

There appears to be progress in attitudes towards one another, but often enough we merely transfer our hatred from one targeted group to another. Where once it was thought normal to ban Jews from teaching in universities or belonging to the Republican Party, we now offer the same treatment to people of Arab descent and anyone who follows Islam. I’m not seeing progress here.
________________
*Churchill favored use of poison gas against “uncivilized tribes,” but actual use against Kurds in 1920 is not settled history. (British history concerning British atrocities is not reliable, I hasten to add.) I have a cousin who was stationed in the Middle East and flew AWACS missions (“Airborne Warning and Control System”) in 1988 when Saddam Hussein gassed Kurds at Halabja in northern Iraq. Missiles do not find their own way through the skies – they need coordinates, which is why AWACS fly high in the sky in battle areas. I asked my cousin who provided coordinates for that missile attack that day, and he much too quickly said it was an AWACS operated by the Saudies.

Over at Intelligent Discontent, Polish Wolf and I had a go-round concerning Bradley Manning. He took the authoritarian stance that misdeeds must be punished, that Manning had committed espionage. I used the word “torture,” and he reminded me that mere solitary confinement is not torture. Now I realize that this is how his treatment is going down here in the Land of the Free. Nothing of his real abuse has filtered down even to well-informed people.

Anyway, a little light on the broader subject, I hope, in my belated reply to him:

After I wrote this it occurred to me that torture as it is perceived is quite different from the sophisticated techniques developed by the CIA and military in the post-war era, and that this is not widely understood. What we saw at Abu Ghraib was the result of development of these techniques over decades of ‘research’ using psychologists and psychiatrists, drugs (which is why LSD originated in the military), trial and error. Hooding is done for sensory deprivation, standing for hours on end the same, cultural taboos (nudity), fear-inducing archetypes (the dogs) are all designed not to elicit information, but rather to induce psychosis. The object is to destroy the personality. When successful the victim is released back into the population rendered harmless, maybe even a warning to the other rebels still at large. They also do pain and murder too, but probably for those who cannot be broken by regular techniques.

When I said Manning was tortured, I meant that they were trying to break him down, probably to use him as a witness when they finally get Assange here for a show trial. It was systematic, monitored and supervised. Apparently they failed, as he is broken but refused to turn on Assange. They have tried him now and are going to imprison him for life. He’ll probably ‘commit suicide’ at some point down the road. And again, since Obama had the power to stop it, he is accountable.

I should have added that humiliation is a large part of it – the dog collars, piling of bodies, dominant-submissive poses.

Abu Ghraib was not aberrant behavior. Those were not ‘bad apples.’ It is concealed behavior. We were never meant to know about it. It’s been going on for decades. It’s still going on. It’s still hidden.

I know – as I’ve been told time and again, the name of my blog should not be Piece of Mind, but rather Blue Bayou.

During the event Rep Kim Gillan of Billings is said to have remarked that last year’s oil spill on the Yellowstone River was a benefit. Her words, as cited by jhwygirl:

…there are people in Billings that think the oil spill was a good thing, that it was good for business. They are looking at their watches and asking can we do this again next year?”

It’s not clear from that brief remark whether she is being sarcastic. I doubt it. I ran for legislature in Billings in 1996 and Gillan was a fellow candidate, one of two or three successful ones. I was terribly unimpressed with her at the time, not sensing any progressive impulses in her. She struck me as a right wing Democrat. I would not fully comprehend until the year 2000 how much the Democratic Party leadership despises progressives**.

I am going on memory here now, but as I remember, Gillan, the wife on a physician, had gotten a later-life masters in economics. Most likely she studied neoclassical economics, and credulously sponged it up – I was not impressed by her intellectual firepower. But she learned duckspeak, and was thereby set to go into politics properly trained in right wing economics.

I believe in public education, and that our brains and grades should be the guide by which we advance, and not our bank accounts. I wonder if Gillan would survive in a merit-based system. The remark above, if cited correctly, is testimony to the Carolyn Kennedy* syndrome: too much education wasted on too little brain.
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*To avoid the tinge of sexism, this could also be called the “Steve Forbes Syndrome.” It is not gender-based, but rather a phenomenon of
privilege, where people like Gillan, Forbes, and George W. Bush have access to higher education without meriting it. They are taught the words, but never quite grasp the music. In Bush’s case, it made him a dangerous man. The others are just annoying.
____________
**I hasten to add that I brought about my own electoral defeat without assistance from anyone.

A wimpy exit from office

[President Obama] is accelerating the advance of the military industrial complex, but is percevied in many quarters as doing the exact opposite. President Obama has increased the size, cost, prioritization, and global presence of the U.S. military. He has, with his War on Libya, established the prerogative to take the nation into war against the will of the United States Congress. He has created drone warfare on a significant scale. He has enlarged and formalized due-process-free imprisonment, and cemented in place warrantless spying and the power to abuse prisoners. He has expanded the use of assassination, including U.S. citizens. President Obama has radically expanded claims of state secrets to protect the crimes of his predecessor, and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Obama has formalized, legalized, systematized and normalized what was illicit under Bush. He has pursued base construction and expansion of missile “defense” systems to the detriment of U.S. relations with China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, among other nations. Like all presidents during this permanent war, Obama is a war president. Unlike all other Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Obama praised war in his acceptance speech. David Swanson, opening remarks at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower’s weak-kneed remarks concerning the Military Industrial Complex. (Emphasis added)

There was a reason why Ike made his famous MIC speech as he left office rather than during his eight-year term – he was afraid to speak up. Even then, only twelve years after passage of the National Security Act, the military had such a hold on government that even a president could not counter its power. So he yelled back a warning to us as we viewed his asshole and elbows.

But the reason the passage above caught my eye was, of course, the reference to Obama being “perceived” in many quarters as doing the exact opposite of what he is really doing. The degree of perception management in this country is amazing, and the critical feature in the mechanics of such a PSYOP is the manner in which the “opposition” speaks about him. It’s a simple concept – the enemy of my enemy is my friend. To call Obama a “socialist” is equivalent to calling Marx a capitalist, but it is done routinely. Most (almost all) Americans operate on low information, so that their attitudes about policy and politicians is cemented by brief glimpses via corporate media. They catch a debate on one of the cable networks of talking heads talking over and by each other, and only a few words resonate, “socialist” one of them. Many like the word, many fear it, and thereby perception is framed and hanged.

A Democrat won the White House! We can relax a little bit now!

It’s infuriating to hear this repeated at every Democratic website. It is so off-target. He’s not better. He’s worse. He’s much worse. And this is so precisely because of managed perceptions. He gets away with stuff, as outlined by David Swanson above, that would have merited at least weak-kneed opposition had they been done or attempted by George W. Bush.

The coming election appears to he headed towards a choice between Obama and Romney. Neither of these wimps would rise even to Ike’s nervous mumbled protest as he walked out the door – we don’t even have that low standard anymore. So electoral politics will not save us. But if one chooses to vote, from my vantage point it appears that the reasonable choice would be Romney. If he won, at least Democrats would be a little less somnambulant.

That’s not much to hope for, but who ever said we have high standards in this country? Who ever said we even have standards?

1. Assassination of U.S. citizens;
   
2. Indefinite detention;
   
3. Arbitrary justice;
   
4. Warrantless searches;
   
5. Secret evidence;
   
6. War crimes;
   
7. Secret court;
   
8. Immunity from judicial review;
   
9. Continual monitoring of citizens;
   
10. and Extraordinary renditions.
    

Any student of post-war America realizes that all of this went on from VJ day forward. The US was in a position of unparalleled power, and the people who ran the country were no less susceptible to absolute corruption than anyone before. It happened quickly, with passage of the National Security Act of 1948, changing the name of the War Department to “Defense,” and conversion of the wartime OSS into the peacetime CIA. Soon thereafter came McCarthyism and the attack on civil liberties in the name of anti-communism. Wars, major and minor, were routine.

But 9/11 is a marker in time – things were different before and after that Reichstag-like event. All that went on before in secret came out in the open and was legitimized, and is now being codified. Obama’s recent signing of the Defense Authorization Bill allowing indefinite detention of American citizens without charges or hearing (his ludicrous “signing statement” aside) is meant to permanently cement disappearance of domestic enemies.

It’s all part of the relentless march of totalitarianism. It’s not new, and comes about naturally in those scenarios where power perceives itself to be omnipotent. It cannot resist the urge vanquish opposition. Prior to 9/11 the great unleashing event was the fall of the Soviet Union. It had served as a weak counterbalance to US power, so it should have come as no surprise that as the USSR receded, the US went on the attack, Iraq in 1991, the Balkans in the 1990′s, Serbia in 1999. The only force holding them back was an unwillingness on the part of the American public to support total unending war. The jackals screamed at Clinton to launch the Iraq attack in 1998, threatening his presidency, but they were shouted down and had to fall back. That attack would not come until 2003. After 9/11/2001, everything was possible.

Ingamar down below proudly cites Bill Kristol, permanent war architect, noting that Americans (in an unscientific poll) supported the pissing on the faces of dead “Taliban fighters.” In a footnote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, preface to the second edition, Hannah Arendt notes

No doubt, the fact that totalitarian government, its open criminality notwithstanding, rests on mass support is very disquieting. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars as well as statesmen often refuse to recognize it, the former by believing in the magic of propaganda and brainwashing, the latter by simply denying it … A recent publication of secret reports on German public opinion during the war (from 1939 to 1944), issued by the Security Service of the SS (Meldungen aus dem Reich. Auswahl aus den Geheimen Lege-berichten des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1939-1944, edited by Heinz Boberach, Neuwied & Berlin, 1965), is very revealing in this respect. It shows, first, that the population was remarkably well informed about all so-called secrets—massacres of Jews in Poland, preparation of the attack on Russia, etc.—and, second, the “extent to which the victims of propaganda had remained able to form independent opinions”. However, the point of the matter is that this did not in the least weaken the general support of the Hitler regime. It is quite obvious that mass support for totalitarianism comes neither from ignorance nor from brainwashing.

And that, I think, explains the passivity of the American people as their liberties are stripped from them before their very eyes. They are not democratic by nature, but rather a lower breed of common people who make up the bulk of the population of the planet. As Napoleon reminded us, ” … men are not born to be free. Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men.”

I look at a map of North America and am struck by the existence of that line on the 48th parallel. It’s not an accident or the result of negotiations. It exists as a tribute to British power. The United States invaded Canada on five occasions, each time rebuffed. That line is there because Americans could not breach it. Some will say that Canada is effectively conquered now via economics, but the line still exists, and life is different and better up there than down here. Canadians managed to preserve their way of life in spite of the incessant ambition of the Americans to conquer everything around them. If even the country in the shadow of the empire can preserve its way of life, there is hope. There is always hope.

So two events have shaped our new century – the fall of the Soviet Empire and 9/11. These events have served to release the wild men in the wings. What lay ahead – who knows? Resistance, violence, chaos, oppression, injustice, American terror. We live in uncertain times. As always.