OMNI
NEWSLETTER ON FASCISM #2, JULY 5, 2013. Compiled by Dick Bennett
for a Culture of Peace (#1 Jan. 10,
2012)
Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
Contents #1 Jan. 10, 2012
Characteristics
of Fascism
Essence of
Fascism
Chomsky: Fascism in USA
Book to Film:The End of America
Militarism USA
Preparations for
Martial Law
US Army vs.
Posse Comitatus
Internet Control
Contents of #2
Henry Wallace
1944 on US Fascism
Larson, Rise of
Nazis in Germany
Cockburn,
Fascism USA
Juan Cole,
Pentagon Propaganda
Jonathan Schell , US
Surveillance State, Celebrate Snowden
Martial Law Detention
List Prepared
If any statements in the above selections are false, contact me. jbennet@uark.edu
The Danger of American Fascism
Henry A. Wallace
An article in
the New York Times, April 9, 1944.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.
.....
4.The obvious
types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These
demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be,
they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been
mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked
up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The
dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did
in Germany
....
11.The American
fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and
fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of
disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every
opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal
their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia
RISE
OF NAZIS, YEARS JUST BEFORE WWII
bestsellers.about.com/.../In-The-Garden-Of-Beasts-By-Erik-Larson-B...
In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson is
a nonfiction story of that takes place in Germany
bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/A.../In-the-Garden-of-Beasts/.../487...
May 11, 2011 – The assumption of power by Adolf
Hitler, step by malignant step, a progress that was far from inevitable,
continues to exercise a grotesque ...
Alexander
Cockburn
Who are the real fascists: Marine Le Pen - or the United States
Americans worry about the rise of extremism in Europe,
but they aren't overly concerned by their own 'proto-fascist' country
Column LAST
UPDATED AT 07:19 ON Thu 3 May 2012
Recent columns
AMERICAN discussions of Europe
swivel between rationality and hysteria. A discussion of Europe's awful
unemployment figures and swelling mutiny against austerity suddenly mutates
into tremulous wails about the menace of fascism in France, rancid racism in
the Netherlands, the anti-Semitic beast unchained in Germany (in the terrifying
form of Günter Grass's new poem).
A lot of this has to do with Marine Le Pen, leader of France
Marine Le Pen is a nationalist politician, quite
reasonably exploiting the intense social discontent in France
Anti-Semitism? Diana Johnstone, an excellent journalist
who has been reporting from France
Marine Le Pen certainly has made some unsavoury comments
about immigrants and Islamisation. But she has gone to the heart of the matter,
asserting that monetary union cannot be fudged, that it is incompatible with
the French nation-state. She has won 18 per cent of the vote by campaigning to
pull France
It's true, things could get ugly. Europe 's
politics are being refashioned before our eyes. Greece Spain Germany was heavily indebted to foreigners in
1930, like Spain Germany
But there's another aspect to this habit of flinging the
charge of fascism at Europe , and that's the
simple matter of national hypocrisy. The mobs who flooded into the streets to
revel in the execution of Osama bin Laden a year ago were not exulting in America United
States
Fascism, among other things, is a system of extreme,
methodical state repression, violent in contour and threat, buttressed by
ultra-nationalist mythology, a militarist culture and imperial ambition. In the
1980s America New York City US
Fascist regimes, ultimately the expression of corporate
power, repress labour in all efforts to organise. The onslaught here began with
Taft-Hartley in 1947 and continued with methodical ferocity during the Reagan
and Clinton years. Obama reneged on pledges to make organising easier, froze
the wages of federal workers and advanced free trade across the globe. Attacks
on collective bargaining are pervasive. Big money's grip on both parties
ensures corporate control no matter who's nominally in charge. Fascist regimes
show open contempt for democracy while deifying a leader who embodies the
national spirit. We salute democracy while suppressing it.
A fascist regime is the sworn foe of the right to
assembly, 'unauthorised' marches and encampments. We're sure to see more signs
of this around the Nato summit and the national conventions. America
A fascist regime spies obsessively on its citizens. Study US laws on secret surveillance since the Patriot Act and you will find procedures that would have been the envy of the East Germans.
A fascist regime spies obsessively on its citizens. Study US laws on secret surveillance since the Patriot Act and you will find procedures that would have been the envy of the East Germans.
Ultimately a fascist state claims the right to imprison
its victims without term or hope of redress or legal representation. As the
executive power, in the form of the president, it claims the right to kill its
enemies, whether citizens (Awlaki) or others (Guantánamo), without judicial
review. In other words, rule by decree - which is what Hitler's Enabling Act
won him in March 1933.
We live in a fascist country - 'proto-fascist' if you
want to allay public disquiet, though there's scant sign that most Americans
are disturbed by the trends. So quit beating up on Europe . ·
Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/46625/who-are-real-fascists-marine-le-pen-or-united-states#ixzz1uJzOW3OR
[Dick: This essay
also appeared in The Nation entitled
“So Who’s the Fascist Here?” (May 21, 2012).
See the four letters in response June 18, 2012.]
GOP CONGRESS AUTHORIZES LYING TO PUBLIC
|
Will get vetoed--but that
they tried to do it shows where the Repubs are headed.
|
|
|
|
|
Juan Cole, “The Creeping
Fascism of American Politics”
Informed
Comment
Cole writes:
"Two congressmen are attempting to insert a provision in the National
Defense Authorization Act that would allow the Department of Defense to subject
the US
Cole writes: "Two congressmen are attempting to
insert a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that would allow
the Department of Defense to subject the US
A bipartisan amendment introduced by Rep. Mac Thornberry and Rep. Adam Smith would allow the Department of Defense to utilize propaganda. (image: Telegraph
The Creeping Fascism of American Politics
20 May 12
wo congressmen are attempting to insert a
provision in the National Defense Authorization act that would allow the Department of Defense to subject the US
domestic public to propaganda. The bipartisan amendment was introduced by
Rep. Mac Thornberry from
Nothing speaks more urgently to the creeping fascism
of American politics than the assertion by our representatives, who apparently
have never read a book on Germany in the 1930s-1940s or on the Soviet Union in
the Stalin period, that forbidding DoD and the State Department from subjecting
us to government propaganda "ties the hands of America's diplomatic
officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively
communicate in a credible way." And mind you, they want to use our own
money to wash our brains!
As Will Rogers observed, "This country has come
to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a
hammer."
I love our guys and gals in uniform, but they can be
extremely obnoxious in any discussion about US Washington
Of course, having a Pentagon propaganda unit at all is
highly anti-democratic. The best defense of the truth is a free press. It
should also be remembered that nowadays everything in Washington
Doing propaganda abroad has the difficulty that it
doesn't stay abroad. False articles placed in the Arabic press in Iraq
Then, another problem is that the Defense Intelligence
Agency analysts *also* read the false articles placed in the Arabic press by
*another* Pentagon office, which they did not know about. So the analysts were
passing up to the White House false information provided by their own
colleagues!
I was told by an insider that one reason Washington
analysts often read my blog in the Bush years was that I had a reputation for
having an accurate bull crap meter, and thus my judgments on what was likely to
be true helped them fight the tendency to believe our own propaganda!
Not only should this amendment be gotten rid of quick,
but their constituents should please vote out of office Reps. Thornberry and
Smith next November.
Zombie Politics, Democracy, and the Threat of
Authoritarianism - Part I
Wednesday, 01 June 2011 09:41
·
(Image: Peter Lang)
The Rise of Zombie Politics
In the world of popular culture, zombies seem to be everywhere, as
evidenced by the relentless slew of books, movies, video games, and comics.
From the haunting Night of the Living Dead to the comic movie Zombieland, the
figure of the zombie has captured and touched something unique in the
contemporary imagination. But the dark and terrifying image of the zombie with
missing body parts, oozing body fluids, and an appetite for fresh, living,
human brains does more than feed the mass-marketing machines that prey on the
spectacle of the violent, grotesque, and ethically comatose. There is more at
work in this wave of fascination with the grotesquely walking hyper-dead than a
Hollywood appropriation of the dark recesses
and unrestrained urges of the human mind. The zombie phenomenon is now on
display nightly on television alongside endless examples of destruction
unfolding in real-time. Such a cultural fascination with proliferating images
of the living hyper-dead and unrelenting human catastrophes that extend from a global
economic meltdown to the earthquake in Haiti to the ecological disaster caused
by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico signals a shift away from the hope that
accompanies the living to a politics of cynicism and despair. The macabre
double movement between “the dead that walk”[2] and those who are alive but
are dying and suffering cannot be understood outside of the casino capitalism
that now shapes every aspect of society in its own image. A casino capitalist
zombie politics views competition as a form of social combat, celebrates war as
an extension of politics, and legitimates a ruthless Social Darwinism in which
particular individuals and groups are considered simply redundant,
disposable—nothing more than human waste left to stew in their own
misfortune—easy prey for the zombies who have a ravenous appetite for chaos and
revel in apocalyptic visions filled with destruction, decay, abandoned houses,
burned-out cars, gutted landscapes, and trashed gas stations.
The twenty-first-century zombies no longer emerge from the grave;
they now inhabit the rich environs of Wall Street and roam the halls of the
gilded monuments of greed such as Goldman Sachs. As an editorial in The New
York Times points out, the new zombies of free-market fundamentalism turned
“the financial system into a casino. Like gambling, the transactions mostly
just shifted paper money around the globe. Unlike gambling, they packed an
enormous capacity for collective and economic destruction—hobbling banks that
made bad bets, freezing credit and economic activity. Society—not the
bankers—bore the cost.”[3] In
this way, the zombie— the immoral, sub-Nietzschean, id-driven “other” who is
“hyper-dead” but still alive as an avatar of death and cruelty—provides an apt
metaphor for a new kind of authoritarianism that has a grip on contemporary
politics in the United
States
Click below to
listen to The Critical Lede's audio interview with Dr. Henry Giroux.
Press play to listen
to the interview:
But the new zombies are not only wandering around in the banks,
investment houses, and death chambers of high finance, they have an
ever-increasing presence in the highest reaches of government and in the
forefront of mainstream media. The growing numbers of zombies in the mainstream
media have huge financial backing from the corporate elite and represent the
new face of the culture of cruelty and hatred in the second Gilded Age. Any
mention of the social state, putting limits on casino capitalism, and
regulating corporate zombies puts Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck,
Rush Limbaugh, and other talking heads into a state of high rage. They disparage any discourse that embraces social justice, social responsibility, and human rights. Appealing to “real” American values such as family, God, and Guns, they are in the forefront of a zombie politics that opposes any legislation or policy designed to lessen human suffering and promote economic and social progress. As Arun Gupta points out, they are insistent in their opposition to “civil rights, school desegregation, women’s rights, labor organizing, the minimum wage, Social Security, LGBT rights, welfare, immigrant rights, public education, reproductive rights, Medicare, [and] Medicaid.”[5] The walking hyper-dead even oppose providing the extension of unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who are out of work, food, and hope. They spectacularize hatred and trade in lies and misinformation. They make populist appeals to the people while legitimating the power of the rich. They appeal to common sense as a way of devaluing a culture of questioning and critical exchange. Unrelenting in their role as archetypes of the hyper-dead, they are misanthropes trading in fear, hatred, and hyper-nationalism.
Rush Limbaugh, and other talking heads into a state of high rage. They disparage any discourse that embraces social justice, social responsibility, and human rights. Appealing to “real” American values such as family, God, and Guns, they are in the forefront of a zombie politics that opposes any legislation or policy designed to lessen human suffering and promote economic and social progress. As Arun Gupta points out, they are insistent in their opposition to “civil rights, school desegregation, women’s rights, labor organizing, the minimum wage, Social Security, LGBT rights, welfare, immigrant rights, public education, reproductive rights, Medicare, [and] Medicaid.”[5] The walking hyper-dead even oppose providing the extension of unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who are out of work, food, and hope. They spectacularize hatred and trade in lies and misinformation. They make populist appeals to the people while legitimating the power of the rich. They appeal to common sense as a way of devaluing a culture of questioning and critical exchange. Unrelenting in their role as archetypes of the hyper-dead, they are misanthropes trading in fear, hatred, and hyper-nationalism.
The human suffering produced by the walking hyper-dead can also be
seen in the nativist apoplexy resulting in the racist anti-immigration laws
passed in Arizona, the attempts to ban ethnic studies in public schools, the
rise of the punishing state, the social dumping of millions of people of color
into prisons, and the attempts of Tea Party fanatics and politicians who want
to “take back America” from President Barack Obama—described in the new lexicon
of right-wing political illiteracy as both an alleged socialist and the new
Hitler. Newt Gingrich joins Glenn Beck and other members of the elite squad of
the hyper-dead in arguing that Obama is just another version of Joseph Stalin.
For Gingrich and the rest of the zombie ideologues, any discourse that
advocates for social protections, easing human suffering, or imagining a better
future is dismissed by being compared to the horrors of the Nazi holocaust.
Dystopian discourse and End Times morbidity rule the collective consciousness
of this group.
The “death panels” envisaged by Sarah Palin are not going to
emerge from Obama’s health care reform plan but from the toolkits the zombie
politicians and talking heads open up every time they are given the opportunity
to speak. The death threats, vandalism, and crowds shouting homophobic slurs at
openly gay U.S. House Representative Barney Frank already speak to a fixation
with images of death, violence, and war that now grips the country. Sarah
Palin’s infamous call to a gathering of her followers to “reload” in opposition
to President Obama’s policies—soon followed in a nationally televised press conference
with a request for the American people to embrace Arizona
The hyper-dead celebrate talk radio haters such as Rush Limbaugh,
whose fanaticism appears to pass without criticism in the mainstream media.
Limbaugh echoes the fanatics who whipped up racial hatred in Weimar
Germany
The roaming hordes of celebrity zombie intellectuals work hard to
fuel a sense of misguided fear and indignation toward democratic politics, the
social state, and immigrants—all of which is spewed out in bitter words and
comes terribly close to inciting violence. Zombies love death-dealing
institutions, which accounts for why they rarely criticize the bloated military
budget and the rise of the punishing state and its expanding prison system.
They smile with patriotic glee, anxious to further the demands of empire as
automated drones kill innocent civilians—conveniently dismissed as collateral
damage—and the torture state rolls inexorably along in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
in other hidden and unknown sites. The slaughter that inevitably follows
catastrophe is not new, but the current politics of death has reached new
heights and threatens to transform a weak democracy into a full-fledged
authoritarian state.
A Turn to the Dark Side of
Politics
The American media, large segments of the public, and many
educators widely believe that authoritarianism is alien to the political
landscape of American society. Authoritarianism is generally associated with
tyranny and governments that exercise power in violation of the rule of law. A
commonly held perception of the American public is that authoritarianism is
always elsewhere. It can be found in other allegedly “less developed/civilized
countries,” such as contemporary China
or Iran , or it belongs to a
fixed moment in modern history, often associated with the rise of
twentieth-century totalitarianism in its different forms in Germany , Italy ,
and the Soviet Union under Stalin. Even as the
United States became more disposed to modes of tyrannical power under the
second Bush administration—demonstrated, for example, by the existence of
secret CIA prisons, warrantless spying on Americans, and state-sanctioned
kidnaping—mainstream liberals, intellectuals, journalists, and media pundits
argued that any suggestion that the United States was becoming an authoritarian
society was simply preposterous. For instance, the journalist James Traub
repeated the dominant view that whatever problems the United States America
Against the notion that the Bush administration had pushed the
United States close to the brink of authoritarianism, some pundits have argued
that this dark moment in America’s history, while uncharacteristic of a
substantive democracy, had to be understood as temporary perversion of American
law and democratic ideals that would end when George W. Bush concluded his
second term in the White House. In this view, the regime of George W. Bush and
its demonstrated contempt for democracy was explained away as the outgrowth of
a random act of politics— a corrupt election and the bad-faith act of a
conservative court in 2000 or a poorly run election campaign in 2004 by an
uncinematic and boring Democratic candidate. According to this narrative, the
Bush-Cheney regime exhibited such extreme modes of governance in its embrace of
an imperial presidency, its violation of domestic and international laws, and
its disdain for human rights and democratic values that it was hard to view
such antidemocratic policies as part of a pervasive shift toward a hidden order
of authoritarian politics, which historically has existed at the margins of
American society. It would be difficult to label such a government other than
as shockingly and uniquely extremist, given a political legacy that included
the rise of the security and torture state; the creation of legal illegalities
in which civil liberties were trampled; the launching of an unjust war in Iraq
legitimated through official lies; the passing of legislative policies that
drained the federal surplus by giving away more than a trillion dollars in tax
cuts to the rich; the enactment of a shameful policy of preemptive war; the
endorsement of an inflated military budget at the expense of much-needed social
programs; the selling off of as many government functions as possible to
corporate interests; the resurrection of an imperial presidency; an incessant
attack against unions; support for a muzzled and increasingly
corporate-controlled media; the government production of fake news reports to
gain consent for regressive policies; the use of an Orwellian vocabulary for
disguising monstrous acts such as torture (“enhanced interrogation
techniques”); the furtherance of a racist campaign of legal harassment and
incarceration of Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants; the advancement of a prison
binge through a repressive policy of criminalization; the establishment of an
unregulated and ultimately devastating form of casino capitalism; the arrogant
celebration and support for the interests and values of big business at the
expense of citizens and the common good; and the dismantling of social services
and social safety nets as part of a larger campaign of ushering in the
corporate state and the reign of finance capital?
Authoritarianism With a Friendly
Face
In the minds of the American public, the dominant media, and the
accommodating pundits and intellectuals, there is no sense of how
authoritarianism in its soft and hard forms can manifest itself as anything
other than horrible images of concentration camps, goose-stepping storm
troopers, rigid modes of censorship, and chilling spectacles of extremist
government repression and violence. That is, there is little understanding of
how new modes of authoritarian ideology, policy, values, and social relations
might manifest themselves in degrees and gradations so as to create the
conditions for a distinctly undemocratic and increasingly cruel and oppressive
social order. As the late Susan Sontag suggested in another context, there is a
willful ignorance of how emerging registers of power and governance “dissolve
politics into pathology.”[10]
It is generally believed that in a constitutional democracy, power is in the
hands of the people, and that the long legacy of democratic ideals in America
spite of these histories, there is no room in the public imagination to entertain what has become the unthinkable—that such an order in its contemporary form might be more nuanced, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent—what one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character. [11]
spite of these histories, there is no room in the public imagination to entertain what has become the unthinkable—that such an order in its contemporary form might be more nuanced, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent—what one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character. [11]
Historical conjunctures produce different forms of
authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent, and
civil liberties. It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that
strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic, which
leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems.
American politics today suggests a more updated if not a different form of
authoritarianism. In this context, it is worth remembering what Huey Long said
in response to the question of whether America Nuremberg America
Ur-Fascism [Eternal Fascism] is still around us, sometimes in
plainclothes. It would be much easier for us if there appeared on the world
scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz ,
I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not
that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our
duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every
day, in every part of the world.[15]
The renowned political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy
Incorporated, updates these views and argues persuasively that the United States
In the United
States United States United
States
Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington
Rather than being forced to adhere to a particular state ideology,
the general public in the United
States
Depoliticizing Freedom and Agency
Agency is now defined by a neoliberal concept of freedom, a notion
that is largely organized according to the narrow notions of individual
self-interest and limited to the freedom from constraints. Central to this
concept is the freedom to pursue one’s self-interests independently of larger
social concerns. For individuals in a consumer society, this often means the
freedom to shop, own guns, and define rights without regard to the consequences
for others or the larger social order. When applied to economic institutions, this
notion of freedom often translates into a call for removing government
regulation over the market and economic institutions. This notion of a
deregulated and privatized freedom is decoupled from the common good and any
understanding of individual and social responsibility. It is an unlimited
notion of freedom that both refuses to recognize the importance of social costs
and social consequences and has no language for an ethic that calls us beyond
ourselves, that engages our responsibility to others. Within this discourse of
hyper-individualized freedom, individuals are not only “liberated from the
constraints imposed by the dense network of social bonds,” but are also
“stripped of the protection which had been matter-of-factly offered in the past
by that dense network of social bonds.” [21]
Freedom exclusively tied to personal and political rights without
also enabling access to economic resources becomes morally empty and
politically dysfunctional. The much-heralded notion of choice associated with
personal and political freedom is hardly assured when individuals lack the
economic resources, knowledge, and social supports to make such choices and
freedoms operative and meaningful. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, “The right to
vote (and so, obliquely and at least in theory, the right to influence the
composition of the ruler and the shape of the rules that bind the ruled) could
be meaningfully exercised only by those ‘who possess sufficient economic and cultural
resources’ to be ‘safe from the voluntary or involuntary servitude that cuts
off any possible autonomy of choice (and/or its delegation) at the
root....[Choice] stripped of economic resources and political power hardly
assure[s] personal freedoms to the dispossessed, who have no claim on the
resources without which personal freedom can neither be won nor in practice
enjoyed.”[22] Paul Bigioni
has argued that this flawed notion of freedom played a central role in the
emerging fascist dictatorships of the early twentieth century. He writes:
It was the liberals of that era who clamored for unfettered
personal and economic freedom, no matter what the cost to society. Such
untrammeled freedom is not suitable to civilized humans. It is the freedom of
the jungle. In other words, the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a
notion of freedom that is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the
expense of others. Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase
in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful, regardless of the
misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use of the state to
limit such “freedom” was denounced by the laissez-faire liberals of the early
20th century. The use of the state to protect such “freedom” was fascism. Just
as monopoly is the ruin of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation
of liberal capitalism.[23]
This stripped-down notion of market-based freedom that now
dominates American society cancels out any viable notion of individual and
social agency. This market-driven notion of freedom emphasizes choice as an
economic function defined largely as the right to buy things while at the same
time cancelling out any active understanding of freedom and choice as the right
to make rational choices concerning the very structure of power and governance
in a society. In embracing a passive attitude toward freedom in which power is
viewed as a necessary evil, a conservative notion of freedom reduces politics
to the empty ritual of voting and is incapable of understanding freedom as a
form of collective, productive power that enables “a notion of political agency
and freedom that affirms the equal opportunity of all to exercise political
power in order to participate in shaping the most important decisions affecting
their lives.”[24] This
merging of the market-based understanding of freedom as the freedom to consume
and the conservative-based view of freedom as a restriction from all
constraints refuses to recognize that the conditions for substantive freedom do
not lie in personal and political rights alone; on the contrary, real choices
and freedom include the individual and collective ability to actively intervene
in and shape both the nature of politics and the myriad forces bearing down on
everyday life—a notion of freedom that can only be viable when social rights and
economic resources are available to individuals. Of course, this notion of
freedom and choice is often dismissed either as a vestige of socialism or
simply drowned out in a culture that collapses all social considerations and
notions of solidarity into the often cruel and swindle-based discourse of
instant gratification and individual gain. Under such conditions, democracy is
managed through the empty ritual of elections; citizens are largely rendered
passive observers as a result of giving undue influence to corporate power in
shaping all of the essential elements of political governance and decision
making; and manufactured appeals to fear and personal safety legitimate both
the suspension of civil liberties and the expanding powers of an imperial presidency
and the policing functions of a militaristic state.
I believe that the formative culture necessary to create modes of
education, thought, dialogue, critique, and critical agency—the necessary
conditions of any aspiring democracy—is largely destroyed through the
pacification of intellectuals and the elimination of public spheres capable of
creating such a culture. Elements of a depoliticizing and commodifying culture
become clear in the shameless propaganda produced by the so-called “embedded”
journalists, while a corporate-dominated popular culture largely operates
through multiple technologies, screen cultures, and video games that trade
endlessly in images of violence, spectacles of consumption, and stultifying
modes of (il)literacy. Funded by right-wing ideological, corporate, and
militaristic interests, an army of anti-public intellectuals groomed in
right-wing think tanks and foundations, such as the American Enterprise
Institute and Manhattan Institute, dominate the traditional media, police the
universities for any vestige of critical thought and dissent, and endlessly
spread their message of privatization, deregulation, and commercialization,
exercising a powerful influence in the dismantling of all public spheres not
dominated by private and commodifying interests. These “experts in
legitimation,” to use Antonio Gramsci’s prescient phrase, peddle civic ignorance
just as they renounce any vestige of public accountability for big business,
giant media conglomerates, and financial mega corporations. How else to explain
that nearly twenty percent of the American people believe incorrectly that
Obama is a Muslim!
Under the new authoritarianism, the corporate state and the
punishing state merge as economics drives politics, and repression is
increasingly used to contain all those individuals and groups caught in an
expanding web of destabilizing inequality and powerlessness that touches
everything from the need for basic health care, food, and shelter to the
promise of a decent education. As the social state is hollowed out under
pressure from free-market advocates, right-wing politicians, and conservative
ideologues, the United
States Silicon Valley ’s technologies to flourish is called the
U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”[25] Freedom in this discourse
is inextricably wedded to state and military violence and is a far cry from any
semblance of a claim to democracy.
Zombie Politicas and the Culture
of Cruelty
Another characteristic of an emerging authoritarianism in the
United States is the correlation between the growing atomization of the
individual and the rise of a culture of cruelty, a type of zombie politics in
which the living dead engage in forms of rapacious behavior that destroy almost
every facet of a substantive democratic polity. There is a mode of terror
rooted in a neoliberal market-driven society that numbs many people just as it
wipes out the creative faculties of imagination, memory, and critical thought.
Under a regime of privatized utopias, hyper-individualism, and ego-centered
values, human beings slip into a kind of ethical somnolence, indifferent to the
plight and suffering of others. Though writing in a different context, the late
Frankfurt School
In a system that reduces life to a chain of disconnected reactions
to shock, personal communication tends to lose all meaning....The individual
under terrorist conditions is never alone and always alone. He becomes numb and
rigid not only in relation to his neighbor but also in relation to himself;
fear robs him of the power of spontaneous emotional or mental reaction.
Thinking becomes a stupid crime; it endangers his life. The inevitable
consequence is that stupidity spreads as a contagious disease among the
terrorized population. Human beings live in a state of stupor, in a moral coma.[26]
Implicit in Lowenthal’s commentary is the assumption that as
democracy becomes a fiction, the moral mechanisms of language, meaning, and
ethics collapse, and a cruel indifference takes over diverse modes of
communication and exchange, often as a register of the current paucity of
democratic values, identities, and social relations. Surely, this is obvious today
as all vestiges of the social compact, social responsibility, and modes of
solidarity give way to a form of Social Darwinism with its emphasis on
ruthlessness, cruelty, war, violence, hyper modes of masculinity, and a disdain
for those considered weak, dependent, alien, or economically unproductive. A
poverty of civic ideals is matched not only by a poverty of critical agency but
also by the disappearance among the public of the importance of moral and
social responsibilities. As public life is commercialized and commodified, the
pathology of individual entitlement and narcissism erodes those public spaces
in which the conditions for conscience, decency, self-respect, and dignity take
root. The delusion of endless growth coupled with an “obsession with wealth
creation, the cult of privatization [and] uncritical admiration for unfettered
markets, and disdain for the public sector” has produced a culture that seems
“consumed by locusts” in “an age of pygmies.”[27]
This culture of cruelty is especially evident in the hardships and
deprivations now visited upon many young people in the United States New Orleans South
Carolina
Lowenthal’s argument that in an authoritarian society “stupidity
spreads as a contagious disease” is evident in a statement made by Michele
Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman, who recently argued that “Americans
should purchase [health] insurance with their own tax-free money.”[34] That 43 million Americans
are without health insurance because they cannot afford it seems lost on
Bachmann, whose comments suggest that these uninsured individuals, families,
unemployed workers, and children are not simply a disposable surplus but
actually invisible and therefore unworthy of any acknowledgment.
The regressive politics and moral stupidity are also evident in
the emergence of right-wing extremists now taking over the Republican Party.
This new and aggressive political formation calls for decoupling market-driven
financial institutions from any vestige of political and governmental
constraint, celebrates emotion over reason, treats critical intelligence as a
toxin possessed largely by elites, wraps its sophomoric misrepresentations in
an air of beyond-interrogation “we’re just folks” insularity, and calls for the
restoration of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America.[35] Such calls embody elements
of a racial panic that are evident in all authoritarian movements and have
increasingly become a defining feature of a Republican Party that has sided
with far-right-wing thugs and goon squads intent on disrupting any vestige of
the democratic process. This emerging authoritarian element in American
political culture is embodied in the wildly popular media presence of Rush
Limbaugh and Glenn Beck—right-wing extremists who share a contempt for reason
and believe in organizing politics on the model of war, unconditional
surrender, personal insults, hyper-masculine spectacles, and the complete
destruction of one’s opponent.
The culture of cruelty, violence, and slander was on full display
as the Obama administration successfully passed a weak version of health care
reform in 2010. Stoked by a Republican Party that has either looked away or in
some cases supported the coded language of racism and violence, it was no
surprise that there was barely a peep out of Republican Party leaders when
racial and homophobic slurs were hurled by Tea Party demonstrators at civil rights
legend Jon Lewis and openly gay Barney Frank, both firm supporters of the Obama
health policies. Even worse is the nod to trigger-happy right-wing advocates of
violence that conservatives such as Sarah Palin have suggested in their
response to the passage of the health care bill. For instance, Frank Rich
argues that
this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to
egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery
by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman
to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti- abortion Democrat. It’s
this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black
representative from Missouri
There is more at work here than the usual right-wing promotion of
bigotry and ignorance; there is the use of violent rhetoric and imagery that
mimics the discourse of terrorism reminiscent of Oklahoma bomber Timothy
McVeigh, dangerous right-wing militia groups, and other American-style
fascists. As Chris Hedges insists, “The language of violence always presages
violence”[37] and fuels an
authoritarianism that feeds on such excesses and the moral coma that
accompanies the inability of a society to both question itself and imagine an
alternative democratic order. How else can one read the “homicidal rhetoric”
that is growing in America
Unfortunately, the problems now facing the United States
NOTES
2. I have taken this term from Stephen
Jones,ed.,The Dead That Walk (Berkeley ,CA
3. Editorial, “Wall
Street Casino,” The New York Times (April 28, 2010), p. A24.
4. Some of the ideas come from Richard
Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds., Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life
for the Undead (Chicago Open Court
5. Arun Gupta, “Party of No: How
Republicans and the Right Have Tried to Thwart All Social Progress,”
Truthout.org (May 21, 2010).
6. Jonathan J. Cooper, “We’re All Arizonians Now,” Huffington Post (May 15, 2010).
7. See the excellent commentary on this
issue by Frank Rich, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care,” The New York Times
(March 28, 2010), p. WK10. See also Justine Sharrock, “The Oath Keepers:
The Militant and Armed Side of the Tea Party Movement,” AlterNet (March 6,
2010); and Mark Potok, “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism,”
Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report 137 (Spring 2010).
9. James Traub, “The Way We Live Now: Weimar Whiners,” The New York Times
Magazine ( June 1, 2003). For a commentary on such intellectuals, see Tony
Judt, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” The London
11. This case for an American version of
authoritarianism was updated and made more visible in a number of interesting
books and articles. See, for instance, Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America
(New York : Free Press, 2006); Henry A. Giroux,
Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (Boulder , CO : Paradigm Publishers,
2008); and Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the
Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton :
Princeton University Press, 2008).
12. Cited in Paul Bigioni, “Fascism
Then, Fascism Now,” Toronto
13. See Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism:
The New Face of Power in America
15. Umberto Eco, “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways New York
17. Along similar theoretical lines, see
Stephen Lendman, “A Look Back and Ahead: Police State in America,”
CounterPunch (December 17, 2007). For an excellent analysis that points to the
creeping power of the nation- al security state on American universities, see
David Price, “Silent Coup: How the CIA Is Welcoming Itself Back onto American
University Campuses,” CounterPunch 17:3 (January 13–31, 2010), pp. 1–5.
18. David Harvey,“Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition,” Monthly
Review (December15, 2009).
19. Chris Hedges, “Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction,” TruthDig
(January 24, 2010).
20. See Janine R. Wedel, Shadow Elite: How
the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free
Market (New York
21. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living
in an Age of Uncertainty (London
24. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Nature and
Value of Equity,” Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political
Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 124–142.
25. ThomasL.Friedman,“A Manifesto for the Fast World,”The New York Times Magazine
(March 28, 1999).
26. Leo Lowenthal, “Atomization of Man,”
False Prophets: Studies in Authoritarianism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Books, 1987), pp. 182–183.
28. I have taken up this issue in my Youth
in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (New York America
29. Evelyn Pringle, “Why Are We Drugging
Our Kids?,” Truthout (December 14, 2009), http://www.alternet.org/story/144538.
31. See Nicholas Confessore, “New York
32. Jake Tapper, “Political Punch: Power, Pop, and Probings from ABC News Senior
White House Correspondent—Duncan: Katrina Was the ‘Best Thing’ for New Orleans
School System,” ABC News.com ( January 29, 2010).
33. Nathaniel Cary, “GOP Hopeful: People on Public Assistance ‘Like Stray Animals,’”
Truthout ( January 23, 2010).
35. See, for example, Patrick J. Buchanan,
“Traditional
Americans Are Losing Their Nation,” WorldNetDaily (January 24, 2010).
37. Chris Hedges, “Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’?,” TruthDig (March 29,
2010).
This article may not be published or
reproduced without specific permission from Peter Lang Publishing.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV
Network Chair Professorship at McMaster
University
Related Stories
By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
By Henry A Giroux, Truthout
America 's Surveillance Net - TheNation
Jonathan Schell - TheNation
June 19, 2013 | This article appeared in the July 8-15, 2013 edition of The Nation.
June 19, 2013 | This article appeared in the July 8-15, 2013 edition of The Nation.
There is a revolution afoot—one that is being carried out by the government against the fundamental law of the land.
http://www.thenation.com/article/174889/americas-surveillance-net#axzz2XBLcJHyq
A school of fish swims peacefully in the ocean. Out of sight, a net is spread beneath it. At the edges of the net is a circle of fishing boats. Suddenly, the fishermen yank up the edges of the net, and in an instant the calm, open ocean becomes a boiling caldron, an exitless, rapidly shrinking prison in which the fish thrash in vain for freedom and life.
Increasingly, the American people are like this school of fish in the moments before the net is pulled up. The net in question is of course the Internet and associated instruments of data collection, and the fishermen are corporations and the government. That is, to use the more common metaphor, we have come to live alongside the machinery of a turnkey tyranny. As we now know, thanks to the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency has been secretly ordering Verizon to sweep up and hand over all the metadata from the phone calls of millions of its customers: phone numbers, duration of calls, routing information and sometimes the location of the callers. Thanks to Snowden, we also know that unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
The first thing to note about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist. They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state. Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others. This other self has become de facto public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching corporations, which use it for commercial purposes. Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex.
Surveillance of people on this scale turns basic liberties—above all the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against unreasonable search and seizure—into a dead letter. Government officials, it is true, assure us that they will never pull the edges of the net tight. They tell us that although they could know everything about us, they won’t decide to. They’ll let the information sit unexamined in the electronic vaults. But history, whether of our country or others, teaches that only a fool would place faith in such assurances. What one president refrains from doing the next will do; what is left undone in peacetime is done when a crisis comes.
The executive branch offers a similar assurance about its claimed right to kill American and foreign citizens at its sole discretion. But to accept such assurances as the guarantee of basic liberties would be to throw away bedrock principles of our constitutional order. If there is any single political idea that deserves to be called quintessentially American, it is the principle that government power must be balanced and checked by other government power, which is why federal power is balanced by state power and is itself divided into three branches.
The officials—most notably President Obama—have assured us that this system is intact, that the surveillance programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government,” in Obama’s words. But the briefest examination of the record rebuts the claim. In this matter, the interactions of the three branches are a cause not for reassurance but for deeper alarm. It’s not that the legislative and judicial branches are not involved; it’s that each, in its own way, has abandoned its appointed constitutional role.
The
story arguably begins with George W.
Bush’s end run around the legal system after the terrorist attacks of 2001,
when, in complete disregard of the law, he initiated warrantless domestic
surveillance by the NSA. So clearly illegal and extreme was this program that
high-ranking officials of his administration, including James Comey, deputy
attorney general, and Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, threatened to
resign. Bush backed off some of the measures, and the confrontation did not
become known until much later.
What
happened then? Did Congress check
this executive usurpation? Did it castigate Bush, forbid the crimes, hold his
officials accountable? It did not. It adopted the worst features of the Bush
program as law, in the Protect America Act of 2007 and the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008; it also immunized from legal repercussions
corporations that had secretly knuckled under to Bush’s wrongdoing. Far from
correcting the abuses, Congress institutionalized them. At the same time, it
supported the executive branch’s cloak of secrecy over those abuses and the
classification of the legal opinions of the FISA court, whose rulings have
given legal protection to the new surveillance programs. The Obama
administration’s legal opinions on the practices are also classified.
As for
the judicial branch, it happens that
in 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that the sort of metadata collected from
Verizon is not covered by the Fourth Amendment. (In fairness, there is no sign
that the Court anticipated or meant to approve the sort of indiscriminate
dragnet of metadata now under way. Thus, a lawsuit recently brought by the ACLU
to stop this has a chance of succeeding.) The FISA court almost never refuses
government requests. James Bamford, an expert on NSA surveillance, has
characterized this institution as “a super hush-hush surveillance court that is
virtually impotent.”
Our system of checks and balances
has gone into reverse. The three branches, far from checking one another’s power or protecting
the rights of Americans, entered one after another into collusion to violate
them, even to the extent of immunizing the wrongdoers. Balanced, checked power
has become fused power—exactly what the founders of this country feared above
all else. The political parties have been no more useful as checks than the
branches of government; their leaderships stand together protecting the abuses,
though individual senators, including Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, have proposed
sensible reforms.
Finally,
even elections have proven ineffective:
the voters chose a president who taught constitutional law running on a
platform of stopping civil liberties abuses; but he has become the author of
new abuses. Even now, his soothing demeanor and reputation for liberalism
(“Change we can believe in”) confuses and thwarts those who otherwise would be
reacting with anger.
What should Americans do when all official channels are
unresponsive or dysfunctional? Are we, as people used to say, in a
revolutionary situation? Shall we man the barricades? The situation is a little
more peculiar than that. There is a
revolution afoot, but it is not one in the streets; it is one that is being
carried out by the government against the fundamental law of the land. That
this insurrection against the
constitutional order by officials sworn to uphold it includes legal opinions
and legislation only makes it the more radical and dangerous. In other words,
the government is in stealthy insurrection against the letter and the spirit of
the law.
What’s
needed is counterrevolution—an American restoration, returning to and reaffirming
the principles on which the Republic was founded. Edward Snowden, for one, knew
what to do. He saw that when government as a whole goes rogue, the only force
with a chance of bringing it back into line is the public. He has helped make this possible by letting the public
know the abuses that are being carried out in its name. Civil disobedients are
of two kinds: those inspired by universal principles, and those inspired by
national traditions. Each has its strengths. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is the first kind; Snowden, the second.
Asked why he had done what he did, Snowden
replied, “I am neither traitor nor hero. I am an American.” He based his
actions on the finest traditions of this country, which its current leaders
have abandoned but which, he hopes, the current generation of Americans still
share. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll find out whether he was right. Jonathan Schell
Read more: America's Surveillance Net | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/174889/americas-surveillance-net#ixzz2YBGEu6yK
 |
|
Main Core: A List
Of Millions Of Americans That Will Be Subject To Detention During Martial Law
By Michael Snyder June 15, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Are you on the list? Are you one of the millions of Americans that have been designated a threat to national security by the The following is how Wikipedia describes Main Core… Main Core is the code name of a database maintained since the 1980s by the federal government of the It was Christopher Ketchum of Radar Magazine that first reported on the existence of Main Core. At the time, the shocking information that he revealed did not get that much attention. That is quite a shame, because it should have sent shockwaves across the nation… According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention. Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a “national emergency.” Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a “natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,” while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.” According to one news report, even “national opposition to So if that list contained 8 million names all the way back in 2008, how big might it be today? That is a very frightening thing to think about. Later on in 2008, Tim Shorrock of Salon.com also reported on Main Core… Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as “Main Core,” the database reportedly collects and stores — without warrants or court orders — the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security. According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as “an emergency internal security database system” designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. So why didn’t this information get more attention at the time? Well, if Obama had lost the 2008 election it might have. But Obama won in 2008 and the liberal media assumed that he would end many of the abuses that were happening under Bush. Of course that has not happened at all. In fact, Obama has steadily moved the police state agenda ahead aggressively. Edward Snowden has just made that abundantly clear to the entire world. After 2008, it is unclear exactly what happened to Main Core. Did it expand, change names, merge with other programs or get superseded by a new program? It appears extremely unlikely that it simply faded away. In light of what we have just learned about NSA snooping, someone should ask our politicians some very hard questions about Main Core. According toChristopher Ketchum, the exact kind of NSA snooping that Edward Snowden has just described was being used to feed data into the Main Core database… A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as “warrantless wiretapping.” In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor “huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records.” Authorities employ “sophisticated software programs” to sift through the data, searching for “suspicious patterns.” In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it’s notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. “The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed,” the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. “Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.” The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database. This stuff is absolutely chilling. And there have been hints that such a list still exists today. For example, the testimony of an anonymous government insider that was recently posted on shtfplan.com alluded to such a list… “We know all this already,” I stated. He looked at me, giving me a look like I’ve never seen, and actually pushed his finger into my chest. “You don’t know jack,” he said, “this is bigger than you can imagine, bigger than anyone can imagine. This administration is collecting names of sources, whistle blowers and their families, names of media sources and everybody they talk to and have talked to, and they already have a huge list. If you’re not working for MSNBC or CNN, you’re probably on that list. If you are a website owner with a brisk readership and a conservative bent, you’re on that list. It’s a political dissident list, not an enemy threat list,” he stated. What in the world is happening to What in the world are we turning into? As I mentioned in a previous article, the NSA gathers 2.1 million gigabytes of data on all of us every single hour. The NSA is currently constructing a 2 billion dollar data center out in If you are disturbed by all of this, now is the time to stand up and say something. If this crisis blows over and people forget about all of this stuff again, the Big Brother surveillance grid that is being constructed all around us will just continue to grow and continue to become even more oppressive. This article was originally published at American Dream |
END
FASCISM NEWSLETTER #2
No comments:
Post a Comment