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How the U.S. Radicalized Conservatism
February 27, 2011: By Professor Lawrence Davidson
How the U.S. Radicalized Conservatism
If you have the stomach to listen to the likes of Glenn Beck or track the antics of people like Sarah Palin you might get the idea that today’s American political conservatives are a bunch of radicals and extremists. And, as we will see, you would be correct. But this is not how it always was. There was a time when conservatism was a more low key affair with a certain sense of pragmatism and even fair play. There is not much of this traditional conservatism left here in the U.S. except in certain intellectual circles. And, even there, one has the sense that it is hanging on by its fingernails.
If you want to learn more about this remnant you might take a look at the writings of Jim Kalb. Kalb is a leading thinker in the traditional conservative movement, a believing Catholic and, in his roll as a wordsmith, an afficionado of palindromes (a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards) to which we will refer at the end of this piece. Here is how Kalb spells out the meaning of his brand of conservatism,
A network of commonly accepted attitudes, beliefs and practices that evolves through strengthening of things that work and rejection of things that lead to conflict and failure. It therefore comprises a collection of habits that have proved useful in a huge variety of practical affairs, and a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive experience and thought.
In other words, this sort of vintage conservatism emphasizes what it regards as useful traditions over rapid innovations, and workable stability over precipitous change. There will always be change, of course, but in the world of traditional conservatives it should be slow and incremental, not “radical” or “revolutionary.” Whatever one might think of this traditional conservatism, it is pretty clear that modern American political conservatism has abandoned it for a multitude of extremist positions that play themselves out as publically expressed obsessions. Let us take a look at some examples of this “fall from grace.”
Part II – American Political Conservative Obsessions
1) The alleged right to possess unlimited numbers of deadly weapons. For modern political conservatives obsessed with the issue of gun laws, this “right” to be over armed supercedes the public’s need for a safe environment. Thus, compared to the age old tradition of public safety, the gun mania of today’s conservatives is absolutely revolutionary. It certainly has nothing to do with the Constitution’s “well ordered militia” and does not reflect “habits that have proved useful in a huge variety of practical affairs.” In fact, the only “habits” this obsession references are those displayed in fantasies that romanticize cowboys and military combat.
2) The battle against legal abortion. This modern political/social conservative cause also references fantasy rather than “a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive experience and thought.” This is because the outlawing of abortion does not eliminate abortion. It simply drives it into the back alleys creating an ever greater risk to desperate and mostly poor pregnant women. Thus, obsessed as they are with the rights of the unborn, these so-called conservatives care little for the much more traditional right of well-being for those who are “post womb.” In addition, unwanted births put stress on the traditional family structure, increase rates of delinquency and deepen poverty. Many of today’s political/social conservatives who seek to outlaw abortion with such religious zeal also sadly stand out as hypocrites. Anti-abortionists, supporting an allegedly “pro-life” cause, often act or support or turn a blind eye to their own violence that can and has reached the level of murder. Perhaps most frustrating of all, these same “right to lifers” often stand in opposition to a pragmatic answer to the abortion problem– that is the age-old and honored tradition of contraception.
3) An obsessive fixation with taxes. Those modern day political conservatives who have this particular mania seem to be incapable of understanding that it is a radical act to advocate the reduction of taxation to the point of social ruination. In order to spare their wallets and allegedly promote “individual freedom” they advocate, among other things, privatizing the public school systems, denial of services to indigent people, and elimination of state involvement in such issues as public health and environmental safety. Yet these state activities are real “commonly accepted attitudes, beliefs and practices.” To stand against them is not to be truly conservative, but rather to play the role of the stereotypical wild-eyed revolutionary. That is because, refusing to be taxed for these purposes means the recreation of conditions experienced in a place like Manchester England, circa 1830. That was a time when, as a matter of policy, no money was made available for government regulation of the “private sector.” Things got so bad in Manchester (and other industrial towns in England) at this time that there was mass illiteracy, pervasive malnutrition among the poor and, due to workplace pollution, the average laborer was dying at about the age of 16.
4) Paranoid concern with illegal immigration. Immigration, legal or illegal, constitutes a process that is one of the defining pillars of the American national character. Unless you are an American Indian you are an immigrant or the descendent of immigrants, a healthy percentage of whom were not “legal.” Therefore, to overreact to immigration is to undermine a traditional practice as old as the nation itself. In addition today’s political conservative approach to immigration is obviously not a “strengthening of things that work and rejection of things that lead to conflict and failure.” Immigration of whatever nature has always worked to strengthen the nation’s economy. Hysterical reactions to it reflect an attitude that only “leads to conflict and failure.”
Part III – The Problem of Radical Conservative Islamophobia
There is yet one more obsession of today’s political conservatives that stalks the American public landscape in a radically malignant way. It is the phenomenon of Islamophobia. For instance, consider the recent 38th annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), attended by a number of Republican presidential hopefuls. Journalists’ reports on the conference show that it was successfully used as a venue by such extremists as David Horowitz (“political Islam is a totalitarian movement that seeks to impose Islamic law on the entire world”), Pam Geller (the CPAC has been”corrupted and compromised by the Muslim Brotherhood”), and Robert Spencer (“Muslims are not able to be moderate–or they would be speaking against what is written in the Koran”). Through their foothold in the conference these radicals were able to influence the already paranoia prone modern American conservative mind. These Islamophobes are joined by some more recognizable, but no less radical, names such as Lt. General William G. Boykin (ret.) who at one time served as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. Boykin is a Christian fundamentalist obsessed with the fantasy of Muslim infiltration of the United States, particularly through the spread of Sharia Law. He has co-authored a book with former CIA Director R. James Woolsey Jr. entitled Shariah: The Threat to America. He has also urged withdrawing the protection of the First Amendment for Muslim Americans. Boykin enjoys much influence among the religious elements of today’s American conservative movement.
The growing number of conservative elected officials who preach Islamohobia is a clear indicator that this is a fantasy has entered the minds of Republican voters. A good example of the consequences is the present activities of Republican Representative Peter King. King is not from the deep south or somewhere in west Texas. He is from Long Island, N.Y. And, he is now Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, a position from which he spreads the same problematic message as Horowitz, Geller, Spencer and Boykin. King is planning hearings on the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” As presently planned, the hearings promise to be low on accurate knowledgeable and objective witnesses and high on those who have a clear record of Islamophobia.
Part IV – Conclusion
This then has been the fate of conservatism in America. What started out as a worldview valuing the wisdom supposedly to be had from tradition, has become a clearly paranoid mentality constantly imagining outside conspiracies and inside saboteurs aiming to destroy national values and the citizen’s personal rights. In addition, the range of remedies that today’s conservatives offer to fight against these “threats” are almost entirely extremist in nature. They range from the financial destruction of the U.S. federal government through severe reduction of taxes, to carte blanche accessibility to deadly force for gun fanatics, to the passing of draconian laws on abortion and immigration, to the McCarthyite persecutions of entire minority groups such as American Muslims. These proposed policies do not reflect any definition of traditional conservatism. They are certainly not examples of a “comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive experience and thought.” Instead they are destructive of the nation’s traditions and values and can only lead to disaster. Thus, out of respect for Jim Kalb’s comparatively sane definition of conservatism, I end with a palindromic warning to all those American pseudo conservatives out there, “Live Not On Evil.”
ldavidson@wcupa.edu www.tothepointanalyses.com
Yang over Yin? Multi-dimensional Thinking
By Jon Bourn
Memory forms character, it cannot be made into stigma.
As with the void of politics which holds character in place as the illusion of prominence only to stigmatize a meditative media as propaganda. Instead of learning from these characters, they are used to prevent awakening to them and the horrible results they have offered the working people. Middle class begins when you realize these illusions. Those who adapt their belief to them, travel into the void as far as they conceive now reigning in their stigma in monetary form.
In the book, “In Search of the Miraculous,” P. D. Ouspensky writes about G. I. Gurdjieff who explains how stigma and our instincts are understood. His example was to drop change out of his pocket as he walked while you walked behind him, and of a particular group, at least one would immediately pick it up to alert Gurdjieff that he has dropped something. In essence, this shows how what he referred to as Astrology has embedded our neurons.
In relation to Astrology, the stigmas of a political party are formed on this basis where memory consumes stigma at the behest of acceptable behavior promulgated as a fury to be held high. The mirror is plain to see for those who see through it, for what is considered elite in today’s standards is visibly involved, such as revolt occurring in Wisconsin and the Koch Industries who have a fascist influence which can be best described as monetary dominance. “If we cannot keep our power in place, then others must be punished by our power.”
What is strongly in power on the right is also working to allude on the left as when the Vanity Fair is promulgated on the Jon Stewart show downplaying truth for all to see. It seems that the implication of gambling is being painted on the working people as cover.
Character does not belong but as an art. Main-streamy media propagates art as stigma to hide character. It is greedy extremists and psychopaths that help to create the chaos that has resulted. It is the overwhelming urge for character where none truly exists. Glenn Beck is a perfect example. Character encompasses a macro-ethos of all our learnings stemming out of the cataclysms on earth which are hidden from us with overlaying blackboard stigmas.
This monstrous ideology of control is now stigmatized beyond anything reasonable for society to exist, and to implement unity in a perceived commerce. It’s basic functions do not operate and we are left with the pony show. It is only referred to as Noam Chomsky places the context in a cold code word stability when it is the ideology of gods painted in the sky perpetuating pathocracy and pathological disorder.
Upon realizing the relation to social mathematics, we may see both the disease, and the cure, while knowing of its nature. The truth is that we are all in the same sinking ship as David DeGraw writes in relation to the instituted divide and conquer strategy in place and the extremists effects that pervade official culture.
To avoid the final delusion of ideology, we must see its power for what it truly is. It is comparable to condition a priori to environment and the mythos generation, to make the stigma amber as a doctrine. No condition can exist without memory, the vast character of history that represents the wave of time from cataclysm to the next. A medicine man sees condition as environment, not a priori to form character, but to see where change truly exists.
Just as Gilad Atzmon reveals the naked condition by calling a spade a spade, monetary force alludes the essence of the religious Faust where reaction dwells upon the painted bunting.
It is up to us to see the dropping of change for what it is. A character where none exists. The essence of the psychopaths. The gods of war.
Wall Street versus the Poor and the Middle Class: Obama’s FY 2012 Budget Is A Tool Of Class War
By Paul Craig Roberts
Wall Street versus the Poor and the Middle Class: Obama’s FY 2012 Budget Is A Tool Of Class War
Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class.
Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets.
The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit. When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.
Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose–the enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.
The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.
China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.
The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.
With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.
The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared: “We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.” The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”
But what are “our” global security responsibilities? Where did they come from? Why would America be at peril if America stopped bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their internal affairs? The perils America faces are all self-created.
The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.” Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes, train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and by a newly created imaginary threat–”domestic extremists,” that is, war protesters and environmentalists.
The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any number of false flag events in order to make these threats seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall experiences, and football games.
So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes, American power goes.
For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.
Their answer is: make the people pay.
And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.
With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work. The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.
All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America.
With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.
American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.
The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.
These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to Israel).
There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.
Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs. They will put no breaks on the Federal Reserve’s need to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.
These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor: The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.
A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.
What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate “entitlements” with welfare. America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15% of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?
The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.
Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees. America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.
The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to Chine and India.
Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.
Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Paul Craig Roberts
The Reign of the Psychopaths
By Steven LaTulippe
One of the key traits of psychopathic personality disorder is a near-total absence of empathy. To the psychopath, other people exist as mere objects, to be used and discarded at the psychopath’s whim.
“I had to beat my mother with that baseball bat,” claims the typical psychopath. “She wouldn’t give me her pension check, and I needed it to buy more beer.”
Such statements are made without irony or sarcasm, since the psychopath literally cannot imagine that other human beings might have needs distinct from his own.
While watching events unfold these past weeks in Egypt, it became apparent to me that the United States is suffering from a foreign policy malady frighteningly analogous to psychopathic personality disorder.
On one hand, the history of the Mubarak regime is well-documented. For decades, the Egyptian people have lived in grinding poverty – on less than $2 per day, by some estimates – while Mubarak and his family have amassed vast fortunes. The Egyptian government routinely uses torture against its political opponents and denies the people even basic freedoms. Election fraud, censorship, and police brutality are realities of everyday Egyptian life.
That the Egyptian people have rebelled against such a regime should come as no surprise. And one would expect that the American government – itself the creation of a revolution against an authoritarian monarchy – would support their cause, at least morally if not materially.
Mubarak’s Thirty-Year Dictatorship
By Steve Lendman
Mubarak’s Thirty-Year Dictatorship
Throughout decades of brutal rule, Mubarak remained a steadfast US ally. As a result, Washington rewarded him generously. US administrations also ignored his crimes, corruption, and lawlessness, as late January released WikiLeaks cables reveal, showing Obama knew he kept power through ruthless state terror.
On January 15, 2009, ambassador Margaret Scobey called security force brutality “routine and pervasive,” saying:
“(P)olice using force to extract confessions from criminals (is) a daily event. (US informants) estimate there are literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone.”
Political activists and opponents are also targeted, Scobey adding:
“(T)he GOE (government of Egypt) is probably torturing (an April 6 activist) to scare other….members into abandoning their political activities.” It also referred to the “sexual molestation of a female ‘April 6 activist,’ ” and that another victim’s torture only stopped “when he began cooperating.”
Moreover, “standing orders from the Interior Ministry between 2000 and 2006 (instructed) the police to shoot, beat and humiliate judges in order to undermine judicial independence.”
Recognizing the Language of Tyranny
AP
February 6, 2011: By Chris Hedges
Recognizing the Language of Tyranny
Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes. The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.
This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately. But to the members of our dwindling middle class—as well as those in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and economic configuration—the powerful use phrases like the consent of the governed and democracy that help lull us into complacency. The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion. Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to. Those who consume and perpetuate the lies—including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party—abet our disempowerment. No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance.
The tactic of speaking in two languages is as old as empire itself. The ancient Greeks and the Romans did it. So did the Spanish conquistadors, the Ottomans, the French and later the British. Those who inhabit exploited zones on the peripheries of empire see and hear the truth. But the cries of those who are exploited are ignored or demonized. The rage they express does not resonate with those trapped in self-delusion, those who continue to trust in the ultimate goodness of empire. This is the truth articulated in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India.” These writers understood that empire is about violence and theft. And the longer the theft continues, the more brutal empire becomes. The tyranny empire imposes on others it finally imposes on itself. The predatory forces unleashed by empire consume the host. Look around you.
The narratives we hear are those fabricated for us by the state, Hollywood and the press. These narratives are taught in our schools, preached in our pulpits and celebrated in war documentaries such as “Restrepo.” These narratives humanize and ennoble the enforcers of empire. The government, the military, the police and our intelligence agents are lionized. These control groups, we are assured, are the guardians of our virtues and our protectors. They produce our heroes. And those who challenge this narrative—who denounce the lies—become the enemy.
Those who administer empire—elected officials, corporate managers, generals and the celebrity courtiers who disseminate the propaganda—become very wealthy. They make immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news, sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of spectacle and entertainment. They all pay homage, even in moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the illusions that keep us passive and amused. But as our society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power. The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with the overt language of force. It is hard to continue to live in a state of self-delusion once unemployment benefits run out, once the only job available comes without benefits or a living wage, once the future no longer conforms to the happy talk that saturates our airwaves. At this point rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can channel that rage inherits power. The manipulation of that rage has become the newest task of the corporate propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to defend core liberal values has left its members with nothing to contribute to the debate.
The Belgian King Leopold, promising to abolish slavery and usher the Congolese into the “modern” era, was permitted by his European allies to form the Congo Free State in 1885. It was touted as a humanitarian gesture, as was the Spanish conquest of the Americas, as was our own occupation of Iraq. Leopold organized a ruthless force of native and foreign overseers—not unlike our own mercenary armies—to loot the Congo of ivory and rubber. By the time the Belgian monarch was done, some 5 million to 8 million Congolese had been slaughtered. It was the largest act of genocide in the modern era until the Nazi Holocaust. Leopold, even in the midst of his rampage, was lionized in Europe for his virtue. He was loathed in the periphery—as we are in Iraq and Afghanistan—where the Congolese and others understood what he was about. But these voices, like the voices of those we oppress, were almost never heard.
The Nazis, for whom the Holocaust was as much a campaign of plunder as it was a campaign to rid Europe of Jews, had two methods for greeting arrivals at their four extermination camps. If the transports came from Western Europe, the savage Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards, with their whips, dogs and clubs, were kept out of sight. The wealthier European Jews were politely ushered into an elaborate ruse, including fake railway stations complete with flower beds, until once stripped naked they became incapable of resistance and could be herded in rows of five under whips into the gas chambers. The Nazis knew that those who had not been broken, those who possessed a belief in their own personal empowerment, would fight back. When the transports came from the east, where Jews had long lived in fear, tremendous poverty and terror, there was no need for such theatrics. Mothers, fathers, the elderly and children, accustomed to overt repression and the language of command and retribution, were brutally driven from the transports by sadistic guards. The object was to create mass hysteria. The fate of the two groups was the same. It was the tactic that differed.
All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs. It speaks to those who remain in a state of self-delusion in the comforting and familiar language of liberty, freedom, prosperity and electoral democracy. It speaks to the poor and the oppressed in the language of naked coercion. But, here too, all will end up in the same place.
Those trapped in the blighted inner cities that are our internal colonies or brutalized in our prison system, especially African-Americans, see what awaits us all. So do the inhabitants in southern West Virginia, where coal companies have turned hundreds of thousands of acres into uninhabitable and poisoned wastelands. Poverty, repression and despair in these peripheral parts of empire are as common as drug addiction and cancer. Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and Palestinians can also tell us who we are. They know that once self-delusion no longer works it is the iron fist that speaks. The solitary and courageous voices that rise up from these internal and external colonies of devastation are silenced or discredited by the courtiers who serve corporate power. And even those who do hear these voices of dissent often cannot handle the truth. They prefer the Potemkin facade. They recoil at the “negativity.” Reality, especially when you grasp what corporations are doing in the name of profit to the planet’s ecosystem, is terrifying.
All tyrannies come endowed with their own peculiarities. This makes it hard to say one form of totalitarianism is like another. There are always enough differences to make us unsure that history is repeating itself. The corporate state does not have a Politburo. It does not dress its Homeland Security agents in jackboots. There is no raving dictator. American democracy—like the garishly painted train station at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka—looks real even as the levers of power are in the hands of corporations. But there is one aspect the corporate state shares with despotic regimes and the collapsed empires that have plagued human history. It too communicates in two distinct languages, that is until it does not have to, at which point it will be too late.
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly columnist for Truthdig. His latest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”.
Copyright © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Chomsky: It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence
By Noam Chomsky
It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence
The nature of any regime it backs in the Arab world is secondary to control. Subjects are ignored until they break their chains.
‘The Arab world is on fire,” al-Jazeera reported last week, while throughout the region, western allies “are quickly losing their influence”. The shock wave was set in motion by the dramatic uprising in Tunisia that drove out a western-backed dictator, with reverberations especially in Egypt, where demonstrators overwhelmed a dictator’s brutal police.
Observers compared it to the toppling of Russian domains in 1989, but there are important differences. Crucially, no Mikhail Gorbachev exists among the great powers that support the Arab dictators. Rather, Washington and its allies keep to the well-established principle that democracy is acceptable only insofar as it conforms to strategic and economic objectives: fine in enemy territory (up to a point), but not in our backyard, please, unless properly tamed.
One 1989 comparison has some validity: Romania, where Washington maintained its support for Nicolae Ceausescu, the most vicious of the east European dictators, until the allegiance became untenable. Then Washington hailed his overthrow while the past was erased. That is a standard pattern: Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo-hwan, Suharto and many other useful gangsters. It may be under way in the case of Hosni Mubarak, along with routine efforts to try to ensure a successor regime will not veer far from the approved path. The current hope appears to be Mubarak loyalist General Omar Suleiman, just named Egypt’s vice-president. Suleiman, the longtime head of the intelligence services, is despised by the rebelling public almost as much as the dictator himself.
A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.
A familiar example is Saudi Arabia, the ideological centre of radical Islam (and of Islamic terror). Another in a long list is Zia ul-Haq, the most brutal of Pakistan’s dictators and President Reagan’s favorite, who carried out a programme of radical Islamisation (with Saudi funding).
“The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control,” says Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. “With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground.”
Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and generalises worldwide, to US home territory as well. In the event of unrest, tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to reasserting control.
The Positivity of Objectivity and the Time of Transition
By Bernhard Guenther
The Positivity of Objectivity and the Time of Transition
“Some people seem to mistake objectivity for negativity and wishful thinking for positivity. Most of what people see as negative or positive are their subjective projections and opinions that don’t really reflect the world as it is. Without Truth and Objectivity there won’t be a change for the “better”, nor a raise in consciousness, within and without.”
Every once in a while I get a message or comment on facebook from someone asking me why I have such a “negative” view of the world, referring to some of the posts and articles I put up on my wall. He or she then goes on telling me that I should “lighten” up, be more “positive”, focus on “love” and the good things life has to offer, because we create what we “see”. I usually respond back by asking, what is so negative about posting information that exposes the lies we’re being fed and told, be it about 9/11, Zionism, the genocide in Gaza, or the fact that many people in places of high power (political, corporate, religious or even in science and media) are psychopaths with no conscience who couldn’t care less about your or the earth’s well-being?
This is not being negative, but simply showing the situation as it is. Anyone who is willing to do a bit of reading and research without being attached to a conditioned world view can see this. Moreover, these topics and how they affect us and the world at large won’t go away by ignoring them or by focusing on more “pleasant” aspects of our reality. Actually by ignoring them, one is doing more harm to the world and feeding entropy as one is putting oneself in a subjective tunnel vision of wishful thinking instead of becoming more objectively aware and seeing the world as it IS, not as we like it or assume it to be. As I wrote in another article: a “shift in consciousness” and “awakening” implies a higher state of awareness, which means to become more aware of it all, which implies again to see the world and oneself more objectively, without blinders on. This doesn’t happen by itself, but requires sincere effort and work to separate truth from lies, within and without.
Israel, Thy Name is Arrogance
By Joharah Baker
It goes without saying there is many an Arab leader right now spending sleepless nights, tossing and turning in the fear that their turn is next. The turn of events in the last few weeks has been nothing short of fascinating. I have spent hours, teary-eyed and goose-bumped, marveling at the strength, determination and sheer courage of Tunisians and Egyptians, of the images of Jordanians and Algerians as they take to the streets demanding change. Nowhere has this been more amazing than in Egypt as millions of people insist that the 30-year old autocracy of Hosni Mubarak come to an end. Most predictions give Mubarak a few weeks, if not days left in power, even though the aging president himself insists he will continue what is left of his term. As the protests grow louder and Mubarak’s inevitable downfall grows closer, Tel Aviv’s worry lines get deeper by the minute.
For Israel, when the Mubarak regime falls, it will leave a gaping hole of uncertainty in terms of the new relationship the two countries will have to forge. Mubarak – Israel’s holy cow in the Arab world – has been one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest allies in the region, with the two meeting in closed quarters in Sharm Al Sheikh as recent as two weeks ago.
Amazing what a few days and a million people can change.
What Happened to Religious Freedom?
By Jon Bourn [Editor comment]
Over the last few days of reading about Egypt and their peaceful revolution, the report implies a great fear is upon the land, but it is not seen as part of thinking, it is more an institution for what is to be felt. What our Egyptian brothers and sisters may have finally accomplished was to realize that what they felt was not an institution, this was the true freedom of thinking that came about in their surrender, something that comes about by letting go of illusion.
The apropos notions of extremism must also be applied to all forms as expressed. There is no religion today that is not extreme in some form. There is no use in calling Muslims extremist if you leave out the opulent American or Israeli versions. Surrendering judgment is the beginning of a peaceful evolution.
It is true, religion today does not offer freedom to think and interpret, as this is the way to understanding judgment. The American conspiracy of a dichotomous church and state has always been a lie. A true religious sense would have preserved the livelihoods of the masses, and as we can see, this is now abound with suffering. If religious extremism is to be defined, this was accomplished long ago right here in America.
Religion can not be separated from living, they are one, and in what manner one lives. Whatever time is spent living reveals the religious nature of life. It serves no purpose to call yourself Christian, Muslim, or Jew, there is no clear differences to breathing, thinking, or consuming between individuals albeit some more than others.
In a process, often referred to by Noam Chomsky’s phraseology of “lame duck” notions, we are told that religion occurs in a church, a mosque, or a dome of the rock, and it is here that judgments are performed. The truth however is quite clear, this is where thinking is to be placed, a safe keeping for thought control, and the institution of feelings seems obviously detectable.
What is said outside as the lame duck metopic illusion is conclusively defined as theater, and propaganda. There is no real thought or participation, this is completely an act and attempt to thwart real thinking as instituted long ago. The result has been the disillusion that church or state even exist, as one entraps, and the other is a corporation.
Religious influence now dictates the world, all battling between themselves for a position on the chess board where life is a game of chance and self-enrichment. Religious freedom is being expressed both as a weapon of mass destruction, and from the heart of living. One is a lame duck fantasy that is being held in place, and one is the awakening and understanding of judgments.
Jericho Rendezvous 