Hi Pathless,
I wish I shared your optimism. The trouble with gauging opinion 'on the street' is that by and large the people you talk to will hold pretty similar views to yourself. Here in the UK in 1992 no-one 'on the street' doubted for a second that the Conservative party would be kicked from power, it did not happen, they won.
You can argue over the nature of what an Executive Order is or is not. But the nature of the powers granted in the recent EO's is troublesome. I have become convinced in recent months that 9/11 was no terrorist attack. I did not want to believe it. But I was left with no option after weighing all the evidence. As I have dug deeper and deeper I have no doubt that 9/11 is the American equivalent to the Riechstag Fire. I am currently working on an extended essay on this which I will post in due course. But for now I make this point, how emboldened, how above the law does getting away with such a crime make somebody? If you can pull off 9/11 under the eyes of your own people and get away with it you feel like you can do anything. This is the worry. Bush himself may not be the sharpest tool in the box but he does not act alone, he is intimately aware of the truth but his role is the figurehead, not the captain nor the navigator. I hope I am reading too much into all I have been reading but to be blunt the people behind this have a long history and its not a pretty one. This most recent campaign is their boldest yet and may mark a turn point where they begin to openly reveal their totalitarian ideology. They are fed up with the whinging and have open contempt for those they have led a fools march and Only time will tell what their next move is.
Tao
Hi Tao,
Certainly I continue to mull all of this over. I think recently I've said that I indulge in a bit of wilfull naivite. The truth is that the widespread corruption in our government and the shallowness of many people's daily lives depresses me to no end, and that in order to deal with that, I choose now to laugh mercilessly at much of the insanity that passes for politics.
Look, the so-called
"Executive Order" issued on July 17th is nearly unintelligible in its self-reference and incestual humping of previous arrogant EO's. The clearest message I get from it is one of a spoiled patriarchal fool puffing up his chest and cranking out another document of legalise in order to impress to
someone (god knows who--the American public?? Naw, they don't tend to read Executive Orders) that Daddy Knows Best and he will take Any Means Necessary to continue to wage war.
Yet that clearly is not what is going to happen. Unless I am missing something (I may be), the
ONLY way Bush could act on these EO's is by declaring a state of emergency. The only way he is going to be able to pull that one off is by exploiting another terrorist event of 9/11 magnitude--perhaps larger. In Paul Craig Roberts' article, he makes an effort to convince his audience that an attack or series of attacks may be in the works--that power-drunk fanatics in secret little cubby holes of Dark American Government Agencies may be at work as we
sleep to stage a horrific
Reichstag Fire type event. False flag operations, he calls them. The grubby maneuverings he points to
are indeed frightening:
[SIZE=-1]Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's (sic) going to have a very different view of this war."[/SIZE]
And la dee da da, what do we have? Of course, more fear. Fear paralyzes. It makes you piss your pants and hide in a closet, or worse, behind Big Daddy--behind the President, perhaps.
I am grateful for Paul Craig Roberts, and would like to thank him for having the courage to bring these EO's to the attention of the proletariat and bourgeois alike. I am also happy and encouraged that he is one voice among
MANY who are taking opposition to the fascism that has seeped into my country of origin. He is doing his job well.
My job is a bit different, and part of my problem with focusing on "dire warnings" and other ultimate downers is that they drain my spirit and my capacity to love. If I do not critically assess them for what they are--information--then I can easily become overwhelmed by the doom and gloom that they portend, even as they warn against said doom and gloom. When I get overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, and despair, I may as well cash in. Seriously, I have been paralyzed for
EXTENDED PERIODS of time by buying into the hopelessness trip.
Again, all of this is not to undermine the value of someone like Roberts stepping forward with this information. I take great joy in the fact that this is a member of the Reagan Administration--not exactly the most progressive administration--who is coming forward, yelling (quite literally in this case),
"FIRE!!!!" These sort of dire warnings are valuable, and they must continue until the current trend of imperialism is reversed. Indeed, they must continue far beyond that. Our social concern and conscience should always be in a state of vigilance. It is actually very, very sad that it takes a very real threat of totalitarianism in "The Greatest Democracy in the World!" for people to think about giving a damn.
I would like to end this post with the most optimistic piece of Roberts' article, which points to the true state of our slothful democracy in the good ol' U S of A. Yes, we are an arrogant bunch of bastards over here. Yes, we've lost most of our claims to being human beings, having sacrificed community, love, and morality to our bloated individualist egos and the shiny, always new, always disposable, altar of materialism. And yes, our leadership is corrupt. Will we get off our asses and get to work re-envisioning Democracy? Even the polls seem to indicate some sort of hazy, self indulgent awakening. Perhaps the slumbering Idiot called America can wipe the sleep from Its eyes and drop its toys, seeing as the Beneficient Guardians of the Homeland have turned out to be real assholes.
Here's that quote:
Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's impeachment.
