My letter to Joe Kishore of the Socialist Equality Party and World Socialist Web Site about his article on the Cheney-Obama "debate."
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/pers-m22.shtml
The Obama-Cheney “debate” and the threat of dictatorship in America
22 May 2009 by Joe Kishore
Dear Joe,
You've written a fine article on the Cheney-Bush debate, in which the shadow government selects its spokesperson to warn the figurehead-in-chief that his continued employment is dependent upon his picking up his grades. You correctly speak of the contradictions faced by a "liberal" president whose goals dovetail with his antagonist's and so who cannot expose their shared corruption, especially regarding the "war on terror" that underlies their surface differences about whether it is best to manage the volk from a constitutional or totalitarian posture. Unfortunately for your aims, you and WSWS share with Cheney and Obama at least publicly the premise that 9/11 was an attack on America by Arab terrorists, an assumption that cripples Obama vs. Cheney and reduces most criticism of Cheney to the irresoluble sphere of whether or not he and colleagues are "overreacting" in their efforts to keep America safe. Not surprisingly therefore, Cheney's approval ratings soared following his defend-America-at-all-costs speech from 20% to 38% as the American public is being persuaded to embrace totalitarianism openly in the service of national security. From my perspective, when I am not wrenched with angst and keeping a more ironic public face, it is amusing to see this battle about "democracy" and the "war on terror" waged with one if not both hands tied behind your back.
The abstract debate about torture comes to an abrupt end when one understands the facts. The three principal purposes of the Cheney torture regimen were to terrorize the people resisting a colonial occupation into submission, to learn who else belonged to the resistance and their locations, and to extract false confessions linking 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. This last achievement was then coupled with a concerted effort by Cheney & friends to concoct a false scenario that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to justify a "necessary" war of U.S. self-defense lest Saddam provide Osama with nuclear or biological weapons.
The abstract debate about "overreaction" also comes to an abrupt end when one understands that 9/11 was in its entirety a very complex USGIC (USG intelligence community) operation. I am not suggesting that you or WSWS become 9/11 truthers because you would be saddled with a true but (largely) unbelievable proposition. The average man, even when unbiased, is capable of effective understanding only of political propositions that are simple, clear, direct, immediate, atheoretical and visceral. A paradigm of such a proposition is, "Look, Mary's house is on fire and she's trapped on the second floor. Let's save her!" And, alas, even that situation leaves much room for debate about how to save her and who should be in charge.
When it comes to something like domestic covert operations, even true propositions move beyond belief. I recently had an acquaintance, a federal judge, who read my essay "Pardon our Dust." http://911review.com/articles/green/PardonOurDust.html He told me it was unpersuasive. Not only had it failed to explain how the explosives were brought into the Towers, who could do it, and at such risk, and why they were never detected either before or afterwards, but even if there were unexploded nano-thermite, it would be a false inference akin to Clinton's error in blowing up the pharmaceutical company in Sudan just because a chemical reportedly found in the ground was associated with munitions manufacturing. I replied that in the case of the chemical in the ground, a false inference occurred because the trace chemical admitted perfectly innocent alternative explanations which were in fact the case, but in the case of the Towers, massive evidence indicated that thermite had to have been used, and then at least ten tons of unexploded DOD-sourced nano-thermite was found in the dust, and nano-thermite had no other usage but explosive pyrotechnics. He was taken aback, stumbled, until I said, "You find the idea entirely incomprehensible," to which he said, "Yes, that's very perceptive." He said there were still 19 missing pieces in the story and I agreed, but most of them had been found by the people who do this kind of research and since he did not have those pieces -- including a picture of how the state actually works -- even if he accepted as true the proposition that the Towers were taken down by controlled demolition he could not begin to understand it. And this very intelligent fellow is more open-minded than most.
So, struggle as best you can with one or more hands tied behind your back but do try as best you can to untie them as circumstances permit. It's not for the sake of mere rhetorical flourish that the sane students of covert ops feel that until the American people come to terms with such matters there is no hope for democratic process and we can only root for the less oppressive branch of the ruling class even while being good local activists. The obedience to authority and trust in its basic goodness -- or at least trust in the existence of limits on its dispositions towards predatory evil -- are at odds with the critical thinking necessary to mobilize the masses. But we must keep on trying.
You wrote, "The institutions of American democracy have already reached a very advanced level of decay." Indeed they have, but they have for quite some time, the current difference being that the propadeutic assassination of JFK, Jr. to silence the only media outlet -- George Magazine -- that threatened to expose its planned covert ops sequelae, followed by the theft of the 2000 election in order to implement 9/11, has released the genie from the bottle and empowered it to fulfill its own wishes. Both sides of the ruling class were full active participants in 9/11 but the neocons betrayed a common understanding of how it was to be used. I recommend that you web-search a 69 minute interview by Alex Jones with Aaron Russo and listen to the entire interview, holding your nose whenever Alex, the useful idiot, opines that the international elite are socialists. Just listen to Russo on Nick Rockefeller -- who tried to recruit Russo to the Council on Foreign Relations -- on three topics: women's liberation, the elite's goals (figurative, and literal if they can get away with it) for the volk, and 9/11. I subsequently bought Russo's DVD "From Freedom to Fascism" on the Federal Reserve just to determine for myself whether he was on the level and to be trusted and have no doubt that he is.
Just as Trotsky opined that Stalin did not creature the system, but the system created Stalin, the National Security State was prepared in a time of peace and prosperity but has created a fully malevolent genie. It has now been honed and empowered for a time of imperial war and domestic poverty that will require brutal oppression of any effective political resistance. It was first used domestically in a major operation over the issue of war (JFK's assassination), and for those who tracked in concrete ways its ruthless lawlessness, the death of democracy was, and remains, a horrific suppurating wound. My friend Vince Salandria said it over 40 years ago, as did his friend Jim Garrison, from the last of whose three-part interview with Playboy (December 1967) I quote below. You will note that even Garrison cannot quite come to terms with his discovery -- call it a contradiction if you will. He at first states who the actual government is, but in his final paragraph vows to bring to justice the individuals who killed Kennedy as though the rest of the bourgeois state had the power and integrity to do so. Garrison paid dearly for his sins, and at the end of his life regretted his choice to pursue the killers of Kennedy because the price he paid had utterly failed to galvanize the American people to effective political action. Hopefully, we can do better.
PLAYBOY: Many of the professional critics of the Warren Commission appear to be prompted by political motives: Those on the left are anxious to prove Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy within the establishment; and those on the right are eager to prove the assassination was an act of "the international Communist conspiracy." Where would you place yourself on the political spectrum --- right, left of center?
GARRISON: That's a question I've asked myself frequently, especially since this investigation started and I found myself in an incongruous and disillusioning battle with agencies of my own Government. I can't just sit down and add up my political beliefs like a mathematical sum, but I think, in balance, I'd turn up somewhere around the middle.
Over the years, I guess I've developed a somewhat conservative attitude --- in the traditional libertarian sense of conservatism, as opposed to the thumbscrew-and-rack conservatism of the paramilitary right --- particularly in regard to the importance of the individual as opposed to the state and the individual's own responsibilities to humanity. I don't think I've ever tried to formulate this into a coherent political philosophy, but at the root of my concern is the conviction that a human being is not a digit; he's not a digit in regard to the state and he's not a digit in the sense that he can ignore his fellow men and his obligations to society.
I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I've always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers. I'm concerned about all of this because it isn't a German phenomenon; it's a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man.
What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it's based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we've built since 1945, the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.
In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn't the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.
I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
PLAYBOY: Considering all the criticism that has come your way, would you still launch your investigation into the assassination if you had it to do over again?
GARRISON: As long as the men who shot John Kennedy to death in Dallas are walking the streets of America, I will continue this investigation. I have no regrets about initiating it and I have no regrets about carrying it on to its conclusion. If it takes me 30 years to nail every one of the assassins, then I will continue this investigation for 30 years. I owe that not only to Jack Kennedy but to my country.
Best wishes,
Michael Green
