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The US is now at a dangerous watershed moment struggling to save the tattered republic and our sacred constitutional rights. Unless we reverse the present course, our future may be the one Orwell foresaw when he wrote: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face....forever...." Like the totalitarian state of Oceania led by Big Brother in his best known book 1984, we're waging a permanent long war; no one is safe anymore - from our own government; we're all being illegally surveilled; anyone may be forcibly taken away, detained, tortured or murdered - all to make the world safe for a brave new world order ruled ruthlessly by capital that's called democracy. It's one without a political process because the Congress gave it up to a "Unitary Executive" with the power to abrogate the separation of powers doctrine, bypass the lawmakers and courts and act as he chooses to protect the nation's security or for whatever other reason he decides.We're now nearing a crisis because George Bush chose to invoke the wartime contingency "national security initiatives" established during the Reagan years that gives the President the power to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law. Bush did it by signing executive orders post 9/11 giving himself absolute power in times of whatever he alone decides is a "national emergency." If he assumes it, he'll become a dictator, accountable to no one, which he claims the right to do on his say alone. The only sensible recourse is for mass people action (like now ongoing for weeks in the streets of Mexico against authoritarian rule) to prevent our crossing the Rubicon and passing from a shaky republic to the tyranny of a full-blown national security police state and a future no one wants. It can happen here just as it did in ancient Rome and in Weimar Germany when the good people there lost their model democratic state. They allowed Hitler to steal it while they weren't paying attention. They bought into his demonic appeal to his divine mission as the nation's savior (sound familiar?) and his pretense to be protecting them from an outside threat that didn't exist. That history should remind us how fragile our sacred liberties are and how easily they're lost when tyrants are allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged. We're at a moment now when there's still time to act before it's too late to save a nation conceived in liberty that may soon no longer have it. Edmund Burke explained it long ago when he said: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." I'm sure today he'd remember the importance of women.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog address at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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