General Discussion

Octafish

(55,745 posts) Fri Jun 21, 2013, 08:55 AM Jun 2013

PRISM and the Rise of a New Fascism (John Pilger)

We Are All Witnesses Now

by JOHN PILGER
CounterPunch WEEKEND EDITION JUNE 21-23, 2013

EXCERPT...

Snowden’s revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone is further evidence of a modern form of fascism. Having nurtured oldfashioned fascists around the world – from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia – the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as understanding the criminal abuse of technology.

Fred Branfman, who exposed the “secret” destruction of tiny Laos by the US air force in the 1960s and 1970s, provides an answer to those who still wonder how a liberal African-American president, a professor of constitutional law, can command such lawlessness. “Under Mr Obama, America is still far from being a classic police-state . . .” he wrote. “But no president has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future police state.” Why? Because Obama understands that his role is not to indulge those who voted for him but to expand “the most powerful institution in the history of the world, one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians, since 1962”.

In the new American cyberpower, only the revolving doors have changed. The director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, was an adviser to Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state in the Bush administration who lied that Saddam Hussein could attack the US with nuclear weapons. Cohen and Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt – they met in the ruins of Iraq – have co-authored a book, The New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the former CIA director Michael Hayden and the war criminals Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair. The authors make no mention of the Prism spying programme, revealed by Snowden, that provides the NSA with access to all of us who use Google.

Control and dominance are the two words that make sense of this. These are exercised by political, economic and military design, of which mass surveillance is an essential part, but also by insinuating propaganda into the public consciousness. This was Edward Bernays’s point. His two most successful PR campaigns convinced Americans that they should go to war in 1917 and persuaded women to smoke in public; cigarettes were “torches of freedom” that would hasten women’s liberation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/prism-and-the-rise-of-a-new-fascism/

4 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

PRISM and the Rise of a New Fascism (John Pilger) (Original Post) Octafish Jun 2013 OP

Good read. "Control and dominance are the two words that make sense of this" Catherina Jun 2013 #1

''Friendly Fascism'' is how Bertram Gross put it...in 1980. Octafish Jun 2013 #3

k&r Puzzledtraveller Jun 2013 #2

From Iraq, A Tragic Reminder to Prosecute the War Criminals (John Pilger) Octafish Jun 2013 #4

Catherina

(35,568 posts)

1. Good read. "Control and dominance are the two words that make sense of this"

Reply to Octafish (Original post)

Fri Jun 21, 2013, 09:18 AM

Jun 2013

The power of truth-tellers such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema and the corporate media. WikiLeaks is especially dangerous because it provides truthtellers with a means to get the truth out.

TOR is dangerous for the same reason, and the people involved with TOR are being harassed and even disappeared.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)

3. ''Friendly Fascism'' is how Bertram Gross put it...in 1980.

Reply to Catherina (Reply #1)

Fri Jun 21, 2013, 10:32 AM

Jun 2013

Before Pruneface Ronnie made his first deal with the Ayatollah, the great professor understood how money and power work, intertwined, to muzzle dissent:

Friendly Fascism - The New Face of Power in America

by Bertram Gross

EXCERPT...

Friendly fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called "free world."

[font color="red"]The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership.[/font color] This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase "friendly fascism" helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the friendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.

The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises-too often rendered false-of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It could lead toward a truer democracy-and for this reason is bitterly fought...

These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in "capitalist society's transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world". [font color="red"]Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality.[/font color] On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in "humankind's long history of resistance to unjustified privilege" and in spontaneous or organized "reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power...and inequality, injustice or coercion".

A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.

But events soon began to change perceptions.

CONTINUED...

link:http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Friendly_Fascism_BGross.html

Thank you for grokking, Catherina.

Puzzledtraveller

(5,937 posts)

2. k&r

Reply to Octafish (Original post)

Fri Jun 21, 2013, 09:20 AM

Jun 2013

Octafish

(55,745 posts)

4. From Iraq, A Tragic Reminder to Prosecute the War Criminals (John Pilger)

Reply to Puzzledtraveller (Reply #2)

Fri Jun 21, 2013, 10:39 AM

Jun 2013

by John Pilger
AntiWar.com May 28, 2013

EXCERPT...

Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War were the cause (of deformities in newborns). A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf War battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, “Each round fired by an A-10 Warhog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare.”

Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that “the epidemic speaks for itself”. The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the cancer programme of the World Health organisation (WHO) in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers (to the Iraq Sanctions Committee).” He told me, “We were specifically told (by the WHO) not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics.”

SNIP...

The “mess” left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse “presidential library and museum” and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.

Their “mess” is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs’ estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost both parents. “This means a horrific 14 per cent of Iraq’s population are orphans,” he wrote. “An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows”. Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

CONTINUED...

http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2013/05/27/from-iraq-a-tragic-reminder-to-prosecute-the-war-criminals/

PS: Thank you, Puzzledtraveller. Pilger is tops.

Reply to this discussion