The State of the Apocalypse

The State of the Apocalypse

The State of the Union address is a farce in the face of the destruction this administration has wreaked on the nation and world.

By Glen Ford, TomPaine.com. Posted January 23, 2007.

Annual State of the Union Addresses usually present themselves as opportunities for various constituent interests to measure the chief executive's national assessment against their own wish lists of priorities. The pomp and ceremony of the occasion, in which all three branches of government are arrayed in one setting, is designed to affirm the stability of foundational national institutions, and to assure the public that normalcy -- or at least a kind of predictable order -- reigns.

Such cannot be the case, however, in 2007 -- the year in which the accumulated crimes and contradictions of the Bush administration's six years of global and domestic rampage must be massively confronted by an alarmed people and their representatives -- most especially, by people of color and those who purport to represent their interests, but also by every human being whose ultimate allegiance is to the species.

The Bush cabal has from its very beginning waged war against the rule of law among nations and within U.S. boundaries, and against the very concept of a national social contract.

Although the Bushite ranks are now demoralized and their public support at low ebb, they have never abandoned their crusade for a new world order based on raw, unilateral U.S. military force, a planetary "market" to be constantly restructured according to the whims of unfettered, hyperactive capital. This global dream regime of theirs recognizes no boundaries, no zones of protection from the predations of aircraft carrier-buttressed capital, whose imperatives they consider synonymous with, not only the "national interest," but the intentions of the Almighty, himself.

In the face of total disarray in Iraq, which was to be the staging area for further conquest, the Bush men choose to escalate the conflict against the clear wishes of the American public, and to the horror of an international community that has come to perceive the U.S. as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" -- as Dr. Martin Luther King recognized in 1967. Relentless, with no other vision but that which leads to apocalypse, the administration persists in its preparations for wider war in the region, and opens yet another offensive centered in Somalia, the eastern flank of an American military buildup that stretches across the northern breadth of the African continent.

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http://www.alternet.org/story/47127/

Is America Becoming Fascist?

by ANIS SHIVANI
CounterPunch
October 26, 2002

Since mainstream left-liberal media do not seriously ask this question, the analysis of what has gone wrong and where we are heading has been mostly off-base. Investigation of the kinds of under-handed, criminal tactics fascist regimes undertake to legitimize their agenda and accelerate the rate of change in their favor is dismissed as indulging in "conspiracy theory." Liberals insist that this regime must be treated under the rules of "politics as usual." But this doesn't consider that one election has already been stolen, and that September's repeat of irregularities in Florida was a clear warning that more such thuggery is on the way. If the "f" word is uttered, liberals are quick to note certain obvious dissimilarities with previous variants of fascism and say that what is happening in America is not fascist. It took German justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin to make the comparison explicit (under present American rules of political discourse, she has been duly sacked from her cabinet post); but at the liberal New York Times or The Nation, American writers dare not speak the truth.

The blinkered assertion that we are immune to the virus ignores degrees of convergence and distinction based on the individual patient's history. The Times and other liberal voices have been obsessed over the last year with the rise of minority fascist parties in the Netherlands, France, and other European countries. They have questioned the tastefulness of new books and movies about Hitler, and again demonized such icons of Nazism as Leni Riefenstahl. Is this perhaps a displacement of American anxiety onto the safer European scene, liberal intellectuals here not wanting to confront the troubling truth? The pace of events in the last year has been almost as blindingly fast as it was after Hitler's Machtergreifung and the consolidation of fascist power in 1933. Speed stuns and silences.

Max Frankel, former editor of the Times, quotes from biographer Joachim Fest in his review of Speer: The Final Verdict: " . . .how easily, given appropriate conditions, people will allow themselves to be mobilized into violence, abandoning the humanitarian traditions they have built up over centuries to protect themselves from each other," and that a "primal being" such as Hitler "will always crop up again." Is Frankel really redirecting his anxiety about the primal being that has arisen in America? When Frankel says that "Speer far more than Hitler makes us realize how fragile these precautions are, and how the ground on which we all stand is always threatened," is this an oblique reference to the ground shifting from under us?

The proposed Iraqi adventure, which is only the first step in a more ambitious militarist agenda, has been opposed by the most conservative warmongers of past administrations. If the test of any theory is its predictive capacity, Bush's extreme risk-taking is better explained by the fascist model. Purely economic motives are a large part of the story, but there is a deeper derivation that exceeds such mundane rationales. Several of the apparent contradictions in Bush's governance make perfect sense if the fascist prism is applied, but not with the normal perspective.

To pose the question doesn't mean that this is a completed project; at any point, anything can happen to shift the course of history in a different direction. Yet after repeated and open corruption of the normal electoral process, several declarations of world war (including in three major addresses, and now the National Security Strategy document), adventurous and unprecedented military doctrines, suspension of much of the Bill of Rights, and clear signals that a declaration of emergency to crush remaining dissent is on the way, surely it is time to analyze the situation differently.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/shivani1026.html