Sunday, December 21, 2008
"The current setup featuring Bush, Cheney, and their gaggle of neocons has pretty much come to the end of the road, as far as functioning as an effective organizing center for Anglo-American imperialism is concerned. The neocon method has long since past the point of diminishing returns. Their arguments and tricks are stale and predictable. The US and British economies are collapsing. Their armies defeated and demoralized. They are increasingly isolated in international affairs. They are the objects widespread hatred and suspicion in the world, and such allies as they have are thoroughly disaffected. Their vassals and satraps are in various stages of rebellion. Their adversaries are becoming more organized every day, most notably in such world alliances as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization."(promoting the creation of a new international political and economic order).
The most immediate issue for the City of London and for Wall Street is to maintain Anglo-American world domination in the face of numerous challenges. They must maintain their monetary and financial hegemony, restore their diplomatic credibility, regroup and rebuild military forces, refurbish their alliances, intimidate their satraps and vassals back into obedience, and prepare for a showdown with such recalcitrant superpowers as Russia and China. With Bush-Cheney or McCain, they have only a very limited chance of accomplishing this.(1)
An Obama presidency, by contrast, would give the Anglo-American imperialism a breathing spell, a second wind, a face lift, and a new lease on life. If Obama were not available, the elitist bankers would have had to invent him. And in fact, they did invent him, probably starting as much as a quarter century ago, when Obama and Zbigniew Brzezinski were both on the campus of Columbia University in New York City in 1981-1983.
...take the case of the new false flag terror attack which the Anglo-American ruling elite wishes to blame on Russia, China, or some other formidable foreign power against whom they wish to inflame and incite the English-speaking world. Imagine a solemn television address to the nation delivered by Bush. It is likely that more than half of the US population would not believe Bush's arguments and might reject his calls for mobilization and sacrifice, while a sizable minority would immediately and openly accuse Bush of being involved in the preparation and execution of the false flag attack. Since the fall of the neofascist Aznar regime in Spain in March of 2004, the Anglo-American ruling class has lived in fear of a potent Spanish-style reaction to their next false flag stunt, in which the target population, instead of blaming the scapegoats and bogeymen identified by the regime, prefer to concentrate their wrath on the incompetent politicians who have allowed the terrorism to take place, and who may even have artificially created it. Consider then, a similar televised address to the nation carried out by Obama in the wake of the same false flag attack. It is clear that Obama would succeed in duping a far higher percentage of the US population than the despised, discredited Bush. These are the sorts of considerations which have impelled the Anglo-American ruling class to consider turning over a new leaf, in the form of a new demagogic profile for their entire worldwide political operations--- a policy shift aimed not at peace or real cooperation, but rather at the more effective waging of war, including economic and cultural warfare.
When an imperialist system faces an array of crises like the one which is presently enveloping the Anglo-American world system, even the short-term survival of that imperialism will tend to require forms of totalitarian mobilization which are exceedingly difficult to implement by means of top-down coercion alone, and which are much more efficient if they can be based on voluntary assent and willing or even enthusiastic mobilization of the masses. This is the area where fascist methods provide a very obvious and substantial advantage in comparison with the crude dragooning which a more top-down dictatorial police state can provide. Under fascism, an ideologized and self-mobilized population can be made to police itself, at least for a time. This begins to explain why a figure such as Obama can exercise such an appeal to a ruling elite in crisis like the Anglo-American bankers of today.
No ruling class begins to consider a fascist transformation except in moments of grave crisis. The ruling class must be desperate enough so as to be willing to jettison many of the traditional forms of their political domination and create something that will at least look like a mass movement, which always implies some risk that the movement will get out of hand." such as happened with Adolf Hitler who the financial elite backed with loans to enable him to fund his war machine.(2)
The Obama campaign demands an active mobilization for international aggression, imperialist domination, and the drastic reduction of standards of living, including in the "homeland" itself. It is no longer enough to support the economy by going to the shopping mall in making purchases. It is now required that the US population actively embrace a stunning reduction of their standard of living and the further immiseration of whole sectors of US society. Carbon taxes will be imposed and cap and trade systems will be financed at public expense, all allegedly to save the planet from the horrors of global warming, even though any warming is overwhelmingly due to changes in solar activity. Compulsory national service and related forced labor schemes like the Green Corps will be set up to give concrete expression to the delirious youthful enthusiasm for Obama. Other taxes will be increased, even as hyperinflation devours more and more of the average worker's paycheck. Sacrifices will also be explained as necessary to tackle problems of economic under development of the Third World. Naturally, all of the resources thus extracted and extorted from the US population will flow into the coffers of David Rockefeller, J.P.Morgan Chase, and the other Wall Street banking interests.
In foreign affairs, it will no longer be enough for the US population to watch the bombing of Iraq or Afghanistan on television as if it were a video game. Larger and larger numbers of Americans will have to be mobilized for direct and active participation in the barbaric new campaigns now being planned on a scale surpassing the imagination of the neocons of 2001 to 2003 (Bush, Rumsfeld et.all). Bush offered shopping malls. Obama will demand a levee' en masse, and mass mobilization for aggression, naturally under the cover of the loftiest ideals. Bush offered war profiteering(Haliburton) and video games(shock and awe). Obama will demand total war in the fullest sense of the term.(3)
It is frequently Michelle Obama who hints in a cryptic and sinister undertone at the real goals of the Obama campaign. On one occasion, she revealed that her husband was demanding that Americans not merely vote for him, but that they also reformed their lives according to his dictates: "We need a leader who's going to touch our souls because you see, our souls are broken," Michelle Obama said. "The change Barack is talking about is hard, so don't get too excited because Barack is going to demand that you too be different." How then should we be different? In yet another speech, Mrs. Obama specified that we would all have to give up something: "We need a different leadership because our souls are broken. We need to be inspired...to make sacrifices that are needed to push us to a different place," she said.
To learn more about the sacrifices, we need only read the policy papers of Warren Rudman's Concord Coalition, Felix Rohatyn's infrastructure program, and the calls for the drastic curtailment of entitlements coming from the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Lehrman Institute, and the Manhattan Institute.
Obama, with his 2004 call for the bombing of Iran and Pakistan, his refusal to vote for the Kerry amendment calling for an immediate departure of US forces from Iraq, and his July 2007 call for the bombing of Pakistan, has represented by far the most aggressive, bellicose, and adventurous voice of the entire Democratic field. Obama has shown himself to be more aggressive and adventurous than Bush himself. In military affairs, Obama in no way criticizes from a pacifist or antiwar point of view. Quite the contrary: Obama attacks Bush from the right, from a more militant and activist standpoint.
The social world of today's decadent and moribund Anglo-American imperialism is full of individuals who are increasingly being propelled by the Obama hysteria out of their previous state of cynical passivity and into active mobilization in the service of militant imperialist barbarism- in the direction of what we can call postmodern fascism. (4)
Consider this series of names: Nitti, Giolitti, Bonomi, and Facta. If you do not know who they are, then you should admit to yourself that you know almost nothing about the genesis of Italian fascism in the years following World War 1. These are the names of Italian prime ministers who were in power in the years of economic crisis and national convulsion preceding Mussolini's march on Rome in October 1922. Some of them, most notably Facta, were parliamentary cretins and nonentities. Giolitti, by contrast, was a politician of real substance who helped Italy develop modern railroads, modern industries, a modern merchant marine, and who fought to save his country from the incalculable folly of intervening in World War 1 on the side of the British and French. Whatever his faults, Giolitti can be considered at the very least, as the lesser evil of the Old Order in Italy at that time, in something of the same way that the Clintons would have to be considered as a lesser evil in comparison to Bush the elder, Bob Dole, and Bush the younger. Several years went by after 1922 before most Italians realized that all the governments up to and including Facta had represented one thing, but that the country had gone off a cliff with Mussolini as far as political life and the rule of law were concerned. It was the fascist seizure of power in October 1922 which marked the great point of no return, the great watershed, even though this had not been obvious to many in real time.(5)
Prior to Hitler's ascension to power in 1933 the German economy was in the throes of an acute economic depression. Chancellor Bruning ruled by emergency decree with the help of President Hindenburg, imposing a series of brutal austerity measures against wages, unemployment benefits, and the standard of living of Germany's working people. By now, people had been watching events in Italy long enough to know that there was such a thing as fascism, and many of Bruning's enemies claimed that his government was already fascist. It quickly became clear that this had been a very foolish exaggeration indeed." since subsequent political leaders were much worse.
After Bruning came von Papon, a reactionary scoundrel who helped open the door to Hitler. The best of the lot was von Schleicher, a maverick general with progressive ideas who wanted to start an ambitious program of public works and infrastructure building to fight the depression and put people back to work.(Sound familiar?) But von Schleicher was ousted before his programs could take hold, and was later murdered by Hitler. It was only after Hitler's seizure of power that the German political world recognized that he represented a dramatic acute, and qualitative deterioration of the political life of the country. A reign of terror began immediately. All opposition and worker's parties were outlawed, and members of the parliament belonging to them were expelled. Trade unions were also outlawed, and their offices and property seized and destroyed. The offices and printing plants of opposition newspapers were attacked and burned down, often by mobs of storm troopers acting outside the law. Many of those who had been preaching that Bruning already represented fascism were now looking back fondly on Bruning's time in office as the good old days. Bruning appeared in retrospect as an authoritarian who had been overthrown by a fascist. These were not the same thing, and there is no doubt which was worse."(6)
Bush may have taken our rights away through the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, but has not mobilized the masses(Green Corps) to impose austerity measures(due to global warming etc.) and instigated lawless scoundrels to burn the printing presses and ban the Internet. Obama may go down that road if necessary to satisfy his Anglo-American elite banksters.
Some observers realized after the fact that there was indeed an immense qualitative difference between just another bourgeois regime, no matter how bellicose, no matter how reactionary, no matter how repressive, no matter how corrupt, and a fascist regime that could act outside the law and use its mass movement to mobilize active enthusiastic public support, and which could deploy its brown-shirted goons and fanatics, to crush opposition without worrying about arrest warrants and death sentences.
The point of this brief overview is to show that for many of its victims, the real nature of fascism revealed itself as a very unpleasant surprise, and this revelation occurred only after fascism had taken power. In its beginning phases, fascism often appeared to naive observers as a movement promising idealism, national unity, and end to political squabbling, parliamentary haggling, and class struggle, plus reform, moral renewal, and a decisive break with the corrupt and discredited practices of the existing political order. To some it even appeared as a liberating force which appealed to young people and the best and most active parts of the nation.
In a somewhat later phase, when the fascist dictators had fully consolidated their power and they decided to take the path of military aggression, it was found that the institutions which might have served as focal points for resistance simply did not exist any more, because those old institutions had been demolished by the fascists, who had not allowed any forms of independent organization to survive in society. If president Obama calls the American people to war with Pakistan, with China, with Russia, we may see his hysterical lemming legions mobilize to beat up congressmen and crush antiwar demonstrators who dare to oppose the decrees of the Perfect Master.
Those who have followed this far can perhaps see that distinct analogies are emerging between post-World War 1 Italy and the United States of today. These go beyond real or imagined military defeat and severe economic crisis and also include political phenomena, most notably Obamism.
For the more than two thirds of the American people who have spent considerable part of the past eight years hating, disliking, or resenting Bush and Cheney, it may sound heretical and hard to digest that there could be anything worse than this bankrupt regime. But we can assure you that there are alternatives as discussed that are much worse, infinitely worse.(7)
Fascism was invented as a last-ditch strategy to preserve the power of the financier oligarchy. Postmodern fascism would necessarily start with a multicultural veneer, since that is currently judged to be the best way to perpetuate the rule of the finance oligarchs. Race itself is never primary; but the fascist demogogue knows very well that his sponsors are bankers and financiers--The Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation, the Chicago School, Skull and Bones - who sponsor Fascism not as a means for acting out their racial prejudices or lack thereof, but for the purpose of maintaining power.(8)
...it is imperative to understand it in statu nascenti, the beginnings of fascism, as a bottom-up mass movement fomented by bankers in order to mobilize society for economic sacrifice, for fanaticism, and for war.(9)
(1)Webster Griffin Tarpley, OBAMA, The Postmodern Coup,Making Of A Manchurian Candidate, (Joshua Tree, CA: Progessive Press, 2008)p. 23.
(2)Ibid., 24-25.
(3)Ibid., 34-35.
(4)Ibid., 35-36.
(5)Ibid., 20-21.
(6)Ibid., 21-22.
(7)Ibid., 22-23.
(8)Ibid., 38.
(9)Ibid., 18.
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