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All Perfectly Predictable
Commentator UESLA adds points on a creepy process that deserve a lift to the front page.
As preface some observations by me, Bernhard.
From today’s NYT we learn that at least four White House lawyers pondered the question of burning evidence of their crimes by deleting video tapes (I believe there are copies) of the CIA torture on Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri:
One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The WH lawyers involved were Miers, Bellinger, Gonzales and Addington. Miers and Gonzales are lightweights. I don’t know about Bellinger, but Eddington has been the heavyweight on the team all along. Being Cheney’s henchmen he explained the general overall strategy:
"We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."
But what if no larger force appears?
The process is well known:
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
That text applies to torture laws, the FISA changes, the Patriot Act and the War on Iraq budgets that still fly through Congress without any significant protest.
But it was written in 1955 and is an interview with an intellectual German about the 1930s/40s. The Goebbels strategy was "push and push and push" too. Back then the larger force appeared only in a very bloody fight over Stalingrad and even after that took years to succeed.
It is the creeping process that is alarming. It is still going on, strong. Several of the last Billmon posts warned about this.
The recent offhanded use of the words "bureau procedures" by the veteran reporter Walter Pincus to describe serious enacted laws really set off my alarm bells.
The creeping slime has seeped into the better folks minds. UESLA goes from there:
—
This is a difficult phase during our nation’s rise to imperial
glory. The transition from the rule of law to the rule of Strong Men
requires, at times, the utmost patience from true patriots.
It is not something that happens overnight, although it will seem like that when it finally blossoms into full view.
Although done without fanfare, it is an absolutely vital step to
refer to laws prohibiting torture as mere procedures. It is masterful.
It is well over 51% of the victory, for it quietly and adroitly hollows
out those laws. They no longer quite apply, and laws that no longer
quite apply — quite effectively no longer exist.
There are dumb laws
in every State of the Union forbidding various things like eating ice
cream on Sunday, using elephants to plow cotton fields, or keeping
horses indoors. No one pays any attention to them, other than to
chuckle over their inanity. Laws against torture, and treaties banning
torture, are relentlessly joining this list.
Now that the restraints against torture have been effectively
removed, the next steps will be easy. In the coming few years, this
Mueller fellow will eventually be replaced with someone who is not
hampered by regard for defunct laws, who can rule his domain within the
empire by fiat and decree.
The same process is taking place in every domain of government. Inch by inch, decrepit laws like habeas corpus
and quaint concepts like freedom of speech, honest elections, freedom
of movement and assembly, and personal privacy become first hollow
procedures, then dumb laws, and finally treason. In the vacuum left
when laws become dumb, only Strong Men can hold society together.
America set out on this course many long years ago, with the birth
of the National Security State after Dubya Dubya Two. We are
approaching the flowering time.
The true nature of the Unitary Executive is the Führer Prinzip,
rule by a hierarchy of Strong Men, each ruling their domain with
absolute authority. This is precisely the slippery slope of legalized
gangsterism rising in America, blithely overlooked by its consumers,
the majority of whom still believe they live in a free society.
They don’t. They have built their own prison, and elected their own
jailers. They are living in a nation of hollow laws, a nation of
procedures on their way to becoming dumb laws left on the books only
for comic effect. Mute laws, stupid laws, quaint laws for the era
before empire, for the era before Strong Men.
The Unitary Executive is rule by thuggery, by fiat, and by raw
power. But it is not the cause of America’s fall. No, it is the last
symptom of America’s internal rot, of the merger of unchecked corporate
and institutional power with the institution of government itself. The
businessman, the soldier, the priest, and the politician are standing
forth now as the Strong Men who will ultimately save the nation from
dumb laws like that "goddammed piece of paper" the Constitution.
The American populace made room for Strong Men by neglecting the
duties of citizenship in favor of life as consumers. They made Strong
Men necessary by letting crooks run the banks and towers of corporate
power, and shysters write the laws. They demand Strong Men and Messiahs
on every hand now to extricate themselves from the consequences of
living beyond their means, beyond restraint, beyond moderation or
common sense.
Just as they want a Messiah to rescue them from death itself, they
want a Strong Man to rescue them from the rigors of citizenship, from
the demanding duties of managing the nation. They habitually turn to
boundless consumption, constant entertainment, and self congratulation
instead, letting whomever promises more of all this to run the country,
write the laws, and rule the airwaves.
In such a setting, reality becomes what you wish it to be.
The result is the largest pool of debt in human history, a bankrupt
nation currently masquerading as the largest economy in the world. All
hollowed out, all ruled by gangsters, by men above the law. The result
is that the great American consumer party is over, and the result will
be the American Reich, as Americans demand Strong Men to save them from
consequences.
All perfectly predictable.
Good piece Bernhard, and you are right, no special glasses needed to see the the writing on the wall, it’s been there for a while now.
Whilst the US is certainly the 500 pound gorilla in the zoo, over in the Insatiable Nations section, it’s by far not the only one. Europeans, Australians, Canadians etc. are not all that different. John Howard, the neocon Australian PM who made the country take part in the coalition of the killing, was reelected 3 times, only to be replaced by Kevin Rudd, the new labor (think Tony Blair) Prime Minister who just looooves the USA, which according to him remains an “overwhelming force force for good in the world.”
Kohl, Schroeder, Merkel, same same. No one has the guts to call a spade a spade, to tell the emperor he ain’t wearing no clothes. They are all in bed with each other. Two party systems, same dog, different head. Be that in the US or in Europe. Consumers are consumers, if they speak English or not, the mentality is alike. Just don’t rattle the cage honey, we have a mortgage to pay.
The school system is already designed to produce brain dead worker bees to support the fat kings/queens who are running the hive. Tangle some flash looking car or a big screen TV as a carrot, and like lemmings the people will follow.
Here a translation from a Hans Soellner song (Bavarian singer/songwriter). The song I’ve chosen is titled “Hey Staat”, meaning in English “Hey State”, from his 1989 album with the same name.
Hey State!
I go to school and learn only what you think I need to know, if that is of interest to me is of no interest to you, you couldn’t care less
From the beginning, all you are trying to do is to bend me the way you need me, I let it happen thinking that you probably know what’s right
Then I go to work and I slog 8 hours every day in my damned job, and from the money I earn you deduct straight away two thirds
And the few bucks I am left with just about pay the rent, gas and light, and I need to go into debt so not to freeze in winter time
Refrain: Hey State, hey State, hey State,….. today I tell you about all the tings I do for you, and then you tell me what it is you do for me
You tell me what I should wear, how to cut my hair, my education and my job. Even my religion you prescribe, and I fool pay although I don’t even have a god.
The one who points his finger at me, I am meant to respect and honour him! The one who has killed entire people or converted over the barrel of a gun.
Buying your drugs, beer and schnaps, but you reprimand me when I take’em, discriminate against me because I smoke, hey you are the state, its you who earns.
You are well off because of people like me, for that you should actually be grateful that we sustain you, pay you, for your blah blah, your insults and lies.
Oh man, I am not good enough for your daughters, before others you are ashamed of me
You call me a ferral and dumb, should be glad that there are still dumb ones. Only through the brownnosers can you live, through the ones who don’t complain and who hold their hands before their mouths when they talk
For thirty years I played along, and did what you told me, but now, that I stand up and stick up for myself, coz’ I finally feel that enough is enough, yeah then you call me a grouch and criminal, wishing you could line me up against the wall.
And today we are standing at the Odeon’s Square and are singing “Blowing in the Wind”, with thousands of other peaceniks are we standing here, Three thousand who show you that protests can be peaceful and responsible, but on TV you show forty skinheads on a rampage somewhere.
You show run amok rioters in Wackersdorf*, how bricks and bottles are thrown
But not the protesters who in sympathy care for your police.
Yeah I am ashamed of the people who fired shots at the Startbahn West protest, but its you who makes sure that everyone believes that all of us are like that.
You also should be ashamed sometimes, hey state, maybe for the little kids who are dying on leukemia and their parents who are holding their hands and cry.
Your time is up, just like mine, and in the end it won’t touch me all that much, but my son has sixty years ahead of him and I’ll do everything so that he’ll make it.
You are no role model anymore for me, you got obese from all the money that others had to earn with sweat, and even the hunger in this world is good for your laughs and profits, with which you run a genocide
oh man none of us voted you in to pull that crap.
Hey State, hey State, hey State,….. today I tell you about all the tings I do for you, and then hey state, I tell you what I think you represent to me.
Posted by: Juan Moment | Dec 20 2007 4:00 utc | 8
Wha La wrote:
B, one of the most interesting narratives I’ve ever read, was about the common German in 1939, the butcher, the baker, the shoemaker, who joined the Nazi Party, and found for the first time in their lives, they were someone important, with an important job, a superior to answer to and take orders from, but most of all a brand new uniform…
Blocher (People’s Party in English, so PP) has just been ousted from the Gvmt. of Switz. A night of long knives, democratically (!) managed.
Further:
PP voters, mainly Blocher voters (they vote for the person first, not the party), since Oct 07 (parliamentary elections), are the first party in Switz. with 29 % of the vote, are a bit of a mystery to the media, sociologists, and ‘thinkers’.
Because::
a) many don’t care to go find out, b) some think mainstream attention will create more adherents, c) these voters are dismissed out of hand as loonies, d) nobody will answer questions.
Party bosses spout generalities, members refer back to the party bosses, and few admit to voting PP.
From the outside Swiss politics looks like a smooth quiet stream – inside it can be vicious to a degree the politically correct Anglo ppl *cannot* imagine.
PP voters are under the radar. Basically, they are opposition voters, from all over the political board. Little ppl done badly by, anti-immigrant; business ppl, industrials, the rich who want more ‘free market’ and lower taxes; farmers who want more subsidies; poor ppl who want more health coverage; even greens who want to protect the eidelweiss and mountain creatures. Nostalgics for the True Original Switzerland, and so on.
Opposition with a big O – Blocher was a low level genius in making up discourse that would by pass real issues and federate all of them together.
It is an uneasy line to toe and bound to fail in the long run. As it did recently.
What does the PP offer its adherents?
Not a uniform, even being identified as a PP voter in the public place can be dangerous. If a pater familias ‘comes out’ his children may be attacked on the way to school. Not just with snowballs or tomatoes.
Being part of a community… the PP offers evening activities, communal meets, clubs, etc. This aspect is ignored by the ‘thinkers’. A place to go, a place to be yourself away from the TV and the vid games, a venue where you can express yourself, are listened to and respected. The status of being a non-sheeple, an opponent, is thrilling. Stay at home moms, poor farmers, clerics, part time workers, the under-employed, the badly paid, teens kicked out of the system, struggling small biz types, etc. all find validation in the PP. They acquire a *voice*, become important.
The comparison with Hizbulla or Hamas is far fetched, as religion plays no role at all, poverty only in a minor/relative way in this rich country, and violence is mainly symbolic; if physical it is directed straight at PP members, and it reinforces their group belonging, they themselves never indulge in it.
In the US, all such opposition is perpetually divided by the PTB and the media.
bit long! Scusi.
Posted by: Tangerine | Dec 20 2007 18:45 utc | 19
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