Orwell's '1984' Revisited

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Margaret Atwood called George W. Bush, the greatest threat to world peace to date! What Atwood did not mention was that Bushco derived its power from the deliberate and well-planned attack on truth by way of language. George Orwell predicted it; his works remain the textbook example of how governments may manipulate people by first manipulating the language.

If all else fails, a totalitarian regime may make the telling of truth a crime. Traditionally, the names given those truths are treason or sedition. A young United States experimented with the Alien and Sedition Acts giving near dictatorial powers to President John Adams, specifically, the power to imprison or deport aliens upon the mere suspicion that activities posed a threat to the new national government.

To his credit, Adams made no use of them but neither did he rebuke the Congress for passing them. George W. Bush proved a greater threat. Bush arrogated unto himself the power to 'define' the very word "terrorist"! Bush could create a 'terrorist' at will by merely re-defining a target. Indeed --Bush assumed and asserted the power and authority to make you a 'terrorist' by merely 'deeming' you to be one!

Orwell's classic cautionary tale, 1984, describes a fascist, totalitarian government spying on its own citizens, denying reality and creating an alternate state that exploits a fictional enemy in order to wage a perpetual war. Orwell's Big Brother tried to re-write history and succeeded.
In "It Can't Happen Here" Sinclair Lewis describes the dictatorship of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip who might have been inspired by George W. Bush had 'he' not preceded him. In both '1984' and in Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here", a fascist state justifies an omni-present dictatorship by maintaining states of perpetual war and perpetual terror.

The lesson of 1984 is less about the state itself than about the individual. When states are absolutely powerful, the individual ceases to exist. Philosophically, individuals robbed of free will are denied person-hood even as mere 'legal abstractions' (corporations) are made 'persons' by decree. In the U.S. 'corporations' are decreed to be persons by way of a bogus and dishonest decision by our Supreme Court, It remains the very worst decision since Dredd-Scott legitimized the keeping of slaves.

"In order to acknowledge the collapse of Soviet Communism and the failure of fascism to reemerge as a potent political force, I ditched Orwell's oppressive totalitarian state in favor of an entertainment-fueled nihilism in which dimwitted citizens frittered away their lives watching web TV and working at slightly overpaid jobs to buy worthless junk ... on web TV, natch. Where Orwell envisioned endless rows of soldiers marching in perfect unison to the strains of the Two-Minute Hate, I saw a world where nations had been replaced by trading blocs and the objects of hatred were the immigrants in our midst."

--Ted Rall, Addicted To Perpetual War

The images from 1984 are seared into our memories --big brother, the telescreen, the grotty bedroom, the cubicle, the memory hole, the drab gray existence, the rat cage. But 1984 is as much about language. It is more than mere sub-text. Language, in 1984, is the means by which Big Brother creates an alternate reality. It is only in the 'alternate reality' that Big Brother has power.
Big Brother is the Wizard of Oz, an illusion, an image on smoke if not mirrors. If millions suddenly deny the illusion, the lies, the bullshit, Big Bro is finished. The bad news is that, like the cowardly lion, we dare not challenge the great and powerful Oz

The most glaring use of Newspeak is the invention of what I have chosen to call "focus group phrases"; so called because they are invented, full cloth, by consultants who most certainly know their way around a focus group. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is just such a phrase. "911 Denier" is another. "Al Qaeda iln Iraq" is designed to make a lazy populace forget that the war was begun upon blackhearted lies about WMD.

"911 Denier" is 'Orwell-speak' or 'Newspeak' designed to shift the burden of proof when it is, in fact,  Bush who must prove his theory of 911 --a theory for which there is not a shred of evidence --let alone proof. Anyone believing it is either a part of the plot or stupid! The Bush administration used up several ex post facto rationales for war. None of them were true! "Al Qaeda in Iraq", for example, implies the existence of a shadowy enemy that was never defined! That was by design! A real enemy is defined and can be targeted! Shadows may be summoned up whenever they are needed! 'Al Qaeda in Iraq', we can be sure, tested well.

A lazy news establishment liked it because it saved them the trouble of trouble of describing reality! Orwell understood as few have the power of language and in, 1984 the "tool of power" is language. Language empowers the all-powerful party which dictates the nature and use of language. The institutions of state maintain their power by exploiting the power of language to shape the nature of thought itself. That is, in fact, the job of the protagonist, Winston Smith. Examples may be found in any study of the recent Bush administration.

The George W. Bush regime very nearly gave the game away with the use of the phrase Total Information Awareness. In response to criticism, the regime stopped using the phrase to denote their program of widespread domestic and illegal surveillance.

Orwell is, of course, most famous for 1984 but his great essay on politics and language should also be required reading. See: Orwell: Politics and the English Language. Orwell explores how politicians exploit language to accrue absolute power. Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

--George Orwell

All who have read Orwell's essay on how easily politicians debase the language for nefarious purposes have recognized in the Bush administration the very techniques that Orwell warned us about.

The White House saw September 11 as a golden opportunity. The first catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil sparked an unprecedented case of leadership projection: desperate for protection and answers (why do they hate us? can we kill them before they kill us?), Americans wishfully compared Bush to FDR and Churchill. Approval ratings hit 92 percent. But Bush's political advisors knew that peaking early wouldn't guarantee reelection in 2004. Bush's father had been turned out of office just 20 months after the Gulf War ratcheted his score up to 911.
...
The Bushies have lifted their reelection strategy straight out of "1984," and not just by creating ominous-sounding agencies like the Office of Homeland Security, the supposedly-closed Office of Strategic Information, and a "Shadow Government". As in "1984," the Bush regime tolerates zero dissent --a two-party system in name only has been distilled to one in which only Republicans express acceptable opinions. And an absence of follow-up attacks has been met by endless alerts, advisors and empty hysterics in the name of security, most recently culminating with Tom Ridge's much-mocked color-code warning system. 

--Ted Rall, Why Bush Is Addicted To Perpetual War

To be fair, it is not only politicians but bullshit artists who make us vulnerable to tyranny. This has been done by dumbing down the language and, thus, our ability to think critically. Until Bush, even Republican "Presidents" paid lip service to the Constitution.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

—Sinclair Lewis, author of "It Can't Happen here"!

In It Can't Happen Here Sinclair Lewis showed us how it might happen here and in ways not unlike those predicted by both Lewis and Orwell. The characteristics of the fascist state so vividly described by both authors were found in abundance in Bush's fascist regime. Millions are still in denial, evidence that truth is tragically denied. A quote from Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here":

"Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going."

--It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis, page 20

Orwell and Lewis not only warned us, they predicted precisely how it would be done. As Shakespeare said: "All is true!" So --why didn't we listen? We did not listen because this nation has a fierce anti-intellectual streak which at its best makes us independent and at its worst makes us stupid!

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How Citizens United Subverted the Rights of Real People and Created a Fascist State

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

I've often written about the detailed and vivid account of A. Hitler's meeting with top German industrialists --Krupp, Thysen, I.G. Farben et al. It was in that meeting that German fascism was made real in terms of an agreement between the Reich and its 'fascist' sponsors, the huge corporations who would benefit from aggression, death and destruction.

The meeting may not have defined the word 'fascism' but it most certainly birthed a Nazi regime in which corporations were given and promised not only privileges but, most importantly, big juicy contracts.

From a lesser known source is another detailed description of the nature of Hitler's fascist partnership with big business:

"From now on, the government in Berlin will allocate large sums to industrialists so that each can establish a secure post-war foundation in foreign countries. Existing financial reserves in foreign countries must be placed at the disposal of the party in order that a strong German empire can be created after defeat. It is almost immediately required," he continued, "that the large factories in Germany establish small technical offices or research bureaus which will be absolutely independent and have no connection with the factory. The bureaus will receive plans and drawings of new weapons, as well as document which they will need to continue their research. These special offices are to be established in large cities where security is better, although some might be formed in small villages nears sources of hydroelectric power, where these party member can pretend to be studying the development of water resources for benefit of Allied investigators."

--Martin Bormann, Nazi in Exile, Paul Manning [PDF]

Some have said that the 'brand' of fascism now emerging in Western democracies, the U.S. in particular, is a completely new phenomenon. I disagree! The odious 'Citizen-United' decision, in which SCOTUS decreed that corporations were 'persons', is an open and odious declaration that a corporation may utilize its wealth, riches and privileges to enslave a population of 'real people' whose humanity is as self-evident as were the principles Thomas Jefferson had declared of 'real' persons in our own 'Declaration of Independence":

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

Earlier, John Adams had written of the same concepts in somewhat different words:

All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

Now, of course, we know that these rights extend to women as well. Surely --even our crooked court must understand that. Even so, the Roberts court cannot be trusted to defend the rights of men or women, or, indeed, the rights of REAL persons of any color, creed or sex. Our court cannot be trusted to uphold the law when it was respected. Nor does it recognize an even older and more venerable position: that governments derive their power, and rights of power from the peole who are ---alone --sovereign!

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The Age of the 'Unperson'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Thanks to the increasingly absurd, bought-and-paid for Supreme Court, corporations are now people but real people can be declared Orwellian 'un-persons' with but a stroke of a pen. This is an unconstitutional power given POTUS by SCROTUS but has no basis in law.

Everything you were told in school with respect to the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, the rule of law, the right to trial, the right to be confronted by your accusers --all of that is by the boards, 'repealed', rendered moot, defunct with yet another idiotic, stupid and dead wrong decision by the most subversive, traitorous 'Supreme Court' in history.

Moreover, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that government officials are immune from lawsuits because --at the time --it was unclear whether the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal. Let me help them out on this one: every 'prisoner' held in Guantanamo is held in violation of every treaty and international principle to which the U.S. is obliged. I believe that applies as well to Abu Ghraib. Clearly --every action of the U.S. in Iraq is illegal stemming from the illegal invasion, a violation of every international principle and/or treaty to which the U.S. is bound. Any death following as a result of any action taken by the U.S. in or to Iraq violated U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441 is a capital crime! Bush himself is in violation of that provision. Others, farther down the food chain, can always plead: 'but ve ver only folloving orters!'

This affront to the rule of law must not stand! It is more repugnant than the so-called 'Intolerable Acts' which motivated the colonial separation from England. Can we have that revolution now?

As everyone knows by now, SCROTUS recently declared corporations --mere words on paper --to be 'real people' having rights that are NOW denied to you who are living, breathing real people. This is intolerable and absurd. The Supreme Court should be dismissed! One wonders now what additional bullshit must the government try to pull before it is declared illegitimate by a 'people's tribunal' and eventually replaced a real government representing REAL people not 'legal abstractions' and the ambitions of the Military/Industrial complex?

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."

[....]

Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" -- did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."

--US: Guantanamo Prisoners Not ‘Persons’, Anti-War Dot Com

In Orwellian terms, an 'unperson is a person who has been vaporized perhaps not literally by the state but nevertheless robbed of his/her natural rights and records of his/her ever having existed. This erasure of personhood itself consists of removing all references to the person in existing books, the destruction of photographs, in fact, any documentary proof of existence at any time, i.e, no trace or evidence is to be found in the historical record.

Even close friends or relatives are 'expected' to forget that an 'un-person' ever existed. The very mention of the unperson's name becomes a 'thought crime'. The concept is not so far-fetched. Consider the Stalinist practice of erasing from photographs the images of convicted 'enemies' of the state. That individuals --real persons --may be subject to this treatment by the 'state' --itself a mere abstraction --is double-plus absurd and more so when corporations are given rights that, by right, belong only to real, living, breathing, biological human beings. Revolution now!

1984 might not have been late in arriving as is often thought. It's implementation may have been complicated but only temporarily delayed by the arrival of the internet. Certainly, the Reagan administration was poised to concentrate, consolidate the conventional and broadcast media into very few and controllable hands. Much of that has occurred. Fox, nothing more than a shrill propaganda organ, is a prime example. Fox arrived on time. The rest of the right wing coup cannot be far behind.

But for the internet and independent blogs, it is this Reagan legacy of concentrated, biased right wing media that you would depend upon for information. That should scare you! If it does not, you're reading the wrong article. Meanwhile, we should not be surprised that the 'conventional' media has yet to grasp the many harms done the world by Reagan, Bush and Bush. The conventional media still speaks another language! Newspeak?

In George Orwell's 1984, life is lived in a state of perpetual war. The U.S. has been at war in one form or another since the beginning of World War II. In 1984 an oligarchical society is defined by its having voided the rights of citizens. It accomplishes this with pervasive government surveillance, mind control, and a 'ministry of truth'. This has been accomplished in the U.S. with the repeal of the Communications Act of 1934 which had established the recently defunct notion that the 'air waves' are owned collectively by the people! That is no longer the law of the land and consolidation of broadcast and print media into very few hands is the result. The internet, we suspect, will eventually be brought under the control of Big Bro. Enjoy it while you can!

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Big Bro Data Base Called 'a Step Too Far'

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

When London is already the world's most surveilled city, there are plans afoot to implement a 'Big Brother' society that even Orwell could not have imagined. In a global economy, the consequences will not be confined to the British Isles. The good news is that a proposal to create a huge database of phone call details, e-mails and internet use has kicked up a firestorm of controversy. The name George Orwell comes up repeatedly.

In London, the Information Commissioner Lord West warns that such a database could be a "step too far for the British way of life".

The most 'Orwellian' aspect of this threat to person hood itself it that not even Orwell might have imagined its implications. The technology exists right now to enslave the entire world. Every movement by every single individual could be monitored 24-7 with implanted chips implanted at birth. Your every movement, perhaps your feelings now and, later, your very thoughts, could be monitored via satellites and a world wide network of super computers. If Google can spider every web site on the world wide web, a network could monitor the implanted, dynamic profiles of every person on earth. There is no place you could go and nothing you could do that could not be traced and documented. In such a society, you could be executed remotely.

Proposals for a central database of all mobile phone and internet traffic have been condemned as "Orwellian".

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the police and security services needed new powers to keep up with technology.

And she promised that the content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of messages and calls.

But the Lib Dems slammed the idea as "incompatible with a free country", while the Tories called on the government to justify its plans.

Details of the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called, website visited and addresses e-mailed are already stored by telecoms companies for 12 months under a voluntary agreement.

The data can be accessed by the police and security services on request - but the government plans to take control of the process in order to comply with an EU directive and make it easier for investigators to do their job.

--BBC, Giant database plan 'Orwellian'

As the British government debates how and whether it should monitor every aspect of a citizens life until death, other interests, primarily corporate, are studying the creation of a computerized 'Big Bro' against which to measure your resume.

There is evidence of a growing concern regarding the authenticity of qualifications presented at interviews. Today's computer software makes it simple to edit documents, thereby allowing falsification of information by the unscrupulous. The use of sophisticated document scanners, printers and copiers further complicates the issue. The research revolved around an investigation of the need for authentication of education qualifications and the establishment of the feasibility of doing this by using information technology to allow for efficient and effective verification that an education qualification was attained that the results were accurately reflected. The research concluded that there is a growing incidence of and concern regarding qualification fraud, that there was a need for authentication of qualifications by Human Resource practitioners as part of the recruitment process and presented a model that met all the research objectives - an innovative model deemed to offer an efficient, effective and feasible technology solution to the problem of qualification fraud in South Africa

--The feasibility of using the world wide web to authenticate higher education qualifications issued by universities and technikons

Some people do make inflated claims on resumes, some tell bald-faced lies. So what? Corporations tell much bigger and more harmful lies to the entire world every minute of every day of every year. In fact, most corporations --perhaps the very concept of 'corporation itself -are themselves deliberate frauds. Enron is the most famous example. The recent financial melt down was the result of numerous frauds by both government and corporations. The resulting bailout is --itself --a hoax!

Government and corporations apparently believe that they have a right to hoax you, lie to you and cheat you! Neither 'computers' NOR 'organizations/corporations' are people. Yet, it is believed as a principle of law that 'corporations' are 'persons' that have rights. As a result, machines are given priority over living, breathing human beings because a small percentage of them may be incipient 'terrorists' or might have fibbed about a degree they almost got but didn't.

This is absurd!

Government thinks it has a right to 'shakedown' a portion of your income every year to finance the campaign of lies and hoaxes that it perpetrates upon you. In other words, you pay for the privilege of being lied to and hoaxed. Government is a shakedown.

Government andl corporations operate only at the collective will of the people. Perhaps the time has come to abolish and bury the idiotic idea that corporations have rights, that corporation are people!

Unless human beings re-assert their sovereignty over both the machines and the 'souless organizations' of their creation, we will have been enslaved by them in the end.

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Federal Judge Ruling: George W. Bush is a Felon

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The US District Court in California has ruled that President George W. Bush is a felon. The ruling stems from the case of Al-Harmain Islamic Foundation Inc. v Bush, a case which will now be remembered as making it official that Bush's program of 'warrantless spying' is illegal.

Judge Walker held that the president lacks the authority to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA -- which means Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance program was illegal. Whether Bush will ultimately be held accountable for violating federal law with the program remains unclear. Bush administration lawyers have fought vigorously -- at times using brazen, logic-defying tactics -- to prevent that from happening. The court battle will continue to play out as Congress continues to battle over recasting FISA and possibly granting immunity to telecom companies involved in the illegal surveillance.

--Suing George W. Bush: A bizarre and troubling tale

The complete story at Sott.net outlines the sorry history of how the Bush administration has defined the law of this nation as well as the laws of common sense and decency to carry out a program that would have made even Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover blush.

It would seem to me that it's now well established that Bush is indictable in a Federal Court. It is also my understanding that any sitting federal judge can now --upon his/her own motion --convene a federal grand jury to investigate Bush's many violations of federal law, not the least of which are US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441, which make Bush subject to the penalty of death for each death of his war of aggression in Iraq.

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

--TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441 § 2441. War crimes

It's easy to find evidences of Bush's tyranny. Here's a headline linked from the article cited above.

Editor's note: This article is part of a Salon investigative series on spying inside the United States by the Bush administration. Research support for the article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.

Spying on Americans without warrants, charges based on secret evidence, a small town divided by fear. Welcome to the world of Bush's "specially designated global terrorists."

May 19, 2008 | RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, and ASHLAND, Ore.

One day in March 2004, Soliman Hamd Al-Buthe, a former member of Saudi Arabia's national basketball team and a government official in the city of Riyadh, picked up his phone for an urgent call with two American lawyers in Washington, DC Most of the call concerned a growing confrontation between the US government and the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Ashland, Ore., the US branch of a global Saudi Arabian charity organization under investigation for possible links to terrorism. Al-Buthe had been an advisor to Al-Haramain from 1995 to 2002 and was a member of the Oregon foundation's board of directors. Just weeks prior to the call, the foundation -- a respected fixture in the Ashland community run for years by an Iranian-American Muslim named Pete Seda -- had been raided by US law enforcement agents.

--Blacklisted by the Bush government, Tim Shorrock, Salon

It is the Bush administration which has pressed this issue, an issue that has come up, until Bush, just four times in 23 years. But since 911 and the Bush wars for which it is fraudulently cited in justification, Bush has seized upon a Supreme Court ruling of 1953 to justify sweeping authority far beyond anything that could have been envisioned by the courts. Mere mention of two words --'state secrets' --was always enough to get a wink and nod from a federal judge. Things have changed. There is the possibility that George W. Bush is under investigation by a Federal Grand Jury as we write this.

Federal grand juries do two things: They investigate to determine if federal crimes have been committed; and they indict, or bring criminal charges against, those whom the grand jury believes committed federal crimes. To indict, the grand jurors must have probable cause to believe the persons indicted did violate federal criminal law.

Grand juries offer prosecutors several advantages in conducting a criminal investigation, especially a high-profile, factually complicated investigation. For one thing, grand juries operate in secret; this not only gives prosecutors the ability to shield the evidence they are gathering from disclosure to the press and others, it can also encourage people to cooperate with a grand jury. Unless a witness reveals that he or she testified before a federal grand jury, no one ever needs to know that occurred, and since the transcripts of grand jury testimony are secret, no one will know what the witness said. This can be an advantage in an investigation, such as an investigation into terrorism, where witnesses may be afraid of retaliation if they cooperate with investigators.

Grand juries also give prosecutors the power to subpoena witnesses and evidence from around the country and, in some circumstances, from other countries, as well. (Getting evidence from abroad is discussed below.) If federal agents want to interview someone, the person can refuse to speak to them; this is true even if the person is arrested as a material witness, because persons who are arrested can invoke the Miranda rights to silence and to an attorney. The U.S. Supreme Court has held, however, that the Miranda rights are not available to witnesses subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. Unlike someone being interrogated by federal agents, a grand jury witness not only has not right to silence or counsel, he or she is required to answer questions posed by the prosecutor working with the grand jury and by the grand jurors. A grand jury witness can refuse to answer if he or she can invoke the Fifth Amendment as to a question, but the privilege must be claimed as to each question and the prosecutor can challenge a witness' ability to invoke the privilege.

--Using a Grand Jury to Investigate the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks, Susan Brenner & Lori Shaw

It is against both the letter of the law, logic, and common sense to allow Bush carte blanche to dismiss out-of-hand legal challenges to his various assumptions of dictatorial powers. This is crucial! Bush wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and 'terror' can be shown to be criminal and fraudulent. No other criminal defendant could simply invoke 'executive privilege' in order to have the smoking gun evidence against him thrown out of court. And Bush must no be allowed to do so either!

In this case, the evidence that must be allowed, the evidence that must be weighed by a federal grand jury will prove beyond any shadow of doubt that the panoply of frauds and lies Bush perpetrated upon the sovereign people of the US amount to high treason, mass murder, and war crimes for which US Codes themselves demand the death penalty.

A very important and related story at Alternet: Worries About War Crimes Heat up in the White House. Bush should worry. Any competent prosecutor could make an open and shut case right now that George W. Bush, who ordered the illegal attack and invasion of Iraq, is personally guilty of war crimes that demand the death penalty.

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The Origins of Big Brother in the Military/Industrial Complex

Big Brother brainwashes his subjects, rewrites their history and deadens their language, but his broadest means of control is the waging of war, or of what passes for war.
—E.L. Doctorow

"Big Brother" is how Orwell depicted the totalitarian state in which human individuality, freedom, choice, and lives are subordinated to the needs of the "state". Every means is, therefore, justified to maintain the omnipresent state in power.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
--1984, Chapter I, Part I, George Orwell

In 1984, when Winston describes a news film of "mercenaries", he might have been describing Blackwater in Iraq.

...[a] great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gun sights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water."
--1984, George Orwell

More recently, UPI reported from Iraq

A man, woman and child in a small white vehicle tried to flee from an armored personnel carrier, but round after round of .50 caliber bullets drilled into the vehicle and soft flesh until at last the car burst into flames. After the inferno had engulfed their vehicle the blackened bodies of the mother and child were melted together in death's embrace'.

In another excerpt from Winston's diary in 1984

"...middle-aged woman with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. Then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood."

Executions happen every day in Iraq, but the carnage perpetrated by Blackwater USA is done in the name of "we the people".

At least four Blackwater sport utility vehicles stopped in lanes of traffic that were entering the square from the south and west. Some of the guards got out of their vehicles and took positions on the street. As though their bodies could stop the bullets, Iraqi men covered women and children. But in the ensuing bloodbath not only were the protectors mercilessly gunned down, so too were those they tried to protect.

And from another dispatch from UPI

A former Blackwater USA employee suspected in the killing of an Iraqi vice president's bodyguard reportedly is a former Army paratrooper who lives in Seattle.

Andrew Moonen, whose identity was previously kept confidential by Blackwater, Congress and the State Department, is the sole suspect in the shooting death of Raheem Khalif, a bodyguard to Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, The New York Times reported Thursday.

U.S. and Iraqi officials previously said Khalif was shot three times by a Blackwater employee who had been drinking on Christmas Eve 2006. Khalif died at a U.S. military hospital the day after the shooting.

When asked about the shooting, Moonen's father, Alvin Moonen, said: They train these guys like they do and then they're surprised?

Moonen was fired from Blackwater hours after the shooting. The company cited a blatant and egregious violation of a company policy that prohibits employees from carrying firearms while drunk.

No charges have yet been filed in the case, but an official with the FBI said the case is being actively pursued.
--Blackwater shooting suspect identified, Gulf in the Media

Americans should be enraged, outraged that Blackwater USA claims to perpetrate arbitrary executions in our name. The "War on Terror" is just another bloody Bush fraud, a hoax, a lie to justify war crimes. By its excesses, Blackwater has exposed to the world the nature of Bush's NeoCon war, in fact, a series of cold blooded murders having nothing whatsoever to do with a "war on terror". As the Blackwater gang of paid thugs make a killing field of the streets of Baghdad, the rest of the world will hold the American people to account for having enabled the Bush regime to begin with.

The apparent lack of outrage in America is as outrageous itself. I often wonder: what has become of the American people? Have we, in fact, become the enemy we claim to fight? The United States is openly called the "world's biggest terrorist" throughout Europe, and with considerable justification! What had been "means" become "ends" themselves. The Military/Industrial complex is machines within machines, what mathematicians would call an "emergent property", a beast of its own making.

Mary Godwin, soon to become Percy Shelley's wife, wrote it in the Summer of 1816 when she and Shelley and other members of Lord Byron's hippie entourage vacationed with Byron in Switzerland. Mary was the 19-year-old daughter of a noted feminist writer, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
...
Frankenstein's Faustian quest for knowledge takes him to the terrifying secret of life. His product, the monster, is more articulate, more intelligent, and more able to feel pain than his human maker. The monster produced by Frankenstein's intelligence and creative drive had Frankenstein's intelligence and sensibilities, but in a kind of grotesque parody. In a curious way, Frankenstein and his monster merge together.
--Dr. John Leinhard, The Engines of Our Ingenuity, Frankenstein

And in yet another essay on this subject:

Mary Shelley was unmistakably talking about the science-based technology of her day. The subject drew her in. Later in her life she wrote biographies of famous scientists for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Her Frankenstein voiced a recognition of the dangers lying in our new powers.

...Mary Shelley had summoned up a demon living in all of us.
--Dr. John Leinhard, The Engines of Our Ingenuity, Frankenstein

Scientists, engineers and philosophers use the term Emergence to describe how complex systems and patterns arise out of many relatively simple interactions. Examples include "intelligence" in artificial intelligence, life itself at the end of an evolutionary process. Emergence is at the very core of a new physics primarily concerned with "complex systems".

Bush claims absolute power. Bush presumes to re-write laws passed by Congress. Bush presumes to enforce only those laws he likes, disregarding the rest. Bush has assumed the power to "declare" a state of war and commit US troops to battle. Never mind that that is a war crime. He has, in fact, assumed powers that the US Constitution reserved solely for Congress and the Courts. There is no need of either in Bush's Orwellian vision of the great American GOP dictatorship.

Albert Einstein wrote that the purpose of socialism is to overcome and advance beyond a "predatory phase of human development". In Bush we revert to it. Bone headed GOP "trickle down economics" and imperial oil theft abroad threatens an economic train wreck, indeed, democracy itself. A new study confirms that military spending is an economic albatross, a depressing drag on the economy, that will increase joblessness, deprive millions more of an education. Military spending and Pentagon waste soak up federal monies better spent on education, infrastructure, and job creation.

Pentagon waste takes monies out of circulation and depresses the economy. Only a tiny part of the economy will benefit, namely, the filthy rich already bought and paid for by Bush's inequitable tax cuts for what he called "his base". None of that wealth has trickled down, though Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan, never really pretended that it would. It was a transparent pay off to the very rich for their support. [See: The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath, Kevin Phillips; and a Hat Tip to Vierotchka re: Swiss headline]

The question then is: how did we get here? After all, we had been warned.

The Last Honest GOP President Warns
of the Military/Industrial Complex

Sen. Mike Gravel Challenges Big Bro's Big Myth: the War on Terrorism, an Orwellian Perpetual War

Big Brother is the Military/Industrial Complex itself, a self-organizing gestalt, a beast of its own devising. Bush is Faust, eager to sell his soul to do Satan's bidding. Bush is not Big Brother but, rather, Big Brother's avatar. Bush is but its pawn --an especially eager, willing, and sycophantic one.

Big Brother is an unfeeling Leviathan, in fact and by design, above the law, above obeisance to Congress, above the ability of the people to control. Like American corporations themselves, said, by law to have all the rights of people and none of their obligations, Big Brother is a law unto itself. At present, no one, certainly no one in Congress, has been able to oppose the Military/Industrial complex served, as it is, so fanatically by those who feed at the trough. No one dependent upon the MIC is free to make a decision based upon conscience. They are the minions of Moloch.

The US now resorts to industrialized death to make a living --its industries hollowed out during the Reagan years. Aggressive war, in reality mass murder, is our only major export. America is in the death business; the MIC is Murder, Inc.

America must certainly lead the world in the production of military hardware --tanks, missiles, nuclear weaponry, in fact, weapons of unprecedented and unimaginable mass destruction. It must surely trail the world in every other industrial classification --a third world nation on steroids. As long as this is the case, no one living in the US, no citizen of the US abroad, is truly free. We are all reduced to mere units in a bigger, evil machine. Bush and his servile ilk serve Moloch willingly and visibly at Bohemian Grove. Slavery, however, is forced upon the rest of us, a process assisted ably by a corporate media.

The most extreme example of this, of course, is Fox News, which is seen by all credible reporters as political porn, of the low grade variety at that, featuring D-listers in the news industry with the ethics of Debbie and her Dallas doers. Fox is laughable, and it is clearly a state run organ which hires official state reporters to report officially sanctioned news.

The Fox outfit is obvious propaganda, but it has played the foil to something far more insidious and sinister, and which in its sheer subtlety is far more dangerous. The mainstream press, as it is known, compared with Fox looks like left wing reportage, of course. In reality, however, the mainstream is neither left wing nor anything remotely resembling even a moderate or objective fourth estate.

Should you have doubt in this regard, I urge you to consider, as an example, the revelations from Dan Rather about what CBS did to curry favor with the White House.

Or the most criminal example of what can happen to a corporate owned, fully politicized, fourth estate: the Iraq war. These types of political propaganda practices used to be called Yellow Journalism. Now they are the standard, cleverly renamed "fair and balanced."

So it naturally follows that the robber barons and their fourth estate business partners should indeed benefit from the puppet they all worked so vigorously to enthrone.

Corporate Interests merged with State Interests

The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We "the people" do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.
--Laura Alexandrovna, Our Cold Civil War

A militarized society is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Much is made of the fact that the military provides opportunities for high school dropouts, the disadvantaged who might not otherwise get an education or a job. The military, it is said, takes these poor folk off the streets. Indeed, it takes them off the street and puts them in the line of fire in wars of naked aggression where suicide rates speak to the issue of our immoral position in Iraq. Moreover, had not the military, by soaking up the lions share of all federal spending, more monies might have been budgeted for truly productive programs like education and training. What is to be said about a society that finds it necessary to send young people off to die in immoral wars in order to get them employed and off the streets?

Eisenhower saw Big Brother's approach but could not have known how it might have been avoided. The revolution, decades in the making, is like a slow boil. We did not even know when we were "done", but cooked we are! We are like one of many puzzles that originated in the mind of the ancient Megarian logician, Eubulides of Miletus.

The puzzle is called "sorites", from the Greek for "heap." The question is whether or not a single grain of sand is a "heap"? The answer is obviously "no". But, if we add grains one at a time, the question arises: at what point have we made a "heap"? At what point have we made of the Military/Industrial complex a Frankenstein monster, Moloch, a Big Brother? At what point have we sacrificed our souls to ol' Scratch? At what point did MIC become the Owl god?

Big Brother does not merely exercise absolute power via the apparatus of the police state. Big Brother marshals the resources of a monolithic state to rob you of your person hood. Big Brother changes what it means to be "human".

In Goethe's version of Faust, Mephistopheles tries to grab Faust's soul when he dies but is frustrated by a divine intervention. Can the people of the US afford to wait passively for divine intervention? No! We have the power to deny to the state its power to define us. Challenged by aristocrats who demanded to know just who he thought he was, Voltaire said "I have no name but the name that I have made for myself!" Big Brother's lies have made of us our own worst nightmares, but only if we buy into the scheme. It follows, therefore, that Big Brother is finished when we make Voltaire's existentialist choice, when we take responsibility for what we have become, when we dare to define ourselves. The seeds of revolution are born when each individual chooses to be free!

Big Bro Changed What it Means to be "Human"

Notes: John H. Lienhard is M.D. Anderson Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and of History at the University of Houston. He is the author and host of The Engines of Our Ingenuity , a daily radio essay on invention and creativity heard nationally on Public Radio and internationally on the Armed Forces Network. He is also the author of the book The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture and Inventing Modern: Growing up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins.

Additional resources

• Read this or George W. Bush will be president for the rest of your life
• Lessons Bush Learned from Hitler
• Bush's Fascist, Private Army of Paid Cutthroats, Murderers and Mercenaries
• Emergent Properties
• Grand Jury: "Can We Indict Bush & Cheney?"
• Why the Bush Regime is an Orwellian Threat
• Lessons Bush Learned from Hitler
• Stanford University: Emergent Properties
• How Invention Begins

The Cowboy's Shared News Items

The Existentialist Cowboy

Imperialism
Military/Industrial Complex
War Crimes
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

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Life Under 'Big Bro'

In March 2006, my article Bush's New PR Offensive: Old Lies Die Hard! was visited by Bush's State Department. [ISP 169.252.4.# (U.S. Department of State) ] I say "Bush's State Department" rather than the "US Department of State" because the letters "US" imply, indirectly the people's ownership of the apparatus of government. Under Bush that is no longer true. And under either Colin Powell or Condo Rice the "State Department" no longer belongs to the people of "...these United States". Now --I am quite sure that other bloggers are visited routinely by Big Brother and there is no reason to suppose that my anti-Bush stance has not been visited on numerous other occasions via proxy servers. I have stopped counting the really suspicious visits, from obvious proxy servers. The really malevolent spying --that done by CIA or NSA --I will most certainly never know about.

Little has changed since I wrote this almost two years ago. Therefore, since Bush is still in office, still flouting the rule of law, still subverting American values, still a threat to world peace with the world's largest stockpile of WMD at his disposal, sill a terrorist in fact, still a war criminal, still a liar, still a failed and sorry excuse for a "President", and for having made my opinion known by at least one "state" visitor, here is the offending article in its entirety.

---

Bush has thrown down the gauntlet yet again! And congress continues to let him get away with it. Once again, the "rule of law" takes a beating. Bush repeats a fairy tale about Iraq and cites it as justification for thumbing his nose at the Constitution, circular, delusional thinking.

The reality in Iraq is a stark contrast to Bush's PR version. Numerous writers in Iraq describe a "...a country convulsed by fear" where sectarian killings are commonplace; the scale of violence is largely unseen. In a nation —still largely without lights or running water —civilians flee old neighborhoods desperately seeking safer ground —IF it can be found. Death squads roam the streets. Bush never talks about this.

And even as Bush has created chaos and civil war in Iraq, he cites Iraq as justification for his crackdown on civil liberties and the rule of law at home. That, in and of itself, should be grounds enough for impeachment and removal from office immediately.

Socrates said that the good was good not because the gods approved it but that the gods approved because it was good. Bush and his party have reversed the logic of Socrates. The GOP reverses thought processes, thinking backward to make legal crimes already committed, rationalizing bad decisions after the harm has already been done. Fast forward to G. W. Bush, who, like Richard Nixon before him, has said that if the President does it it's legal. If Socrates were alive, he would say that both Nixon and Bush had it backward. Socrates is right; the GOP is dead wrong.

Backward thinking is not uncommon in the ranks of the GOP but it seems to have reached epidemic levels with the ascension of George W. Bush. Before the Supreme Court handed down Bush v Gore, the most infamous 5 to 4 decision in its history, Antonin Scalia had already given the game away. Continuing the recount, he said, would be harmful to Bush.

On still another occasion, Scalia said:

Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires.

—Antonin Scalia, US Supreme Court Justice

Scalia assumes that Bush had already more votes than Gore but, of course, we know now that such was not the case. Scalia's conclusive was, therefore, entirely partisan. His mind had been made up going in. Had the court simply ordered that the recount continue, as it should have, Gore would surely have won the White House. Take Scalia to his logical conclusion and the actual counting of votes need never be done again. Counting votes is sure to be harmful to someone. Last time I checked, the candidate getting the fewer number of votes was supposed to lose.

Ironically, it was Scalia who had said that it was not the court's job to hand down decisions applicable only in single cases; it was, rather, the job of the court to make precedent, establish case law. But, guiltily, the Bush v Gore court added a hasty, guilty proviso limiting Bush v Gore to one case and one case only. This would seem to be, in itself, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment cited so fallaciously and disingenuously by the five vote ideological majority.

And lately Bush crows about "Inherent" powers" and "implicit" authorization! It makes one long for the good old days when President Bush pledged his allegiance to a philosophy of "strict" construction. I've never seen anything in the Constitution about "inherent" or "implicit" powers and, if the GOP had not been disingenuous about "strict constructionism", they would have to admit that they haven't either.

President Truman claimed to have "implicit" or "inherent powers" to seize U.S. steel mills during the Korean War. But, in a landmark decision, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, the Supreme Court rejected Truman's argument, ruling that his seizure was unconstitutional.

When the United States signs agreements like the Geneva Conventions, they become the law of the land. Congress is therefore allowing Bush to circumvent the law with his unilateral re-invention of both law and language. Bush has invented new descriptions of "enemies", and he has arrogated unto himself the power to define what he unilaterally chooses to call "enemy combatants". He assumes the power to hold this "class" of his invention incommunicado indefinitely —even if they are American citizens. Though the Supreme Court has said that this is outside the law, Bush would have you believe that he is above the law. If Bush is correct, SCOTUS is moot. Have the justices on the court been given two weeks notice and pension?

If Bush is allowed to interpret the laws, then the independent judiciary is no longer required. Bush has denied authorizing the torture of captives, but when Congress proposed to outlaw the practice, he threatened to veto their efforts. That would seem to be, in itself, evidence that he had ordered torture knowing that it was a violation of the law. Then Bush compounded his crime; when a ban was passed with a veto-proof majority, Bush signed the measure but added a memo that said, in effect, that if he felt the need, he would not obey it, "it" being the law.

It is not Bush's job to decide which laws he will enforce and which laws he will not. I don't give a damn about how Bush "feels" about the law. If he wants to talk about his feelings, let him join a support group! "His "memo" is a challenge to the separation of powers and more evidence that the quote attributed to Bush is accurate.

The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!

—George W. Bush, as quoted in Capitol Hill Blue

On yet another related issue, Bush has acted in a manner consistent with the quote that is attributed to him. For example, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act states —without ambiguity —that domestic phone surveillance could not be conducted without a warrant. A special court [FISA] was set up by Congress so that Presidents could obtain court approvals in a timely manner. Bush, however, chose to ignore and violate the law setting up the FISA court.

It was not only Democrats who were alarmed:

We have not just allegations, but proud admissions by the Republican Administration of George W. Bush that it has been conducting surreptitious electronic surveillance of American citizens, without court approval, in obvious contravention of an explicit federal law to the contrary.

—Bob Barr

Meanwhile, Bush continues to thumb his nose at Congress, wiretapping, bugging and spying on American citizens and boasting about it —though he is violating the law daily! NOTHING said by Bush has in any way refuted the law or rescinded it.

Where is the Congress when the President of the United States thumbs his nose at the rule of law, the Constitution, and the separation of powers? Everything done by Bush over the last several months has supported the charge that Bush exploits terrorism in order to maintain the U.S. presence in Iraq —in itself an ongoing war crime. [See:325 000 names on terror list ]

Bush's subversion of our laws erodes Democracy and the rule of law. Our Chief Executive has become an outlaw, and, in the process, we have ceased to be a Democratic Republic.

Gore Vidal on the Origins of the Cold War

Additional resources

• NY Times: ‘The Big Con’, America Has Been Hijacked by Right Wing Extremists
• The CIA's Pain Project
• Charges Sought Against Rumsfeld Over Prison Abuse
• Committee Against Toture
• Human Rights Committee
• Can Radical Capitalism Survive the Disasters It Creates?

Discoveries

• Goodbye Joe, Adieu... R.I.P.
• Operation Gladio - Behind False Flag Terrorism & 9/11

The Cowboy's Shared News Items

The Existentialist Cowboy

Imperialism
Conservative Lies
War Crimes
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

Spread the word: