by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy
The Military/Industrial complex makes its "living" killing! This is true of "empire" in general. It was true of Rome. It's true of the US now. Outsourced enforcement thugs of Blackwater USA are symptomatic of the
GOP quest to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship. Blackwater --like Rome's
Praetorian Guard, like Hitler's Storm troopers --are but the inevitable result of fascism.
How Hitler came to power is the story of how the German people, shocked by back to back debacles, the loss of WWI, hyper-inflation, and depression, simply "lost their senses" and allowed a mad man to seize dictatorial powers.
Then what is the excuse of the American people? How could the inhabitants of a land of conspicuous consumption, pretentious suburbs, and cheap gasoline, fall prey to a vicious megalomaniac of unbridled ambition, lack of empathy, the IQ of a failed third grader.
There are precedents throughout history. Roman writer and military strategist
Flavius Vegetius Renatus --supported in modern times by
Arthur Ferrill --believed that Rome's decline can be traced to the use of German mercenaries in the legions. Certainly, any fan of the BBC's historic
"I, Claudius" based upon the books by
Robert Graves will remember the "Germans" who wore the tunic, who fought the battles, who took the orders.
A state of
Orwellian "
perpetual war" and foreign occupations are defining characteristics of empire and fascism. A series of foreign wars and internal struggles preceded Caesar's "
crossing the Rubicon". The rest is grist for Shakespeare's mill whose
Julius Caeser may not be literally true but captures more important, essential truths about the sources of empire and the internal dynamics driving
the will to power. The result in America, as in Rome earlier, is the literal "auctioning off" of the office of President of the United States, an act embodied in Mussolini's term:
corporatism. A society is morally lost when mass murder becomes its number one export. A nation is lost whenever there are mercenary exceptions to the "rule of law". In such a society, everyone is guilty. That is Fascism.
The "War on Terrorism" has always been both a diversion and a hoax, diverting attention from the criminal nature of Bush's regime, a hoax covering up a gestalt of outsourced war crimes, mass murders, grand theft and aggressions. GOP fascists either shared or adopted Karl Rove's Hitlerian visions of a "permanent Republican majority", perhaps a "thousand year Reich". The real GOP agenda is, therefore, nothing less than dictatorship. In Herr Bush, the GOP found "der Fuhrer". It had been the their goal when Prescott Bush, the Shrub's Grandfather, conspired to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States and replace it with a fascist dictatorship.
The conspirators were operating under the umbrella of a front group called the American Liberty League, which included many families that are still household names today, including Heinz, Colgate, Birds Eye and General Motors.
Butler played along with the clique to determine who was involved but later blew the whistle and identified the ringleaders in testimony given to the House Committee on un-American Activities.
However, the Committee refused to even question any of the individuals named by Butler and his testimony was omitted from the record, leading to charges that they were involved in covering the matter up, and the majority of the media blackballed the story."
-- BBC: Bush's Grandfather Planned Fascist Coup In America
In 1936, William Dodd, the US Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated:
"A clique of US industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.... A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies.
Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. [ed. treason!] Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."
Prescott Bush's role in
helping finance Hitler's Nazi War Machine is a fact, a matter of record. Clearly, the elder Bush was a part of a criminal, treasonous enterprise that sought to overthrow the elected government of the US and impose upon it a fascist dictatorship.
The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.
Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of I.G. Farben, the powerful German chemical company.
Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.
--How Bush's Grandfather helped Hitler's Rise to Power
Much later, the grandson, the idiot scion of George H.W., would give the game away with a smirk and a hideous, evil chuckle.
This would be a whole lot easier if this was [sic] a dictatorship...jest as long as I'm the dictator...heh heh heh heh
--George W. Bush, Aspiring Totalitarian Dictator
"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us."
-- George H.W. Bush
It's never too late to do the right thing! Certainly, the Bush family planned to assassinate Franklin D. Roosevelt and round up dissidents for internment in concentration camps. The Bush gang, had partnered with Fritz Thyssen, among Hitler's inner circle of complicit "industrialists" and supporters. Thyssen was among a group of "business men" who were in attendance when Hitler literally made them all an offer that they could not refuse. Also at the meeting were representatives of I.G. Farben, the corporate brains behind the Holocaust. [See: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, also: The Influence of Big Business on Adolf Hitler.
The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Maxwell House. George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.
--William Bowles, The Bush Family Saga
John Buchanan From Martial Law
Bush Jr's every move since the election theft in Florida must now be placed within the context of a new paradigm. This is not "conservatism" as Barry Goldwater or Kevin Phillips would have known it. On its face, the Bush regime is illegitimate and contemptuous of the rule of law. Everything done by Bush takes on added, chilling significance in the wake of the revelations about Prescott Bush. Certainly, Bush's real agenda remains the acquisition and/or creation of a fascist empire, nothing less than a crooked business enterprise premised upon aggressive war and territorial acquisition operating under the cover of "government". Fascism is nothing new.
So God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be.
--Of the Religious in Utopia, St. Thomas More
Empires are typically enforced through Blackwater-type brutality, murder, lawlessness and oppression.
Blackwater is the most hated symbol of Bush's regime of mayhem and destruction in Iraq. Every self-respecting Iraqi, no matter how they feel about anything else, wants to wipe out the mercenary savages the Bush Regime has loosened on their country with a license to kill randomly and at will-- and with no oversight and no accountability. It is a clear war crime and hopefully one day we will all watch Bush being handed a last cigarette and a blindfold after his war crimes tribunal for this alone. Better than that than having to deal with a savage Republican private army in our own country.
My friends in Iraq-- some military, some civilian-- all agree on the brutality of the Blackwater mercenaries. "They use Iraqis for target practice," one friend told me. "The Iraqis all fear them and hate them." Most people who know of former CIA field officer Robert Baer know him for the film Syriana (which was based on his books Sleeping With the Devil and See No Evil and starred George Clooney playing him).
Fascists will enforce their regimes as Prescott Bush had envisioned in America, with a brutal campaign of repression to include concentration camps, murder, brutality. That Bush Jr would trash the US Constitution is to be expected of a "Bush".
When Bush is above the law, there is then nothing to protect the domestic population from the campaign of abuses that he has, in fact, begun by proxy. Expect more taser incidents. Expect thugs and brownshirts to shed their inhibitions. Expect Blackwater types to patrol our streets as crime, like terrorism, inevitably gets gets worse under GOP regimes. Expect the poor, the elderly, the innocent to wind up incarcerated in hellholes like those which already exist in the gulag state of Texas.
It has fallen to George W. Bush the family job of completing what Prescott might have achieved had not a courageous General Smedley Butler blown the whistle.
The largest beneficiary of fascism in the US the oil industry, perhaps the most important spoke on the MIC wheel, lately called the Military Evangelical Complex by Maureen Dowd. It was the Reagan administration that conceded the manufacture of automobiles, electronics, and steel to the rest of the world. With the collapse of the US manufacturing base came the end of the middle class, a first symptom of incipient fascism.
The eclipse of the domestic oil industry, however, was the inevitable result of the fact that oil is a finate resource. Oil moguls still make a killing, literally, but only by way of empire and conquest. "Peak Oil" is approaching, if not here already. Bush's oil adventures have nothing to do with securing cheap oil for US consumers. It is about the control of the earth's remaining hydro-carbon resources. It is about his regime's Hitlerian partnership with "big oil".
The business of defense contractors is death! Blackwater not merely fits the profile, they are its archetype. Somewhat simplistically, but true: the Military/Industrial Complex is Murder, Inc.
Bush will not admit this though he knows it to be true. His party will even deny that we've become it's euphemism: the National Security State. [See: National Security State]. The origins of our Murder, Inc. is the National Security Act of 1947. Called a blueprint for fascism, the act created the CIA, which JFK later threatened to "smash into a thousand pieces" when it became clear at the Bay of Pigs that the agency was out of control, beyond the powers of President and/or Congress to supervise effectively. The act granted to the Pentagon powers of unlimited defense spending.
I would think it impossible to justify such largesse without a bogeyman dragged out whenever the population is roused by truth to suspicion. In 1947, the bogeyman was the specter of communism, a tactic urged upon President Harry Truman by Senator Arthur Vandenburg, not surprisingly, a Republican. A climate of fear is maintained by both parties, in fact, two wings of one "security" party. The charge, however, is maintained with much less less embarrassment by the GOP. [See: The Decline of the American Empire. [Gore Vidal] In what Vidal called "a fit of conscience" never witnessed among modern Republicans, President Eisenhower warned that such a Military/Industrial complex might establish permanent control over the state itself.
The GOP could never have achieved its goals had it told the American people up front what it was up to. Hence,
GOP-speak, an Orwellian perversion of the language, designed by focus groups for its effect of cloaking a real agenda, in this case, a program of conquest, mass murder, and empire. Central to GOP plans for world conquest is the Military/Industrial complex, of which Blackwater is a symptom, a partner, a chief beneficiary. Central to the Bush's fascist schemes for world domination, Blackwater is often called Bush's private army.
The primary role of the Praetorians was to act as a bodyguard to the emperor and serve as a police force in the city. However, they did take to the battlefield when the need arose. Members of the guard received much higher pay than other soldiers. The scorpian appears as a symbol on much of the Praetorian equipment, possibly due to the fact that the birthsign of emperor Tiberius was scorpio. In the city, they wore no armor and carried no shield. They wore a plain tunic and carried a sword. On the battlefield they were outfitted with the same equipment as the normal legions.
Tiberius, under pretense of introducing a stricter discipline among them, assembled them all at the great Praetorian Camp [the Castra Praetoria] in Rome. In AD 23 this huge and strongly fortified camp was established in the eastern suburbs of the city by their notorious commander, Lucius Aelius Sejanus. Tiberius gradually gave much of his power to Sejanus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard. Sejanus used his position to murder his enemies, accusing them of plotting to assassinate the emperor and other acts of treason. Caligula, who succeeded [and may have assassinated] Tiberius, paid the Praetorian Guard one thousand sesterces each which was bequeathed to them in Tiberius’ will, but Cassius Dio claims that a generous amount was given to them out of the pocket of Gaius himself probably for the purpose of maintaining their loyalty.
--Praetorian Guard, Global Security
As will prove to be the case in America, the seeds of Rome's fall and destruction are found at the very birth of empire. Reasons cited for Rome's fall often sound very modern; there is simply no way to avoid making the analogy to the US militarism since WWII. Like the Bush regime today, the Roman system lacked budgetary controls and restraint; resources were wasted; near absolute power accrued to emperors. Bush actively seeks it out. He has failed to conceal or disguise his lust for power and overt trappings of empire.
Like the US today, the Roman empire became a kind of Ponzi scheme premised and dependent upon conquest and plunder. Booty trickled up forcing small scale farmers into destitution, just as it had done just prior to Boudicca's revolt in Briton, just as it has done to US small farmers and small business owners. Unlike the US Social Security system, a "Roman dole" never paid its own way. But like the present day US, poorer farmers got poorer while the landed gentry escaped taxation altogether. How much of this is beginning to sound familiar?
The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war."
--Albert Einstein
The military industrial complex seems designed to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful, at the expense of decency, common sense and the American taxpayer. It is one of two primary means by which wealth is transferred from the working and lower classes to the upper "ruling classes" who themselves maintain the offices of the "complex". Unfair "tax cuts" favored by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are another means by which this is achieved. The one method reinforces the other. The primary beneficiaries of such tax cuts are the CEO's of big military contractors. It's hard not to think of the tax cuts as payoffs for support and, likewise, a promise of more pork to come.
According to Vidal, the "American Empire" has been at war since 1950. The historical precedents are legion, Roman Legion, specifically. The Roman Empire was likewise stretched to the limits of current technology. When the time came to withdraw from Briton, the legions, for the most part, walked back home to Rome. It is easy to imagine a long walk through a desolate landscape of abandoned farms, decaying estates, and hungry serfs. There is a poignant description in Thomas Cahill's,
How the Irish Saved Civilization
There is sufficient probable cause to arrest and charge George W. Bush for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace. I would suspect that there is now enough evidence, in the public record alone, to indict and convict George W. Bush of numerous counts to include violations of both the Geneva Convention and U.S. Criminal Codes.
Hamden v Rumsfeld addressed the question of whether the United States Congress may pass legislation preventing the Supreme Court from hearing the case of an accused combatant before his military commission takes place, whether the special military commissions that had been set up violated federal law (including the Uniform Code of Military Justice and treaty obligations), and whether courts can enforce the articles of the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Only those guilty of crimes would seek to make their actions legal after the crime has already been committed. Nevertheless, the GOP continues to support efforts by Bush to make his crimes legal after the fact. There is no slicker way to exalt Bush above the law. It is, however, a transparent attempt and those supporting it in Congress are thus made complicit in Bush's crimes. In the case of the Geneva Convention, those members of Congress supporting Bush's overt and transparent efforts to exempt him from Geneva are, in themselves, in violation of Geneva. It follows, therefore, that Congress cannot, by a mere vote Congress, exempt the US from this nation's Constitutional obligation to uphold those treaties to which it is a party.
It has been argued that the Constitutional provision prohibiting
ex post facto laws apply only to those accused of violating laws passed
after commission of the act in question. Indeed, such laws are unconstitutional. It is, moreover, absurd to prosecute someone for an act "legal" at the time it was committed. Nevertheless, it is equally absurd for Congress to allow Bush to make it all up as he goes along, making crimes legal but only after he's already committed them.
For those of us who have maintained for some time now that Bush is a "war criminal", who has breeched not only international conventions but also U.S. Criminal Codes, The US Supreme Court decision in Hamden v Rumsfeld was vindication. The triumvirate of Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney was said to have been in violation of the Third Convention on treatment of prisoners of war as well as a US federal law of 1996 which binds the US executive to those relevant parts of the Geneva convention.
Clearly -the specter of terrorism has been of greater benefit to Bush than it has been to those who espouse terrorism. Hitler, for example, could only seize dictatorial powers after a "terrorist" attack on the Reichstag building in 1933. Hermann Göring would later boast of having ordered the torching himself. He boasted of it, laughed, and slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand.Meanwhile, Hitler would raise the specter of communist terrorism and assume new powers. Later, Hitler would start World War II with the lie that Polish troops had invaded German territory to blow up a radio tower. The culprits -not surprisingly -were Nazi SS in Polish Army uniforms. Bush's lie about Iraq's non-existent WMD was no less pernicious.
We are now familiar with this tactic. Bush attacked and invaded Iraq though his administration knew there were no WMD to be found. Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations was known at the time to have been a fraud consisting of plagiarized student papers and out-of-date satellite photos. Since that time, Bush has told some five or six rationales for the attack --all of them
ex post facto, all of them inconsistent, none of them true! Equally interesting --none of them were cited as reasons
before the attack. This act of aggression by Bush has since claimed at least one million innocent civilian lives. This act of aggression is, in fact, a war crime, punishable by death even under US Codes, Title 18 Section 2441.
The GOP record is one of fomenting an atmosphere of irrational fear and hatred, necessary if one is to exploit a phantom menace like "terrorism".
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
--1984, George Orwell
During the administration of George W. Bush, the Fox Network primarily, has played the role of "un-cheerleader" conducting "hates" of varying lengths via airwaves that are legally owned by the people themselves.
We've seen this apologist for the right wing conduct Orwellian campaigns of vilification against science, the humanities, art, literature, and most of all, philosophy, evidence of its inherent distrust and irrational fear of critical thought itself. The GOP finds critical, logical thinking subversive of its own inflexible, unquestioned dogma. Alas, all GOP efforts are fruitless, meaningless, vain. For that reason, however, GOP victims are all the more tragic, the morally equivalent to dying "for" Hitler in a concentration camp or gas chamber.
What matters - all that matters, really - is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest - women, art, success - is nothing but excuses.
--Albert Camus
It would appear that America's
raison d'etre has become the mass murder of people from Viet Nam to Iraq. If Camus was right, then the collective will of America is doing precisely what it really wants to do. There are no rationales. There are no excuses. And the world will not be safe until the GOPs perversion of "America" is smashed "into a thousand pieces". Long live, JFK!
Maliki didn't detail the incidents, which he said add to the case against the North Carolina-based security firm. Blackwater's license to operate here has been revoked while U.S. and Iraqi officials investigate a shooting Sunday that Iraqi officials now say left at least 11 people dead.
But Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed al Askari told McClatchy Newspapers that one of the incidents was former Iraqi Electricity Minister Ahyam al Samarrai's escape from a Green Zone jail in December. Samarrai had been awaiting sentencing on charges that he had embezzled $2.5 billion that was intended to rebuild Iraq's decrepit electricity grid.
Another incident, Askari said, was the shooting death last month of a Baghdad taxi driver when Blackwater guards led a convoy the wrong way down a street. When the taxi driver failed to stop quickly enough as the convoy approached, the Blackwater guards opened fire, Askari said.
Maliki left no doubt that he had already made up his mind about Blackwater's culpability in Sunday's incident, which Blackwater has characterized as an ambush, but which survivors and witnesses have described as an unprovoked shooting spree.
No matter how much lipstick and rouge we smear on the face of this war no matter how we attempt to dress up the evil and bestial acts that have been performed in its unholy name, it still has the hideous countenance of an evil swine from hell.
It is an illegal war, begun and conducted under false pretenses, by a group of criminal liars and thieves in the United States Government, abetted by a cowardly congress who abrogated their constitutional duties in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds and furthered by a complaisant press that ignored their obligation to remain independent from government, from their sponsors and report the facts.
The members of the completely rogue executive department acted in their own self interest in a quest for personal power and wealth, in concert with the usual domestic and international corporate pirates who, in the depths of their insatiable greed, continually amplify human conflict to their own ends and bring poverty, war, suffering and death down upon the world.
There is no such animal as extraordinary rendition, nor do I know of the existence of any beasts called enhanced interrogation methods.
I found the following steps for taking back America on The Republican Party Offers a Choice: 'Fascism or Anarchy?"
- The key goal of "total anarchy" is to make the leadership of the Republican Party, and their supporters, so uncomfortable that they will run off and hide in fear for their bank accounts and their lives. This level of discomfort will make the GOP's key supporters want to stop supporting the Republican's fascist ideology and they will want to seek a new democratic ideology that can offer them a much more stable, secure, and friendly form of government.
- Bring world wide attention to our cause. This can be done through mass resignations by the Democrats in Congress, mass education efforts, by boycotting of all businesses and real estate owned by the GOP's key supporters, by lobbying local law enforcement to join the fight, and by staging mass protest and demonstrations. If this step is successful no other steps will be necessary.
- Hold mass protest in public, and at the private homes of the GOP's members and the private homes of their key financial backers. If they leave follow them. If they run, run after them. And if they fight then we must fight back even harder. The key is to make them extremely uncomfortable until they realize that their cause is no longer winnable because their risk/reward ratio has turned negative. If this step is successful no other steps will be necessary.
- Take control of key roads, businesses, homes, and government buildings. The purpose is not necessarily to destroy but to take control and begin to organize a new government, new businesses, and a new social structure. If this step is successful no other steps will be necessary.
If these three steps fail then it will be time for the final step and last hope of our democracy, REVOLUTION. Load your guns, dig in, and fight for your life and the lives of your family.
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
The Bush government did every thing it could to prevent Katrina survivors from surviving the US military occupation of New Orleans. Governor Kathleen Blanco described National Guard troops sent to New Orleans to impose order. She said that they were "fresh back from Iraq ...locked and loaded ...ready to "shoot to kill." And they did!
