America is going fascist

The signs are all there for anyone to see, and time is getting short for action

By Michael Nenonen

12/04/07 "The Republic"

Reading Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I realized the hour is later than I thought.

Many of us have watched the Bush regime’s actions with a growing feeling of horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we’ve seen all of this before, but we aren’t sure where. We’re confused because what we’re seeing conflicts with unexamined and deeply held assumptions we have about American freedom. Wolf’s short but meticulously documented book shows that what is happening in America has indeed happened many times before, not in the United States, but rather in places like Chile, Italy, Russia, and Germany. In each case, people couldn’t understand why they didn’t recognize where they were heading before they passed the point of no return.

It's shifting fast

Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a “fascist shift” from an authoritarian but still relatively open society to a totalitarian society. The techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the last century and are now studied by aspiring tyrants the world over. These methods are even part of the formal curriculum in places like the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, where thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United States government in the most savage techniques of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open societies. They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers. They establish secret prisons that practice torture, prisons that are initially few in number and only incarcerate social pariahs, but that quickly multiply and soon imprison “opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union leaders, well-known performers, publishers, and journalists.” They develop a paramilitary force that operates without legal restraint. They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance that gathers information for the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing citizens. They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens’ groups. They arbitrarily detain and release citizens, especially at borders. They target key individuals like civil servants, academics, and artists in order to ensure their complicity or silence. They take control of the press. They publicly equate dissent with treason. Finally, they suspend the rule of law. All of these strategies are being employed in America today.

Consider the evidence

The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently portrayed the security threat posed by international terrorists as a threat to the very survival of Western civilization in order to justify permanent war and to keep the American public in a state of panic and paranoia.

The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA “Black Sites” torture their inmates, even though human rights organizations have demonstrated that the majority of at least Guantanamo’s inmates are innocent victims of mass arrests. The inmates are designated as “enemy combatants” who have no rights under international or American law. And there is nothing stopping American presidents from filling these prisons with American citizens. In an April 24 2007 article for the Huffington Post, Wolf writes that thanks to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, “the president has the power to call any US citizen an ‘enemy combatant’. He has the power to define what ‘enemy combatant’ means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define ‘enemy combatant’ any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial.” She points out that while currently Americans in such situations will be spared any torture except psychosis-inducing isolation and can look forward to eventual trials, these rights typically evaporate in the final stages of a fascist shift.

They're called "mercenaries"

Military contractors are the regime’s paramilitary force. Blackwater’s mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin America’s most horrific police states, have operated in Iraq outside of Iraqi, American, and military law, and have murdered uncounted innocent Iraqis with impunity. Domestically, Blackwater was contracted to provide hundreds of armed security guards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and there’s evidence that they fired on civilians. Blackwater’s business plan calls for their use in future disasters and emergencies throughout the United States, and it’s supported by some of the biggest powerbrokers in America.

American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to wiretap citizens’ telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor their financial transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces corporations, booksellers, librarians, and doctors to turn over previously confidential information about Americans to the state.

Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other citizens’ groups have been infiltrated by government agents, many of whom have clearly acted as agent provocateurs in order to undermine the groups’ solidarity and to legitimize police actions against them.

Political opponents listed

America’s Transportation Security Administration maintains a terrorist watch list of tens of thousands of Americans who are now subjected to security searches and arbitrary detention at airports. The list includes people like Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and respected constitutional scholar Walter F Murphy.

US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil servants who’ve disagreed with the Bush administration have been threatened and fired. David Horowitz and his colleagues have mounted a well-funded nation-wide intimidation campaign that has university students spying on their professors and that has successfully coerced regents at State Universities to discipline or fire left-leaning professors like Ward Churchill. The regime’s supporters have organized campaigns to damage the careers of artists like the Dixie Chicks for criticism of the president and his policies.

The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid journalists for positive coverage, it has disseminated misinformation through the media, and it’s ferociously attacking critical journalists. Arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high. The Bush administration’s outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame was done in retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson, whose New York Times op-ed piece exposed lies that the Bush administration used to lead the nation to war. Worse than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for death by American forces in Iraq. In her Huffington Post article, Wolf writes, “The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. . . . In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.” The goal of these tactics, as she writes in The End of America, is to create “a new reality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer counts.”

Dissent = treason

In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, and William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of treason and espionage for publishing leaked material damaging to the administration, and in February 2007, Republican Congressman Don Young said “Congressmen who wilfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are sabateurs, and should be hanged.” This would be amusing, were it not for the Bush administration’s revival of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act after half a century’s slumber.

And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law. In The End of America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more signing statements than any previous president, and by doing so has relegated “Congress to an advisory role. This abuse lets the President choose what laws he wishes to enforce or not, overruling Congress and the people. So Americans are living under laws their representatives never passed. Signing statements put the president above the law.” He has also gutted the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to prevent the president from maintaining a standing army for use against American citizens. Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence Authorization Bill lets the president “expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops without the permission of the governor when ‘public order’ has been lost; he can send these troops out into our streets at his direction—overriding local law enforcement authorities—during a national disaster, epidemic, serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or ‘other condition.’” On its own, this is an incredible expansion of presidential power, but when combined with the use of military contractors like Blackwater it gives the president almost dictatorial authority.

Wolf shows that fascist shifts don’t happen overnight, but rather over a course of years during which the fascists’ plans unfold at an accelerating pace. Germany in 1933 was further along this path than it was in 1931, and Germany in 1935 was farther along than it was in 1933. Similarly, America in 2007 is farther along the path than it was in 2005, or will be in 2009, provided that a massive pro-democracy movement, complete with impeachment proceedings, doesn’t reverse the shift while there’s still time. A simple Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election won’t do the job unless the institutional and legal environment created by the Bush administration is thoroughly dismantled. Regardless of whether the next president is a Republican or a Democrat, he or she will inherit a legacy of centralized power that a democracy simply can’t tolerate.

Left behind

Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and activists still tend to perceive the world through a democratic frame of reference, and this prevents them from seeing that their opponents are no longer operating within this frame. As the opposition is tying its boxing gloves, the fascists are breaking out the machetes.

Wolf’s work has its problems. She doesn't acknowledge that Black and Indigenous Americans have long lived under quasi-fascist rule, she doesn't examine the role that previous administrations have played in setting the stage for the Bush regime, and she doesn't acknowledge the roles played by corporatism, widespread social dislocation and the radical Christian right in the rise of a fascist American zeitgeist. Despite this, The End of America needs to be read by as many people as possible.

Wolf writes about America, but Canadians don’t have any cause for comfort. Canadian and American military forces are already deeply enmeshed. Thanks to NAFTA, we’re tied at the hip to the American economy, while the Security and Prosperity Partnership is integrating our countries’ security forces and harmonizing our no-fly lists. The Harper government is eager to kowtow to the Americans, even to the point of refusing to advocate for Canadian citizens on American death rows. The powerful think tanks and lobbying groups that influence our provincial and federal governments, such as the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, either can’t see the shift for what it is or they don’t care. More than all of this, however, is the simple reality that once the shift is complete, the American government will act even more irrationally and belligerently than before. Canada has resources like oil and water the United States is going to need, and the Canadian border is less defensible than the French border was in 1940.

Americans and Canadians have to fight back more fiercely than ever before, to organize and lobby and fill the streets with mass protests, to raise awareness and forge alliances with anyone opposed to totalitarianism regardless of whether they’re liberals, socialists, or conservatives. We have to take all the steps that have rescued dying democracies in the past, and to take them immediately, in the desperate hope that it isn’t already too late.

Michael Crichton on Complexity Theory and Environmental Management

Michael Crichton on Complexity Theory and Environmental Management

Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy

Washington DC

November 6, 2005

In previous speeches, Michael criticized environmental groups for failing to incorporate complexity theory. Here he explains in detail why complexity theory is essential to environmental management, using the history of Yellowstone Park as an example of what not to do.

In Praise of Chaos

In Praise of Chaos

by J. Orlin Grabbe
Speech Presented to Eris Society, August 12, 1993

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Introduction: The Intrusion of Eris

Chaos has a bad name in some parts. It was chaos that brought us the Trojan War (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, chapter 159). Eris, goddess of chaos, upset at not being invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, showed up anyway and rolled a golden apple marked "kalliste" ("for the prettiest one") among the guests. Each of the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite claimed the golden apple as her own. Zeus, no fool, appointed Paris, son of Priam, king of Troy, judge of the beauty contest. Hermes brought the goddesses to the mountain Ida, where Paris first tried to divide the apple among the goddesses, then made them swear they wouldn't hold the decision against them. Hermes asked Paris if he needed the goddesses to undress to make his judgment, and he replied, Of course. Athena insisted Aphrodite remove her magic girdle, the sexy underwear that made everyone fall in love with her, and Aphrodite retorted Athena would have to remove her battle helmet, since she would look hideous without it.

As Paris examined the goddesses individually, Hera promised to make Paris the lord of Asia and the richest man alive, if she got the apple. Paris said he couldn't be bribed. Athena promised to make Paris victorious in all his battles, and the wisest man alive. Paris said there was peace in these parts. Aphrodite stood so close to Paris he blushed, and not only urged him not to miss a detail of her lovely body, but said also that he was the handsomest man she had seen lately, and he deserved a woman as beautiful as she was. Had he heard about Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta? The goddess promised Paris she would make Helen fall in love with him. Naturally Paris gave the apple to Aphrodite, and Hera and Athena went off fuming to plot the destruction of Troy. That is, Aphrodite got the apple, and Paris got screwed.

While the Greeks had a specific goddess dedicated to Chaos, early religions gave chaos an even more fundamental role. In the Babylonian New Year festival, Marduk separated Tiamat, the dragon of chaos, from the forces of law and order. This primal division is seen in all early religions. Yearly homage was paid to the threat of chaos's return. Traditional New Year festivals returned symbolically to primordial chaos through a deliberate disruption of civilized life. One shut down the temples, extinguished fires, had orgies and otherwise broke social norms. The dead mingled with the living; Afterward you purified yourself, reenacted the creation myth whereby the dragon of chaos was overthrown, and went back to normal. Everyone had fun, but afterward order was restored, and the implication was it was a good thing we had civilization, because otherwise people would always be putting out the fires and having orgies.

Around us in the world today we see the age-old battle between order and chaos. In the international sphere, the old order of communism has collapsed. In its place is a chaotic matrix of competing, breakaway states, wanting not only political freedom and at least a semi-market economy, but also their own money supplies and nuclear weapons, and in some cases a society with a single race, religion, or culture. Is this alarming or reassuring? We also have proclamations of a New World Order, on one hand, accompanied by the outbreak of sporadic wars and US bombing raids in Africa, Europe, and Asia, on the other.

In the domestic sphere we have grass roots political movements, such as the populist followers of H. Ross Perot challenging the old order imposed by the single-party Democratic- Republican monolith. We have a President who is making a mockery out of the office, and a Vice President who tells us we should not listen to any dissenting opinions with respect to global warming. Is this reassuring or alarming?

In the corporate-statist world of Japan we see the current demolition of the mythic pillars of Japanese society: the myth of high-growth, the myth of endless trust between the US and Japan, the myth of full employment, the myth that land and stock prices will always rise, and the myth that the Liberal Democratic Party will always remain in power. Is the shattering of these myths reassuring or alarming?

In fact, wherever we look, central command is losing control. Even in the sphere of the human mind we have increasing attention paid to cases of multiple personality. The most recent theories see human identity and the human ego as a network of cooperative subsystems, rather than a single entity. (Examples of viewpoint are found in Robert Ornstein, Multimind, and Michael Gazzanaga, The Social Brain.) If, as Carl Jung claimed, "our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems," then it can be said that psychological polytheism is on the rise. Or, as some would say, mental chaos. Is this reassuring or alarming?

Myth of Causality Denies Role of Eris

The average person, educated or not, is not comfortable with chaos. Faced with chaos, people begin talking about the fall of Rome, the end of time. Faced with chaos people begin to deny its existence, and present the alternative explanation that what appears as chaos is a hidden agenda of historical or prophetic forces that lie behind the apparent disorder. They begin talking about the "laws of history" or proclaiming that "God has a hidden plan". The creation, Genesis, was preceded by chaos (tohu-va- bohu), and the New World Order (the millennium), it is claimed, will be preceded by pre-ordained apocalyptic chaos. In this view of things, chaos is just part of a master agenda. Well, is it really the case there is a hidden plan, or does the goddess Eris have a non- hidden non-plan? Will there be a Thousand Year Reign of the Messiah, or the Thousand Year Reich of Adolph Hitler, or are these one and the same?

People are so uncomfortable with chaos, in fact, that Newtonian science as interpreted by Laplace and others saw the underlying reality of the world as deterministic. If you knew the initial conditions you could predict the future far in advance. With a steady hand and the right cue tip, you could run the table in pool. Then came quantum mechanics, with uncertainty and indeterminism, which even Einstein refused to accept, saying "God doesn't play dice." Philosophically, Einstein couldn't believe in a universe with a sense of whimsy. He was afraid of the threatened return of chaos, preferring to believe for every effect there was a cause. A consequence of this was the notion that if you could control the cause, you could control the effect.

The modern proponents of law and order don't stop with the assertion that for every effect, there is a cause. And they also assert they "know" the cause. We see this attitude reflected by social problem solvers, who proclaimed: "The cause of famine in Ethiopia is lack of food in Ethiopia." So we had rock crusades to feed the starving Ethiopians and ignored the role of the Ethiopian government. Other asserted: "The case of drug abuse is the presence of drugs," so they enacted a war on certain drugs which drove up their price, drove up the profit margins available to those who dealt in prohibited drugs, and created a criminal subclass who benefited from the prohibition. Psychologists assert: "The reason this person is this way is because such-and-such happened in childhood, with parents, or siblings, or whatever." So any evidence of abuse, trauma, or childhood molestation--which over time should assume a trivial role in one's life--are given infinite power by the financial needs of the psychotherapy business.

You may respond: "Well, but these were just misidentified causes; there really is a cause." Maybe so, and maybe not. Whatever story you tell yourself, you can't escape the fact that to you personally "the future is a blinding mirage" (Stephen Vizinczey, The Rules of Chaos). You can't see the future precisely because you don't really know what's causing it. The myth of causality denies the role of Eris. Science eventually had to acknowledge the demon of serendipity, but not everyone is happy with that fact. The political world, in the cause-and-effect marketing and sales profession, has a vested interest in denying its existence.

Approaches to Chaos

In philosophy or religion there are three principal schools of thought (in a classification I'll use here). Each school is distinguished by its basic philosophical outlook on life. The First School sees the universe as indifferent to humanity's joys or sufferings, and accepts chaos as a principle of restoring balance. The Second School sees humanity as burdened down with suffering, guilt, desire, and sin, and equates chaos with punishment or broken law. The Third School considers chaos an integral part of creativity, freedom, and growth.

I. First School Approach: Attempts to Impose Order Lead to Greater Disorder

Too much law and order brings its opposite. Attempts to create World Government will lead to total anarchy. What are some possible examples?

• The Branch Davidians at Waco. David Koresh's principal problem was, according to one FBI spokesman, that he was "thumbing his nose at the law". So, to preserve order, the forces of law and order brought chaos and destruction, and destroyed everything and everyone. To prevent the misuse of firearms by cult members, firearms were marshaled to randomly kill them. To prevent alleged child abuse, the forces of law and order burned the children to death.
• Handing out free food in "refugee" camps in Somalia leads to greater number of starving refugees, because the existence of free food attracts a greater number of nomads to the camps, who then become dependent on free food, and starve when they are not fed.
• States in the US. are concerned about wealth distribution. But, to finance themselves, more and more states have turned to the lottery. These states thereby create inequality of wealth distribution by giving away to a few, vast sums of cash extracted from the many.

The precepts of the first school find expression in a number of Oriental philosophies. In the view of this school, what happens in the universe is a fact, and does not merit the labels of "good" or "bad", or human reactions of sympathy or hatred. Effort to control or alter the course of macro events (as opposed to events in ones personal life) is wasted. One should cultivate detachment and contemplation, and learn elasticity, learn to go with the universal flow of events. This flow tends toward a balance. This view finds expression in the Tao Teh King:

The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says:
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass.
(Chapter 57, Stephen Mitchell translation.)

You don't fight chaos any more than you fight evil. "Give evil nothing to oppose, and it will disappear by itself" (Tao Teh King, Chapter 60). Or as Jack Kerouac said in Dr. Sax: "The universe disposes of its own evil." Again the reason is a principal of balance: You are controlled by what you love and what you hate. But hate is the stronger emotion. Those who fight evil necessarily take on the characteristics of the enemy and become evil themselves. Organized sin and organized sin-fighting are two sides of the same corporate coin.

II. Second School Approach: Chaos is a Result of Breaking Laws

In the broadest sense, this approach a) asserts society is defective, and then b) tells us the reason it's bad is because we've done wrong by our lawless actions. This is the view often presented by the front page of any major newspaper. It's a fundamental belief in Western civilization.

In early Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity, evil is everywhere and it must be resisted. There is no joy or pleasure without its hidden bad side. God is usually angry and has to be propitiated by sacrifice and blood. The days of Noah ended in a flood. Sodom and Gomorra got atomized. Now, today, it's the End Time and the wickedness of the earth will be smitten with the sword of Jesus or some other Messiah whose return is imminent.

In this context, chaos is punishment from heaven. Or chaos is a natural degenerate tendency which must be alertly resisted. In the Old Testament Book of Judges, a work of propaganda for the monarchy, it is stated more than once: "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes" (Judg. 17:6; 21:25). Doing what appeals to you was not considered a good idea, because, as Jeremiah reminds us "The heart [of man] is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked" (Jer. 17:9).

And in the New Testament, the rabbinical lawyer Paul says "by the law is the knowledge of sin" (Rom. 3:20), and elsewhere is written, "Whososever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law." (1 John 3:4). And, naturally, "the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23).

New age views of karma are similar. If you are bad, as somehow defined, you built up bad karma (New Age view), or else God later burns you with fire (fundamentalist Christian view). For good deeds, you get good karma or treasures in heaven. It's basically an accountant's view of the world. Someone's keeping a balance sheet of all your actions, and toting up debits or credits. Of course, some religions allow you to wipe the slate clean in one fell swoop, say by baptism, or an act of contrition, which is sort of like declaring bankruptcy and getting relief from all your creditors. But that's only allowed because there has already been a blood sacrifice in your place. Jesus or Mithra or one of the other Saviors has already paid the price. But even so, old Santa Claus is up there somewhere checking who's naughty or nice.

What is fundamental about this approach is not the specific solution to sin, or approach to salvation, but the general pessimistic outlook on the ordinary flow of life. The first Noble Truth of Buddha was that "Life is Sorrow". In the view of Schopenhauer, Life is Evil, and he says "Every great pain, whether physical or spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it" (The World as Will and Representation). Also in the Second School bin of philosophy can be added Freud, with his Death Wish and the image of the unconscious as a murky swamp of monsters. Psychiatry in some interpretations sees the fearful dragon of chaos, Tiamat, lurking down below the civilized veneer of the human cortex.

The liberal's preoccupation with social "problems" and the Club of Rome's obsession with entropy are essentially expressions of the Second School view. Change, the fundamental motion of the universe, is bad. If a business goes broke, it's never viewed as a source of creativity, freeing up resources and bringing about necessary changes. It's just more unemployment. The unemployment-inflation tradeoff as seen by Sixties Keynesian macroeconomics is in the Second School spirit. These endemic evils must be propitiated by the watchful Priests of Fiscal Policy and the Federal Reserve, and you can only reduce one by increasing the other. This view refuses to acknowledge that one of the positive roles of the Market is as a job destroyer as well as a job creator.

More generally, the second school has generated whole industries of "problem solvers"-- politicians, bureaucrats, demagogues, counselors, and charity workers who have found the way to power, fame, and wealth lies in championing causes and mucking about in other people's lives. Whatever their motivations, they operate as parasites and vampires who are healthy only when others are sick, whose well-being increases in direct proportion to other people's misery, and whose method of operation is to give the appearance of working on the problems of others. Of course if the problems they champion were actually solved, they would be out of a job. Hence they are really interested in the process of "solving" problems--not in actual solutions. They create chaos and destruction under the pretense of chaos control and elimination.

III. Third School Approach: Chaos is Necessary for Creativity, Freedom, and Growth

You find this view in a few of the ancient Greek writers, and more recently in Nietzsche. Nietzsche says: "One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star." The first fundamental point of view here is: Existence is pure joy. If you don't see that, your perception is wrong. And we are not talking about Mary Baker Eddy Christian Science denial of the facts. In this approach you are supposed to learn to alchemically transmute sorrow into joy, chaos into art. You exult in the random give and take of the hard knocks of life. It's a daily feast. Every phenomenon is an Act of Love. Every experience, however serendipitous, is necessary, is a sacrament, is a means of growth.

"Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types--that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge-- Aristotle understood it that way [as do the Freudians who think one deals with ones neuroses through one's art, a point of view which Nietzsche is here explicitly rejecting]--but in order to be oneself the eternal order of becoming, beyond all terror and pity--that joy which included even joy in destroying." (Twilight of the Idols).

It is an approach centered in the here and now. You cannot foresee the future, so you must look at the present. But because "nothing is certain, nothing is impossible" (Rules of Chaos). You are free and nobody belongs to you. In the opening paragraphs of Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller says: "It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive."

Your first responsibility is to take care of yourself, so you won't be a burden to other people. If you don't do at least that, how can you be so arrogant as to think you can help others? You make progress by adapting to your own nature. In Rabelais' Gargantua the Abbey of Theleme had the motto: Fay ce que vouldras, or "Do as you will." Rabelais (unlike the Book of Judges) treats this in a very positive light. The implication is: Don't go seeking after some ideal far removed from your own needs. Don't get involved in some crusade to save the human race--because you falsely think that is the noble thing to do--when what you may really want to do, if you are honest with yourself, is to stay home, grow vegetables, and sell them in a roadside market. (Growing vegetables is, after all, real growth--more so than some New Age conceptions.) You have no obligation under the sun other than to discover your real needs, to fulfill them, and to rejoice in doing so.

In this approach you give other people the right to make their own choices, but you also hold them responsible for the consequences. Most social "problems", after all, are a function of the choices people make, and are therefore insolvable in principle, except by coercion. One is not under any obligation to make up for the effects of other people's decisions. If, for example, people (poor or rich, educated or not) have children they can't care for or feed, one has no responsibility to make up for their negligence or to take on one's own shoulders responsibility for the consequent suffering. You can, if you wish, if you want to become a martyr. If you are looking to become a martyr, the world will gladly oblige, and then calmly carry on as before, the "problems" unaltered.

One may, of course, choose to help the rest of the world to the extent that one is able, assuming one knows how. But it is a choice, not an obligation. Modern political correctness and prostituted religion have tried to turn all of what used to be considered virtues into social obligations. Not that anyone is expected to really practice what they preach; rather it is intended they feel guilty for not doing so, and once the guilt trip is underway, their behavior can be manipulated for political purposes.

What would, after all, be left for social workers to do if all social problems were solved? One would still need challenges, so presumably people would devote themselves to creative and artistic tasks. One would still need chaos. One would still need Eris rolling golden apples.

Conclusion

In the revelation given to Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, authors of Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her, the goddess Eris (Roman Discordia) says: "I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free."

Today, in Aspen, Eris says: I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.

Copyright 1993
J. Orlin Grabbe
1275 Terminal Way, Suite E
Reno, NV 89502
Internet: kalliste@aci.net

Talk by Naomi Wolf - The End of America

Keep in mind Wolf is a Rhodes Scholar. Readers should be familiar with the history of the Cecil Rhodes program and how it ties into the Round table groups. Although Wolf brings up an issues that's topical, ask yourself why this is getting press now. Why are spokesmen for the elite coming out and putting their cards on the table?

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Talk by Naomi Wolf author of "The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot" given October 11, 2007 at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus.

Intellectual superiority, chaos, and genocide

Intellectual superiority, chaos, and genocide

Nancy Levant

Nancy Levant
September 7, 2007


Because people don't read, they don't understand that all recorded human history has documented the destruction of civilizations, nations, and ethnic groups by corrupt and greed-driven aristocrats. It is the history of the few, who by stealing the money and resources from the masses, ultimately conquer and destroy the masses. It is the history of the attainment of great wealth, for great wealth, in one way or another, comes from the combined and stolen wealth of ordinary people.

Mankind relives this story generation to generation. In microcosm, it is the story of the black sheep who refuses to comply with the social and political attributes of the parents, and who is cast out of family gatherings, family knowledge, family compassion, and inheritance. It is the history of non-compliance to authority. It is the history of mean-spirited gossip, fear-building, and ultimate alienation. Strip a person of his family, history, cultural roots, dignity, resources, and opinion, and that person is emotionally and permanently damaged and conquered.

The ousting of the black sheep is the history of arrogant intellectualism, which is based in a eugenic philosophy of defined superiority. For centuries, monarchies and religious leadership have defined eugenic superiority. Unfortunately, they still do. You see proof positive everywhere in today's world. Christians are infidels. Muslims are insane. The Jewish are corrupt. The Appalachians are inbred, Blacks hate Whites, Whites hate Mexicans, etc. The bad seed in the family remains the bad seed — and all implanted, political indoctrination.

As intellectually defined superiority continues its path of destruction into the 21st Century, historical patterns reoccur. Legislated theft of the masses continues and escalates. More and more intellectual mechanisms are defined and created to profile and rate the inferior masses and their resources. New edicts are declared and dictated. Groups are pitted against groups. The rights of the people are rescinded, and the masses become confused, angered, and frightened. Manufactured chaos lives and escalates, and elite-owned media guarantees it escalates.

As the child fears the angry and shunning parent, the masses fear the anger of intellectual authority. And as fear and resentment breed rebellion, intellectual authority and over-mastering builds a eugenics-based defense system to eliminate pre-defined inferiority. And today, we see the mass-production of over-mastering armaments.

Technologies that now exist, funded by highly secretive elite groups, are fully genocidal technologies. And as an ultimate plan takes shape to rape the globally combined masses of their wealth and natural resources, another new authoritarian government implants its social systems and bureaucracy into laws they devised and continue to devise. Today, mankind is told that a new government is giving freedom to the world, saving the world from ecological destruction, and eliminating global poverty. That's quite a cover story.

In reality, all privately held property is to be confiscated, which the American people now realize. Drinking water is next with globally-based legislation pending. Mobility rights, food, medicines and health care including supplements; education, housing, and every other requirement for quality of life are also pending. But it is the elites' unending weapons technologies that demonstrate their intentions, their fears, and their continued self-assured and proclaimed superiority. They have created multiple means and levels of genocidal technology while proclaiming to build a world of peace and freedom. We should be grateful that they are poor liars.

Even those who have never read history have heard that history repeats. But this time, in the 21st Century, it is not one nation or one ethnic group that the intellectual elite choose to eliminate. This time, inferior humanity is slated for massive reduction in number. And "inferior humanity" is anyone non-compliant to authority or incapable of producing and boosting corporate wealth.

Their secrets are being revealed. Many insiders have come forth, and will continue to do so as the big picture continues to take shape and fall apart — simultaneously. We are headed for very dark and dangerous times, though they have happened many times before using the same historical model for dictatorship. But this time, genocide is a technologically automated science.

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Nancy Levant is a renowned writer for constitutional governance and American culture. She is the author of The Cultural Devastation of American Women: The Strange and Frightening Decline of the American Female (and her dreadful timing).

She is an opponent of deceptive governance and politicians, global governance by deception, political feminism, the public school system, political economics based upon manufactured wars and their corporate benefactors, and the Federal Reserve System. She is also a nationwide and lively radio personality.

© Copyright 2007 by Nancy Levant
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/levant/070906

How Political Psychology Explains Bush's Ghastly Success.

Death Grip

by John B. Judis

Post date: 08.17.07

Issue date: 08.27.07

In June 2004, I went door to door in a white, working- class neighborhood of Martinsburg, West Virginia, a small blue-collar town in decline. There, I found voters disillusioned with both the Iraq war and the flagging economy. But, when I returned five months later-- the Sunday before the election--I had difficulty digging up anyone who didn't plan to vote for George W. Bush. As far as I could tell, Martinsburg voters were backing him for two reasons: first, because he opposed gay marriage and abortion ("There are two gays around the corner who are voting for Kerry," one fellow, with a Bush sign in his yard, advised me scornfully from his stoop); and, second, because he was leading the war on terrorism ("I feel more safe with Bush in there," an elderly disabled man explained). There was still grumbling over the war, the economy, and other topics--the same elderly man who praised Bush for making him feel safe also bemoaned America's lack of universal health insurance--but these issues were eclipsed by the threat of gay weddings and terrorist attacks.

Bush carried West Virginia and won the election partly because he ran a better campaign than John Kerry. But that wasn't the only reason. There was something odd about the support for Bush in places like West Virginia. Unlike voters in New York City, voters in Martinsburg had little to fear from terrorist attacks; yet they backed Bush, while New Yorkers voted for Kerry. If gay marriage were legalized, Martinsburg would be unlikely to host massive numbers of same-sex weddings; yet voters I talked to were haunted by the specter of gay marriage.

Some pundits have tried to explain away this mystery by arguing that Bush backers voted for their values rather than their interests. But this explanation is unsatisfying, since many of those voters didn't opt for "family values" in 1992 and 1996, when the country elected a well-known philanderer as president.

In fact, many political scientists can't begin to explain what took place in West Virginia in 2004. In recent years, the field has become dominated by rational choice theorists, who have tried to develop complex mathematical equations to predict voting behavior. These equations rest on a view of voters as calculating consumers choosing a product on the basis of relative cost and utility--a view that generally leaves little room for the possibility of voters acting irrationally.

There is, however, one group of scholars--members of the relatively new field of political psychology--who are trying to explain voter preferences that can't be easily quantified. The best general introduction to this field is Drew Westen's recent book, The Political Brain, but the research that is perhaps most relevant to the 2004 election has been conducted by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. In the early 1980s, they developed what they clumsily called "terror management theory." Their idea was not about how to clear the subways in the event of an attack, but about how people cope with the terrifying and potentially paralyzing realization that, as human beings, we are destined to die. Their experiments showed that the mere thought of one's mortality can trigger a range of emotions--from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores. Initially, the three scholars didn't attempt to apply their theory to elections. But, after September 11, they conducted experiments designed to do exactly that. What they found sheds new light on the role that fear of death plays in contemporary politics--and, arguably, goes a long way toward unraveling the mystery of Martinsburg.

olomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski met as graduate students at the University of Kansas in the late '70s. (Today, they are professors at Skidmore College, the University of Arizona, and the University of Colorado, respectively.) In 1980, Solomon discovered the work of Ernest Becker, an anthropologist whose last book, The Denial of Death, had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Becker was part of a generation of American social psychologists--stretching from David Riesman, who wrote The Lonely Crowd in 1950, to Christopher Lasch, who penned The Culture of Narcissism in 1979--who operated outside the academic discipline of psychology and were far more influenced by Freud and Marx than by B.F. Skinner and John B. Watson. Riesman, Lasch, and company are no longer avidly read--partly because of the fascination with neuroscience, but also because today's students and academics don't appear as interested in fundamental questions about life, death, love, and history.

Becker, who died of colon cancer in 1974 at the age of 49, had a checkered academic career, largely because his work failed to fit within academic departments. Although a riveting lecturer--he filled the 700-seat Wheeler Hall auditorium in Berkeley for a class on Marx and Rousseau--he bounced from school to school on short-term contracts. In 1967, Michael Lerner (later of Tikkun) and I helped organize a demonstration on the Sproul Hall steps to demand that Berkeley's anthropology department hire Becker permanently, but to no avail. Two years later, Becker finally found a home at Simon Fraser University outside Vancouver, where he wrote what turned out to be his most influential books.

In The Denial of Death, Becker tried to explain how fear of one's own demise lies at the center of human endeavor. "Man's anxiety," Becker wrote, "results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation." Becker described how human beings defend themselves against this fundamental anxiety by constructing cultures that promise symbolic or literal immortality to those who live up to established standards. Among other things, we practice religions that promise immortality; produce children and works of art that we hope will outlive us; seek to submerge our own individuality in a larger, enduring community of race or nation; and look to heroic leaders not only to fend off death, but to endow us with the courage to defy it. We also react with hostility toward individuals and rival cultures that threaten to undermine the integrity of our own.

Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski first presented a summary of Becker's ideas at the Society for Experimental Social Psychology in 1984. As they talked, the three later wrote, "well-known psychologists jostled each other vigorously to escape." Afterwards, they submitted their take on Becker to The American Psychologist and were peremptorily turned down. "I have no doubt that these ideas are of absolutely no interest to any psychologist, alive or dead," the journal's reviewer replied. Later, the journal's editor told the three psychologists that, if they wanted to be taken seriously in their profession, they would have to find ways to test their ideas experimentally. And that's what they proceeded to do.

Their first experiment was published in 1989. To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense"--their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religi- osity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger--they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead." They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.

Over the next decade, the three performed similar experiments to illustrate how awareness of death could provoke worldview defense. They showed that what they now called "mortality salience" affected people's view of other races, religions, and nations. When they had students at a Christian college evaluate essays by what they were told were a Christian and a Jewish author, the group that did the mortality exercises expressed a far more negative view of the essay by the Jew- ish author than the control group did. (German psychologists would find a similar reaction among German subjects toward Turks.) They also conducted numerous experiments to show that mortality exercises evoked patriotic responses. The subjects who did the exercises took a far more negative view of an essay critical of the United States than the control group did and also expressed greater veneration for cultural icons like the flag. The three even devised an experiment to show that, after doing the mortality exercises, conser- vatives took a much harsher view of liberals, and vice versa.

In conducting these experiments, they took care not to tell the subjects what they were doing. They also devised experiments to answer obvious objections to their theory. For instance, they substituted other exercises designed to increase anxiety--by reminding subjects of an upcoming examination or a painful dental visit--to determine if these thoughts had the same effect as the mortality exercises, but they didn't. It wasn't anxiety per se that triggered worldview defense; it was anxiety specifically about one's own death.

Drawing on psychoanalysis, but looking for experimental verification, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski developed a theory to explain how mortality salience works. When they started conducting experiments, the psychologists had believed that the sheer recognition of one's mortality directly triggered worldview defense. But, when other psychologists, varying the procedure, failed to reproduce the same results, they discovered an important caveat: When they would ask sub- jects to make judgments immediately following the mortality exercises, the exercises would have little effect. It was only when they interspersed a diversionary interval between the exercises and the judgments that the exercises had their full impact.

Freud had distinguished between "primary processes" of thought that were unconscious and irrational and "secondary processes" that were conscious and rational. Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski reasoned that, when individuals first feel anxiety about their mortality, they respond consciously by invoking the usual psychological defenses-- for instance, telling themselves that "it's not me, now." That allayed conscious anxiety, but, after the conscious anxiety about mortality had subsided, the thought remained unconscious and active and led people to erect worldview defenses. "The implicit knowledge of death rather than the current focal awareness is the motivating factor," they wrote. "Once the problem of death is out of focal attention but while it is still highly accessible, terror management concerns are addressed by ... bolstering faith in the worldview."

To demonstrate this effect, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski devised experiments using subliminal cues. They asked subjects to evaluate whether two words on a computer screen were related. One group of subjects had the word "death" flashed subliminally between the two words, while another group had the word "field" flashed. Afterward, neither group said they saw more than two words at a time. But, by using word-fragment completion tests--for instance, is "coff_ _" completed as "coffin" or "coffee"?--the psychologists were able to establish that the group which had "death" flashed before them, but not the control group, was unconsciously thinking about death. The psychologists then asked the groups to evaluate essays critical and supportive of the United States. Those who had "death" flashed before them had a much more negative view of the essay critical of the United States than those who had seen the word "field." They exhibited the same pattern of judgment as those who had done the mortality exercises but, unlike them, did not need an interval before making judgments. The psychologists still lacked a full explanation of how this worked, but they had shown that, in their words, "worldview defense in response to thoughts of death does not require any conscious awareness of such thoughts." Indeed, it worked best when these thoughts were unconscious.

y the end of the 1990s, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski had made their reputation among social psychologists. Psychologists around the world--particularly in Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel--were using their theories to devise experiments of their own. In October 2001, the American Psychological Association asked the three to write a book on how their theories could explain Americans' reaction to September 11. In the Wake of 9/11, which appeared in 2003, recounted more than a decade of experiments and speculated on how the public's reaction to the attack-- including heightened religiosity, patriotism, and support for both Bush and his evangelical swagger--could be explained as worldview defense.

The three scholars also began devising experiments to test this theory. The first of these explored whether reminders of September 11 functioned as mortality reminders. In the spring of 2002, the psychologists, along with five colleagues, conducted an experiment at the University of Missouri, where subjects had either "911," "WTC" (for the World Trade Center), or "573" (the area code for Columbia) flashed subliminally between word associations. Afterward, they completed word-fragment tests to see whether thoughts of death were stirring in their unconscious. The psychologists found the same pattern between "911" and "WTC," on the one hand, and "573," on the other, that they had earlier found between "death" and "field." They concluded that reminders of September 11 awakened unconscious mortality thoughts. Later experiments would further confirm this.

They then explored whether Bush's popularity in the years after September 11 stemmed in part from Americans' need for a charismatic figure who could help them overcome these thoughts. Bush's appeal, the psychologists speculated, lay "in his image as a protective shield against death, armed with high-tech weaponry, patriotic rhetoric, and the resolute invocation of doing God's will to rid the world of evil.'" In 2002, the psychologists, aided by two colleagues, conducted an experiment at Brooklyn College that showed that mortality reminders dramatically enhanced the appeal of a hypothetical candidate who told voters, "You are not just an ordinary citizen: You are part of a special state and a special nation."

Next, they began testing Bush's appeal directly. In October 2003, the three scholars, together with five colleagues, assembled 97 undergraduates at Rutgers to participate in what the students thought was a study of the relationship between personality and politics. One group was given the mortality exercises. The other wasn't. They then read an essay expressing a "highly favorable opinion of the measures taken by President Bush with regards to 9/11 and the Iraqi conflict." It read, in part:

Personally I endorse the actions of President Bush and the members of his administration who have taken bold action in Iraq. I appreciate our President's wisdom regarding the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power and his Homeland Security Policy is a source of great comfort to me. ... We need to stand behind our President and not be distracted by citizens who are less than patriotic. Ever since the attack on our country on September 11, 2001, Mr. Bush has been a source of strength and inspiration to us all.

This was not the kind of statement that would appeal to most Rutgers undergraduates, and indeed, on average, members of the control group rated it unfavorably. But those who did the mortality exercises on balance favored the statement. In February 2004, the psychologists repeated the experiment, but this time they used September 11 cues. They had one group of students write down the emotions that September 11 aroused in them and describe what happened on that day. They got the same results as before: On average, those in the September 11 group approved of the statement, while those who didn't do the exercises disapproved. Based on political questionnaires they had the students fill out, they also found that the September 11 and mortality exercises "increased both conservatives' and liberals' liking for Bush."

Then, in late September 2004, the psychologists, along with two colleagues from Rutgers, tested whether mortality exercises influenced whom voters would support in the upcoming presidential election. They conducted the study among 131 Rutgers undergraduates who said they were registered and planned to vote in November. The control group that completed a personality survey, but did not do the mortality exercises, predictably favored Kerry by four to one. But the students who did the mortality exercises favored Bush by more than two to one. This strongly suggested that Bush's popularity was sustained by mortality reminders. The psychologists concluded in a paper published after the election that the government terror warnings, the release of Osama bin Laden's video on October 29, and the Bush campaign's reiteration of the terrorist threat (Cheney on election eve: "If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again") were integral to Bush's victory over Kerry. "From a terror management perspective," they wrote, "the United States' electorate was exposed to a wide-ranging multidimensional mortality salience induction."

n their experiments, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski make a good case that mortality reminders from September 11 enhanced Bush's popularity through November 2004. But, on the basis of their research, it is possible to draw even broader conclusions about U.S. politics after September 11. Mortality reminders not only enhanced the appeal of Bush's political style but also deepened and broadened the appeal of the conservative social positions that Republicans had been running on.

For instance, because worldview defense increases hostility toward other races, religions, nations, and political systems, it helps explain the rage toward France and Germany that erupted prior to the Iraq war, as well as the recent spike in hostility toward illegal immigrants. Also central to worldview defense is the protection of tradition against social experimentation, of community values against individual prerogatives--as was evident in the Tucson experiment with the judges--and of religious dictates against secular norms. For many conservatives, this means opposition to abortion and gay marriage. This may well explain why family values became more salient in 2004--a year in which voters were supposed to be unusually focused on foreign policy--than it had been from 1992 through 2000. Indeed, from 2001 to 2004, polls show an increase in opposition to abortion and gay marriage, along with a growing religiosity. According to Gallup, the percentage of voters who believed abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances" rose from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2002 and would still be at 19 percent in 2004. Even church attendance by atheists, according to one poll, increased from 3 to 10 percent from August to November 2001.

In the months after September 11, most Americans were caught up in the same reaction to the tragedy--and that included adulation for Bush, even among many Democrats. But over the next few years, faced with two elections, Bush had to maintain his popularity; and he did so by constantly reviving memories of that dark day. As the 2002 election approached, voters turned their attention to the recession, as well as Enron and other scandals--all to the Democrats' favor. At that point, Bush, who had stood aside in the November 2001 gubernatorial elections that Democrats won, sought to base the 2002 election on terrorism. Bush and Karl Rove used the full arsenal of scare tactics to evoke fears of another September 11. The result was that the electorate became sharply polarized between conservatives and liberals and between Republicans and Democrats, while those caught in the middle tended to side with the Repub- licans--exactly as the psychologists' experiments might have predicted.

Some political analysts harshly criticized Kerry in 2004 for failing to counter Bush's charismatic style with an equally attractive appeal of his own. Many, like Slate's Chris Suellentrop, complained that Kerry lacked vision. "Vision without details beats details without vision," Suellentrop wrote. Others, like Thomas Frank, wrote that Kerry should have countered Bush's "cultural populism" with "genuine economic populism." But, if Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski are right, it would have been very difficult for any politician--not just the stolid Kerry--to overcome Bush's built-in advantage from being the nation's leader at a time when many voters feared another attack. In 2004, Bush, as the commander-in-chief, still had the unconscious on his side. And that advantage may have proven insuperable.

oon after the 2004 election, the mood in the country began to shift. Reminders of September 11 lingered, but they were increasingly displaced by worries over the Iraq war and anger over the growing scandals within the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. Bush's incompetence in responding to Katrina tarnished his image as a father-protector. Says Solomon, "Bush became less of a useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death."

One explanation for what happened psychologically can be drawn from experiments that Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski conducted in the mid-'90s. These showed that there were conditions under which the mortality exercises had a reduced impact. One such situation occurred when the experimenter repeatedly told the subjects to make a "careful" response to the questions rather than a "gut-level" or "natural" or "first" response. In those cases where the experimenter urged care and deliberation, the psychologists concluded, subjects acted on a "rational" basis that reduced the influence of unconscious anxieties.

Something like that might have happened after the 2004 election, as voters, forced to weigh other concerns--Iraq, Katrina, the Abramoff scandals--subjected reminders of September 11 to greater thought and skepticism. These associations made Bush "less of a useful object." It could also be that active memories of September 11 have begun to fade for many Americans--just as memories of Pearl Harbor did for an earlier generation--reducing the effect that these memories have on unconscious fears. The reduction of mortality salience is evident not just in growing public dissatisfaction with Bush, but in reduced support for conservative social causes. The average annual percentage of those believing abortion should be illegal dropped from 19 percent in 2004 to 15 percent in 2006, and the percentage believing it should be legal "under any circumstances" rose from 24 to 30 percent. The postSeptember 11 outburst of religiosity also began to abate, particularly among the young. These changes in public sentiment, which reflected the diminished psychological impact of September 11, help explain the Democratic triumph of 2006.

Of course, there are still voters within the Republican electorate whose hearts beat to the rhythms of September 11 and who are still engaged in a passionate defense of their worldview. They continue to identify the war in Iraq with the war on terror; they worry about illegal aliens and terrorists crossing the border; some even judge the growing public opposition to Bush as further confirmation of his role as protector. These voters appear particularly attracted to Rudy Giuliani, whose entire campaign is based upon reminding voters of September 11. And, if Giuliani is the Republican nominee in 2008, the election may pivot on his ability to use reminders of September 11 to provoke the public into another massive bout of worldview defense.

But, right now, it doesn't look promising for any candidate who hopes to follow Bush's 2004 script. The voters of 2008, including those in Martinsburg, will probably be buffeted by competing emotions about Iraq and the war on terrorism, and therefore less inclined to base their decisions on gay marriage. Barring another assault on American soil, the moment of September 11--and the reminder of mortality that it brought--may well have passed. And with it, too, the ascendancy of politicians who exploited the fear of death that lies within us all.

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Chertoff: You Will Submit to the Control Grid

Chertoff: You Will Submit to the Control Grid

Thursday August 16th 2007, 9:16 pm

On occasion, our rulers tip their hands a bit too much, especially when confronted with the recalcitrance of subjects in resistance to their best laid plans. “Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act,” reports CNN. “The Department of Homeland Security insists Real ID is an essential weapon in the war on terror, but privacy and civil liberties watchdogs are calling the initiative an overly intrusive measure that smacks of Big Brother.”

The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation warn “the IDs and supporting databases” mandated by Real ID legislation “will infringe on privacy.” The EFF “says on its Web site that the information in the databases will lay the groundwork for ‘a wide range of surveillance activities’ by government and businesses that ‘will be able to easily read your private information’ because of the bar code required on each card.” Of course, that would be simply the beginning, as our rulers plan to eventually use biometric technology and not simply a bar code. Moreover, the Real ID scheme will not be limited to the United States. Back in 2005, BlueBear Network International announced “it has extended its exclusive licensing of facial recognition and secure distributed search technology from Ottawa-based VisionSphere Technologies, to offer State motor vehicle agencies the ability to link driver’s license databases between all U.S. states, Canada and Mexico—as proposed by the sweeping REAL ID Act approved by Congress this month,” Prime Newswire reported at the time. “VisionSphere Technology has developed technology to securely search multiple biometric databases…. The unique technology uses secure internet connections to link and biometric databases maintained anywhere in the world. BlueBear, as the exclusive licensee, adapts that technology for law enforcement by building applications for forensic identification, background checks and the fight against child exploitation.”

Naturally, in order to protect the children, fight crime, and remain vigilant against “al-Qaeda,” we will need surrender our DNA at the door. “For terrorists, travel documents are like weapons,” said Ministry apparatchik, Michael Chertoff. “We do have a right and an obligation to see that those licenses reflect the identity of the person who’s presenting it.” In response to the impudence of at least some commoners, who managed to get a handful of states to pass laws opposing Real ID, Chertoff declared identification issued by our rulers will be mandatory for all “federal purposes,” which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park. In the not too distant future, no doubt, such an ID will be mandatory for the purchase of food.

Not mentioned in the CNN article is the fact Chertoff and the Ministry of Fatherland Security plan to merge the Real ID Act with proposals spelled out in documents issued by the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. In October, 2005, John MacDonald, president of the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators, wrote to the Ministry: the SPP “provides general direction on a number of security issues, although it does not specifically mention the use of driver licences as part of any security solution. Under the section headed ‘Securing North America from External Threats’ is the following statement. ‘We will develop standards for lower-cost secure proof of status and nationality documents to facilitate cross-border travel, and work to achieve optimal production before January 1, 2008.’” It is hardly coincidental this “optimal production” will be achieved a few months before the Real ID is mandated to take effect.

As representative Ron Paul noted in a speech delivered on the floor of the U.S. House, the “legislation gives authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to expand required information on driver’s licenses, potentially including such biometric information as retina scans, finger prints, DNA information, and even Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) radio tracking technology. Including such technology as RFID would mean that the federal government, as well as the governments of Canada and Mexico, would know where Americans are at all time of the day and night.”

It has nothing to do with “al-Qaeda” and everything to do with a police state control grid.

Confronted with growing resistance, our rulers decided to trot out Chertoff to deliver a message—subjects of the evolving global order will submit, otherwise they will not be allowed to interact with the federal government, something most citizens are required to do on numerous occasions during their lives. “This is not a mandate,” Chertoff said. “A state doesn’t have to do this, but if the state doesn’t have—at the end of the day, at the end of the deadline—Real ID-compliant licenses then the state cannot expect that those licenses will be accepted for federal purposes.”