Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps. The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in America, turning our nation into something that in the near future could be quite other than the open society in which we grew up and learned to love liberty.
– Naomi Wolf, The End Of America
It is a Sunday Morning and I am sitting and thinking about the postings I have made in the past few months and those of so many others in the blogosphere. We are six years into the Bush Administration, 25 years into the age of Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the great American Middle Class, and 62 years since the creation of that Middle Class that was the result of triumphing over the Depression and World War II. So many things have changed for us, and over such a long period of time, that we almost ignore our complacency in making it happen.
Last night, watching a re-run of The War on PBS, seeing the dedication of a whole country (including a focus section on folks from Waterbury, CT, my birthplace and Home Town) to defeating the fascist invaders who had used preemptory strikes at defenseless countries in Europe, Asia and Africa to bring their choice of government to the world, my wife and I started discussing what had happened to us… to ordinary Americans.
How did we let Reagan start privatizing those elements of the government that had made us so strong: education, unions, healthcare? And how did he get the people he had hurt the most… the lower middle class, the middle class, my parents… to love him for it?
How did we let Bush get into office twice? How did we let him start turning control of things the military used to handle to private companies? How did we let him develop relationships with America’s own Blackshirts and Brownshirts (Blackwater, if you haven’t noticed)? How did we let him cut Habeas Corpus from the Constitution? How did we lose our freedom from being wiretapped, or having our luggage searched if someone put our name on a no-fly list for authoring a blog like mine or writing an article criticizing the government?
Senator Inouye was one of the talking heads on The War last night, one of the Japanese-Americans recruited to a segregated army contingent (which ended up the most decorated battalion in US History), saying how his father encouraged him to join by saying how much America had done for them… giving them their freedom and an education! I laughed as I thought of how long we would be paying for my son’s school loans knowing this country no longer gives anyone an education… we have made education one of the most expensive purchased goods imaginable (after healthcare, of course).
We now have a Supreme Court which, we are told, does not legislate from the bench. It does, however, appoint those who lost the vote as president without allowing a full recount. It does put the rights of individuals behind the rights of corporations. It does uphold the destructuring of the Constitution.
We now are taught not to refer to our country as America, but as “The Homeland”. The security of “The Homeland” trumps the security of Americans. We invade countries who, we now find out, have been willing to negotiate to the terms we wanted all along, and are told that we are defending “The Homeland.”
Our political parties are now opposition teams that disagree along party lines. Republicans have forgotten the great Republicans: Lincoln who fought for Freedom and Unity of the country, and Eisenhower who warned us against “The Military-Industrial Complex” which now eats up our economic future on a cost-plus basis. Democrats have forgotten the great Democrats: FDR, who put the people above those who caused the markets to collapse and brought us the Depression, and Truman who made sure that corporations did not profit from the misery of a people at war.
We are led by a man that we often make fun of… I am guilty of this as much as anyone. He handles the English language poorly. He seems to function as the tool of NeoCon fascisti. But he should not be seen as a center of amusement.
He is a man who, more than anything else, has a love affair with his control over life and death. As a governor in Texas this was noticeable: he seemed to delight in signing death warrants, even joking about at least one in public. He set a record! As president, he sends our soldiers to their deaths, but avoids their funerals or the return of their flag-draped coffins. When it is revealed that he knew all along that he could have avoided their deaths (and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis young and old) in the Spanish Press (see my previous post Revelations This Week Show Bush Could Have Avoided War…), his office gives “no comment.”
The great dictators we fought in World War II… Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo … had no qualms about sending men to their deaths, either.
And we go on, wondering what we can do about it now. Wondering why our Congress, with it’s slim Democrat majority, doesn’t even hold up the funds to keep Bush going. Wondering why the leading Democratic candidates seem to be unable to commit to an instant pullout and change of policy, but are willing to justify continued death until at least 2013. Wondering why the Republican candidates, except one Libertarian (who would fund nothing – not education, not health, and, yes, not war), are stepping all over themselves to show us which one would push more “freedom” onto the Middle East.
And we seem to find no way out.
