Thursday, February 28, 2013

Liberal Fascism in America

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/20/liberal-fascism-in-america/

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

The Obama Era

Liberal Fascism in America

by NORMAN POLLACK
Is liberal fascism a misnomer?  Perhaps Sinclair Lewis’s antecedent question is more basic, Can it happen here?
Fascism comes in several varieties without losing its distinctive structural-ideological-political features, all of which point to an hierarchical societal framework characterized by extremes of wealth and power, a system of government authority, its opaqueness shielding it from accountability in both domestic and foreign policy, and, because of its secrecy, able to hide its disconnection from the public interest, as for example a dereliction of responsibility to the working class in terms of job creation, the preservation of the social safety net, and adequate funding for public education, and meanwhile, able as well to hide its connection, rather, to ruling groups and upper social strata through beneficial economic and fiscal policies, subsidies, the wider geopolitical strategies for wealth accumulation in international affairs, and the protective cover of military strength and involvement to preserve order and a martial spirit at home and trade and investment opportunities abroad—ensuring the resultant generation of wealth will not be channeled inward to democratize the social order.
Prevention of democratization at home, unilateral exercise of dominance on all major indices of power and a broad counterrevolutionary posture abroad, pretty well sums up the paradigm of fascism in a skeletal form, its methods varying to suit historical circumstances and cultural tastes, repression in some cases, persuasion and a promotion of false consciousness in others, so long as the basic objectives are served: inequality, secrecy, militarism (all, under Obama, brought to fruition via the warm glow of rhetorical liberalism).
Liberal fascism is an elusive historical formation; instead of goosestepping automatons, gas chambers, Stuka dive bombers, the bombastic Leader, all is normality on display, although, to be sure, some traces of the nonliberal variety of fascism remain.
For goosesteppers substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarization of the total culture, under constant reinforcement, with  Second-Amendment gun-rights zealots rubbing their hardware in our noses.
For gas chambers substitute the structural reinforcement of gun violence, incarceration of an underclass, surveillance—admittedly far less painful, but expeditious in its social-control consequences.
For the Stukas, we actually go one better, with armed drones for targeted assassination, directed to terrorizing, as did the Stukas along with the closer analogue, buzz bombs, whole populations.
And for the bombastic Leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work in planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while and, now, advertising his “Fireplace Hangouts” in a phony effort to imitate FDR’s Fireside Chats.
Even were large numbers of individuals the victims of political murder abstracted from the record, there would still be ample grounds for treating  the presidential context as the flourishing of liberal fascism.  Militarism, beyond drones, beyond the global network of bases, beyond extravagant budgets and exotic weaponry, beyond expanding the role of CIA operations, beyond the Pacific-first strategy of enlarging the US presence in Asia and containment of China, is alive and well in the Obama White House through a grand design of permanent war carried on largely by paramilitary forces with the heavy hitters, viz., supercarriers, etc., in the background, and the “modernized” nuclear weapons gently out of sight.
Still, liberal fascism requires more, given that America has been in the business of counterrevolution, militarism, and intervention for some time, as it has, through government-business interpenetration, in support of monopolism and economic consolidation generally.
Now, however, is qualitatively different, or rather, the intensification of previous key trends, with still less protest than perhaps at any time since 1933.  In broadest terms, America has absorbed its own negativity, and by America I mean a culmination of tendencies toward the systemic integration of capitalism, now at a mature stage of development, and correlative mechanisms of support, previously inchoate or less operant, starting with the bludgeoning of a radical political consciousness through several decades of applied public and private pressures toward conformity: i.e., internalized boundaries of acceptable doctrine and modes of protest.
Obama can begin from where the long-term formation of a dissipative consciousness leaves off, extolling “change” as the formula for acquiescence—submission to authority, war, assassination, bank bailouts, military budgets, false either-or alternatives in social policy, whatever it takes to keep the ship of, not state, but monopoly capitalism, on course.  Why liberal?  Because rhetoric trumps reality, and the attachment of leader and led is bound up in an apolitical moral vacuum, affecting each, altogether resistant to critical thinking and analysis.
Yet more, liberalism has itself demonstrated its bankruptcy, as when, for example, a majority of the American people support the armed drone program.  Assassination is cost-effective in protecting America from the Nefarious Other.
Whether we had created the conditions of international hostility to the US, is unthinkable.  Better to plod ahead.  Draw together in classless harmony.  Celebrate America as the Land of Opportunity, as societal dislocation proceeds apace, whether unemployment, foreclosures, renditions, torture, nonregulation, crumbling infrastructure, gun rampages, or presidential unctiousness papering over war crimes, wealth concentration, and destruction of the environment.
Keystone XL, anyone?
Addendum:  I commend Obama, though, for exposing liberalism, in its journey of transvaluation, from the New Deal to the present, for what it is, a right-of-center political-ideological position hardly worthy of the name, as understood during the New Deal.  Liberalism, once centrist, or moderately left of center, could not withstand—nor even try to—the anticommunist hysteria beginning with McCarthyism in the aftermath of World War II, becoming increasingly, as with Americans for Democratic Action and National Security Democrats, part of the red-baiting political-ideological universe of cultural discourse translated into a marked rightward shift in politics which distinguished the major parties solely on who was fairest of them all (i.e., most patriotic).
Under the liberal banner, the US ventured into the Cold War arena.  Its anticommunism became a spacious umbrella for sacrificing dissent on the altar of respectability, so that by the 1960s at the latest, liberalism should have been, but was not, detected for being more antiradical than progressive (and, in fact, rendering so-called progressivism as, at bottom, antiradical).  Obama could have stepped forward two decades earlier without missing a beat, from a policy- if not racial- standpoint, and his conservatizing thrust has now touched race, with blacks in prominent positions firmly installed in the Praetorian Guard of Vested Interests.  Neither Paul Robeson nor Dr. King would be admissible in the political culture of today (lip-service to the celebration of the latter notwithstanding, in light of his Poor People’s Campaign and opposition to war).
Liberalism has been a chief contaminant of democratic theory and practice, joined at the hip to a Democratic party solicitous of Wall Street and the whole flock of interests defining predatory capitalism, from health insurers to defense contractors, and further joined at the hip to a White House that can find no better exemplification of its stewardship than the nomination of John Brennan, closing tightly the circle of secrecy so as to hide the practically daily exhibit of war crimes.
Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Andrew Harvey and Gary Null Discuss Sacred Activism in the Face of Extinction

Source: PRN.FM, Progressive Commentary Hour with Gary Null 

Andrew Harvey is an internationally renowned religious scholar, writer, teacher, and author of over thirty books.  He is the founder of the Institute of Sacred Activism, an international organization dedicated to inspiring people to become more involved in challenging our global crises and to commit themselves to peace and sustainability.
Andrew was born in India, studied at Oxford University where he was a fellow at All Soul’s College, and has taught at Oxford, Cornell, the California Institute for Integral Studies and other institutions over the years.  He is perhaps best known for having explored all the different religions in depth, particularly Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Sufism, and interpreting them in a passionate manner that preserves their meaning and significance for our own time.
He received many awards for his writings including the Benjamin Franklin Award. His most recent book is “Radical Passion: Sacred Love and Wisdom in Action” and before that “The Hope: A Guide To Sacred Activism” which won the Nautilus Silver Award for Social Change.
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Pray for an Asteroid

source: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/


TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2013

Pray for an Asteroid

Dmitry Orlov


On the morning of February 15, 2013, a 500-ton meteor entered the atmosphere somewhere near the Ural mountains, in the vicinity of Chelyabinsk, Russia, an industrial city of over a million. The intensity of the blast was estimated at around 500 kilotons of TNT equivalent, or 30 nuclear bombs of the type the Americans dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The shock waves from the sonic boom it created blew out numerous windows. Around a thousand people were wounded, mostly with lacerations from flying glass; 40 of them remain hospitalized. The damage is being estimated at over one billion rubles ($33 million USD). Over 24,000 workers and volunteers, coordinated by Russia's Emergency Ministry, went to work on the clean-up. Their specific emphasis was on keeping buildings from freezing (the temperature in Chelyabinsk is around -20ºC). By February 17 much of the damage had been repaired. Schools, hospitals and other pubic buildings had their windows replaced and were reopened. The government is supplying replacement windows to residential buildings.

There was, by all appearances, no panic of any sort. Quite the opposite: the Internet instantly filled up with pictures, videos and tweets of the light show and the percussion that followed. Then came the jokes: one was that Chelyabinsk residents detonated something and claimed it was an asteroid to get the government to provide them with replacement windows. A major television channel was successfully spoofed into accepting as real a video of what was supposedly the impact crater. Supposed bits of the meteor (which were only recovered on February 17) instantly appeared for sale. Some of the observers seemed positively giddy, describing how the shockwave made them jump, discussing how the object in question must have been traveling at supersonic speeds, then going on to estimate distances based on the lag time between the flash and the shock wave. In all, the reaction and the response could perhaps be best characterized by what is currently a very popular word in Russia: “adequate.”

By a complete coincidence, on that same day the Earth was buzzed by a much bigger body: an asteroid, nicknamed 2012 DA14. Coming from a different direction, it came closer to Earth than the ring of geostationary weather and communications satellites that hover in fixed positions over the equator 35,786 km above the planet, and could have caused far more extensive damage—similar to that caused by the one that exploded over Tunguska, Russia, in 1908, which is the largest meteor event in recorded history. (If it seems like Russia gets more than its fair share of cosmic debris, that's because it's big: try to hit the Earth from space, and you are likely to hit the ocean, but, failing that, you are quite likely to hit Russia.) But the coincidences don't end there: there was also a meteor seen over Ufa, Russia, on the 12th, and another one over Japan on the the 14th. There was another flash in the sky that rattled windows reported on the 12th near Cienfuegos, Cuba, and another on the 15th near San Francisco. Are we being bombarded from outer space? Is someone out there throwing rocks at us, from different directions? Let there be no rest for the conspiracy theorists!

Asteroids are exciting, because they are part of a small class of singular events capable of dramatically altering the course of history. There is nuclear war, followed by nuclear winter—but we like to think that we have nuclear war somewhat under control, simply because nuclear weapons make for good defense (deterrence) but bad offense, because nuclear confrontations offer no winning strategies for anyone. Then there are the massive volcanic eruptions, like the ones that triggered the Little Ice Age, which began quite suddenly between AD 1275 and 1300. We don't control these at all, of course, but we sometimes get some advance warning, and the events themselves can be arbitrarily nasty without being mysterious. Then there are pandemics like the Bubonic Plague which wiped out a third of Europe's population; their unpredictability provides some amount of excitement, plus epidemiologists tell us that their likelihood keeps rising, giving them an aura of inevitability. Less inevitable but also very nasty are solar storms that fry all of our electronics and take down the electric grid, while a supernova within the Earth's galactic neighborhood would be even nastier, potentially sterilizing the entire planet.

So much for unpredictable, history-altering, cataclysmic events. But there are a couple more—ones we can predict with complete accuracy and confidence. Let's start with the smaller one: there are 437 operational nuclear reactors in the world. These sometimes produce electricity (and steam for industrial and residential uses) but they always require electricity to run the cooling pumps, or they overheat and explode, like Fukushima Daiichi in Japan did. If they cannot get electricity from the grid, then they have to make their own, using diesel generators on site. And if these generators run out of diesel, then the reactors and the spent fuel pools all melt down and generate a radioactive plume that poisons the surrounding area for generations. The problem is that there probably isn't enough diesel to keep them supplied over the decades it would take to shift all of the nuclear waste into dry cask storage and bury the casks in tunnels in geologically stable rock that will at some remote date enter a subduction zone and melt safely into the Earth's mantle. Since we really don't want there to be 437 Fukushima Daiichi's, it would make sense for us to get cracking on the problem of eliminating these reactors from the face of the earth; but are we doing that? Of course not! We are extending the lifetimes of the existing reactors, and even building a few new ones.

And now we come to the really important cataclysmic event that at this point seems all but unavoidable: the effect of chemical changes to the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Scientists have reached a consensus that anything beyond a 2ºC rise in average global temperature will put the Earth's climate in an unknown state, but probably one that is not conducive to our continued existence. Beyond that point, various tipping points are reached, causing positive feedback loops that can quickly take the climate very far from the homeostatic equilibrium we have enjoyed thoughout our history as a species: glaciers melt inundating coastal cities where much of the population lives; droughts parch farmland causing famines; extreme weather events cause ever greater damage to our infrastructure. A temperature rise in excess of 2ºC all but assures a planet that our children will not be able to live on. It will be a planet that we will not be around to not recognize. Now, it turns out that to avoid exceeding the 2ºC budget, we have to stop burning fossil fuels—all of them, and not at some point in the future, but right now. And not gradually taper down our use or attempt to shift to renewables over time, but cold turkey. All oil refineries, all gas distribution networks, all coal-fired power plants have to be shut down immediately; but are we doing that? Of course not! We are doing all we can to ramp up production of fossil fuels, to restore economic growth. As I write this, Bill McKibben and numerous protesters are gathered at the White House protesting the plans for the XL pipeline. I applaud the effort, but that's one pipeline out of how many?

It seems that we can't help ourselves at all, can we? But we can still hope. It seems like asteroids can potentially fix things for us. I would venture to guess that a series of good-sized asteroid impact craters around the world's financial and industrial centers would pretty much cancel the rest of the fossil fuel-burning extravaganza, saving the planet for our children (the few who will survive the transition to life without fossil fuels). This may seem to you like a raw deal, but then what's the alternative? Peaceful protest? Or would you like to try some more civil disobedience? There isn't any time for any of that left, you know; 2ºC is already baked in, and we are now working on something that goes beyond unpleasant and is starting to border on lethal.

But does hoping for a global fix to our fossil fuel predicament to rain down on us from heaven amount to hoping against hope? It is rational to hope for things that have a finite, non-negligible likelihood, but the likelihood of such a “solution” from outer space is unknowable. Rather, what we should do is pray. Now, it is well known that even avowed atheists resort to prayer under certain circumstances: mostly when they think they are going to die. Not all people are capable of such a realization, preferring to remain delusional, but I would like to think that you, dear reader, are sufficiently far-sighted and diligent in researching catastrophic climate change to realize that that is indeed the case: if the fossil fuel-burning machine isn't shut down now, you are facing extinction within just a few generations. It doesn't seem to matter how you pray or what deity or deities you pray to. What matters is that, through prayer, you take the locus of control over your destiny somewhere far outside your puny, helpless person and place it somewhere else—perhaps in the strange benevolence of nature that allows us to survive in spite of our best efforts. In so doing, you may find inner peace, and sometimes even the strength to survive.

And so, let us pray. Let us pray that a fix will show up before it is too late for us and for life on Earth as we know it. Clearly, we can't bring ourselves to do what's needed, which is to stop ourselves in our tracks no matter the immediate consequences. Let us therefore pray that there is a force somewhere in the universe, beyond our control, that can do that for us. And let us pray that we will be able to recognize it when it shows up, and that we will have the presence of mind to not fight it. If we can't win the battle for survival, then let's try going down in defeat.

If you are wondering what keeps this blog going, it is you. If you haven't done so yet, please pre-order your copy of The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit.

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Thursday, February 7, 2013

Kill Anything That Moves

Source: Occupied Territory

An interview with Nick Turse, author of “Kill Anything That Moves” – a new book about American atrocities in Vietnam, and what we should learn from that experience.

Related and recommended:

drone
John Brennan, drones, and Anarchism; “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” (Bob Dylan)

Download

Read more: http://prn.fm/2013/02/07/occupied-territory-020713/#ixzz2KFgSFRIZ
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution


See Also:

https://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2023/06/unto-final-chapter-of-great-reset.html

Into the Final Chapter of The Great Reset: Orchestrated Collapse by Way of Cyber Polygon and WW3 (Re-Post)

After being up for over a year (I was able to thwart their algorithmic censorship by omitting tags, tags are keywords that direct searche...