to what end, Empire?

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“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

John Dalberg-Acton 

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“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.”

Walter Scott 

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(“The reasons for intervention, subversion, terror, and repression are not obscure. They are summarized accurately by Patrice McSherry in the most careful scholarly study of Operation Condor, the international terrorist operation established with U.S. backing in Pinochet’s Chile: ‘the Latin American militaries, normally acting with the support of the U.S. government, overthrew civilian governments and destroyed other centers of democratic power in their societies (parties, unions, universities, and constitutionalist sectors of the armed forces) precisely when the class orientation of the state was about to change or was in the process of change, shifting state power to non-elite social sectors…Preventing such transformations of the state was a key objective of Latin American elites, and U.S. officials considered it a vital national security interest as well.’ 

“It is easy to demonstrate that what are termed ’national security interests’ have only an incidental relation to the security of the nation, though they have a very close relation to the interests of dominant sectors within the imperial state, and to the general state interest of ensuring obedience. 

“The United States is an unusually open society. Hence there is no difficulty documenting the leading principles of global strategy since the Second World War. Even before the United States entered the war, high-level planners and analysts concluded that in the postwar world the United States should seek ‘to hold unquestioned power,’ acting to ensure the ‘limitation of any exercise of sovereignty’ by states that might interfere with its global designs. They recognized further that ‘the foremost requirement’ to secure these ends was ‘the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament,’ then as now a central component of “an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.’ At the time, these ambitions were limited to ‘the non-German world,’ which was to be organized under the U.S. aegis as a ‘Grand Area,’ including the Western hemisphere, the former British Empire, and the Far East. As Russia beat back the Nazi armies after Stalingrad, and it became increasingly clear that Germany would be defeated, the plans were extended to include as much of Eurasia as possible. 

“A more extreme version of the largely invariant grand strategy is that no challenge can be tolerated to the ‘power, position, and prestige of the United States,’ so the American Society of International Law was instructed by the prominent liberal statesman Dean Acheson, one of the main architects of the postwar world. He was speaking in 1963, shortly after the missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.”) 

Dives and Lazarus in New York City…

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(“With the $57 she and four friends put together in 1933, partly from an article she published in America magazine, they printed an eight-page tabloid called The Catholic Worker and handed out 2,500 copies at the May Day Communist rally in Union Square. With only the $5 she had to her name a few months later, she rented a vacant apartment to provide emergency shelter for six homeless women after hearing that one of their friends had thrown herself in front of a subway. These two acts launched one of the most elegantly simple revolutions in history.”)

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“There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day. And, lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. Dogs even used to come and lick his sores.

When the poor man died he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried, and from the netherworld, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.

And he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.’

Abraham replied, ‘My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.

Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.’

He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.’

But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’

He said, ‘Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

Then Abraham said, ‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.’”

Luke 16: 19-31

the “American Heroes” series, and the shot heard ‘round the world…

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“Lord, I’m one, Lord, I’m two, Lord, I’m three, Lord, I’m four, Lord, I’m five hundred miles away from home.
Away from home, away from home, away from home, away from home, Lord, I’m five hundred miles away from home.”
[from a popular folksong by Hedy West, heard in the sixties]

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[Rosa Parks, with Dr. King]

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Parks: “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”

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Regarding Parks’ decision to remain seated on the Montgomery, Alabama bus she was riding, many issues had come to a head, with the Emmet Till murder on 28 August 1955 being only the most recent crisis in the Southland.

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Having just finished her studies that summer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee—being a rural, adult program of social and labor activism training—Parks’ decision on 1 December 1955 galvanized a collective of both Blacks and whites preparing to effect racial equality and dismantle segregation in America.

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The first result of Parks’ action was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which resulted in the Supreme Court ruling citing bus segregation laws in Alabama to be unconstitutional.

American Holocaust, part II: the consummate fascist act…

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(“Nearly ten years ago I declared myself a pro-lifer. A Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer. Immediately, three women editors at The Village Voice, my New York base, stopped speaking to me. Not long after, I was invited to speak on this startling heresy at Nazareth College in Rochester (long since a secular institution). Two weeks before the lecture, it was canceled. The women on the lecture committee, I was told by the embarrassed professor who had asked me to come, had decided that there was a limit to the kind of speech the students could safely hear, and I was outside that limit. I was told, however, that I could come the next year to give a different talk. Even the women would very much like me to speak about one of my specialties, censorship in America. I went and was delighted to talk about censorship at Nazareth.”)

[Journalist Nat Hentoff, from "Pro-choice bigots: a view from the pro-life left"; 30 November 1992]

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“At the heart of the controversy in these cases are those recurring pregnancies that pose no danger whatsoever to the life or health of the mother but are, nevertheless, unwanted for any one or more of a variety of reasons — convenience, family planning, economics, dislike of children, the embarrassment of illegitimacy, etc.”

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“I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the court’s judgment. The court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.”

[U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, one of two dissenters in Roe v. Wade, 22 January 1973]

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“Aware that in Roe it essentially created something out of nothing and that there are many in this country who hold that decision to be basically illegitimate, the Court responds defensively…. I do not share the warped point of view of the majority, nor can I follow the tortuous path the majority treads in proceeding to strike down the statute before us. I dissent.”

[U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, dissenting in Thornburgh v. American College of Obst. & Gyn., 1986]

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“It was my pseudonym, ‘Jane Roe,’ which had been used to create the ‘right’ to abortion out of legal thin air. But [attorneys] Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, ‘Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.’ Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.”

[Norma McCorvey, the anonymous litigant known as "Jane Roe" in the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade, in testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights, 21 January 1998]

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[N.B.: graphic photos posted on the next page depicting abortion's aftermath]

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American Holocaust, part I: the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890…

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On December 29, anywhere from 140 to 200 Sioux men, women and children were killed by the Seventh Cavalry regiment in a slaughterfest underwritten by Empire near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The events of that afternoon were fully in keeping with our intended narrative of racist oppression, decimation, and disenfranchisement—i.e., a virtual American holocaust—the ur-strategy contrived by the investor class for addressing “the Native American question.”

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The photo depicts the mass grave dug at the site. Wiki:

US/Israeli hegemony: folie à deux and fount of terrorism…

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(“America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.”)

Regarding the Fort Hood incident, and the obsessively two-poled analyses of Hasan’s motives—i.e., was he 1) simply deranged, or was he 2) a rogue adherent of Islam—consider former CIA analyst Ray McGovern’s argument on the vilification of Muslims, i.e., of Empire’s considered opinion, this time via Dick Cheney—and as dutifully proffered by the MSM—on the need to monitor, corral, suppress, or otherwise impede the lives of that collective portrayed as inherently, mindlessly antagonistic of the US.

McGovern touches upon the matter of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—waterboarded 183 times—and the source of his grievance against the US, as recorded in the 9/11 report and quoted by McGovern:

‘By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.’

United States’ torture victim #001…

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Rumsfeld to Lindh’s American torturers: “…take the gloves off.”

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[Letter to Noam Chomsky (24 April 2009)]:

Professor Chomsky,

An article posted at the After Downing Street website by David Lindorff concerning the John Lindh issue
here:

David Lindorff

or here:

After Downing Street

has the credibility to generate a groundswell of support for re-examining the case. If you have not already done so, would you consider an endorsement—i.e., a written statement, however brief—of a re-examination of the indictment and conviction of Lindh. He has thus far served seven years of a twenty-year sentence, in a case established, it is argued, via torture and threats against a then eighteen-year-old student of Islam—with his studies and trip abroad occuring prior to 9/11.

Since Lindh was, arguably, the first casualty of the Bush/Cheney-induced hysteria and dragnet, his cause, it would seem, would possess gravitas, in addition to the possibility that the rush to impale him might imply that all the ‘i’s and ‘t’s were not dotted and crossed, i.e., some aspect of the indictment/conviction idée fixe was left unattended to in that first blush of torture fever. This would mean that a “fissure” exists into which to gain a legal foothold.

Misandry and the co-opting of a feminist movement…

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the prelude: systemic oppression as stimulus for collective activism…

Consider: for as long as men and women have engaged with one another—and, generally speaking—men have dominated, exploited, abused, raped, vilified, or otherwise disenfranchised their other-gendered partners on the planet. And—again, generally speaking—such hideous behaviour went without redress or reparation as well. That is, not only was it condoned, the “permission” was codified as well, i.e., endorsed by the State. Women were treated like chattel, i.e., the man’s movable property. This was the nightmare reality of many women’s existence since time out of memory.

Further, and although feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft had published works arguing to women’s rights—e.g., A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)—and the Suffragettes had been a political force to reckon with here in the US early in the last century, the feminist movement came into its own as recently as the sixties at places like Cal-Berkeley—a split second ago in the full, historical context of the matter of women’s disenfranchisement! And how could it have been otherwise that the academy is where the issue would be addressed? Outside of the university, the topic was generally off the table, but within its halls—ostensibly, a site of inquiry into values, ideas, etc., unhindered by norms taken for granted without—the issue was fixed, i.e., for analysis, dialogue, and, ultimately, activism. Specifically, in the academy feminism became praxis, and not merely ideology or socio-political scholarship.

The Creel Committee, the corporate media, and systematic deceit: Manufacturing Consent

“They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.”

(John Milton; from epigraph to Manufacturing Consent).

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson established an independent agency, known variously as the Committee on Public Information (CPI) and the Creel Committee, whose purpose was to control public opinion in the US with an eye towards generating support for the war effort in general and cultivating a deep seated and abiding hatred of everything German in particular. Further, this bias propagating “machine” did not scruple to arouse fear and hatred of German-Americans as well—that was then manifest by the public at large—so effective was it at influencing said endemic prejudice via a calculated use of various media, including print and film.

And, although the CPI had been dissolved within two years, the all-important lesson of methodological mind control of the masses was not lost upon those facilitators of media propaganda Wilson had employed, most famously Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. Lippmann was to develop his ideas related to the establishing of opinion within the rank and file, which collective he deemed to be inherently deficient in participating in that American polity coming into focus in the aftermath of a world war—and amidst a burgeoning labor movement in early twentieth century America, i.e., the worker-collective response to the exploitative industrial age.

Socialism via “other people’s money”—versus the prior grand theft…

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“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?”

Ecclesiastes 1: 2-3

In a recent CounterPunch article, Mark T. Harris recounts the calculating imposture in place in the American corporate regime, in lieu of, e.g., union arbitration contending for a fair share of America’s wealth in the form of a living wage. Without unions and their legal representatives agitating for the workers—i.e., their rights, their families, etc.—management and owners will bleed American labor as its own fungible commodity, i.e., easily bought, easily sold, and readily replaced. That the capitalist agenda has been reified in the US—e.g., the frank avowal of Coolidge: “the business of America is business”—leaves the American worker as “second best,” a lesser species of citizen in comparison to the elitist clique of the investor class, their attorneys, and their merely self-serving prerogatives. Harris writes of one corporate CEO feathering his own nest at the expense of workers and their families, Whole Foods’ John Mackey:

“Instead of offering an enlightened perspective on health care, however, Mackey gives us the pseudo-clever nonsense of Margaret Thatcher. ‘The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money,’ Mackey quotes the former British prime minister to begin his Journal op-ed. Of course, by ‘other people’s money’ what Thatcher or Mackey really mean is their money, the money of people of their economic status” [Harris].

Lawrence Textile Strike, 1912—America as ruination of her working class…

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“Work in a textile mill took place at a grueling pace and the labor was repetitive and dangerous. In addition, a number of children under the age of fourteen worked in the mills. For example, half of the workers in the four Lawrence mills of the American Woolen Company, the leading employer in the industry and the town, were girls between fourteen and eighteen….thirty-six out of every 100 men and women who worked in the mill died by the time they reached twenty-five” [Wiki].

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“The very existence of the State demands that there be some privileged class vitally interested in maintaining that existence, and it is precisely the group interests of that class that are called patriotism.”

Mikhail Bakunin, Letters on Patriotism (1869).

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Survey of American labor resistance and opposition

Bread and Roses Strike

Ludlow [Colorado] Massacre, 1914

Mikhail Bakunin

Libertarian Socialism

Anarcho-syndicalism

Participatory democracy

Wagner Act

Taft-Hartley Act

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(revision: 11/14)

La grande séduction, or…“the American Dream,” and other conceits…

 

(“The US corporate ruse of, ‘Arbeit macht frei’ as vague postulate and entrée to the equally vague ‘American Dream’–-i.e., a diversion and seduction for an American electorate caught up in wage slavery and personal debt peonage–-has devolved into something akin to a ‘final solution’ for the American worker.”)

The National Labor Relations Act—as David Macaray states in a recent CounterPunch article—guaranteed the right to organize, i.e., employees could establish a union within their place of employment, despite wishes of management and owners to the contrary.

Yet, the de jure “right” has been repeatedly undermined since its 1935 inauguration by various underhanded—and illegal—methods, mostly quite effective in that employees are either dimissed from their jobs or, in the prolonged period of legal deliberation seek alternate routes to raising their standard of living, all too often stalled at or below the poverty level.

Macaray:

“In 1978, the Carter administration attempted, more or less, to address this problem. Not by doing anything radical, mind you—not by adding hundreds of NLRB field investigators, not by establishing hard and fast time limits—but by introducing two remarkably tame and almost laughably superficial changes to the Wagner Act…. In 1978, the Democrats owned the government. They held the House, the Senate, and the White House. But even with this numerical and tactical advantage, the bill failed….It failed to pass because the Democrats defeated it. They didn’t just defeat it, they crushed it. The bill lost by a landslide. Why? Because, deep-down, Democrats in the House and Senate were just as frightened of a heavily unionized (and therefore ‘independent’) workforce as were their Republican counterparts” [Macaray, 2009].

“Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good…”

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One Abbot Howard Hoffman referred to Dorothy Day (with Dan Berrigan, upper right) as, “the first Hippie.” High praise indeed. Day’s Weltanschauung included as its primary consideration aid to the poor. She remarked: “If anybody comes to you hungry…you don’t say to him, ‘go be thou filled,’… ‘go be warm’…You go ahead and see to it that he does get what he needs. You can’t pass the buck that way.”

“We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.” (Dan Berrigan, Catonsville Nine statement, 17 May 1968)

 

(“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children…”)

“Some 10 or 12 of us (the number is still uncertain) will, if all goes well (ill?) take our religious bodies during this week to a draft center in or near Baltimore. There we shall, of purpose and forethought, remove the 1-A files, sprinkle them in the public street with homemade napalm, and set them afire. For which act we shall, beyond doubt, be placed behind bars for some portion of our natural lives, in consequence of our inability to live and die content in the plagued city, to say “peace peace” when there is no peace, to keep the poor poor, the home- less, the thirsty and hungry homeless, thirsty and hungry.

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.

“For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. And for thinking of that other Child, of whom the poet Luke speaks. The infant was taken up in the arms of an old man, whose tongue grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty.

twelve-year-old Adeline “Addie” Card…

The photograph depicts twelve-year-old Adeline “Addie” Card, yet another casualty of American capitalist greed. She is at her textile machine. A commodity herself, she is withheld for the exchange value she represents to American business interests. The Lewis Hine photo archive of child labor in the U.S. is here (scroll down to the “thirty-two states” links). Addie Card, property of the Pownal, Vermont Cotton Mill.

Libertarian Socialism

Mother Jones

(photo: Lewis Hine, August, 1910)
 

(revision: 10/03)