All About the New Cruelty

Congrats, America. You've finally done it. You've become a fascist police state. I was pretty sure it would happen at some point during my lifetime, but 2005? You've exceeded my every expectation.

Okay, first things first...The fascist part. Fascism is a word that's tossed around a lot on the ol' Internet. Usually, people use it to mean "something bad." Like, "Oh, I hate AP Bio with Mr. Thompson. He's such a fucking fascist." This is wrong, unless of course Mr. Thompson is centralizing power within the Teacher's Lounge and quelling any dissent via propaganda and oppression.

Accordingly, everyone kind of tunes out a political blogger or commentator online if they start throwing around F-bombs. "Bush is a fascist," "Cheney is a fascist" and so on. It's a good way to get pegged quickly as a wacky hippie with nothing sensible to say, like the time I said that Sean Hannity molests kids. Obviously, that's not 100% accurate. He does molest kids, but I'm using that term to refer to young goats, not humans. I apologize for being misleading.

This is a shame, because the Bush Administration really is a fascist organization, and the country is slowly but surely transforming from a representative democracy and into a corporate-run beurocracy where the monied elite retains power through coersion, corruption, media control, propaganda and an underground network of prisons where dissidents are arrested without being charged, held for indeterminate periods of time, tortured and even killed.

Here's the Dictionary.com definition of "fascism":

A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

Tell me how that's different from circa 2005 America.

Now, some may say that Bush isn't a dictator. It's true, he calls himself a "president" and operates under an assumption of having won an election, but there are a few problems with this veneer of legitimacy.

(1) Neither of the two elections in which Bush assumed power were fair, and both were tainted with corruption both in terms of actual electoral practices and post-election legal wrangling. I frankly still doubt that Bush beat Al Gore in 2000, and believe if the Supreme Court had not intervened, he may have lost the election outright. And I don't even have a guess as to the actual outcome in 2004, because the voting practices in Ohio, Florida and other states seem to me at this point hopelessly flawed. (Here's an enlightening article by Christopher Hitchens, hardly a cheerleader for the Democrats, discussing Ohio's inconsistant and questionable election results).

(2) With a Republican controlled Court, Senate, House and Executive Branch, the American people get exactly 1 chance every two years to change any aspect of the way their nation is governed. Other than the mid-term elections of '06, these criminals have years of total domination to look forward to, without any chance for Americans to get the hell rid of them.

(3) Because the corporations that control the government also control the American media, they have the exclusive opportunity to shift attitudes among the electorate. Representative democracy is fueled by an informed, aware populace, not a group of zombies held helplessly in the sway of a slick, expertly-tuned marketing machine that works down their resolve 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

(4) Bush and Cheney's entire ruling philosophy is based around enhancing their own power while removing it from every other governing body. They are exactly fascist in their thinking...Any opposition is treasonous, any dissent is anti-America, any attempt by any group of influence any specific policy is an infringement on the jurisdiction of the White House. Think about it...Cheney was infuriated that the Senate passed a law asking him politely to stop torturing people. He was infuriated.

Okay, so Bush/Cheney is a dictatorship, albeit one with a terrific PR wing to convince people that they're just mild-mannered public servants.

You want socio-economic controls? How about enriching their corporate partners while keeping the vast majority of Americans in crippling, cyclical poverty? Moreso, how about removing vital funds set aside for the protection of Americans and using it instead for opportunistic wars of pleasure and kickbacks for the rich and powerful?

Suppression of opposition through terror and censorship? Karl Rove has that slogan at the top of all his personal stationary. "From the Desk of Karl Rove...Supression of opposition through terror and censorship." Often, Bill O'Reilly will combine both of these concepts into the same sentence. We're talking about a country in which Billy O can call for the destruction of San Francisco by terrorists live on the radio, in which Ann Coulter can insist that we murder foreign heads of state and forcibly convert his or her citizens to Christianity, but Howard Stern has to flee to privately-owned pay radio to make doody jokes.

Just consider how the U.S. has now openly adopted torture as a foreign policy. The White House and the Wall Street Journal are basically telling the American people that torture is okay, because it one day might possibly help us try to stop another potential terrorist attack that could hypothetically strike at an unknown future date. I'd link a great New York Times article on this very issue, but it's behind that bogus Times Select firewall, and I'm not paying $4 for each of you to read it.

Finally, belligerant nationalism and racism. Um...please look around you. Okay, you've looked around? Do I still need to talk about how rah-rah Americanism has reached new and absurd heights of absurd absurdity? Here's a mp3 of a horrible pop-punk song called "Bush Was Right." Case closed. And racism? Man, GWB is all about racism. You need look no further than the defense he and his apologists use against charges of racism...He can't be racist, because he hangs out with Condoleeza Rice! They're buddies! Forget his racist policies and the fact that his mother has made openly racist comments in public or that his administration allowed thousands of black Louisiana residents to die while he praised his friend Brownie and made jokes about his wild days on the bayou. He's a friend to the Negro!

Also, his narrow-minded fundamentalist religious views, in which Christianity supercedes American values, can be considered a form of extreme prejudice, or at least unfair religious favoratism.

So, there you go. Bush/Cheney is a fascist organization. But I also referred to modern America as a police state. Surely I can't be serious...Americans still have relative freedom from inappropriate, strong-arm gestapo tactics, right? WRONG.

Miami police announced Monday they will stage random shows of force at hotels, banks and other public places to keep terrorists guessing and remind people to be vigilant.

Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats.

Haven't any of you people read 1984? Or, if you hate reading as much as most American hillbilly shitheads, haven't any of you seen Brazil? Or...sigh...Star Wars: Episode III: The Good One? Notice how the bad guys always use the threat of terrorist violence as an excuse to seize ever-greater power for themselves? You think George Lucas just made that shit up? He's clever, but he's not that goddamn clever. Orwell included it in his book because it's totally fucking true.

The Miami Police aren't really thinking they're going to stop terrorism by harassing people at banks and hotels. They just want to harass people, and this gives them a great excuse. Why do they want to harass people? Because that's their fucking job. We pay them to catch people doing shit they shouldn't be doing. So I don't really blame the police for making a stupid, crazy power grab as much as I blame everyone else for not stopping them. Of course the police want to abuse their power as much as possible. That's why they become policemen! Guys who aren't bullies and don't want to push people around for no good reason don't become cops.

I mean, holy shit, go read this whole article. It's extraordinarily frightening.

The operations will keep terrorists off guard, Fernandez said. He said al-Qaida and other terrorist groups plot attacks by putting places under surveillance and watching for flaws and patterns in security.

...

Police Chief John Timoney said there was no specific, credible threat of an imminent terror attack in Miami. But he said the city has repeatedly been mentioned in intelligence reports as a potential target.

Timoney also noted that 14 of the 19 hijackers who took part in the Sept. 11 attacks lived in South Florida at various times and that other alleged terror cells have operated in the area.

Things to notice about Fernandez and Timoney's statements:

(1) No specific information. Only a vague threat of terror activity.

(2) What percentage of the world's total terrorist population are actual members of al-Qaida? I'm guessing less than 2%. Yet in every single article where terrorism is mentioned, members of al-Qaida are cited. This organization has become a symbol used to scare people. it's an archetype, nothing more.

(3) Connecting 9/11 to something with which it has no connection. In this case, gestapo tactics in South Florida)

According to the article, the ACLU has approved the Miami Police's suggested tactics, which does kind of surprise me. They can usually be counted on to uphold civil rights laws as strenuously as possible. But I still think this is way, way over the line, and the soothing, "we don't want to take your rights away" talk of the officials in charge only convinces me further that something is rotten in the state of Florida. (Well, okay, an additional thing is rotten.) I mean, look at this quote:

"People are definitely going to notice it," Fernandez said. "We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don't want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears."

We plan to shock and surprise you in public, make you present your documentation to us while we invade your personal space and privacy. We want to put you in awe of our power over you, and we want you to be aware that you are always being watched, spied upon and are a suspect in an ongoing, secretive investigation, the details of which are specious, vague and unclear. But we don't want you to feel threatened. Just go about your business like it's not even happening...

Ignorance is Knowledge. War is Peace. Bush isn't a Fascist.