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Fire Alarm: Feeding the Flames at
Traitor's Gate
Chris
Floyd
Tuesday September 25, 2007
"The
nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around." Martin
Luther King Jr., April
3, 1968.
I.
We are told that in the weeks before 9/11, then CIA chief George Tenet
and his colleagues across the intelligence community were so alarmed by
the flood of reports about an impending major terrorist attack that they
felt their "hair was on fire." God only knows what the truth of this
self-serving, after-the-fact assertion might be, but it is indeed an apt
term for a sense of imminent doom in the public sphere. And given the
headlong rush to
a new war against Iran, and the G-force acceleration into the tyranny
of a
lawless, all-encompassing surveillance state that is unfolding before
our eyes -- not to mention the
Democratic Party's complete abandonment of even
the pretense of carrying out the people's mandate and opposing
the Administration's maniacal, murderous, criminal policies -- anyone
whose hair isn't on fire today is either brain-dead, bought-off, or an
active, eager, conniving traitor to the American people, and the human
race.
That latter designation covers all those who now willingly serve the interests
of the Bush Administration: not only the scuttling worker ants of the
Bush-controlled Republican Party, but also every so-called "conservative"
commentator toting water for the Bushist agenda; every so-called "libertarian"
lining up for war, tyranny, torture and corruption; every
star-spangled general whoring himself with propaganda exercises on
Fox News and deceitful testimony before Congress; every so-called "centrist"
wringing their hands over the need for "bipartisan compromise" with the
blood-soaked thugs and rapers of liberty who have seized the Republic.
Call them out by name: Bill Kristol, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael
Leeden, David
Petraeus, Fred Kagan, Glenn
("More Rubble, Less Trouble") Reynolds, Joe Leiberman, Jon Kyl, Gasbag
Limbaugh, and on and on, straight down the line. Call them by name, and
call them what they are: traitors, and yes, betrayers, leading the nation
-- knowingly, gleefully -- into ignominy and ruin.
This is not the time for polite debate and "political positioning." This
is not the time for "politics as usual" at all. The Bush Regime long ago
took anything resembling "politics as usual" off the table. Get that through
your head already. The current presidential campaign -- an utter farce,
a multi-billion-dollar carnival of despair and deception -- is meaningless.
Anyone who pays attention to it for more than two minutes a day is wasting
their time. Do you think that any of the candidates -- yes, any of them
-- are putting all their cards on the table? Do you think that anything
that any of them is saying right now can be taken on trust, or will be
translated into actual policy once they are in office?
If so, let me sell you some shares in all that "high-speed rail" Bill
Clinton talked about building in 1992, when he was going to take the "peace
dividend" from the end of the Cold War and beat a few of our redundant
swords into gleaming ploughshares for American workers ravaged by globalization.
Where did that dividend go? It went to the NAFTA boondoggle. It went to
Halliburton (yes, the massive privatization of the American military --
the results of which we saw on the streets of Baghdad last week -- began
under Clinton, who threw billions of dollars in fat contracts at Dick
Cheney and other "military servicers."). It went right back to the Pentagon,
with its "missile shield" scams, its "Space Command" plans, its new missiles,
tanks, and planes, its ever-expanding global empire of bases. It went
to the continuing strangulation of the Iraqi people (and the continuing
enrichment of Saddam Hussein with the express approval of the US and the
UK). It
went into the bombing of civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in an illegal,
undeclared, unsanctioned war that ended with the same settlement that
was on offer before the US and NATO attack began. In short, it went --
as usual -- to the same murky conglomeration of arms merchants, corporate
cronies, revolving-door contractors, energy interests, investment firms
and elite institutions that hold the true reins of power, and will do
so whoever gets elected in 2008, no matter what they say now, or even
try to do afterwards.
"Oh, but that Dennis Kucinich," you say, "that Ron Paul, that Mike Gravel
-- they're sincere about wanting real change." Well, maybe that's so;
I have no way of knowing if it's true or not, and neither do you, but
let's assume that it is. The brutal fact of the matter is that the more
likely they are to actually change things in a fundamental way, the less
likely it is that they will ever be allowed to take office, or come anywhere
near it.
Already they are mocked, scorned and marginalized by the powers-that-be
and their sycophants on both sides of the political aisle. And if by some
miracle they managed to punch through this cordon sanitaire, and gather
the makings of a mass movement behind them, we know exactly what would
happen to them. The last person who broke in from the outside and spearheaded
a mass movement that seriously questioned the social, economic and military
underpinnings of the American Empire was gunned down in Memphis on April
4, 1968. Although he was long a controversial figure, long a target of
government surveillance and dirty tricks, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed
only after he began expanding his movement beyond the issue of civil rights
(which many Establishment figures supported) to include opposition to
the Vietnam War and economic justice for American workers. Remember: he
wasn't in Memphis that day for a civil rights rally; he was supporting
a strike by garbage workers.
No, this is not the time for fretting over who is or isn't allowed into
some sham debate, or how much time they are or are not given to answer
some witless question from a corporate hack. (And why would a genuine
agent for genuine change want to be associated with such farces and
with such corrupted and compromised parties in the first place?) This
is not the time for endless noodling over the political horse race, for
wondering if Barack can catch Hillary as they mud-wrestle in a sty of
dirty money poured in by the same conglomeration that devoured the "peace
dividend." Neither one of these powerful senators have called for the
impeachment of the White House criminals, nor refused, as a matter of
honor and principle, to treat with them, but instead continually "seek
compromise" with the Bushists on the mass murder in Iraq, while echoing
even magnifying the Administration's bellicosity toward Iran.
The only important issue concerning these two candidates, and indeed all
the "serious" contestants, is not whether they are fit to govern the Republic
clearly, they are not but whether they should be ranked directly with
the traitors who beset us today, or simply be dismissed as fools or tools.
In other words, are they among "Bush's willing executioners," like the
bootlickers named above and all of the "serious" Republican candidates,
or are they just moral cowards and craven climbers, willing to go along
to get along, to compromise with evil, to acknowledge the legitimacy of
a tyrannous usurper, in hopes of grabbing some of that same tainted power
for themselves?
In a time of traitors, when the rough beast of another war is spreading
its hot breath across the land, the political travails of a few moneyed
moral cowards is not worth the proverbial bucket of warm spit. Let one
of them step out on stage with their hair on fire, let one of them denounce
the traitors for what they really are, let one of them denounce the White
House criminality for what it really is no word-mincing, no fancy-stepping,
no weaseling, no insinuation then, perhaps, they can be taken "seriously."
Until then, let their campaigns be classed with the stories of Brittney
and Lindsay and all the other celebrity sewage that floods the media today.
II.
So what should be done? We
addressed this question briefly a few weeks ago, but it bears expanding
upon here. What we need most urgently is for national leaders to step
forward with a massive, relentless campaign of non-cooperation with the
Regime. Let those who have some leverage of power and whose position
provides them some measure of cover boycott all dealings with the White
House, all meetings with its criminals and accomplices. Let them vote
on principle, without exception against every single appointee of
the Bush Administration, and every single measure proposed by its supporters.
Let them immediately introduce articles of impeachment against Bush and
Cheney. Let them act immediately on de-funding the war. Let them launch
a widespread public education campaign to inform the American people of
the exact nature and extent of the Bush Regime's crimes.
There are of course hundreds of other actions that national leaders could
and should be taking to begin cleaning out the filth of the Bush Regime
and the mountains of filth left over from the Regime's predecessors
but first let them end all recognition of these criminals as legitimate
partners in government, and condemn them for what they are: traitors,
tyrants, torturers and thieves. Take that first step, then we can move
on to other measures.
But again, as we said before, we all know that nothing like this is going
to happen. Because it would call into question the whole greasy system
upon which all of our national leaders have slithered to the top. It would
undermine the conglomeration in which our elites live and move and have
their being.
Some cling to the idea that in the face of this moral abdication by national
leaders, a mass movement can spring up from below, from the ordinary people,
and bring change and renewal to the troubled land. But there is little
cause for hope in this regard, little sign that the many flashpoints of
dissent that flare up from time to time will catch fire and coalesce into
something more sustained. I once entertained wan but not entirely fanciful
hopes that
the bold stand of Cindy Sheehan in the Texas scrub-brush would light
such a gathering flame. But as we have seen, she too has been mocked,
scorned, slandered and marginalized, often by those supposedly on her
side. And there was a moment or two when it looked as though the outrage
of a few TV talking heads at the
atrocity of abandonment in New Orleans after Katrina would outlast
a couple of news cycles and drive that brutal reality deeper in the American
psyche; but we know that didn't happen.
Likewise, last
week's peaceful rally against Jim Crow justice in Jena, Louisiana,
was indeed heartening; but as we have seen, not even years of the civil
rights movement at its strongest, widest and deepest impact was able to
break the power of the conglomeration: the empire of bases kept growing,
the militarization of the economy and society accelerated, millions of
people were massacred in Indochina. (Who can forget Nixon's
chilling orders on the bombing of Cambodia: "Anything that flies on
anything that moves"?). The half-century of hope that dawned on a Montgomery
bus ended with the illegal installation of George W. Bush and his bloodthirsty
clique in the White House.
In any case, the history of the past six years has shown that the American
people, as a whole, cannot be stirred even by the most brazen outrages.
Not by the wholesale assault on their liberties; not by the rot of their
roads, bridges, towns and cities; not by the massive perversion of their
electoral system; not by the deaths of their sons and daughters, their
friends and neighbors, in a war of aggression they were tricked into by
deliberate lies; not by their government's embrace of torture, concentration
camps, secret prisons, and death squads; not even by the murder in their
own name of
more than one million Iraqis. Not even this genocidal fury powerfully
evoked here by Arthur Silber and here
by Lew Rockwell has shaken them from the half-sleep of what Silber
calls "our impenetrable national narcissism."
But there's nothing else for it. We must keep sounding the alarm, even
in the face of almost certain defeat. What else is our humanity worth
if we don't do that? And if, in the end, all that we've accomplished is
to keep the smallest spark of light alive, to help smuggle it through
an age of darkness to some better, brighter time ahead, is that not worth
the full measure of struggle?
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