Players are from Andover; Freepers are from Brazil (posted Nov 15, 2002)

[arendt]

Players are from Andover; Freepers are from Brazil
by arendt (November 15, 2002)

Twenty five years ago, we were harmlessly scared by the book/
movie "The Boys from Brazil" (BfB). Its plot was that Nazis had
saved Hitler's DNA and cloned many copies. The clones
were raised from infancy in families chosen by the Nazis
to duplicate Hitler's dysfunctional family. The reasoning was
that, with the same ingredients, it was only a matter of time
before one of the clones grew up to be another Fuhrer. As with
most Hollywood potboilers, good prevailed and heavy-handed
evil was vanquished. Too bad it doesn't work like that in real
life.

In the real world at that time, the Church and Pike Committees were
exposing CIA excesses like the MK-Ultra mind-control program, the
Phoenix program of mass assasination in Viet Nam, hiring the Mafia
in an attempt to assasinate Castro; and America was appalled. Today,
the CIA casually murders Afghani prisoners by drowning and dehydration,
and blows up "terrorists", including American citizens, on network TV;
and segments of America cheer.

The loudest cheers come from Freeper types (a contraction of
Free Republic, a website for true believers in the Republican
party line, whatever it is on any given day.) Nevertheless, I have
some compassion for the Freepers. Like the children in BfB, they
have been placed in a situation designed to bring out the worst in
them, then rewarded for their wretched behavior.

"...propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where
common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing
the...total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid,
fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably
will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual
sacrifices - and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because
in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-
respect."

- Hannan Arendt
Origins of Totalitarianism (OoT)

This essay reviews the changes in America over the last twenty five
years and concludes that they were run from a playbook. The Freepers
are certainly not the instigators of that playbook, but rather just the loudest,
most expendable of the manipulatees put into play.


1. What has changed?

America has moved to the extremist right, and it didn't "just happen".
This sea-change of societal values took a lot of planning, effort, and money;
but the blueprint was already there - just like Hitler's DNA. (Have you noticed
that no one ever wrote a plot about Stalin's DNA? Stalin was just a back-
stabbing, bureaucratic weasel, like Martin Bormann or Ari Fleischer. Whereas,
Hitler was possessed, demonic.) The political DNA for our change is found
in the garden-variety overworked, underpaid, miseducated working stiff.

Since 1980, the economic and social conditions of a defeated
Weimar-era Germany have been imposed on the United States by
an unholy alliance of multi-national corporations and reactionary
theocrats in order to activate this totalitarian political DNA. If you
recognize that Naziism was a "redemption psychosis" in a defeated
society, you can see the same deadly disease at work in the U.S. today.


2. What events were the working stiffs allowed to see?

2.1 The threat

First, the working stiff had to lose his job security. So, the corporations
started sending American jobs overseas (using profits made in America
and export tax credits paid for by American taxpayers). Soon, skilled jobs
were hemorraging; and skilled workers were driving cabs and flipping burgers.
What was worse was that the next generation of working stiffs never got the
chance to learn those high-paying skills and the critical thinking that went
with them. Instead, they got cash registers with pictures of burgers and fries
in place of numbers.

At the same time, college costs were over-inflated and cheap government
loans were replaced by expensive private loans. This made it hard for
even the solid middle class to stay educated, much less the working stiff.
Finally, record inflation (nothing near the 1923 German hyperinflation,
but significant for the U.S.) drove first-time housing out of reach of the
working stiff.

The end result was to sour the working class on the American Dream.
They stopped trying to get a college education or think critically, and instead,
took a mac-job and began to look for someone to blame.

2.2 The scapegoats

Following the Plan (see section 3), "the designated scapegoats" were ready and
waiting. They were the same scapegoats the Nazis used: gypsies, homosexuals,
Jews, and Communists. In our society, gypsies became hippies, feminists were added
to the homosexual category, commies mutated into liberals and intellectuals, and
Blacks replaced Jews as the race to hate. This is no surprise, since hatred of
such groups has been part of the political DNA of angry, disinformed, insecure
working class guys since the Roman Empire.

2.3 The solution

Also ready and waiting was "the Solution", in the form of an Apocalyptic Christianity to
save us from "moral decay", which also promised Roman "pater familias" domination
of women and children by angry men and KKK domination of minorities by angry white
folks - a typical authoritarian hierarchy. Since no mainstream denomination
espoused such barbarian sentiments, the planners recruited a fundamentalist
theology of "dispensationalism" that had been created in the late 1800s as a
toxic reaction to the modern world. This psuedo-Christianity preaches that God can
be coerced to start "the rapture" if certain earthly events are made to happen. These
blasphemous fabrications are passed off as the teachings of Jesus. (In passing,
it is worth mentioning that the Jewish community in Eastern Europe had a religious
revival at roughly the same time, spawning the ultra-orthodox reactionary Hasidics
and Lubavichers who dominate Israel today.)

Again, if you know history, you can see the political DNA at work. From about 1880,
Germany had been captivated by Ariosophy, a cult claiming the Ayrans were
descended from Atlanteans and were in a death struggle with the Jewish race.
Different fundamentalists, different enemy, same script - a recipe for mindless conflict.
Needless to say, the religious documents of Ariosophy became the Nazi Party
program of racial purity and the Nuremberg race laws. With this background, it
should be no surprise that the Apocalyptic Christians want their version of the
Bible to be the law of the land.

2.4 Imminent catastrophe

The final stage of the Plan for the U.S. is now underway. Completing the replay of
the dysfunctional society of the 1920s-30s requires Great Depression levels of
economic dislocation to destroy what is left of the middle class and turn them into
additional scared/outraged working stiffs. Along with a manufactured permanent
terrorist scare, the last vestiges of democracy will be swept away by "emergency"
decrees.

To implement this part of the Plan, the Bush team began wrecking the economy
even before they were elected by "talking down" the economy in the 2000
political campaign. They have continued to stay "hands off" as the economy
tanks to 1930s levels of damage (except to support looting by their cronies).
Their only proactive measure was to throw an anvil to the drowning economy
in the form of tax cuts for the rich.

--

So that is what has happened. The economic and social chaos of the Weimar
Germany period has been artificially and deliberately visited upon contemporary
America to create the conditions necessary for authoritarian overthrow of legitimate
democratic government. And even the working stiffs will agree about the economic
conditions, the "scapegoats" and "the solution". What they won't agree about is why
it happened.


3. Who instigated these events?

3.1 The black hearts

As the rogue elements of the field operations side of the intelligence
community and its assets, like the Miami Cubans, were momentarily
exposed, disgraced, and rolled back by the post-Viet Nam, post-Watergate
revulsion with secret government, they looked around for new employers.
They had already set up worldwide drug-running and arms-peddling schemes
for off-the-budget self-funding, front companies and front banks for
deceptive cover, and captive political and religious leaders (like the
ex-Korean CIA Sun Myung Moon, Noriega, and the redoubtable Saddam
Hussein) for accomplishing their missions of deniably overthrowing governments
and assasinating leaders overseas (and, perhaps, leaders in Dallas, Los Angeles,
and Memphis).

So, like the post-WW1 German Army, who made illegal secret deals with the equally
disreputable Soviets during the interwar period, the CIA field operatives
expanded their clandestine contact with the most rabid rightwing elements of the
Republican Party. (It was a widely held, but false, belief of the1970s U.S. political
establishment of both parties that these elements had been discredited and
rendered impotent.)

3.2 The blue-bloods

Reactionary billionaires like the Coors brothers, and the other families whose
names are attached to "philanthropies" began to heavily fund conservative/
fundamentalist think tanks and astroturf lobbying groups. They had concluded
from the events of the late 60s-early 70s that the U.S. had become an unfriendly
country towards them and that they were entitled to get back under their control.
The motive wasn't money. They had plenty of money, and they spent it like water
to buy intelligence operatives to execute "the Plan". The motive was what the Plan
would deliver: naked authoritarian control - control which would allow so much
looting and economic blackmail that the entire Plan could be looked upon as a
sound business investment.

3.3 The black-and-blue alliance - beating up the little people

The Plan is carried out by acting and former intelligence operatives of both high
and low status. Beginning in the Reagan/Bush White House, the line between
government and private covert operations has been blurred. After all, if the rich
own the intelligence services the way the corporations own the Congress, who is
going to mind if the two organizations have a revolving door between them?

At the low-status end of these operatives, you have bloody-minded fanatics like G.
Gordon Liddy. In the mid-range, you have charismatic, but unmasked Machiavellians
like Charles Colson and Oliver North - guys who tried for the big heist and got caught,
so now they sit on the conservative lecture circuit making only small fortunes.
At the top you have classic behind-the-scenes manipulators like Philips Andover
graduate Poppy Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Succesful Machiavellians
one and all. This small clique of top dogs are the instigators, "the Players". It doesn't
take many when you have a ton of money and your own private intelligence service.

Note the omission of George W. Bush from the Player list. He is simply the most
visible and willing manipulatee. No one believes that he understands, much less
plans, all the devious scams of the cabal. He is a hand-puppet. He is also totally
uncharismatic; and therefore, no potential Hitler. Perhaps the rich-boy cabal learned
from history not to put someone charismatic and smart in a public position of power.
They can remember as far back as Bill Clinton.

Just one final thought on the Players. As a puppet, George W. is expendable in
the cause. If his untimely death could advance the movement, they would not
hesitate. When the fanatic Tom DeLay becomes number three in the succession,
behind crash-cart Cheney, start to make book on George's tenure.


4. What events were the working stiffs not allowed to see clearly?

The first fruit of the Plan was the smelly "October Surprise" hostage standoff,
arranged by the Bush/Casey intelligence duo, which put Ronald Reagan into the
White House and Bush and Casey into new and higher positions of power.

With the White House as a base for covert operations, the whole democracy-
subverting Plan really got rolling. A classic propaganda campaign was
set up to fund, organize, arm (in several senses), and legitimize an in-country
base of Neanderthal conservatives. The movie actor and GE asset, the pre-senile
Ronald Reagan, was coached through his "role" as president and packaged by
a media savvy staff. This packaging was made doubly effective by the beginnings
of the purge of liberals from the media.

Overseas, the intelligence agencies were paid off by being restored to their
glory days, controlling guerilla campaigns in Guatamala, Nicaragua, Angola, and
Afghanistan, and coordinating the Iraq War. Predictably, it took the spook shop run
out of George Bush's office by Oliver North a mere four years to get caught doing the
bad old things, i.e., Iran-Contra. But, in the end, all were pardoned by George Bush.

Domestically, the Players began to destabilize U.S. law just as blithely as the spooks
had destabilized other countries. Self-funding CIA black ops like Southern Air Transport
(a.k.a. "the enterprise" - WASP talk for La Cosa Nostra) were used to supply the Contra
War while other, ostensibly retired intelligence operatives joined domestic political
groups and began recruiting support and raising funds delivered to SAT and other
organizations for a "roll back" of Communism by "freedom fighters". This activity was in
violation of the venerable Neutrality Act and the more specific Boland Ammendment,
but the Reagan administration provided "national security" cover for this illegality,
as well as the Contra drug-running that went with it.

That administration also placed what Stalin would have called "wreckers" into key
positions in the government. These wreckers refused to enforce the laws on the books
and came up with their own bizarre interpretations of agencies' roles. The infamous
James Watt decided that since the Second Coming was just around the corner, it made
no sense for his EPA to enforce the pollution laws. The embittered Clarence Thomas
decided that the anti-discrimination laws he had been hired to enforce were wrong
and should be resisted.

This kind of protection of Republican illegality continued through Ken Starr's repeated
violations of Independent Council ethics, and peaked in the "Brooks Brothers Riot"
during the Miami Selection tragedy. Congressional aides, identifiable from their photos
and from their own admissions, were never prosecuted for a calculated political
event that was outrageous for people at their station. It continues in the Cheney
stonewalling of the Energy Task Force attendee list.

So, what the working stiff was not allowed to see (or did not want to see) was that
being a Republican means that obeying the law is optional. Putting it another way:
you don't have to be smart to commit the perfect crime, you just have to be in charge
of the investigation.


5. The front organizations

Beyond merely appointing like-minded zealots to positions of power, what
really makes students of totalitarianism pay attention to present-day America is the
creation of unofficial "front organizations" that duplicate and subvert genuine
organizations. These are the kinds of fronts that used to horrify Cold Warriors
when run by commies. Most prominent among these fronts have been the
Federalist Society, the Christian Coalition, and Hate Radio.

The mission of the Federalist Society (FS) has been to invent from whole cloth
a reactionary reading of the Constitution (original intent, natural law, takings) ,
recruit lawyers sympathetic to that reading, and have them appointed to judicial
positions by the captive White House. If this were a genuine organization, it
wouldn't be so creepy; but, to watch it follow the party line from decade to decade
is to see it as just another finger of the hand-puppet of the reactionary cabal.

With subtrefuge and cynicism, the FS promotes fanatically anti-liberal jurists,
like Robert Bork (who carried out Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre) and
Clarence Thomas. When they gained power in Congress, the Players totally
politicized the selection of Federal judges. With their trademark hypocrisy and
law-breaking, they simply refused to perform their legally mandated duties of
bringing Clinton's appointees up for a vote, then had the nerve to brand the
legal philosophy of the appointees as a danger. The FS's payoff has occurred in the
Bush 2 administration, whose various appointment lists read like the membership
roster of the Federalist Society.

The other two front organizations didn't need to manufacture a whole new body of
argumentation for a critically thinking profession. There have been religious zealots
and haters from time immemorial. What the Christian Coalition and the "Hate Radio"
network provided were centralization, financing, and message control. By changing
the FEC rules to allow the monopolisation of the media, the Players made it possible to
create every propagandist's dream: a totally fictitious, homogeneous, and ideologically
pure world that could be fed 24/7/365 to unsuspecting Freeper types.

The spooks had perfected these techniques in the Third World. Incoherent dissent
became focused. Mountains of psychotic rantings were mined for a few nuggets which
could be sanitized for public debate but were really codewords for those in the know.
Reliable hypocrites were vetted; unreliable principled conservatives were kicked out
for railing against Pat Robertson's anti-Semitism or Oral Roberts' naked hucksterism.

This is classic revolutionary technique. Alexandre Koyre called such fronts "secret
societies established in broad daylight".

"...the structure of the (totalitarian) movements...reminds one of nothing
so much as of certain outstanding traits of secret societies. Secret societies
form hierarchies according to degrees of initiation, regulate the life of their
members according to a secret and fictitious assumption which makes
everything look as though it were something else, adopt a strategy of
consistent lying to deceive the non-initiated external masses, demand
unquestioning obedience from their members who are held together by
allegiance to a frequently unknown and always mysterious leader, who
himself is surrounded...by a small group of initiated who are in turn
surrounded by the half-initiated who form a 'buffer area' against the
profane world."
- Hannah Arendt, OoT


That passage was written 50 years ago, but it is a textbook diagnosis of America
in 2002. Today we have Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Ridge - the most secretive Executive
Branch in living memory, wartime or peacetime. Who knows what Cheney or Ridge
are up to? George Bush's few public appearances are tightly controlled before hand-
picked audiences of what Arendt calls the "half-initiated". We have Rush Limbaugh
turning logic inside-out to "prove" that this monopolised corporate media paying him
$250 Million is "liberal". We have fundamentalist churches and movements like
Promise Keepers demanding total obedience not only from their rank and file, but
from the entire "Christian nation" which they claim America is.


6. What is to be done?

As the lame-duck Democratic Senate caves in on Homeland Security and
reactionary judges before they have even handed over power, and the Greens
one-sidedly beat up only the Democrats, there is little hope from the political left.

The only hope comes from the Freepers themselves. If any of them take the time
to consider the points in sections three through five above, they might realize
that they are being played for suckers. They are going to get just as screwed
as anyone else who is not part of the Players inside-team of rich boys, thugs,
and media manipulators.

If they live in Tornado Junction, Oklahoma, they can choose between starting to
build a throne and a a palace for their local Wal-Mart manager (because he is
going to be their liege lord in a society that will make the world of Mad Max look
compassionate), or getting a clue. Here is an example clue: until a terrorist blows up
something that hurts the Players, like CIA headquarters or a Houston oil refinery,
instead of a largely empty wing at the Pentagon and a bunch of replacable bond
traders or a French oil tanker, you might conclude this is all part of the playbook.)

If the left will shut its self-mutilating mouth for long enough to let the Freepers see
that the Bush Cabal is worse news for them than the Left, they might wake up and
join us in saving both our sorry asses - for which I will be eternally grateful.

If this doesn't happen quickly, the only advice I have is to emigrate while it is still
allowed. Innoculate the world against this nasty, media-borne, money-driven
political pathology before it wrecks what is left of this fragile, looted and polluted,
overpopulated planet.

I have never been an optimist, and now is no time to start.

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