Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in America (posted May 31, 2003)

[arendt]

Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in America
by arendt (May 31, 2003)

"They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful
monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any
people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper,
or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to
concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was
aimed at a hand holding out graces, favors, and immunities.

"They have found their punishment in their success. Laws over-
turned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigor; commerce
expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished..."

"Were all these dreadful thing necessary?...No nothing like it.
The fresh ruins of France...are not the devastation of civil war;
they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant
counsel in time of profound peace.

- Edmund Burke
"Reflections on the Revolution in France"

Truly the world is turned upside-down when liberals can quote the arch-
conservative Burke against the cabal of liars, thieves, and vicarious murderers
that has usurped the government of the United States.

Never have so few stolen so much from so many. A tiny, but extremely
well-funded, cabal of radical neocons has triumphed by secrecy and
deception. They have applied the CIA principles for overthrowing third
world democracies to the most advanced country in the world; and it
was as easy as boiling a frog slowly in a pot. The CIA's rule is: use the parts
of the establishment that you control to subvert the parts that you don't
control.

They began by subverting the standards of "journalism of record" to a low
not previously seen in our democracy, and by packing the Federal judiciary
for twenty years, while the Democrats refused to see the magnitude and
relentlessness of the threat. By capturing these centers of power, the neocons
gained the ability to make any fiction they desired both the law of the land and
the official public opinion. Having thus stacked the deck, the rest of the coup was what bridge players call "a laydown grand slam".

They used their slim majority on the Supreme Court to steal the Presidency.
Once in office, there was no detail of the non-military side of government they
would not stoop to conceal, from embarrassing Presidential papers to illegal
Energy Policy meetings. By this executive secrecy, plus a warlike stance in
the Congress, they created a situation where the legitimate opposition was
unable to find out what was going on inside a supposedly open government
in a time of peace.

With the freedom to operate under the radar, unthreatened by a bought-and-
paid-for media, they started to pick fights. They tore up treaties, violated
precedents, and began implementing their confrontational "clash of civil-
izations" policy (whose author, Sam Huntington, is PNAC.) around the world.

Meanwhile, at home, their lies are so profligate as to be uncountable. To
borrow a quip from Joe Stalin, the neocons think "One Democratic lie
(especially one of Bill Clinton's) is an outrage; but a million GOP lies is just a
statistic." The corporatized media mentions the truth about the GOP once on
page 97 of the Saturday edition, and then goes back to being the propaganda
arm of the neocons, led by ex-GOP political attack dog and now FOX News
honcho, Roger Ailes. The administration has become adept at making
embarrassing announcements on Friday evenings or on Election Day, certain
that the press will let the garbage be tossed overboard in the dark without any
stink.

The parade of lies began with "compassionate conservatism" and "Al Gore
can't be trusted", went ballistic with "they hate us for our freedoms", "Axis of
Evil", and "Saddam has WMDs", and returned to earth with tired, discredited
supply-side economic quackery to "justify" an unjustifiable looting of the middle
class by two consecutive giveaways of the public treasury to the plutocratic top
1% of grasping, crooked CEOs. Of course, the CEO scandals were oh-so-
conveniently pushed out of the news by a year of war/war/war.

But now that the war is over, we get Laci Peterson instead of the facts. That's
because the facts are incendiary. The real war was on America's most
precious possession - the civil liberties and open self-government guaranteed
by our former Constitution, and guaranteed most especially during times of
war. The only true name for what has happened in America is "counter-revolution".

----

"The nation (of France) as a whole experienced a rise of prosperity during
the eighteenth century, but most of the new affluence was confined to the
middle class...(it) appeared most visibly in merchants and financiers..."

"The very poor were too weak to revolt; they could cry out for relief, but they
had neither the means nor the spirit to organize rebellion, until they were
aroused by the more prosperous farmers, by the agents of the middle
class, and by uprisings of the Paris populace..."

"While wars were bankrupting the government, they enriched the middle
class, which provided transport and material...The middle classes did not
wish to overthrow the monarchy, but they aspired to control it...The
essence of the French Revolution was the overthrow of the nobility and the
clergy by a middle class using the discontent of the peasants to destroy
feudalism, and the discontent of the urban masses to neutralize the armies
of the king...The Revolution was due not to the patient poverty of the
peasants but to the endangered wealth of the middle class."

- Will and Ariel Durant
"The Story of Civilization -
Book 10 Rousseau and Revolution"

It is fairly well acknowledged that the neocons have followed the secretive,
elitist playbook of their academic mentor, Leo Strauss. What is not usually
mentioned in the corporate media is that they are running the French Revolution in reverse. Just as the French bankers used the peasants and the
urban mob to pressure the nobility and the king, the neocons use the hate
radio audience and the conditioned fanatics of the fundamentalist churches to
pressure democratic institutions into submission to the corporate and
fundamentalist agendas. (To appreciate the similarity, realize that in Bourbon France, super-rich bankers were "middle class"; neither aristocrats, nor
peasants. The world was so different that basic terms need careful
definition.)

The neocon Cabal (their own sarcastic coinage) has overturned the oldest
Constitutional democracy in the world; and they are in the process of re-
instating, under suitable euphemisms and apologetics, an Ancien Regime of
untaxed CEO nobles, an Established Church of fanatical fundamentalists,
and "chartered" overseas (multi-national) companies that enforce their
corporate mercantilism upon populations domestic and foreign to the private
profit of the ruling oligopoly. Each of these affronts to citizenship was cause for
rebellion in America or England or France hundreds of years ago. Yet today, a
restoration of a society that is transparently identical goes on without a
whimper.

The perpetrators of this royalist restoration openly flaunt their contempt for
the Enlightenment, having identified it as "evil", and the root of all our troubles.
Yet, few Americans today have enough of a grasp of civics to see any connection between this rhetoric and our Constitution, which was held in its
time to be a model of Enlightenment thinking.

Fundamentalist Christianity pervades the Executive Branch with prayer
services; and GOP members of Congress live, monk-like, in group housing
provided by a religious foundation and cross-populated with fundamentalist
ideologues-in-training. A constant barrage of bills to make us "more Christian"
(i.e., to tear down the wall between Church and State) is shoved down our
throats by laughable bigots who themselves are constantly caught in child
molestation, wife beating, and infidelity. And, yet, the media tells us that it is
the "godless liberals" who are the cause of our society's problems, who want
to tear down our "traditions".

GOP tax policy bankrupts the country, enriches the rich, castrates the
government, and robs the citizenry of their institutions and their services. A
"war president" cuts the VA budget, and the media says nothing.

Meanwhile, the most massive corporate corruption in our history goes
unpunished, in fact, perpetrators like Haliburton and WorldCom are given fat
government contracts. American jobs continue to be shipped overseas; and
the shadow world government of the WTO tears up our social, environmental,
and even our medical laws as "barriers to free trade".

In the midst of all this, we are as anaesthetised as Soviet "citizens" reading
Pravda. Deficits go from being "absolutely unacceptable" to "so what?" in an eyeblink. One day, we are certain that Saddam has WMDs and our "evidence"
is compelling. Six months later, it is all admitted to be "exaggerated"; but now
we are sure Iran has those elusive WMDs. Saddam Who? Well, never mind.
That kind of bald-faced lying is just fine if the GOP does it. I know that's right
because the Washington Post tells me so.

Recently, the FCC, whose appointed head is a premier example of aristo-
cratic nepotism, rubber stamped the handing over more of the people's
property to unaccountable corporate behemoths of the same ilk as Clear
Channel, now accused of monopolistic behavior. As a citizen, you might think
this important decision would have been widely considered; but you would be
wrong. Every effort was made to keep this rule change out of the public eye
and off the debating table. GOP majorities refused to allow hearings, either
inside the FCC or in the Congress. The corporate media ran the story on its
customary page 97. The result is one more small-d democratic institution
thrown on the trash heap of history, and one more giant step on the road to
economic royalism.

----

It is time to face reality. We are well on the road back to rule by hereditary
wealth and title, legally-codified class distinctions, mass disenfranchisement,
imposed state religion, and royal chartered trade companies that hand the
power of the state over to secretive merchants. Only this time around, the
corporate state controls a Military-Industrial-Secret Police-Prison Complex that
will make the Spanish Inquisition look like high-school detention.

Yet, the bulk of Americans do not seem to comprehend what is being done to
them. Its like that Martin Amis book where time runs backwards, where people
pop into existence at the moment of their death, grow younger, and crawl back
into their mother's womb. To them, such bizarreness is normal.

Only by similar unreality could the citizens of a democracy stand by, much less cheer, the reinstatement of aristocracy and the destruction of middle class infrastructure and of basic judicial rights dating from the Magna Carta. Only by mass amnesia could it be forgotten that the Democratic Party rescued America from anarchy during the Great Depression, won World War 2, and presided over decades of unprecedented mass prosperity. The GOP have
succeeded in portraying it to a younger generation as the equal in perfidy to
Oliver Cromwell's regicidal religious dictatorship - pure psychological
projection if there ever was such. According to the corporate media, "we the
people" are rebelling against "liberal domination". Truly, we are through the looking glass to put up with this nonsense for ten seconds, much less the ten
years we have been subjected to it.

The press coverage of the serial malfeasance of George Bush - in military service, in business, and in politics - is breathtaking in its absence. Equally
thunderous silences are heard in the non-coverage of the routine
appointment of corporate apparatchiks to demolish the bureaucracies set up
to oversee them, the steady stream of unconstitutional court challenges
meeting with approval by a judiciary packed with members of the reactionary
Federalist Society. The coverage is so ridiculously counter-factual that it has
already become a pop-culture cliche that the corporate media has constructed
a lying alternative reality.

We are, pardon the expression, being frog-marched backwards into the past
by privileged, cynical ideologues who see secrecy and elitism as guiding
principles. As Abraham Lincoln foretold, we have been conquered from within;
and it was structural weaknesses in information management that allowed us
to be conquered. Although the Founders had never conceived of mass media
and giant intelligence agencies with self-financing rogue operations, they left
us the tool of Constitutional Amendment to deal with such eventualities. So,
the blame is not in the Constitution, but in the corruption of the political process itself by vast amounts of money.

If America ever sees the light of day again, the first thing it must do is totally
replace the existing laws governing campaign finance, media control and
equal time; intelligence agencies and information classification; and the
political process governing judicial appointments and tenures.

There is nothing new in the GOP program; only its tactics are innovative. The
future course of their illegitimate regime is already well-known:

"The paradox of totalitarianism in power is that the possession of all the
instruments of government power and violence in one country is not an
unmixed blessing for a totalitarian movement. Its disregard for facts, its
strict adherence to the rules of a fictitious world, becomes steadily more
difficult to maintain, yet remains as essential as it was before. Power
means a direct confrontation with reality, and totalitarianism in power is
constantly concerned with overcoming this challenge. Propaganda and
organization no longer suffice to assert that impossible is possible, that an
insane consistency rules the world; the chief psychological support of
totalitarian fiction - the active resentment of the status quo...is no longer
there; every bit of factual information that leaks through the iron curtain, set
up against the ever-threatening flood of reality from the other, non-totali-
tarian side, is a... menace to totalitarian domination..."

"The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the
elimination of every competing non-totalitarian reality, is inherent in the
totalitarian regimes themselves; if they do not pursue global rule as their
ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they have
already seized...Totalitarianism in power uses the state administration for
its long-range goal of world conquest and for the direction of the (overseas)
branches of the movement; it establishes the secret police as the executors
and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality
into fiction; and it finally erects concentration camps as special laboratories
to carry through its experiment in total domination."

- Hannah Arendt
"The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Ms. Arendt was 50 years ahead of The Matrix in recognizing the need for total
fiction in support of total control. She would definitely agree with the movie's
tagline:

Free your mind!