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Bush saves America by Ran Prieur
If you believe in freedom and democracy, the 2000
elections could not have gone better. What we have
in the USA is an occupation government, like the
Nazi occupation of France except more subtle. But
this occupation did not begin with the Bush coup in
2000. The Bush coup was a sub-coup, a coup within a
coup. The USA has been fully occupied now for more
than a hundred years.
The occupation took a long time and began much
earlier. The USA Patriot Act of 2001 is only a wordy
repeat of the Sedition Act of 1798, which
criminalized "intent to oppose any measure or
measures of the government of the United States" and
participation in "writing, printing, uttering or
publishing" anything the government didn't like. The
American federal government was merely beginning to
do what governments always do — become a
channel for abusive power.
If you think Bush is bad, consider another
Republican president, who acted against the
Constitution and in defiance of the Supreme Court to
jail citizens indefinitely without giving a reason,
who had people arrested and tried by military courts
merely for publicly speaking against him and his
war, who got 600,000 people killed so he could ruin
the country, but because he was so intelligent and
competent, got what he wanted and is credited to
this day with saving the country. I'm talking about
Abraham Lincoln.
In 1858, Lincoln said "I as much as any other man am
in favor of having the superior position assigned to
the white race." In 1862 he wrote "If I could save
the Union without freeing any slave I would do it."
Lincoln was finally compelled to oppose slavery only
to popularize his crusade to brutally crush the
legal secession of the southern states, which was
itself a means for his totalitarian ambition to
redefine the "united states" as one state, a single
centralized power in which the formerly autonomous
states are merely subservient divisions. (At the
moment only right wingers are bashing Lincoln. See
Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln.)
Lincoln's successful centralization enabled the next
stage of the occupation. By this time, capitalism
was already being replaced by the economic system we
have had ever since — corporate socialism, where the
government actively channels money from the people
to very large anticompetitive monoliths of capital.
And a big corporation can more easily control one
central government, far removed from the people,
than many smaller quirkier governments closer to the
people.
The first big corporations were the railroads. In
1864, Lincoln signed the Northern Pacific land
grant, giving railroads 40 million acres, or more
than 60,000 square miles of public land, for
conditions which the railroads failed to meet.
Later, much of this land passed illegally to timber
companies which still hold it today. (See Derrick
Jensen & George Draffan, Railroads And
Clearcuts.)
In 1886 the occupation became complete, when the
convenient 14th Amendment, ostensibly written to
abolish slavery, was interpreted to give
corporations, giant machines for separating profit
from responsibility, the rights of human beings.
By this time, the education system was already being
turned into a mind control system to make Americans
stupid and obedient enough to submit to rule by
corporations and strong central government. (See
John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of
American Education.) Look around and see how
successful it has been! Except for a few minor
loosenings, like the antitrust and labor and
environmental movements, and the cultural
half-awakenings of the last 40 years, the American
Empire has just been getting tighter and tighter
around the throats of its subjects, channeling more
and more of the power to behemoth engines of
exploitation and their elite human collaborators.
But in 2000, the occupying forces stumbled. Drunk
and dull-witted with arrogance and hubris, they blew
a critical move. Al Gore Jr. was groomed and
perfectly suited to lead the occupation government.
Cautious, sensible, extremely knowledgeable, an
enthusiastic supporter of the WTO and corporate
globalization, the man who personally persuaded Bill
Clinton to sign welfare reform and screw the poor
worse than any Republican, yet popular with
liberals, Al Gore had the skills and disposition to
work with a Republican congress and lay the
foundation to keep the occupation strong for many
more years.
Instead of following through with Gore, the ruling
powers allowed a faction, associates of the sinister
ex-president George Herbert Walker Bush, to install
Bush's simple-minded son George W. Bush, a man who
could have been a great gym teacher, as the
disastrous and probably final president of the USA
as we know it.
This is good! If we support the original American
ideals of freedom and democracy, we oppose empire.
If we oppose the occupation of the US government, we
want its leader to be as buffoonish, as incompetent,
as transparent as possible. And if he didn't even
get the most votes, and was installed only by an
obviously dishonest ruling by the five Republicans
on the Supreme Court, well that's gravy!
President George III of America (counting
Washington) should end up at least as unpopular as
King George III of England, who became king only
because he was descended from George II, and who was
well known to be intellectually weak. But in a
global context, a better parallel might be Adolf
Hitler.
Germany in the 1930's was all set for fascism —
the most emotionally repressed people of all time,
furious with France and England for the humiliating
and exploitative Treaty of Versailles, in desperate
poverty and ready to try anything, Germans were only
waiting for some good fascists to come to power, as
they did in Spain and Italy, and lead them on an
old-fashioned war of conquest. Instead they got a
cartoon evil dictator who led them on an insane
Wagnerian fantasy suicide (see Robert G. L. Waite,
The Psychopathic God), going to war with the
the two most powerful countries in the world,
burning out on all fronts and collapsing, caught
red-handed in shocking genocide.
Imagine what Germany could have done with sensible
and rational evil leaders: kept peace with the USSR
and the USA, conquered all of Europe and the
Mediterranean, ended the war under good terms, and
remained there to this day, practicing only cautious
and moderate eugenics, purifying the Aryan race
through sterilization and only a little bit of
killing, maybe a hundred thousand a year of the
poorest and darkest-skinned people.
I'm not suggesting our situation now is the same as
Nazi Germany. It's a different holocaust, more
tolerable and obscure: millions dying in hospitals
from cancer and heart disease caused by the
industrial lifestyle, instead of dying screaming in
gas chambers; destitute women working in nameless
factories in Asia, blind and crippled by age 30 from
squinting at microcomponents and doing repetitive
labor, instead of educated European men going to
concentration camps and living to tell; countries
being conquered not by goose-stepping armies but by
loan agreements that no one reads, not by killing
their soldiers all at once in noisy battles but by
killing their political activists, a few at a time,
quietly.
This is the world eloquently and skillfully
championed by Clinton and Gore and their neoliberal
and neoconservative allies, and now, brutishly
clumsily championed by Dubya Bush, usurper,
ex-cokehead, pretzel-choking clown, fool.
William Blake said "If the fool would persist in his
folly, he would become wise." With a little more
luck, Bush will hold power long enough to fatally
embarrass the New World Order, to do for
corporate/military empires what Hitler did for
eugenics. With more luck after that, when occupied
America finally falls, the agents of its fall won't
vengefully firebomb our oblivious asses like the
English did to Dresden. And if we're really lucky,
this crisis will break the backs of the big systems,
and the USA will loosen up into what the colonists
wanted and the Indians already had, a diverse
patchwork of autonomous and democratic nations.
And maybe, the spirit that made America audacious
and powerful, if not often good, will survive to
stand up to the next global empire, and we will do
with full knowledge and sincerity what we can now do
only with aggressive ignorance or elaborate
qualifications — feel proud to be American.
© 2002, Ran Prieur.
Comments? Contact ranprieur@yahoo.com.
Past articles by Ran Prieur:
The system works
The soul of progress
J.R.R. Tolkien:
The man who saw tomorrow
Violence vs. pacifism: A quick tour
Thinking through the fall
The mathematics of responsibility
Untamed futures
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