2012 could well mark the last celebration of our once brave and
free Republic whose firm moral bearings have slowly been eroded by a cancerous
military industrial complex and the sinister emergence of a fascist corpocracy:
Allen L Roland
Enjoy
this fourth of July; watch the patriotic parades and fireworks, wave your flags
and stuff yourself with hamburgers and hotdogs ~ but beware, this could well
be Amerika’s last independence day. The moral pillars of our Republic have
almost disintegrated and beneath the ruins lay a rapidly blooming fascist
corpocracy.
Mark Twain
once wrote that true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to
the Nation ALL the time and loyalty to the Government ONLY when it deserves it.
Our present corporate welfare state government does not deserve our loyalty for
it has not only hijacked democracy but we have become a fascist corpocracy in
the process. A
fascist state seeks to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives,
values, and systems, including the political system and the economy.
The Obama
administration not only represents corporate
welfare you can believe in but, in the process, we have moved from a democracy toward a fascist corpocracy ~ which
millions of Americans patriotically annually celebrate while still being manipulated by false threats, false
promises and manufactured nightmares. President
Obama's once formidable Main
Street base has now been totally replaced by Wall
Street's financial elite and an arrogant and greedy corpocracy.
No
where is this greed as obvious as the great middle class swindle ~ Obamacare.
As Mike Adams writes in
Natural News ~ “ Obama got the middle class to support his legislation by
promising it was NOT a tax, and by promising it would LOWER health insurance
costs. In reality, however, it RAISES health insurance costs, it IS a tax, and
the majority of that tax burden falls squarely on the very same middle-class
voters who put Obama into office under false pretenses. That's a swindle, by
any definition.”
Manufactured fear, corporate welfare
and false patriotism are also among the 14 key
characteristics of a fascist state. Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of
Hitler (Germany), Mussolini
(Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin
American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each ~ and
America
has virtually all of them;
1.
Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of
patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia.
2.
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and
the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human
rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need."
3.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a
unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat
or foe.
4.
Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the
military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the
domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5.
Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost
exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are
made more rigid.
6.
Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the
government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by
government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and corporate
executives.
7.
Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational
tool by the government over the masses.
8.
Religion and Government are intertwined - Governments in fascist nations
tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate
public opinion.
9.
Corporate Power is protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist
nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power,
creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is suppressed – Because the organizing power of
labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either
eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher
education, and academia.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police
are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing
to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of
patriotism.
13.
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
- Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and
associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental
power and authority to protect their friends from accountability.
14.
Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a
complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against
or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control
voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media.
Are our present active duty military fighting illegal occupations
for our nation, a democracy, or an increasingly fascist government corpocracy?
As the Rev Michael Piazza writes in Liberating Word ~ “When war is profitable, it becomes too
tempting to resist. We cloak our attitudes in terms of patriotism and
supporting our troops, but the truth is, if war wasn't so profitable our troops
might not be so endangered. Is it pure coincidence that the South, which is
most economically dependent on military expenditures, is also the region where
support for the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan
is the greatest? Will we ever make truly ethical choices between war and
peace if war is so profitable?”
How can Amerika be the home of the brave when our cowardly
and illegal drone attacks are killing thousands of innocent civilians every day - many falsely counted as "combatants", "militants" or
"terrorists" ~ while at the
same time more of our troops commit suicide every year than get killed in
action?
In Pakistan
(an American "ally") alone, through mid-August last year as many
as 2,956 people were killed and another 1,158 injured by U.S. drone attacks.
Many were labeled "militants", but the death toll
includes at least 175
children and as many as 781 verified civilians. Despite
all this collateral
damage, no more than 150 "named militants" were
killed. And again, these statistics are for Pakistan alone. President Obama has embraced a
disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him
in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as
combatants, according to several administration officials ~ unless there is
explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
In perhaps the most unconstitutional power grab by the Obama
administration to date the constitutional rights of Freedom of Press and
Freedom of speech have now been suspended under the false premise that the "human
rights violations" in Syria
and Iran
constitute a "national emergency".
President Obama issued an executive order declaring Syria a
national emergency and outlaws reporting on terrorist rebel activities ~ once again validating the wise words of one of our
founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin; "All wars are follies,
very expensive, and very mischievous ones."
4 minute Video: The case Against Moving Forward With War
And what are the moral effects of our unjust occupations and
military killing machine?
It is impossible, given the paucity of current data, to
determine
the suicide rate among veterans with any accuracy.
However, the VA
estimates that a veteran dies by suicide every 80
minutes. Moreover,
although only 1 percent of Americans have served in the
military, former
service members represent 20 percent of suicides in the United States."
For the second year (2010) in a row, more US soldiers killed themselves
(468) than died in combat (462). 'If you... know the
one thing that causes
people to commit suicide, please let us know,' General Peter Chiarelli told the Army Times, 'because we don't know.'
Suicide is a tragic but
predictable human reaction to being asked to kill as well as
watch your friends
There's lots of talk about government debt, but very little
talk about how much of that debt comes into being as
well as the ongoing diabolical partnership we have between crooked banks and
corrupt politicians ~ both here and abroad. John Perkins pulls back the curtain on how countries get in over their
heads... 2 minute Video: http://www.realecontv.com/page/6314.html
This Independence day we
must face the fact that we are neither the land of the free nor the home of the
brave ~ but instead have given away our precious birthright to the
military/industrial complex and a fascist corpocracy.
Former US
President and Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter rightly says that “ the United States
is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights “
In that regard,
I am reminded of Milton
Mayer’s classic “They Thought They Were Free” (The Germans 1933
– 1945).
For German exceptionalism
in the 1930’s was really not too different, in many ways, than American
exceptionalism in the last decade and very likely headed for the same
disastrous fate.
Mayer’s
book describes the slow but sure seduction of the people as their liberties,
freedoms and moral values were gradually stripped away by Hitler’s fascist
government while waving the flag of national security and patriotism;
THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE
FREE – Pg. 166 / 167
“ But Then It Was Too
Late ~ What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by
little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated
in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the
government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or
so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be
released because of national security.
And their sense of
identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this
gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it … this
separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so
gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even
intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true
patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and
reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the
slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and
remoter.”
Apathy sets in with each
step, as it most certainly has in America,
and Mayer knowingly describes the consequences for Germany in the early 1930’s~
THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE
FREE – Pg 171
“In between come all the
hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing
you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B,
and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on
to Step D ~ and one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever
sensible of them, all rush in upon you.
The burden of
self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my
little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at
once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed
completely under your nose. The world you live in ~ your nation, your people
~ are not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all
untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the
visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which
you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with
the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the
people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is
transformed, no one is transformed.
Now you live in a system
which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not
have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was
compelled to go all the way… You have accepted things you would not have
accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany,
could not have imagined … Suddenly it all comes down, all at once.
You see
what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for
that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing) You remember the occasions in which maybe if you had stood
others would have stood too. You remember everything now, and your heart
breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
And that is Mayer’s main
point ~ it is the
spirit that dramatically changes when we accept if not condone the
disintegration of our national moral values through illegal wars and
occupations as well as crimes against humanity such as torture, secret renditions
as well as intrusive full body scans and pat downs, which will soon be extended
to trains, boats, schools and court houses.
On
this Independence day 2012 , let us remember the clouds of glory in our infancy
and the words of Thomas Paine;
“Never
had a country so many openings to happiness as this.
Her setting out in life, like the rising of a fair morning, was
unclouded and promising.
Her cause was good.
Her principles just and liberal. Her temper serene and firm.
Her conduct regulated by the nicest steps, and
Everything about her wore the mark of honor.
It is not every country that can boast so fair an origin.”
And
then let us truly reflect on what we have indeed become as the world’s largest
supplier of arms, the supporter of inhumane dictatorships throughout the world
with the blood of millions of innocent people on our hands as the result of our
imperialistic war machine ~ and reflect on the words of our famous poet Carl
Sandburg;
“ For
we know when a country goes down and never comes back, when a society or a
civilization perishes, one condition may always be found, they forgot where
they came from ~ they lost sight of what brought them along”
I finish my
Independence Day requiem with this four minute Bill Moyers reflection on
Independence Day where Moyers reminds us that “Thomas Jefferson got it right when he wrote about
"Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness" as the core of our human aspirations. But he
lived it wrong, denying to others
the rights he claimed for himself. And that's how Jefferson
came to embody the oldest and longest war of all ~ the war between the self and
the truth, between what we know and how we live.”
And that quite simply is
America’s on going current war ~ between what we choose to believe and the
truth and what we know in our hearts and how we live.
Allen L Roland
Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist
and psychotherapist Allen L Roland
is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements
and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )
Allen L Roland is a practicing
psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and
social commentary on his weblog
and website allenroland.com
He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net
