When anyone can be arrested at any time for any reason or no reason at all, when they are not permitted to question their arrest and incarceration or to communicate with anyone; when everyone but the very wealthy, who are totally sheltered from contact with the peons save for servants who dare not speak unless spoken to if they want to keep their ‘good’ jobs; when ‘religion' is added to the law giving it the unquestionability of being ‘the Word of God’, the government is as secure in robbing the treasury and natural assets of the country (including the populace, of course) as possible, and in using war for various reasons given to an ignorant citizenry in order to rob other countries – after bombing them into moonscapes and making them radioactive if necessary first. After a time, countries who have something we want won’t dare fight or even question. Not if they prefer to survive; the dead are, after all, easier to rob than the occasionally protest-prone living, as well as being excellent object lessons.
There they stand like a bunch of overage kids done up for a class picture (and not an ounce of class in the whole group, either, for all their stolen wealth). It’s a Who’s Who of the Neofascist core (they prefer Neocon; I prefer accuracy), and they’ve decided to award themselves the Medal of Freedom. After all, Ashcroft got one, but they’re the ones who finally managed to get rid of the pesky stuff – freedom, that is. Unusually stupid of them, too: one decent bomb could free a good few billion people in the U.S., South America, the Middle East and some of the Far East, what with all of them in one place like that. That’s just daydreaming, of course. With Posse Comitatis and Habeas Corpus finally dead and buried, it looks like the whole damned military (modifier intended and likely accurate) is there, and they can do anything they damned well please to anyone and get away with it. There is no pretense whatsoever of an "Honor Guard", either. For one thing, everyone knows there is no honor here; for another, they are fully armored and armed to the teeth, with orders to shoot to kill if in doubt – and they’re not a bright bunch, since the recruitment requirements were lowered again last year. They’re essentially told, "If there’s a problem, point the gun, pull the trigger, and it will go away; if someone next to the problem goes away too, don’t worry about it." They are good at following simple instructions. And with the "Collective Responsibility" law now in effect, being willing to die isn’t enough: You have to be ready to allow your entire family and probably your friends and neighbors to be tortured to death on TV for your ‘crimes’. There is nothing at all in the way now – except the occasional tread-filler civilian; those are for running over, target practice and a good object lesson, which are becoming few and far between.
Assassins, successful or not, are NOT popular. Successful ones can get entire TOWNS destroyed as examples, and entire townships have been known to murder everyone in any way close to such people in an attempt to survive government retaliation, or ‘Collective Punishment’, as they call it.
It doesn’t help.
It is likely going to be necessary to invent another offense of "extrajudicial execution" proportions soon; formerly ‘free’ people are slow to adapt to the new type of government and need frequent object lessons. His Holiness, Lord High (the Black) Abbot Dick(less) "Chainsaw" Cheney, aka "The Executioner" and "The Soulless One" (he has lots of nicknames, depending on who is speaking and how far away from Cheney he is), sighs. A dictator’s work is never done, and being the man driving the dictator, well, he is too damned busy to be frittering away time for this PR stunt; still, he knows it’s necessary. That "chickenhawk" label has to be countered somehow, and a medal should help. Too bad old Georgie was so damned stupid and went and got himself killed a few years ago by that Green Party shooter. Someone that dim, from a family that rich, AND that compliant is almost impossible to find. Cheney himself got out of the limelight (read ‘target area’, ASAP after Dubya was killed. Up front is a place for an expendable puppet. Jeb works just fine.
"Well, my goodness gracious me," ‘Rummie’ Rumsfeld is at least as dangerous as Cheney. He speaks like someone’s slightly dottie old grandmother for the TV people, and is perfectly capable of ordering the extrajudicial execution of said grandmother without losing a wink of sleep or needing to skip his next meal. His temper is a foul as the Black Abbots’ (odd nicknames, really – Cheney is not really religious, whereas Rumsfeld is a child of the vengeful Old Testament God who made jungles, ordered the annihilation of 30,000 women and children, and created Hell), but he attacks with more subtlety, and is as cold as the void between galaxies. If people can’t follow instructions, like those CIA fools, he simply goes his own way, cuts them out of the loop, and gets rid of them. He has made the CIA a place where men of principles (other than his) have found it impossible to exist. He still can’t understand their attitude. He had told them, clearly and repeatedly, what they were to find, and they keep repeating to him that it isn’t true, it isn’t there to find, there is no such information, and that if he tries to operate on it as though it were there he’ll end up with a complete mess. Well, he’d shown them. He knows what God wants, he knows what his President wants, and he knows what he wants; that is enough. If those so-called experts can’t adapt, well, they can be elsewhere. The mess they are in has to do with the incompetence of others and several unpredictable factors, that’s all. (He chooses to disremember, to use one of George’s words, that they were predicted; he didn’t predict them, so that’s that).
Karl, now, he is an inside-outsider. He and George were friends – well, master and attack dog – for a long time, though he works with the new figurehead well enough. Karl is devious and completely vicious: the Pillsbury Doughboy with poison fangs, claws, and no conscience whatsoever. He is a weapon. You give him a destination, and he gets there, whoever he has to ruin or run over, whatever he has to destroy to do it. Point him at a person and he gets that person, whatever lies, fake pictures or anything else he has to invent, whatever he has to do, and never mind collateral damage. There are rumors about some of those executions back in Texas, for instance. No one in The Group believes them, of course. But no one disbelieves them either. He’s also good at jiggering elections, especially using the Bush family connections, which made Jeb almost as useful as his retarded, alkie brother. Rove is completely reliable and completely expendable, though he is valuable enough they’ll protect him as well as possible for as long as they can – he’s too useful to lose easily. He layers his attacks so that others tend to have to fall on their swords for following his instructions; direct protection is rarely necessary. What he believes doesn’t matter in the least, any more than what a gun believes matters, as long as it works when you pull the trigger.
Then there is John "My God, My Country" Bolton. He hates any non-WASP, anything that looks like a person but is too dark or too poor to be one. As far as he’s concerned, every pissant little excuse for a country in the world should just shut up, hand over whatever they have that America wants, say thank you, be grateful for their lives, those who still have them, and piss off. The ones who don’t should be bombed back to the Stone Age like Iraq, the ungrateful bastards, then robbed. A bulldozer, not an attack dog – a dog has a mind of it’s own. All he has is hate, greed, and something he calls ‘faith’ but a psychiatrist would likely have a long Latin name for. Somewhere in there. For whatever reason, he is a hate-full man, a Neofascist to the core, and his specialty is removing wealth from poor countries, usually making the middle class poor and making the poor dirt poor, homeless or dead, and transferring the wealth to the wealthy of his own country. It’s amazing how the riches that would leave a medium-sized country full of people on the edge of starvation adds up into real wealth when you add it all up – and walk off with it.
Jams A. Baker III is a roving lawyer, and another thief of a special level and kind. He was pulled out of Iraq because his mission had been accomplished, or at least most of it had, and there would be other uses for him. Also because whoever was in charge there after him would be in charge of an impossible situation and many if not all would have to be sacrificed. The public mission was to rebuild the country, set it on it’s feet again and go away; his real mission was to gain control over Iraq’s oil – all of it, so the government must be in name only and entirely under the control of the Neocons – to make sure that that the place became a drain that emptied the ‘rebuilding’ money into the coffers of crony corporations. The rest of his mission, a quieter part, was to get the Iraqis to sign over all of their massive debts to the Carlyle Group and perhaps other companies belonging to the friends and family of George Bush. At the very least, no money of any consequence was to go to Iraqis; it was to profit some American company – any American company. If Iraq began to actually prosper, they would, of course, ask us to remove ourselves as we had promised, and that must not happen, so the above stipulations – profits to American companies and so on – were to be included in any constitution written, else it would not be recognized as valid by the US. Baker was also to lay the groundwork for an ‘embassy’ compound and at least one giant, and very permanent, base, both forbidden to and impenetrable by the citizens of Iraq, all while keeping this information from America, especially Congress, as long as possible. It is one of several bases to be used in keeping the Middle East under control until all the oil was gone. After that, the Neofascists will leave them all with nothing but sand, snakeshit, and too many people to feed in any way other than predation on each other. They seem to be good at that.
Such a dichotomy could not remain secret for very long, and someone, likely many someones, will have to pay for the failure as they have in the past, and perhaps for the lies before it’s all over there, so mostly military – who are seen by the Neocons as being exactly as expendable as any other weapon – have been left in charge since Baker.
The entire torture issue was created for several reasons. For one thing, if rights – and the Constitution recognizes rights as belonging to anyone, not just citizens – could be removed from non-citizens in the name of protecting citizens, then if citizenship could be suspended or removed in the name of defending against terrorism, finally rights could be removed from citizens, in the name of defending the country while oppressing it, giving the government – in the persons of the president and those close to him – something approaching dictatorial power. Eventually they would have it in truth, completely. To continue, the reason behind torture is not gathering information, as most of the US believes (STILL!); oeioke in agony and terror will say anything to make it stop, which makes discerning any truth that might really be there all but impossible, especially considering the inevitable resentment and hatred of the victim for the tormenters. The last reason for torture is terror, pure and simple. People fear torture like little else, and fear is a weapon. The Neocon/ Neofascists like weapons – when they’re the ones holding them.
Roe versus Wade had to be defanged, sex education had to be rendered ineffective, choice of abortion had to be removed along with contraception, and gays had to be demonized again, all for two reasons. First, all of it catered to the fanatic, vengeful Christian right base of the President and the Neofascists. Second, it did a lot of other useful things: it caused more pregnancy and disease, neither of which the government would help people with in the name of ‘making government smaller and putting social services where they belonged’: with the people, which the people could pay for if they chose to on top of taxes used to support the corporate military, bosses of various sorts and levels, and the other wealthy. More single women or even married women getting pregnant when they couldn’t afford it means more poverty, which means more slave-wage workers who are too poor to cause much trouble while they’re working so hard just to stay alive. It also keeps do-gooders too busy trying to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and so on to cause the government trouble while it goes about the real business of government: making the rich even more wealthy. De-funding schools serves the same purposes as keeping people poor by keeping them ignorant. People who read a lot think a lot; they might learn to do it well, and become trouble-makers. Eventually, intelligent people, people who read, think, and use big words will have to be demonized so they can be gotten rid of without much fuss if they begin making trouble.
As many things as possible must become criminal offenses: illegal drugs, anti-government behavior, too many legal drugs, unmarried or gay sexual behavior, nonconformist behavior of any sort – everything possible. To cover any holes left over, people need to get used to the idea that anyone arrested must have done something wrong because the government says so. This way they can be used, first, as an excuse for money appropriated for prisons, which will all be privatized eventually, adding to corporate wealth. Of course, very little of this money will go to ‘caring’ for prisoners - they’re criminals and are being punished - they’re not worth it. Second, with the excuse that even criminals must pay their own way, those imprisoned and not incapacitated by the low-intelligence, angry and sadistic guards often hired (which gives them a semi-legitimate outlet for their abuse instead of causing trouble elsewhere that might require profits to be spent in dealing with them), those imprisoned will be ‘loaned out’ to corporations as functional slave labor, increasing profits. The prisoners may get pennies per day just for PR purposes, but probably not.
When anyone can be arrested at any time for any reason or no reason at all, when they are not permitted to question their arrest and incarceration or to communicate with anyone; when everyone but the very wealthy, who are totally sheltered from contact with the peons save for servants who dare not speak unless spoken to if they want to keep their ‘good’ jobs; when ‘religion' is added to the law giving it the unquestionability of being ‘the Word of God’, the government is as secure in robbing the treasury and natural assets of the country (including the populace, of course) as possible, and in using war for various reasons given to an ignorant citizenry in order to rob other countries – after bombing them into moonscapes and making them radioactive if necessary first. After a time, countries who have something we want won’t dare fight or even question. Not if they prefer to survive; the dead are, after all, easier to rob than the occasionally protest-prone living, as well as being excellent object lessons. Best, then, to cooperate.
The Neofascists figure they can get technology, medical care and other things they want from the technically educated who are here now. Also, a few will always show the right promise, and manage to squeak into colleges and universities for enough education to be useful that way, and more, if they are needed, can be outsourced or brought in from elsewhere. Keeping the populace ignorant is more important than educating them, though. Perhaps science, being the knowledge of how God’s universe works as far as humans can understand it, can be made officially ‘Holy Knowledge’, secondary to Scripture of course, and kept under the control of what will be The Church. In time.
If the entire country tanks, the rich will still be rich, and they will always have someplace else to go. As long as they can take their stolen wealth with them, and as long as they always cultivate power elsewhere as well as in America, they will always have a place to go where they are still richer than anyone else, where they control.
As for global warming, an ice-age triggered by global warming, new diseases and radioactivity, well: the truly wealthy have enough money to buy and build places where they can live out their own lives in luxury and comfort with all the servants they could ever need or desire (who wouldn’t be a servant in exchange for a safe, well-supplied place to live in such a world?), and that’s all they really care about. Their children, if they choose to have any, will inherit all that, and they and their descendents can keep the race alive if they feel like it. Today’s Neofascists (who are really old-fashioned, self-centered elitist, Hobbsian fascists after all) will be safely dead by then, so it won’t matter.
Unless Jesus shows up first, but best to cover all the bases, nicht war?
Ian MacLeod
Vet, disabled, disgusted
Oregon
December 3d, 2006