With all due honoring of MontanaMaven's diaries Who Can Stop the Shape Shifters? Naomi Klein, You're Freaking Me Out and Shock Doctrine II: Sacred Friedmanism vs Mongrel Capitalism from November 11th, there is so much that we can learn from Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The first we need to learn is that the actions of BushCo are not the inconsistent actions of a blithering idiot and his Dark Lords. Secondly, we need to finally recognize what it is that they are doing, and why. Thirdly, we need to get out of our SNITCH mode and actually start to take back the country.
Snitch mode? What in the hell is that? you are thinking.
It is the mode that has us hollering to the choir, "Look at him! He is doing something that wasn't in my Civics class!", followed up a week later by an echo of that on some different point. Over and over. Snitching about it is useless blather. After a while, even we stop hearing our own snitching. Snitching does no good. By reacting to every new Civics class no-no as if some principal somewhere is going to come out and smack their hands with a ruler is STUPID. Now, if we were going to corner the jerks and make them pay, that would be different. But expecting that someone else might punish them? Gimme a break!
The biggest reason it is stupid is that THEY WANT US IN THAT MODE. Why? Because as long as we are in that mode, WE DON'T ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING TO STOP THEM. Want proof? Try counting the number of FUBARs they have perpetrated, and then subtract the number of their FUBARs we have actually done anything about. If the number ain't zero, I am Jack Robinson.
Now, onto the real issue here:
PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO STEAL THE WORLD.
FROM THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE.
WE ARE THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE.
PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO STEAL THE WORLD FROM US.
AND TURN US INTO ROAD KILL.
Everything you see in politics RIGHT NOW is about that. Everything.
READ Naomi Klein's book listed above. In it you will find the whys, the wherefores and finally see that there is method to their madness. Her ties it all together.
SURPRISE: IT IS ALL ABOUT MONEY.
The greedy sickos are all after all of our money. For whatever reason, they don't think they have enough. 1% of the people owning 50% of the world isn't enough for them. Nope, they want the world, and they want it . . . NOW!
Literally. Completely.
And we are in their way.
They found a little wizard who had a magic wand, and they asked him to wave it over their enemies - the little people who had started to get in the way - and find a way to shut the the hell up.
Those people wish that they could have the 'good old days' back, and to them the good old days are the days of the aristocrats and royalty. I refer to them as Royalists; others use different terms. They believe that some people - them - are better than others, and by dint of that, are entitled to the fruits of others' labor - everybody else's labor, if possible. They believe in a 2-class system with themselves at the top of the pyramid. They believe that they are more entitled and that the laws that govern others don't apply to themselves.
MANIFEST DESTINY AND US
160 years ago the concept of Manifest Destiny took hold in North America, in which the white Europeans believed that it was ordained that they should own the continent all the way to the Pacific Ocean. It was a big continent and there were wild 'subhuman' savages out there, too, so the royalists couldn't just go out there on their own and grab it by themselves - hell, as it was, it didn't even have any value to them. Not yet. So they sent (enticed) the rabble (the white rabble, that is) to go out and beat on it for a while with concepts like 'freedom' and 'land for the taking' and 'a chicken in every pot' and 'the American Dream', while they sat back and bided their time. They let the little buggers believe that what they acquired was their own, but that was just while the little ones turned the wild place into something the royalists would want. When the continent was more or less 'civilized' enough, the royalists realized that the same principles could be applied elsewhere, too.
There was more of the world to steal from the indigenous peoples, besides just North America. Pretty near immediately after the attainment of the Atlantic-to-the-Pacific closure in North America, the American whites stole Hawaii from the indigenous peoples there. Then after a bit, we stole Panama from Coumbia, then the Spanish-American War came along and we stole Cuba, the Phillipines and Panama, subjugating the indigenous peoples there.
Throughout the 20th century, and especially after WWII, the U.S. reluctantly 'allowed' ourselves to become the leaders of the western world, ostensibly to save it from Communism, but in reality to get a toe-hold everywhere we could, most emphatically though in those whose resources our royalists lusted after. Instead of protecting the weaker countries from Communism and installing democratic governments, we 100% sided with aristocratic oligarchs to empower or reinforce 'plantation nations' - essentially royalist set ups, with a few people living like kings and the rest were basically their slaves. Why? Because they were like our own royalists (but ours plotted to eventually take their oligarchs' wealth, too, when their usefulness was done).
Our royalists used any terminology available except the real truth. They were trying to enslave the world, but they certainly couldn't call it that, not out loud, so they wrapped it in lies about democracy and freedom. When everybody else heard those terms - democracy and freedom, and its sister concept, free markets - they thought that what the oligarchs were talking about was egalitarianism, fraternity and brotherhood. But the royalists use the terms differently from you and me. By freedom, they mean freedom for themselves and servitude for yourself and myself. By democracy, they mean that they get to make deals in smoke-filled rooms to limit our choices to the ones they dictate to us. By free markets, they mean the right for the more powerful to overwhelm the less powerful (referred to in Klein's book as 'savage capitalism; I have always called it carnivorous capitalism) - and that, in time, the more powerful will become the all-powerful; that is the way the world works as far as they are concerned, and if the hoi polloi think they terms mean something else, well who are they to inform the rabble otherwise? They sure aren't going to; let the rabble live in a fantasy world.
Manifest Destiny is all about seeing that far shore and striving to devour everything between here and there, and to trample anything who stands in the way, especially those who are brown- or black-skinned. But now skin color means almost nothing; they will certainly take everything from everyone - they are equal opportunity enslavers and thieves.
Naomi Klein has hit the nail on the head. The royalists are out to steal everything from everyone. Friedman's free market is only a thin veil of legitimacy-cum-science, a smoke screen of words and academic terms to rationalize and legitimize their plunder and pillage, as they have raped nation after nation in their attempt to turn back the clock and hand the world over to those with the divine right of Manifest Destiny, to put them on the thrones all over the world. Again.
We are the indigenous people, and we will be trampled under foot, if they have their way.
And they do mean to have their way.
As Ms Klein also points out, though, it is in the first area to suffer their shock doctrine that the shock has begun to wear off. Everyone here should be glad that there is a Hugo Chavez out there, and should not only do everything possible to support him (BUY CITGO GAS!), but to learn from him, from Michelle Bachelet in Chile, from Lula in Argentina, from Brazil, from the Bolivians (if not Evo Morales), from the Ecuadorians, and also from the Thai beach people, and from the Lebanese.
Unless and until we take to the streets LIKE THEY DID, until we all get super skeptical about anything the bastards say, until We The People start pulling together, we are had. Our strength is our numbers. We have more in common with the little people in the Red States, for example, than we do the Dems in Congress. When we all recognize that, even a little bit, we will start to find our way out of the wilderness - when our 9/11 shock has really worn off. I can't believe it took so many until 2005 to start to wake up, but there are so many more that we NEED, to wake up.
We CANNOT count on politicians to do our fighting for us.
The single biggest fallacy of a republican form of government is the one that says that we elect others to represent us, to speak with our voice, believing that they will in fact do so. This breeds in us a docility that is incompatible with a free people. We cannot continue to cast a vote every 24 or 36 or 48 months and think that that is democracy. Unless we are electing people who REALLY ARE LIKE US, we are road kill, later if not sooner. But even that isn't good enough. Unless and UNTIL we participate in the arguments, in the intensity, in the skepticism, in denying the grabbers, the royalists, their prize, we are our own gravediggers.
The single thing that democracy does is protect itself against royalists.
Until we stick our necks out and protect ourselves, Manifest Destiny will flatten us like crepes - and not even feel the bump.
...Oh, and by the way, only prey can be shocked. Ms Klein points out that in Latin America they are no longer prey. We have 20-30 years before we stop being prey. Now is a good time to start stopping...