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Creeping Fascism
Is silence our answer to genocide?
Comment by Larry Ross, November 5, 2006
Creeping Fascism in the U.S. struck home to a lot of Americans with the passage of Bush's Military Commissions Act a few days ago. That and the fact that Bush's illegal Iraq war, based on lies, has now murdered some 655,000 Iraqis. See Keith Olbermann's comment which follows, to see just how this Military Commissions Act takes away American civil rights, including the right of Habeas Corpus, and ushers in a new dictatorship in America's politics, claiming it is necessary to protect America's 'freedom and democracy'. As with Adolph Hitler dictatorship laws, passed into law by the government of the day, Bush's new American 'Dictatorship Law' was passed into legislation by the U.S. Senate and Congress.
Probably the great majority of Senators and Congressmen know it is little more than a fraud to greatly increase Bush's dictatorial powers and smother dissent. However they signed it is a matter of political expediency to stay in power - no matter what the consequences might be. As Olbermann points out, under the new law any American can be seized as an enemy combatant, imprisoned anywhere and tortured, until he or she makes a 'confession' acceptable to his accusers. Whatever evidence Bush aides decide to invent and present, can be kept secret and the accused is not allowed to see it or respond to it. So the verdict of the Military Court is a foregone conclusion.
The new law will probably be applied in force to critics of the Bush Administration, especially after Bush begins his planned war on Iran , and even more so if Bush orders a 'False Flag' operation to accuse Iran of a terrorist attack on the U.S. , in order to justify war, even nuclear war, against Iran . This can happen before the Nov 7 elections or after the elections so that the expected new Democratic Congress will be complicit in approving the use of any force the President thinks necessary against Iran , including nuclear weapons.
Dissent and criticism of Bush will become non-existent, both because the media will suppress it and because people will be unwilling to express criticism and risk imprisonment, torture and jail.
If events unfold as now indicated, it will be a triumph of dedicated and diabolical evil, employing all the instruments of ultimate force and deception, backed by millions of duped and fearful Americans and the huge wealth and government apparatus of the state.
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Silence
Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.
But silence is impossible.
Silence screams.
Silence is a message,
just as doing nothing is an act.
Let who you are ring out & resonate
in every word & every deed.
Yes, become who you are.
There's no sidestepping your own being
or your own responsibility.
What you do is who you are.
You are your own comeuppance.
You become your own message.
You are the message.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
Leonard Peltier
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"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!' When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."
- Bertolt Brecht
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OLBERMANN PROPERLY NAMES BUSH AS AMERICA'S GREATEST THREAT
Mr Bush, your words are lies that imperil us all ~ Sadly, of course , the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you: Keith Olbermann
Yesterday marked the signing of the Military Commissions Act by George W Bush and the loss of Habeas Corpus.
A silent America watched in cowed silence but many, including myself, felt the first cold breath of fascism chilling our bones and the fall landscape.
Last night Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, marked the death of habeas corpus with an eloquent speech which spoke to the heart of the matter. As he noted we have suffered similar temporary loses of freedoms, but we have never lost the heart of our liberty - habeas corpus which dates back to the Magna Carta in 1215.
Every American should hear this 8 minute video or read the enclosed text.
Here is the video:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/
Olbermann: And lastly, as promised, a special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.
We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived. as people in fear.
And now - our rights and our freedoms in peril - we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before - and we have been here before led here - by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives - only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America.
We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives - only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said, about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9-0-6-6 was necessary to save American lives - only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110-thousand Americans.
While his man-in-charge.General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen - he is still a Japanese."
American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did - but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced, survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900-thousand votes ~ though his Presidential campaign was conducted entirely. from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States , to the citizens of the United States , whose lives it ruined.
The most vital. the most urgent. the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been, only human.
We have let Roosevelt 's "fear of fear itself" overtake us.
We have listened to the little voice inside that has said "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass."
We have accepted, that the only way to stop the terrorists, is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets, was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.
Or substitute. the Japanese.
Or the Germans.
Or the Socialists.
Or the Anarchists.
Or the Immigrants.
Or the British.
Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always. wrong.
"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"
Wise words.
And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.
Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.
Sadly - of course - the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital. the most urgent. the most inescapable of reasons.
And - again, Mr. Bush - all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere - anywhere - but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria ~ ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" - exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received it.
Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?
"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. "In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them."
'Presumed innocent,' Mr. Bush?
The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
'Access to an attorney,' Mr. Bush?
Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
'Hearing all the evidence,' Mr. Bush?
The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.
Your words are lies, Sir.
They are lies, that imperil us all.
"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us yesterday. "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America ."
That terrorist, sir, could only hope.
Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.
Habeas Corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The Moral Force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush. they would be "the beginning of the end of America ."
And did it even occur to you once sir - somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 - that with only a little further shift in this world we now know - just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died -
Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" for, and convene a Military Commission to try, not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, sir, all of them - as always - wrong.
Good night, and good luck.
Every American should hear this 8 minute video or read the enclosed text.
Here is the video:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/
Here is the text:
http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2006/10/19.html
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Information is the currency of Democracy."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."
-- Howard Zinn
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
-- James Baldwin
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