Minneapolis, St Paul, Minnesota : Resistance Seems Futile ...

This is ruddy outrageous!

And no, we don't mean the damned poxy picture.

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Church Shooter Loved Wingnut Propaganda

Michael Savage became a multi-millionaire when he stopped peddling snake oil and started peddling hate

It didn't surprise me when police found books by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage in the home of Jim David Adkisson after Adkisson murdered two people and wounded six during a shooting spree at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. After all, if you believed the crap that the bestselling authors on the right are spewing, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that you had a patriotic duty to kill liberals. After all, it's the liberals who are trying to take guns away from patriotic Americans like Jim David Adkisson.

Of course, there are also violent extremists on the left, but they tend to admire authors like Mao, Régis Debray, Eldridge Cleaver, and Frantz Fanon, not the popular mainstream authors of the left. That's because writers like Vincent Bugliosi, Stephen Colbert, Michael Moore, David Sirota, and Amanda Marcotte don't turn out hate-filled screeds that demonize liberals, intellectuals, and the entertainment industry (scapegoats who used to be referred to collectively as "the Jews", before Hitler made such shorthand unfashionable).

But that sort of crypto-fascist ideology is exactly what the popular political authors of the right are peddling. In their work, it's easy to see echos of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, which provided most of the underpinnings of the fascist movement. And Savage, Hannity, and O'Reilly aren't alone in pushing for their Americanized version of fascism. Pat Buchanan openly alludes to Spengler's work in Death of the West, and in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, he argues that Churchill was wrong to oppose Hitler. In her book In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror, Michelle Malkin argues for imprisoning people based on their ethnicity.

Given the pervasiveness of fascist ideology among popular conservative opinion makers, is it any wonder that one of their admirers decided to shoot up a Unitarian congregation, or that others bomb clinics and assassinate doctors?

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Note that when I say "popular" conservative authors, I'm not necessarily talking about the ones at the top of the bestseller list. I mean "popular" in the sense of being light and easily accessible as well as being widely read.

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I should say a few words about the work of Oswald Spengler for the benefit of those unfamiliar with his work. Spengler held that civilizations inevitably pass through "seasons". In Spring, the civilization is strong, vibrant, passionate, and expansive. In Summer, the civilization matures and becomes more rationalist, and a more rigid hierarchy develops. In Autumn, the civilization is at the height of its power, but becomes overly rationalist and is undermined by the rise of the bourgeoisie (middle class). In Winter, the civilization goes into decline, weighted down by materialism, rationalism, and moral decadence.

Spengler's work is relentlessly pessimistic, but the fascists believed that they could renew their civilization (Spengler's admirers inevitably see their own civilization as being in either Winter or Late Autumn) by purging the "Winter" elements: materialism, rationalism, and moral decadence. In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, Jews were identified with these qualities, so it was natural for the fascists to see the purging of the Jews as the first step toward renewal. Urbanization was also thought to be a cause of these evils, so Hitler embarked on a pan-European war, with the goal of acquiring enough land in Poland and western Russia to empty the German cities and turn Germany into a civilization of yeoman farmers, thus returning German civilization to its Spring phase.

It's easy to see the hostility toward materialism (now promulgated by atheists, rather than Jews), intellectuals, the "decadent" entertainment industry, and urban life in the work of people like Savage, Hannity, and O'Reilly. You can even see it in the work of less angry conservative popular authors like George Will and David Brooks. And increasingly, the modern Spenglers are becoming less shy in their calls for a fascist renewal, to be achieved by purging the soft, intellectual, and "deviant" elements from our society.

Spengler's ideas were made popular in the English-speaking world by historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who is still very much admired in both the United States and the United Kingdom. And it should surprise no-one to find that his admirers include some of the architects of the Neoconservative movement, including George Kennan and Henry Kissinger.

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Spengler was not, of course, the first to believe that civilizations follow predictable cycles that end in decline, nor the first to believe that decline is caused by urbanization and materialism. And Hitler was not the first to believe that civilization could be renewed by pushing "non-civilized" people off of their land so that "civilized" people could become farmers and experience renewal. Thomas Jefferson believed that urbanization was killing the American spirit (at a time when the largest city in the US had just over 50,000 people), and his policy of deliberately dispossessing Indians of their land was driven by his desire to empty America's cities and turn the US into a nation of yeoman farmers.

Note, however, that Jefferson did not favor forcibly driving the Indians from their land (that policy would come with the administration of Andrew Jackson), but instead pursued a strategy of offering credit to prominent Indians, which would then be paid off by ceding communal Indian land.

(cross posted at appletree)

'InfraGard ': Lincensed To Kill Americans In America ? For profit? With Impunity?

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Someone, somewhere once said that fact is far stranger than fiction.

So who the hell are we to argue?

FBI Deputizes Private Contractors With Extraordinary Powers, Including 'Shoot to Kill'

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive.

Posted February 8, 2008.

The FBI has a new set of eyes and ears, and they're being told to protect their infrastructure at any cost. They can even kill without repercussion.

Sound too far fetched to be true?

Even for 21st century (fast becoming fascist), America?

Judge for yourself.



And if this is the sort of sickening stuff that turns you on ... right now they're recruiting.

*(Cross posted at Appletree)

Video Tapes and Lies: CIA Continues Coincidence/Conspiracy/Carelessness Crap ...

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Cor blimey, Charlie. Can you Adam & Eve it?

(For the none intelligent intelligence types (lagging behind) among us, that's Cockney rhyming slang.

Take all the time you need to try to figure it out for yourself if you can't comprehend all that quickly. Since from here on in, we're staying schtum on said subject. After all, who ever said we were here to educate enemies? Especially, enemies within.

(Sarcastic British black humour ends.)



Unfortunately, much as we'd cherish the chance to show certain special things, we can't.

But we can show you - and speak shout out about - what follows below, since it's now in the public domain.

CIA destroyed interrogation tapes

The CIA destroyed the tapes when being scrutinised over secret prisons The CIA has confirmed that it destroyed at least two video tapes showing the interrogation of terror suspects.

According to the intelligence agency, the tapes were destroyed to protect the identity of CIA agents and because they no longer had intelligence value.

But civil liberties lawyers have refused to accept this, saying the CIA previously denied such tapes existed.

They say the move appears to be an attempt to destroy evidence that could have brought CIA agents to account.

The New York Times, which broke the story, quotes current and former government officials as saying the CIA destroyed the tapes in 2005 as it faced Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program.

Officials feared the tapes could have raised doubts about the legality of the CIA's techniques, the newspaper says.

Well now, slap us in the kisser with wet flat fish and flatten us all with that fabled feather duster! Surprise, surprise. NOT.

They can recognise a vehicle registration plate from satellites circling in space. They can examine at will every single one of everyone's emails with ease. They can continually listen in to (and tape), all of our telephone talks.

Yet they can't (like even the most unsophisticated civilian TV techies do daily), simply blank or fuzz out faces?

Yeah, sure. And the band played 'Believe me if you like'.

Call this continual load of lying crap what you want to - coincidence, conspiracy, careless - or perhaps to put it more politely, a clear cut (and dried) case of economy of truth.

Whatever you care to call it, remember the famous literary line, "A Rose by any other name" ?

There are also questions over whether CIA agents withheld information from the courts and a presidential commission.

The CIA's failure to make the tapes available to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the 9/11 Commission could amount to obstruction of justice, according to the New York Times.

Well, we say the CIA are shower of shitty serial liars. What's more, we challenge absolutely anyone to prove us wrong.



Read the rest of this report.

*(Cross posted at Appletree)

US Courts Calmly Claim Kidnapping Brits (And Anyone Else In The World) Is OK ...

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This is a first for us.

We're speechless.

US says it has right to kidnap British citizens

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they
are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

(snip)

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

Read the rest of this intolerable revelation.



Special relationship?

Don't sodding start us.

Special relationship, our arses!

* (Cross posted at Appletree)

21st Century Bush-America And Fascism ...

If you didn't read this great Guardian article on Tuesday then we strongly suggest you read it today.

In fact, we really recommend reading it right now -- while it's still not too late -- we hope.

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

Tuesday - April 24, 2007 - The Guardian

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations.

Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled.

Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

So hit it here to see the 10 steps for yourself.


Any arguments?

Then take them to the tw*ts in the White House.

* (Hat tip to Michael Scott.)