The Iraq war continues though there is now no stated rationale behind it and no stated goal in fighting it. The Iran war looms. The economy teeters on the brink of collapse, on the brink of the burst of the bubble of unsustainable economic leveraging to maintain the illusion of wealth. The panel tasked to investigate domestic surveillance of citizens (read: dissidents) has been “denied” the security clearance to carry out the investigation into wrongdoing (!!) and unceremoniously disbanded. No-one reported on it. This month for the first time ever we have public acknowledgment from several quarters of the Echelon program, which records and analyzes every contact every citizen makes, by phone or online, regardless of carrier or technology, for the military intelligence (NSA) system rather than the civilian intelligence (CIA) community. No-one reported on it. Draconian measures that will surely soon result lag only as a function of the inertia that must be fought in constructing mega-mechanisms for such enforcement. Macromilitary tyranny on the superpower scale, after all, is a logistical issue as much as it is an ideological one. As if to confirm our suspicions, the civilian boss of the civilian intelligence agency has been forced out, to be replaced by military brass with close ties to military intelligence (NSA), essentially unifying the national intelligence/analysis/diplomacy apparatus as a single entity answering to the military command. Military brass or central neoconservative players now effectively run every wing of our government with statutory powers. An incredible wave of anti-immigration and pro-consumption sentiment has overtaken the public even as record dollars that they don’t have are spent on mass culture entertainment and rank indulgence. Congress is powerless to do anything; any passed bill that runs afoul of White House policy or strategy is simply, publicly, and literally written off by the president as not-to-be-enforced with a great flourish and reference to the all-powerful (and “new for 9/11”) so-called unitary executive.
For the most part, the public stridently desires only cheaper gas, fewer immigrants, and better television, and cares little about how the government goes about delivering such things, much less what else the government might be doing. A few here and there hope for change in two upcoming elections… but they will be shocked when they see what actually happens—and I don’t mean who wins.
Children, look around. Look around **closely** and remember.
You are living in the middle of Weimar Mark II. In short days you will reach the end of it. Far too soon for comfort and before you realize what is happening, something will have changed. People you know will simply disappear, and others you know will be persecuted, imprisoned, destroyed—and unless you are very careful, you won’t realize that they were innocent—and unless you are very brave, you won’t worry about it much even if you do.
And when everyone wakes up again, decades from now, untold atrocities and long, grey years of terror will have been written in stone and a new generation will be asking you, in the same way that the world once asked the Germans:
“How could you have let it come to all of this? How could you not have seen?”
By that time, it will seem obvious once more, as transparent as it should have been all along, and you will gasp at the evil that has been visited upon you, that all have had a hand in visiting upon each other, and you will wonder at the wasted years and lives. It will seem to you that you have been unfairly fooled and made to suffer.
But of course by the time you understand, the story will have been written already by the scribes long ago. We are living in the Weimar Republic. We, you and I, Americans, are the next Reich, the all-too-immutable foundations of which are already solidly and well in place.
Those who cannot be bothered to learn their history are indeed doomed to repeat it.
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Panem et circenses, while it all comes tumbling down!