The
Coming Fascism
by
Karen Kwiatkowski
by Karen Kwiatko
The
Anderson-Obama
interview this week wrapped by congressional hearings
on government collusion with friends and relatives
(otherwise known as the Bernie
Madoff scandal) have brought forth only more
government whining, moaning and self-justification. In
them, we have also been given a pale notice of future
full-fledged American fascism.
Our
government is bloated past the point of repair, and
those in government understand this perfectly. We
still have an overstretched, poorly led, and unreliable
military web, funded by various other confused
governments and unborn American taxpayers. Before
long, the state will not only demand we spend what paltry
savings we have as a civic duty, but that we bear
more children to ensure the kingdom has serfs.
The
military empire abroad is a bubble. It looks big, even
shiny; it hovers over lesser entities as if it is something.
The old alchemist fantasy of creating gold from lead
at least led to many
productive inventions – only when the fantasy
became opportunistic dogma and blind faith were people
fooled. In terms of American empire – 700 military
installations around the world fearing for their
collective future as they watch their individual backs
– is not gold, is not powerful, and is not fooling
anybody.
The
American financial empire exists as a thin,
transparent, vulnerable shell of its former self. It
too is a bubble – yet unlike the military fantasy,
Americans readily conceive of financial bubbledom. Our
money – that fiat paper which we have been using for
our houses, our cars, our pay-later purchases – is
vaporous in the sense that we do not really see it,
feel it or understand it. We do not control it –
that role is extra-constitutionally,
extra-democratically ceded to the Federal Reserve, an
entity cloaked in mystery until the 2008 presidential
campaign of Ron Paul pulled the unraveling thread.
Like
the US dollar, signing your name, making your promise,
has become quaint and archaic. Our money is promises
to pay by those who do not produce or save. The
bundled promises of such payments, much like the
social security lockbox, Medicare, and government
pensions, we now call "toxic assets,"
bringing to mind poisonous vapors. Vaporous from the
beginning, their metaphorical description falls not
far from the tree. Vaporous, as
this definition explains: "vaguely formed,
fanciful, or unreliable." US fiat currency today,
as it has been for some time, is exactly this.
As
abrupt and painful as it is for bubbles to burst, we
get over it. Individual creativity, hard work, and
indeed love will get people through, as it generally
does in all things. The military bubble will burst
happily, and troops will flow homeward, bases will
languish, orders will be given but not followed.
Defection will be of the heart, even as economics
keeps many on the payroll. The financial bubble will
also be overcome – as people shift down and shift
forward in their lives and dreams. We will read of
Zimbabwe’s reality-based decision to abandon its
currency and allow freedom of commerce – a classic
case of Gandhi’s reported response of "There go
my people; I must run to catch up with them for I am
their leader" – with interest, and be inspired.
We will share Representative Kucinich’s contempt of
the state’s frantic spasms of the past several
months as "an
unprecedented fraud."
We
can survive and thrive in the collapse of both the US
military empire, and its financial house of cards.
Patriots of all political persuasions should welcome
these collapses, encourage them, cheer them, and revel
in them. Like the great lion with a painful but
removable thorn in its paw, we the people will be far
better after the military empire and financial fakery
is expelled. Not corrected, not improved, just gone.
The
problem isn’t that these bubbles are collapsing. The
problem is that unsupportable federal
and state
level liabilities don’t automatically lead to
the linear collapse of the state itself. Logically,
they should. We cannot, and will not pay to support
the parasitic state. The people will naturally assume
the property and any pertinent authority of the state
at a far more personal and neighborly level. Less
government is needed, less government is wanted, less
government is more enlightened, more moral, and more
economically and scientifically liberating. This the
founders understood, and this many Americans still
understand.
But
while we cheer the necessary contractions of the
state, we may find that we are a small country with a
very large and well-equipped standing army. Before our
very eyes, the grappling hook of constitutional
debasement, government
"jobs" programs, and a
state propaganda machine par excellence is
psychologically if not physically preparing us for
fascism at home, both in terms of national socialism
proper, and the less talked about but innately
understood pressure to conform in speech and in deed
to state edicts and state priorities. Key to
tolerating fascism is fear – of our neighbors, for
ourselves, and about the future – and the state has
both the means and the motive to produce this domestic
fear.
How
else can it be explained that Dick Cheney, possibly
the most despised and concretely wrong man in America
gets a propaganda pulpit for his opinion (or
is it hope?) that America will be attacked
catastrophically in coming years?
Like
our shady financial dealings and our military empire,
fear is vaporous, yet temporarily influential. A
decade or two from now, we will certainly discover
that the fear was real – but we will understand that
it was the state’s own fear gone viral. We will
recall how the state projected its own existential
disaster on us, attempted to force we the people to
own the state’s festering self-destruction, and when
we resisted that toxic deal, ramped up the state’s
only remaining asset – force – on the
non-conformer.
What
to do? A great religious leader known for challenging
the state advised that we must become as little
children. In our current American predicament, this
might mean proceeding as any four or 14-year-old
would. When the state is looking, stay alert and
listen carefully not only for words, but for intent.
When the state turns its back, stick out your tongue
and do what you damn well please.
February
5, 2009
LRC
columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send
her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has
written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective
for MilitaryWeek.com,
hosted the call-in radio show American
Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com
and Liberty and
Power. To receive automatic announcements of new
articles, click
here.
Copyright
© 2009 Karen Kwiatkowski
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