January 10, 2004
The Bush Hitler Affinity
Just Say No to the Corporate State
This Bush Hitler thing is so rich, there's so much to mine from it if you want to get into it. I've been considering renaming the site and just devoting the rest of eternity exclusively to exploring the fascinating web of connections that weave the two themes together.Bush-Hitler. Bush/Hitler. Bush. Hitler. A Tale of Two Kingdoms. It's endless really. When you realize that George W.'s paternal grandfather and maternal great grandfather were the operating partners of a bank that funneled millions and millions of investment dollars into the Nazi war machine, it's easier to understand his "joke" right after he stole the election when he said, "It'd be a lot easier if it were a dictatorship -- as long as I'm the dictator."
Knowing he had that family culture, it's a lot easier to understand how he can so proudly do the things he does, like steal elections, execute innocent people, wage war on defenseless countries based on outrageous false claims and tell lies constantly with that cockeyed grin on his face. Sure. It makes perfect sense. It's family tradition.
Any fool can see the sympathetic vibrations between these two personalities, these two movements, two power networks at different times and places in history, if he takes a fair look at the data. So when some nitwit like Eddie Gillespie starts crying about how outraged he is at someone comparing Bush to Hitler, I say take a pill, son. If you can't handle people drawing the parallels, get your boy to stop acting out the Hitler playbook. And you know that ain't gonna happen.
Any fool can see, yes, but not the reporters in the major corporate media. Those "well-paid conformists," as someone called them recently, can't afford to see the obvious, or to fail to take the proper tone of outrage or scorn at the proper time as prescribed by their lords. That's fine. Those are businesses. They make a lot of money. They are well established in networks of commercial exchange. They make fortunes from their advertisers. They must not rock the boat.
They can't let themselves rock the boat even if the boat is sailing over a precipice to hell. They cannot stop their knee-jerk responses. They will do whatever they are told, nodding their heads on command like china doggies with spring-mounted heads.
That's fine for them. But making fortunes or brainwashing the masses are not the only reasons for a medium to exist. There is also the matter of communication. There is that quaint thing called The Fourth Estate. There is a need to communicate information to a public who are participants in a democratic society. That function has been abandoned by the very same corporate media that make obscene amounts of money selling political advertising, because the FCC no longer requires them to devote some programming to that function. (Gee, wonder whose interests the FCC is looking out for in its management of the public airways.)
So it's time for anyone with any intelligence to recognize that the corporate media are frauds. They are liars who help to perpetrate massive lies that are screwing the vast majority of the world who are getting robbed by the corporate pirates who control most of the world. I'm talking about phony wars, where poor people die for lies made up by the rich people who make money off the wars. If that is not obvious to anyone who hears the stories about Dick Cheney's Halliburton, I have no words of pity great enough for such a disarmed intelligence.
It's time to turn away from the corporate media -- to just say no. To say once and for all, I am not buying it. I'm not buying the whole phony corporate culture in which value system it is okay to murder innocent people for no stated reason ("It doesn't matter," says Bush, with a crooked grin) but for reasons that are very obvious (O-I-L) when one looks at actions, not words.
It is time to just say no. To refuse to participate.
The generation that has abdicated its political system to a bunch of neofascists is the same generation that stopped the Indochina war. The Pentagon and the military industrial complex wanted to spread that war beyond Vietnam, to continue to conquer the rest of Southeast Asia. Nixon and Kissinger did carry out a secret war against Cambodia, but finally it became unmanageable and they had to stop.
This they have never gotten over. This is where all the rage of the neoconservatives comes from. This is their "Vietnam Syndrome," which meant to them having the public tie your hands and keep you from carrying out your unlimited conquests, your heart's desire.
For many years they have built this infrastructure. They have built a media system of unprecedented sophistication, an instrument for molding the public mind beyond anything yet known to man. That advance in technology and technique is the reason comparisons between Bush and Hitler may yet make Hitler look like small potatoes.
Since the 1960s, the military industrial corporate network has repositioned itself, and taken over the country with astounding effectiveness. It is an extremely organized and intelligently directed movement. It can only be defeated by an intelligent response. And that begins with shrugging off the fairy tale being perpetrated by the corporate media as reality. The people have to reclaim their own culture. It begins by rejecting the virtual reality that is invented by and maintained by corporate media, and to build an authentic culture that is purified from the whole sick mess and built on the old American principles that were undermined by the corporate hijacking of a formerly democratic republic. The republic must be restored. The corporate oligarchy must be brought down. This is within the power of the people. The medium is not tanks and rifles and brute force. The corporate fascists are the ones who control physical force. But they do not control intelligence. You have the power to reject lies. At least in your mind you can be free. That's the first and last freedom.
Now the children of the generation that stopped the Indochina war have abdicated their responsiblity and allowed their children to get dragged into the war machine to be used as fodder for the fantasies of Wolfowitz, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.
Young people now are victims of a system that they did not create, but that is killing them. People like Jessica Lynch cannot be expected to be sophisticated enough to understand the system that sent her to Iraq to be brutalized and possibly killed, but she understood when lies were being told about her. She knew when she was being used and she did not stand for it.
Remember the slogan, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" That is the way you stop war and massive injustices like slavery. Our children are being forced to make existential decisions. They are dying, or having to choose between the hard decision of standing up against the war and possibly facing grave consequences. And they have not been prepared to deal with having their lives compromised for lies.
Those Americans who are in the military in Iraq and their close family and friends cannot afford to take a casual stand on the question of a war for lies, and then let a corrupt regime do whatever it wants anyway no matter how illegal or immoral. Their lives are on the line. They may pay the ultimate price -- for what? No one knows. At least not officially. Unofficially we know it is what is stated in the papers of the Project for a New American Century, world domination through control of oil. Those with their eyes open do not want to die for that.
If they have to make those decisions, it isn't fair for the rest of us to act as if nothing is going on. We can't stand helpless like inmates of a concentration camp while they drag our children off one by one to die.
We cannot behave like robots while this is being done to us. Americans are so brainmassaged they don't even know that they're alive. They are brainwashed to think that everything is normal and orderly and every morning everything all starts over again, the same day over and over. A perfect world, no imperfections, no death. From death we hide our eyes. Our children are dying for a lie, and we look away.
No system of propaganda should ever be allowed to harden our hearts that much. Young people are having to make life-and-death decisions. We must all face up to the life-and-death decisions, not leave them to the kids as if by a lottery of death. Have you ever wondered how the cattle feel when one of them is pulled away to die? And none of the others do anything about it.
All of us must make our decisions based on life and death. And we should not ignore those of our friends who are caught in the trap. It may be you next. Those who are called in a draft, or reservists forced to extend beyond their contract, are the hardest pressed to make choices. But ultimately each individual does have the ultimate choice to say no. Sometimes the consequence of saying no is death. But it is still a choice, especially when saying yes may also be death. There is some value in doing the right thing.
Jean Paul Sartre, whose existential philosophy grew out of the Nazi occupation of France, said that we must all be responsible for our situations. "There are no accidents in life," he wrote in Being and Nothingness. "A community event which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it does not come from the outside. If I am mobilized in a war, this is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion; these ultimate possibilities are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it. This can be due to inertia, to cowardice in the face of public opinion, or because I prefer certain other values to the value of the refusal to join in the war (the good opinion of my relatives, the honor of my family, etc.) Anyway you look at it, it is a matter of choice."