March 9, 2003
Look Out Bush & Co., Here Come the Quakers
Resistance to the war machine is building to awesome proportions
The regime that makes enemies continues to grow its enemies list. To the Pope, add the Quaker church, which was Nixon's church incidentally, before he became such a warmonger. According to The Washington Post, the American Friends Service Committee, an arm of the Quaker church, is one of a growing number of activist organizations that do not intend to sit passively while the regime wages illegal war on third world countries.As a survey in Editor & Publisher, recently showed, even establishment newspapers have been swayed by the fierce popular resistance to the war machine's latest plans, and papers like the Washington Post are reporting a movement their owners kept out of their pages until recently.
Yesterday's article in the Washington Post said, "Once spearheaded largely by leftist students, hippies and draft-card burners, the peace movement is now taking on more support from the mainstream: labor unions, war veterans, middle-aged professionals, and teenagers born years after the last draft. Almost 100,000 backers have donated to Peace Action, one of the biggest anti-war groups, over the past six months, coordinators say."
Some of our elder, more experienced voices have come right out and said what the establishment media has run scared of for years. The venerable reporter Helen Thomas recently said in plain terms that Bush was the worst president in history. The efforts of the Bush administration and the Republican National Committee to isolate her and target her for destruction are just further embarrassment and will fail pathetically.
Gore Vidal said some time back that Bush will leave office the most unpopular president in history. He's just caused too much damage, Vidal said. When you realize that it's coming true, it almost makes you feel sorry for the fool.
But not quite, not yet. Meanwhile some are saying, "'60s redux?" It reminds me of a saying I've heard: "This is going to make the '60s look like the '50s."
What we witnessed on February 15 was the appearance of a worldwide, self-conscious movement for democracy and justice, a phenomenon of awesome power. History happens in spite of the efforts of rulers to contain it and maintain their power and control. Looking back at history we see the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and within the last few years, the fall of the massive totalitarian Soviet empire. Each of these was a massive natural phenomenon. Efforts to stop such movements are doomed to failure.
The Soviet empire could not withstand the information explosion. Information and culture coming from outside showed its subjects another world was possible. The same thing could happen here as more Americans realize their major media are a fraud. There is evidence that this is happening. Americans are increasingly going abroad via the Internet to seek their news (see journalism.co.uk). Once the lid is off and Americans begin to discover the world outside their controlled media system, things could change drastically, and very quickly.
We get used to thinking of things in certain ways, but this regime is not inherently permanent. Its support system is based on a very deep structure of lies, which is why it is acting so quickly to hide as much information as possible from public view. It knows it's in a race against time. But don't think for a minute that it can't come crashing down. We saw the Berlin wall come down; we saw the Soviet Empire crumble. Very few people predicted that to happen even very shortly before it happened. It was practically unthinkable. Empires like that didn't just fall down of their own weight. But it happened. And it can happen again.
Someone said, "In the '80s capitalism defeated communism; in the '90s it defeated democracy." And that is true, as far as it goes. As far as we are now. But history is not over. The New World Order may be overthrown just as the Thousand Year Reich was, just as the Soviet Empire was. And I'm betting that it will be. After February 15 we have seen a glimpse of the power that will overthrow it.
The corporate state, with the ascension of George W. Bush and subsequent events, is making an all-out play for power. The goal is to come into the open with its dictatorial character and no longer have to maintain the pretense of democratic government. By making the power play, the corporate barons are forcing the confrontation which will, I am betting, bring them down. They are coming into the open with their tyranny, and it is arousing the awareness of a population that has long remained politically dormant, believing that it is part of a democratic system.
Globalization began with the transnational corporations, who were best positioned to take advantage of the Global Village that was made possible by global electronic communications. But that was only the vanguard of globalization. Trailing behind is a global people's movement. It's going to dwarf the globalization of corporations in its scope and power.
We will see what happened in the '60s peace movement played out on a global scale. We will see the New Deal, which regulated and humanized capitalism and in fact gave it a new lease on life, playing out on a global scale. We will see the American Revolution, which dethroned kings and established democratic republics, take place on a global scale.
It was the international corporate pirates who initiated globalization who are now in fact responsible for setting off the global people's movement. The excessiveness of their tyranny is sparking a reaction of outrage that is burning itself around the world at electronic velocity. Mussolini himself defined fascism as corporatism, the marriage of corporate and state power. The colonial pirates of the European empires, from Columbus on through Cortez, Coronado, Da Gama and on and on, are the precursors of the corporate plunderers who are behind the New World Order. What we are witnessing is the approaching confrontation on a world scale of the old forces of aristocratic tyranny with the forces of democracy.
History is on the side of democracy. The people have always had to seize power from autocrats, but they have done it before against more daunting powers than these. De Tocqueville said, "Can it be believed that the democracy which has overthown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesman and capitalists?"