Subject:

Cryptome - American Democracy R.I.P The Emergence of the Fascist American
Theocratic State
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<http://cryptome.org/amer-demo-rip.htm>

10 February 2002. Thanks to Wayne Madsen.

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American Democracy: R.I.P
The Emergence of the Fascist American Theocratic State
By John Stanton and Wayne Madsen

John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer on national security affairs and
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist who writes
and comments frequently on civil liberties and human rights issues.

Historians will record that between November 2000 and February 2002,
democracy—as envisioned by the creators of the Declaration of Independence
and the U.S. Constitution—effectively came to an end. As democracy died,
the Fascist American Theocratic State ["The State"] was born. This new
fascist era was designed and implemented primarily by Republican
organizations and individuals who funded, supported and ultimately
inserted George Bush II in office. Equally complicit in this atrocity was
the Democratic Party, itself having become corrupt and beholden to its own
interests. But the greatest tragedy in this horrific turn of events was
that the public and media embraced fascism’s coming. It should be noted
that the Green Party’s valiant efforts were too little, too late.

Three events accelerated the demise of American Democracy. The Election of
2000 (the American version of a coup), the 911 attack on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon primarily by terrorists from Saudi Arabia (a
vaunted but corrupt U.S. "ally" that funded both the terrorist Al Qaeda
network and the Taliban) and the US response to it, and the spate of
corporate bankruptcies, most notably Enron, which provided clear
evidence—to those who dared look at it—that the American democratic
process was a sham. The Bush administration, composed of a number of
former Enron officials in its upper ranks, could only describe the worst
financial collapse in the world’s history as a "tragedy" as if it were
akin to a hurricane or earthquake and not man-made. The administration
then proceeded to convince a nation of lemmings that Enron was not a
political scandal but merely an unfortunate mistake that must not be
repeated. However, other Enron-like collapses began being reported with
similar disastrous consequences for pensioners and workers. Indeed, a long
train of abuses and usurpations took place at a frightening pace in that
short 15-month period.

Prior to 911, proponents of the The State were busy dismantling tried and
tested treaties and agreements, such as the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty, painstakingly hammered out by President Richard Nixon and Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev—and panning others such as the Kyoto Agreement on
the environment and the Oslo Accord on Israeli-Palestinian peace. It’s
worth noting that the US was voted off the UN Human Rights Commission
during that timeframe and, in spite of that, appointed three suspected
human rights violators (John Negroponte, Otto Reich, and Elliott Abrams)
to positions of high office within the US Department of State and National
Security Council. Post-911 saw suspension of US constitutional and
international law and modifications to suit the needs of The State. Soon
thereafter, an inaptly named USA PATRIOT Act and the establishment of US
Military Tribunals would be enacted in the same lightning fashion as when
Adolph Hitler scrapped the German Constitution in the wake of the 1933
Reichstag fire.

Pentagon spokesman began looking beyond 911. They branded "activists,
anarchists, and opportunists" as the terrorists of tomorrow. In fact, the
FBI began scanning the Internet for web sites that contained what The
State considered seditious and unpatriotic content and, in a few cases,
began shutting them down in a sort of cyberspace version of Nazi book
burning. With the apprehension of John Walker Lindh in northern
Afghanistan, Americans were inundated with the misdeeds of the "American
Taliban," the Traitor. Not since the witch hunting days of Joe McCarthy
and the execution of the Rosenbergs had the country been swept up in a
tempest of quick accusations of traitorous activities. Off the Orwellian
telescreens run by the three cable news networks was any mention of the
close contacts between American oil companies, like UNOCAL, and the
Taliban, and the fact that the firm, unlike Lindh, made cash payments to
the regime in return for the much-sought-after trans-Afghan oil and
natural gas pipeline. This was done with the active encouragement of key
members of both the Clinton and Bush II administrations. U.S. laws
prohibiting such influence peddling, like the Foreign Corrupt Practices
Act, were overlooked. This hypocrisy and the overarching influence of oil
over The State’s foreign policy is described in a new book by ex-CIA agent
Robert Baer, a veteran covert operator in the Islamic world. He states
that he found "that the tentacles of big oil stretch from the Caspian Sea
to the White House."

Big Oil would convince the Bush administration to turn an ill-advised and
ineffective counter-drug war in Colombia into a counter-insurgency
operation aimed at protecting the pipelines of US oil companies. Bypassed
was a congressional law limiting the number of US private military
personnel in Colombia to five hundred. Bush announced that he wanted as
many military privateers as it took to "stabilize" the entire Andean
region. Meanwhile, Bush’s CIA shock troops began destabilizing the
government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who began to appear as a
candidate for the "Axis of Evil" for his independent views of US foreign
policy.

With the statement, "You’re with us or against us," The State signaled to
its long term allies that it reserved the right to establish a new world
order based on the great Western Way. Dictatorships and totalitarian
regimes were now praised by government officials as freedom loving
nations. Military dictators became heroes. George Bush II used the opening
of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City to push American nationalism and
his stone-faced grimace directed at the passing of the team from Iran –
one of Bush’s "Axis of Evil" nations—evoked memories of that other
nationalist-based Olympic opening ceremony, that in Berlin in the Summer
of 1936, a ceremony that saw Hitler making snide remarks to his Reich
lieutenants on the presence of African-American sprinter Jesse Owens on
the American team. Under the guise of a war that would never end, The
State became brazen in its mission.

On the domestic front, clear distinctions between the government and the
corporation, and the government and the military evaporated. Government
propagandists, formerly corporate propagandists, proclaimed that The State
would be an easy brand to sell to the people. In fact, the State
Department appointed a Madison Avenue advertising executive as head of its
International Public Diplomacy Bureau to pitch "America" abroad as if it
was a brand of running shoe, detergent, or deodorant. Meanwhile, The State
gave carte blanche authority to the CIA to assassinate foreign leaders—an
edict that abrogated President Gerald Ford’s 1976 Executive Order banning
such murders. Responding to the policies of The State, senior military
officers began questioning why right-wing Bush political appointees in the
Defense Department scrapped the concepts of US military/international
coalition peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in favor of "stability
operations" and "unilateralism."

The defense budget ballooned to $400 billion while the wealthiest
individuals and organizations received tax reductions and bailouts from
the government. Those same recipients would fire close to a million people
and rape their pension plans conveniently forcing them back into the
workplace. The State raided the Social Security and Medicare accounts to
transfer billions of dollars to defense contractors and out of the pockets
of senior citizens who were promised assistance with prescription drugs by
a now utterly exposed ruse—a "Compassionate Conservative Bush
administration." In a country gone mad, cattle and crops would be
designated matters of "national security" as an un-elected occupant of the
White House ineloquently declared, "the nation has to eat". Meanwhile, The
State’s media machine would equate the speeches of George Bush II, an
individual who relies on cue cards with a short list of antonym pairs like
"good man" and "evil doer," to those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and
Abraham Lincoln.

Government officials would proclaim on many occasions that any dissent to
and from the government’s initiatives would be branded as unpatriotic and
terrorist. In that environment thousands of Americans and those of color
were pilloried by the government and their fellow citizens for questioning
The State’s actions. Demonstrators who opposed the corporate power grab in
a world that ignored labor and social protections were described as
commercial and economic terrorists. The White House Press Secretary urged
Americans to watch what they say and do in response to barbs by a
television comedian. What would come next, the creation of an American
Stasi? Just so. The State initiated the Citizen Corps, in which local
residents were encouraged to form their own councils to, among other
things, report suspicious activity and gather intelligence, thus cementing
the people’s support for The State.

The State acted swiftly to reprogram American culture. Artwork
antithetical to officials in the Department of Justice was hidden from
public view by an Attorney General who opposes the same cultural and
social pastimes—dance, drinking of alcohol, and viewing of sculptures—that
once subjected an Afghan to death by an edict of the Taliban. Flag burning
prohibitions were introduced into law. God, whose name was placed on US
currency and inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s, became
indistinguishable from The State. The State’s sanctioned religion was
literal biblical paternalism, militant in its own way. In this environment
it was no surprise that women, once again, lost dominion over themselves
and their wombs as the state proclaimed the unborn, born, and subject to
The State.

Practitioners of The State argued that freedom was to be defined as the
ability to wealth maximize. In this form of raw materialism, "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness…"—those transcendent concepts debated
so heartily and openly by the authors of the US Constitution—became
desiccated commodities. The State melded God and Country and Business into
one credo. With the Supreme Court firmly with The State – having
sanctioned the accession to power of a president lacking a plurality in
either the contested state of Florida or the United States—it, along with
an Executive beholden to religious zealots, planned to strike down other
laws, including a woman’s right to choose, over the long term. But 911
appeared. The Federal courts saw their power to sanction government break
ins of homes and offices, wiretap telephones and e-mail, and bug premises
usurped by a law enforcement and intelligence establishment that instead
of being forced to answer for their lack of knowledge about the events of
911, was showered with billions of dollars and new unsupervised powers.

Viewed within the acid bath of wealth maximization, 911 became an
unexpected bonus for The State in its mission to build the fascist and
theocratic underpinnings of its government. With a frightened Congress,
receptive corporate media, and a largely uneducated and nervous public,
The State brilliantly orchestrated the destruction of the open society.
Prior to 911, The State knew, with the exception of a pitiful few, that
Congress could be bought. But it viewed the media and public as a holdout
and feared rebellion on editorial pages and at the voting booth. But in
the aftermath of 911, with the media now indistinguishable from the "war
effort" and the public instructed to fly and buy for patriotism, The State
achieved in a mere 15 months, the utter decimation of American democracy.

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