Donald Trump inherited a government that had been engaged in war throughout the last eight years on unprecedented levels. Obama had attacked a record eight countries, making for him being at war longer than any other president. Obama had rained depleted uranium bombs onto tens of thousands of people, violating prior laws against unacceptably cruel weapons and creating hideously deformed newborn babies. The drone program had been expanded under Obama to something Noam Chomsky called “The most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times,” a judgement justified by how this drone program once assassinated the American 16-year-old son of a suspected terrorist without trial.
That assassination was explained by Obama’s spokesman by saying the teen’s father should have been more responsible, a rationalization similar to those used for the rest of America’s recent atrocities. The uranium bombings, like torture and a lack of Habeas Corpus, are now only theoretically illegal, with the authorities trying to minimize or erase these things from the public consciousness. Obama’s wars, like Trump’s wars so far, have gone ignored or numbly accepted by a people that can’t remember when their country wasn’t at war.
Hillary Clinton has innately committed war crimes, mainly when she approved the catastrophic NATO invasion of Libya after being informed that the invasion was about gold and oil. Like with dozens of other modern war criminals, she’s never even been investigated for these actions, and whether those actions are war crimes have become a matter of debate. At the same time those who’ve opposed the empire are demonized, with Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden being reviled for their exposing the crimes of the state. This amounts to a rally around barbarism as those first two have been tortured with solitary confinement and the latter is hiding out in Russia to avoid the same penalty.
This is how dictatorships are formed: indefensible things get incrementally remade as defensible. Corruption becomes more and more normalized. We lapse less and less out of a society that can call itself civilized.
The change is created by the establishment's guiding what can and can’t be talked about in our realms of political conversation. When the deeper evils of the system mentioned are hidden from the mainstream, Democrat partisans can easily think that the meager differences between the parties make up all that needs to be debated-according to what they’ve been presented, there’s little else to think about.
Legacy media is unequivocally part of this, as fifteen billionaires own the vast majority of TV, newspapers and magazines. But the effort to limit what the people see and discuss goes all the way down to social media, our main space for political discourse these days; Facebook has long censored dissenting viewpoints, though it’s spokespersons ardently deny this. The same is for Twitter, You Tube and Google, which have been attacking dissidents a lot more in the last year under cover of the insidious “fake news” psy op.
These suppressions come from the social media companies’ involvement in the unelected coordination of power centers-defined as the Deep State-that’s thickened itself in recent decades. In 2005 an agency was created at the request of corporations called the Domestic Security Alliance Council, which lets dozens of elite executives collude with our intelligence agencies. Facebook, Twitter and Google rose amid the new environment of required corporate partnership with the state, leading to these and other companies working with the intelligence community to hand over surveillance data and censor the opposition. The same is true for major media companies like the Washington Post, which is owned by a mega-billionaire who’s received $600 from the CIA through his 2014 Amazon deal with the agency.
As is true for the government. PAC money and wealthy politicians came to dominate politics decades ago, but this year the state became totally merged with industry when corporate executives were appointed to virtually every major Trump cabinet post. This direct government control from corporations, started by Obama with his appointment of Goldman Sachs executives to some cabinet posts, is the completion of our forty year corporate coup.
The social media companies are the intelligence agencies. The media companies are the state. The banks and the oil companies are the government. The corporations are law enforcement. This alliance showed bloody consequences last year when Standing Rock protesters were attacked with police dogs and shot with rubber bullets, and that won’t be the worst we’ll see of it as dissent is fought with increasing ferocity.
While I believe in release from this oligarchy, as revolutionary changes are clearly happening right now in ways that mirror those before the fall of the Soviet Union, I don’t believe we can have permanent release from it. When this unequal system is brought down, oligarchy will plausibly (if improbably) reappear within the next five decades after the overthrow, and very probably within the next five centuries. Inequality is where human societies inevitably trend, whether under a socialist or capitalist system. And even if civilization could fragment itself into the most purely democratic form of local government, an opening will always be there for re-centralization and then new oligarchy. Because there’s no way to fix society in one place permanently.
Yet while our current revolutionary work can’t affect society forever, the will to endlessly fight against evil is made immortal through the ideas we’re advancing. These ideas will reach all future fighters of oligarchy by making them confront their eternal battle in the same way the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay confronted death, which was with: “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
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