In related news, Francisco Franco is still dead, too.
Whether Osama bin Laden departed the mortal realm for an unpleasant eternity years ago -- as sober and serious people have reported -- or last week in a firefight suitable for a sweeps week episode of NCIS, this much is certain: The government ruling us managed to turn that despicable creature into a prophet.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden gloated shortly after 9-11. "The U.S. government will lead the American people, and the West in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
Osama's fondest wish was to see a civilizational conflict between the West and the Islamic world. A subsidiary desire was to see the United States spend itself into oblivion by carrying out that demented crusade. He doubtless was delighted to see the United States become mired in an intractable war in Afghanistan, and to see Washington expand the compass of its conflict with the Muslim world to include Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia.
Bin Laden was almost certainly gleeful to witness the collapse of the most recent Fed-engineered financial bubble in 2008, and probably emitted a chuckle or two over the dollar's rapid disintegration. Assuming that CNN or Fox is available in hell, bin Laden will probably be permitted a fleeting moment of satisfaction when the United States descends into a hyperinflationary crisis worthy of Weimar Germany or contemporary Zimbabwe -- something that could occur before the end of this year.
The purpose of terrorism, explained Marighella, is to "to intensify repression," resulting in draconian measures that "make life unbearable" for the subject population. When faced with "revolutionary violence," government will eagerly resort to "police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people [that] make life in the city unbearable.... " Rejecting the "so-called political solution," the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act...."
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who published and widely disseminated Marighella's terrorist tract, was a millionaire Marxist publishing magnate (yes, such people do exist). He concisely summarized Marighella's strategy as using relentless violence against the innocent in order to provoke an "authoritarian turn to the right" -- the imposition of dictatorial measures and the consolidation of power by a State that ere long will fall into the hands of the revolutionaries. Whatever else bin Laden was, he understood that dynamic and eagerly promoted it. Whether or not it was a product of conscious design, bin Laden and Washington's Power Elite existed in symbiosis. Every action taken by the government ruling us that abridged individual liberties and enlarged the public debt was a small victory for bin Laden's vision. The same is true of every CIA-conducted Predator drone strike that wiped out a helpless Muslim family, thereby sowing seeds of rancor that will blossom into anti-American terrorism.
Not a scene from a debt-ridden Third World nation. No, wait...
Some people have long suspected that worms had gagged on bin Laden's mortal remains long ago, and that his name and likeness were being used in a "Weekend at Bernie's"-style hoax by our rulers.
Every once in a while the image of the omnipotent troglodyte -- who supposedly had the power to threaten our very existence while living in a cave somewhere in the Tora Bora Mountains -- would be resurrected to rally the public on behalf of the Long War. This routine succumbed to the law of diminishing returns about five years ago.
By now, however, the Regime no longer requires bin Laden's service as a hate figure. The purpose of such a totem is to personify an abstract "Enemy." Over the past two years, proponents of a civilizational conflict with the Muslim world have succeeded in convincing a large and growing segment of the population that Islam itself -- everywhere it exists, in whatever form it takes -- is the Enemy, and that coexistence isn't an option.
Although he would be on the opposing side of the proposition, bin Laden would appreciate the War Party's efforts to criminalize the practice of Islam in the United States. This is the objective of the "anti-Sharia" enactments that are sprouting like poisonous toadstools wherever the War Party and its acolytes have fertilized the ground with that malodorous substance in which such fungi thrive.
Bin Laden would have admired the clarifying fanaticism behind the original version of Tennessee's proposed anti-Sharia ordinance, which would have treated peaceful belief in Sharia law as a felony punishable by up to twenty years in prison. He would be delighted to see the same U.S. government that is bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim nations abroad actively working to suppress the religious liberty of American Muslims at home. What better way to validate bin Laden's claim that war between Islam and the West is inevitable?
Ten years ago, the image of the Enemy was that of an unabashedly hostile self-proclaimed sheik who reveled in his hatred for America. By now, much of the Right has been convinced that law-abiding American Muslims who conduct peaceful commerce and profess to love our country are the most insidious threat we face.
Assuming that the official narrative of bin Laden's death as a recent event is reliable, this development fulfills a promise made about a year ago by Attorney General Eric Holder, who told a congressional committee that bin Laden "will never appear in an American courtroom." Bin Laden was indicted for mass murder and other terrorism-related offenses (although, intriguingly, not the 9-11 atrocities), which means that it would have been entirely proper for him to be arraigned before a criminal court in an appropriate jurisdiction.
The Regime has a deep bench: Al-Awlaki.
But that's not how things are done now by the Regime ruling us: The post-Bush doctrine of presidential war powers dictates that the incumbent dictator, as our "living Constitution," can order the summary execution of anyone on the planet for any reason he deems suitable. A corollary to that doctrine is that a "terrorist" is anyone thus designated by the Regime.
For a decade bin Laden was used to demonstrate the supposed necessity and wisdom of these totalitarian innovations. Anwar al-Awlaki, a "radical cleric" in Yemen who was clearly groomed as bin Laden's understudy for the past two years, will now assume the marquee role.
Thanks in no small measure to the ministrations of such people, much of the American public will be praising the government ruling us for sending Osama to hell, oblivious to the hell that the same government has stored up for the rest of us.
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Hello, Tea Partiers. Look at your president. Now back to me. Now back at your president. Now – back to me. Sadly, your president isn’t me…. Look down. Back up -- where are you? You’re in a torchlight parade led by the man who could be your president! What’s in your hand? – back at me. I have it – it’s that Constitution that you say you love. Look again – your Constitution has been replaced by a military junta! Anything is possible when your man smells like white phosphorous. I’m on a white horse.
"I want to start a draft Allen West movement!" exclaimed Glen Beck during his April 21st radio program. The radio personality has been cooing and burbling about West for months. He's convinced that the retired Army Lt. Colonel -- who was cashiered in disgrace for abusing a prisoner in a fashion that merited prosecution under Article 93 of the UCMJ -- is the "man of honor" our troubled country needs.
Of course, Beck isn't the only one infatuated with West: the freshman congressman from Florida is emerging as something of an Old Spice Guy for the punitive populist Right.
"The next president will be either the end or the beginning of our country," Beck intoned, taking note of the potentially apocalyptic consequences of the metastasizing debt and our continued descent into an economic abyss. West has displayed no measurable interest in reducing the size and expense of the Leviathan State. In fact, the contrary is true: Before being elected to represent a Florida congressional district, West was an employee of the wealth-devouring, debt-propelled imperial military. His career as a hireling killer is what Beck describes as his most alluring trait.
"He has a strong military background," Beck gushed. "The guy was led through war, and he's not afraid to pull the trigger."
With Washington's legions engaged in three open wars and at least five covert conflicts, it's clear that the incumbent warlord is not hindered by a disinclination to "pull the trigger." In fact, under the reign of the Nobel Peace Laureate, Washington's military entanglements have expanded considerably and deepened dramatically, particularly through the use of death-dispensing drone aircraft.
In terms of bellicosity overseas, a President Allen West would most likely take up seamlessly from his predecessor. The substantive difference between the two would become apparent in domestic affairs: West's model of an ideal society is the proto-fascist totalitarian state that ruled ancient Sparta.
In a recent address to a meeting of the Evangelical group "Women Impacting the Nation," West extolled the supposed virtues of the Spartan system, in which children (at least those who made the initial cut as newborns and weren't selected as genetic culls to be hurled from a cliff) were stolen from their parents and raised as the property of the State.
"Spartan women at the age of nine gave up their male sons," West recounted to the gathering. "And their male sons went into a training that was called the Agoge and they stayed in that training for the next eleven to twelve years. And when they were finally qualified, when they were finally ready to join the ranks for the Spartan army, it was not their father who gave them their cloak and shield. It was their mother who gave them their shield" -- while uttering the famous admonition to return either carrying the shield in triumph, or as a lifeless corpse being carried upon it.
The ironies are thick enough here to blot out the sun, but it's sufficient to focus on three of them. First, the Evangelical women in the audience can be heard swooning with approval as West hymns the purported merits of a thoroughly pagan society that embodied the antithesis of every Christian virtue. Second, West -- who insists that we must either subjugate or annihilate Muslims because they "have no respect for human life" -- apparently believes that America should re-model itself after a garrison state built on a foundation of institutionalized child sacrifice on behalf of the State.
Even more remarkably, the same Allen West who recently sent a thrill down the leg of many Right-collectivist warbots by denouncing the integration of homosexuals into the imperial military heaped extravagant praise on a military indoctrination system built on what Dr. Paul Cartledge of Cambridge University calls "ritualized pederasty." Enforced homosexuality was part of the process whereby Spartan boys became "qualified" (as West so daintily put it) for service in the city-state's army.
In his book The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, from Utopia to Crisis and Collapse, Dr. Cartledge observes that after a Spartan boy's seventh birthday "he was removed from the home environment, for good, to embark on the compulsory and communal educational system know as the Agoge or Raising/Upbrining. Between the ages of seven and eighteen the boys and youths were organized in `packs' and `herds' and placed under the supervision of young adult Spartans. They were encouraged to break the exclusive ties with their own natal families and to consider all Spartans of their father's age to be in loco parentis."
At the age of twelve, the Spartan male "was expected to receive a young adult warrior as his lover -- the technical Spartan term for the active senior partner was `inspirer,' while the junior partner was known as the `hearer,'" relates Dr. Cartledge. When the Spartan boy reached age eighteen he was evaluated for membership in the Crypteia, a police force assigned "to control the Helots" -- a population of civilian slaves who lived under a form of martial law and could be killed, with impunity, by the Spartan police.
If Barack Obama -- or even some tertiary bureaucratic appointee in his administration --were to invoke totalitarian Sparta as a model for an American social renaissance, Glenn Beck most likely would suffer a seizure at his chalkboard, and the entire warbot Right would go into convulsions. Allen West's candid endorsement of that vile totalitarian system, however, is seen as "courageous" and "principled" by that same social cohort.
"When was the last time you heard a politician speak like this?" squealed an enraptured conservative commentator regarding West's paean to Sparta's child-snatching militarist overlords.
Well, let's see:
There was that curious little fellow -- a bit eccentric, but a decorated combat veteran nonetheless -- who about eighty years ago explained: "When an opponent says, `I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, `Your child belongs to us already.... You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community."
Fleshing out the Dear Leader's vision, his Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, insisted that the "primary obligation" of parents, schools, and other institutions was "to raise youth for service to the Volk and state...."
Another version of that same sentiment was expressed at a Soviet Communist Party Education Workers' Conference in 1918: "We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."
Allen West, on the other hand, has candidly endorsed the idea that virtuous American mothers should "[give] up their male sons" to be raised by the State, for the State; that they should teach their sons that there is no vocation holier than killing on behalf of the State; and that there is no act nobler than sacrificing one's life in the State's service.
Many of the same people who saw the odd little performance in Kansas City as evidence of a plot to create a monolithic, nation-wide Paramilitary Youth Corps of fearsome size and iron discipline apparently think this arrangement would be just fine, as long as Allen West were the one in charge.
Perhaps he's being coy, but Colonel West insists that he's not interested in a presidential run in 2012. If he's sincere in that refusal, he might find himself gravitating toward a different venture promoted by Beck -- what one of his publicists describes as a coterie of "former CEOs, CIA agents, and military personnel who share his vision to restore the republic."
On the basis of prior performance, it's pretty clear that Beck's "vision" doesn't include a repudiation of the Warfare State. The thumbnail sketch of his proposed brain trust suggests that he would be communing with people who have been instrumental in building that vertically integrated enterprise of plunder, bloodshed, and misery, and have profited from it.
Allen West would make a suitable figurehead for a post-collapse American military junta, and I suspect that among his admirers can be found many people who quietly long for the advent of an American Galtieri or Pinochet. I suppose it would be progress, of a sort, to see a black man considered for the role of the Man on the White Horse.
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Uninvited, unwanted, but there anyway: Hamilton police disrupt a funeral.
Within the space of about a day, New Jersey experienced two public displays of organized intimidation by paramilitary thugs. The first involved an armed assault by black-clad bullies whose conduct was indistinguishable from the criminal street violence of the Nazi SS. The other was merely a public protest by the local chapter of the National Socialist Movement.
The family of Elsie Wenzel, a beloved school lunch lady who died at age 71, gathered for a memorial service at a funeral home in Hamilton (a small town near Trenton) on April 15. Charles Wenzel, one of her grandsons, "had ... something like a seizure," related Elsie's widower, Edward, in an interview with The Trentonian. The family called 911 to summon the paramedics. Unfortunately, if you call the paramedics, the police are part of the package deal, whether they're wanted or not -- and they have an unfailing talent for making matters worse.
When Charles had another convulsion, he committed the unpardonable offense of defiling one of the sanctified bully-boys through physical contact. This constitutes "battery on an officer," and so the offended cop and several of his boyfriends attempted to handcuff Charles while he was lying on the ground receiving medical treatment.
"We didn't call you for this!" exclaimed a witness as several other people, including a granddaughter of the deceased, tried to intervene to protect Charles from the criminal assault. The officers responded by pepper-spraying the mourners and throwing several of them -- including Edward's middle-aged granddaughter -- to the ground.
One of the officers called in a report that a "riot" was in progress -- "riot" being defined as any situation in which Mundanes loudly criticize the anointed purveyors of consecrated violence for their crimes against innocent people. Apparently the funeral parlor was located near a donut shop, because within seconds at least a dozen police vehicles were on the scene.
(Courtesy of the Trentonian.)
One of Elsie's sons, who was to be a pallbearer at the funeral, was jumped by "seven or eight" of the armed tax-feeders and thrown to the floor of the funeral parlor, Edward Wenzel reported. Another eyewitness who drove by the scene was alarmed to see police swarming four other prone, helpless men.
By one account, at least a half-dozen of the pallbearers were arrested to sent to the hospital as a result of gang violence by the police. When police attempted to "escort" him from the chapel, Edward Wenzel refused; if they had laid hands on the bereaved elderly widower, an authentic riot might well have ensued.
As is typical in events of this kind, the NSM nitwits were outnumbered about three-to-one by counter-protesters. Events of this kind are an orgy of overtime for the unionized gendarme, and the April 16 protest was no exception: Every law enforcement agency -- local, state, and federal -- sent a contingent of uniformed trough-swillers to strut and preen in riot gear.
The familiar ritual of neo-Nazi protests reminds me a bit of Voltaire's description of the typical 18th Century Parisian dinner party, where one would experience "the usual unintelligible chatter, witticisms, false rumors, bad reasoning, a little politics, [and] a great deal of slander...."
Every time neo-Nazi numbskulls conduct a protest, the air will be clotted with the same familiar slogans, the standard assortment of insults will be exchanged, and all of the familiar poses will be struck.
All of this, I'm convinced, is incidental to the real two-fold purpose of such displays: Allowing the local constabulary to run up overtime, and reinforcing the notion that the police are the valiant protectors of the innocent, rather than the most significant threat to their life, liberty, and property.
It wasn't neo-Nazis of the NSM variety who disrupted Elsie Wenzel's funeral. It would be interesting to find out how many of the paladins of public order who pulled "riot duty" in Trenton on Saturday, April 16 had taken part in the police riot in Hamilton on the previous day. In similar fashion, it's quite likely that nobody who attended Elsie's funeral had ever been the victim of criminal violence apart from that inflicted on them by the Hamilton police.
Domesticated neo-Nazi groups like the NSM have a way of Bogarting all of the civic outrage wherever they materialize, including outrage more properly directed at the local branch of the Ordnungspolitzei.This is one reason why the Feds are eager to feed and care for groups such as the NSM -- which also act as useful vehicles for federal provocateurs.
The likelihood that the National Socialist Movement -- or any similarly situated neo-Nazi group -- could become a menace to individual liberty and dignity comparable to that posed by the State's punitive priesthood is so small that it couldn't be detected by en electron microscope. Neo-Nazis are almost impossible to find, unless one seeks them out in a few rural habitats in the Northwest and Deep South. The police, by way of contrast, are almost impossible to avoid, and their behavior -- as I've noted before -- increasingly resembles that of an army of occupation.
In part, this is because many of them are Reservists or Guardsmen who have served in Washington's military occupations abroad. But even those who have not been deployed overseas are being indoctrinated to think of themselves as combatants in constant peril for whom "officer safety" is the paramount consideration.
To understand the institutional mindset of contemporary law enforcement, it's useful to juxtapose video records of two incidents. The firsttook place in Iraq’s Camp Bucca prison in 2005:
“Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” exclaimed an armed thug after one of his comrades hurled a grenade into a prison enclosure. The scene, described by commentator David Kramer as something out of "Schindler's List," struck me as some perverse hybrid of Wounded Knee and “Jackass”: Armed adolescent bullies cackling with juvenile glee as they gun down desperate, defenseless people.
One wonders how many of these murderous mouth-breathers are now employed in domestic law enforcement. And then one wonders how many of these sadists had been employed as police before being called up by the Regime to serve as hired killers overseas. And that thought leads us irresistibly to the second video:
In 2003, two years before the episode at Iraq's Camp Bucca, riot police in Miami carried out a full-scale military assault — albeit with “non-lethal” weapons — against demonstrators who had assembled to protest a summit meeting promoting the artfully misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas.
“After last week, no one should call what [Chief John] Timoney runs in Miami a police force,” observed investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill following the event. “It’s a paramilitary group. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki uniforms with full black body armor and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, chanting, `back… back… back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters.”
Among the protesters was an attorney named Elizabeth Ritter. She was driven into the streets out of disgust that Miami had been turned into a garrison state. Wearing a modest, professional business suit, she marched in front of Timoney’s stormtroopers carrying a sign that read “Fear Totalitarianism.” As if to vindicate Ritter’s point, some of Timoney’s goons shot Ritter several times in the back and legs with rubber bullets. Ritter crouched down and covered her face with her protest sign — only to be shot again by a rubber bullet, which penetrated the sign and struck her in the forehead.
“I don’t know who got her,” chortled Kallman, “but … it went through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head.”
“Can I get a little piece of her red dress?” chimed in one of Kallman’s cretinous underlings from somewhere off-camera.
In a conversation with Major John Brooks, the ranking officer at the briefing, another of the blackshirts showed off a bandana that he had retrieved “from one of the scurrying cockroaches.”
“Oh, cool!” exulted Brooks in a fashion worthy of a twelve-year-old. “This is going in my office forever, and it’s going to bring me some very good memories.”
Despite the fact that Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel confirmed that police had committed criminal assaults during the protests, none of the costumed assailants responsible was punished in any way. In fact, the scenes described above were included in a training video, presumably used to instruct the Schutzstaffel in the proper use of what has come to be known as the “Miami Model” of homeland security.
The foundation of the "Miami Model" is a doctrine of overwhelming force in the service of "order": The Mundanes are told to submit or be hurt -- or killed. This is the operative principle of every encounter between police and "civilians," which is why every such encounter -- even one incidental to emergency medical treatment at a funeral -- is freighted with incipient police violence.
Earlier in the drama we had seen how Teyve, the Jewish milkman at the center of the story, was on friendly terms with the police chief. That friendship is savagely thrust aside once the chief's "duty" is made clear to him.
"Orders are orders -- you understand?" simpered Anatevka's village police chief to Tevye as the troops under his command carried out their pogrom. After all, the chief had been told by his superior, in no uncertain terms, that his job depended on his willingness to carry out orders: "If you don't want to carry out orders, we will get someone else who will." Such people are never in short supply.
We are told that many -- nay, most -- of those employed in police agencies are people of conscience and principle. This is true of several people I know who are thus employed. I sometimes suspect that I've met everybody who fits that description.
For reasons of institutional solidarity -- or, what's much the same thing, conformity achieved through the threat of retaliation -- such worthy and decent police officers never seem to intervene in defense of innocent people being abused by their costumed comrades. In such instances, any effort made to de-escalate a situation involves admonitions to outraged Mundanes that they must "calm down" in the face of criminal violence being inflicted on a friend, loved one, or clearly inoffensive stranger.
There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible for Americans to avoid contact with the police, and the police were trained and expected to leave people alone. Now, however, police are permitted and encouraged to behave like packs of lupine predators, eager to exploit any opportunity to inflict themselves on the helpless.
It's tempting to think that at some point some helpless American is going to become our nation's Mohammed Bouazizi, or Khaled Said -- a living (or recently deceased) symbol of resistance to the persistent, unpunished abuse inflicted by the Regime's armed enforcers.
When he was three years old, Mohammad Bouazizi's father died. As the oldest son of an indigent family living in Sidi Bouazid -- a town about 160 miles from the Tunisian capital, Tunis -- Mohammad was responsible to provide for his mother and two sisters. He earned a computer science degree, but found that it was of little use in Tunisia's deeply depressed economy.
For years, Bouazizi managed to eke out a living as an unlicensed street vendor, peddling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. Like others who carried out commerce without official permission, Bouazizi endured harassment from shakedown artists employed by the State, who in the course of the typical visit would steal the equivalent of seven dollars as a "fine."
As the song says, talk is cheap, but even nickels add up. Even a single nickel is sorely missed when it's extracted at gunpoint from someone barely managing to earn enough to survive. But the contemptuous, arrogant words emitted by the armed functionary to carries out that theft do damage as well. The cumulative effect of such indignities can be enough to drive a despairing man to do desperate things.
"What happened to him?" The police "happened" to him.
Khaled Said was a 28-year-old businessman from Alexandria, Egypt. Last June, after Said posted a video he had captured of narcotics officers divvying up the proceeds of a drug bust, he was dragged out of an internet cafe, taken to a nearby police station, and beaten to death. A small bag of hashish of the sort used by police everywhere to plant evidence was stuffed down Said's throat.
News of this atrocity was quickly propagated throughout Egypt, engendering a protest movement that eventually grew into the rebellion at Tahrir Square and the still-unfinished effort to uproot Egypt's deeply entrenched, U.S.-subsidized police state.
In police states of the kind Washington has supported in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the region, people have been willing to endure a great deal of abuse as long as there was some reasonable expectation that they would be able to feed themselves. It's not surprising to see that forbearance evaporate in the heat of the ongoing economic meltdown, which has left many people without the means to feed their families.
The triggering incidents that set off revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt were episodes of casual, arrogant abuse by police officers who considered themselves to be imperviously clothed in official privilege. Incidents of that kind are becoming more commonplace here in the putative Land of the Free, and the debt-prolonged illusion of prosperity that has long anesthetized public sensitivities is coming to an end.
Once again, it's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone, somewhere is going to be pushed too far by an officious prig in a government-issued costume, an atrocity will result -- and then all hell will break loose.
Given the perverse ingenuity police display in arranging opportunities to impart such abuse, this could happen nearly anywhere, at any time. Meanwhile, those of us who belong to the productive class should avail ourselves of every opportunity to share the following message with representatives of the State's coercive caste:
We don't need you.
We don't want you.
We don't respect you.
We won't tolerate you much longer.
Obiter Dicta
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