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The Real War--On American Democracy
(Thom Hartmann, AlterNet, April 18, 2003)
In the midst of news of foreign wars, Americans are beginning to wake up to the real war being waged here at home. It is, however, a confused awakening. . . . juicy deals for Bush administration insiders are just a by-product of the real and deeper war against democracy. The neoconservatives are perfectly happy for us to think they're just opportunists skirting the edges of legality and morality, but this is far more dangerous than simple government corruption. . . . Without a larger view, the issues of domestic spending, oil, neo-conservative power plays in both major parties, the loss of liberties, anti-government rhetoric, and war in the Middle East all seem like separate and unconnected events. They're not. . . . The "new conservatives" who've seized the Republican Party and, through the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) are nipping at the heels of the Democratic Party, are not our parents' conservatives. . . . In past times those promoting what is now called the neo-conservative agenda went by different names. . . . What we are seeing now in the neoconservative agenda is nothing less than an attempt to overthrow republican democracy and replace it with a worldwide feudal state. . . . it raised its head again in the 20th Century, revived by Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini. The Italian dictator even used the word "corporatism" to describe it, and then later renamed it as "fascism" - a word that was defined in American dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company) in 1983 as "fas-cism (fash'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." . . . Thus, the war on Iraq was just one front in the larger feudal war against democracy itself. (And a particularly useful one - it gave the corporate feudal lords access to oil wealth, and was so effective at distracting the populace from Bush's outrageous domestic agenda that we can expect to see another war, somewhere, in November of 2004.) . . . Facing the power of The East India Company's corporate feudalism in 1773, the Founders of our nation, unable to get their voices heard in the halls of the British government or even in many of the newspapers of the day, turned to two nonviolent and very effective methods to spread the new meme of democracy. . . . The first was pamphleteering - and the internet is today's pamphlet. Millions are using email and pointing to websites to awaken people and promote democratic change. . . . The second was creating "committees of correspondence," also used extensively by the Women's Suffrage movement. These were groups organized to write letters to the editors of newspapers. . . . People across American have already begun letter writing, faxing, and email campaigns, and you can see the results on the editorial pages of our newspapers and in the reactions of some of our politicians. Other correspondents are blogging or calling in to talk shows, modern variations on this theme. . . . A correspondent in York, New York, who is pamphleteering in email and encouraging committees of correspondence to write letters to newspaper editors against the new feudalism's wars on America and overseas, shared the following quote from Emerson: "One of the illusions [of life] is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour." . . . Yet this is the critical and decisive hour, and we are not without voices or tools.

posted by LoZo 8:48 PM