The fate of the world stands now upon a razor’s edge, and as always the actions of a few may serve to determine how Themis’ scales will find us either in favour or debased in forfeiture of our cultural and historical inheritance. We stand now on the brink, watching the sky clot with clouds, steel eyed against the swelling maw of receding tides, the question is no longer whether, but how and when the gathering tempest will find us equipped to acknowledge the rising waters of economic slavery, social injustice, and spiritual and psychological debasement. The growing specter of empire shedding finally it’s democratic skin, the hideous protean visage of fascist totalitarianism squirming from the egg sac of intellectual complacency, the halcyon days of the republic having been squandered by it’s feckless youth, resting upon the laurels of their father’s vigilance.
Indeed, the significance of this historical moment, through which we are now living, cannot be overstated, and yet we are cajoled and entreated by every orifice of the corporate media apparatus, to pay no such heed. If there is fault with the world it must be in you; it says-undeserving as you are of the benevolent embrace of the state. Trim that waistline, meet that quota, make do with less, be innovative, find your passion; this brand of hollow rhetoric and callow negative appeal to pathos tells us that we are never good enough, that we should in fact hate ourselves—as it does—and not question the grosser injustices it’s architects thus commit in our name; war, imperialist expansion, economic exploitation and the machiavellian meddling in the affairs of other countries, characteristic of the hubris of empire. For this now is the modus operandi of the state, believing itself beyond reproach it tinkers in the minds and beliefs of it’s citizenry with faustian exuberance, through media manipulation and lies; with the same murderous enthusiasm that it would force the people, governments and leaders of other countries onto the procrustean chessboard of it’s own design. It is this very insidious force, this hidden hand guiding the affairs of state governance and economic slight of hind alike, which through it’s terrible majesty, has silently expanded its influence and like a noxious weed, or parasite, infested the very institutions which previously existed at the behest of the democratic state, and by extension the people. Colleges and universities, newspapers, print and television media, even church groups and other social and philanthropic organizations; whether by the immediacy of threats from without or by the fatigue of resistance from within, have been turned inside out and quietly made to serve the interests of the few, at the expense of the many. But what is this growing specter which moves unseen, beneath the floors and behind the ribs, batting, and electrical wires, of the halls of power. University Professor, author and political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, has given a name to this force which has become a kind of moving sea between the poles of the technocratic elite, the ‘Deep State’, and the general population who knowingly or unknowingly function as it’s greater body. This system of ‘inverted totalitarianism’—as Wolin describes it—represents an intimation of the forces that now shape foreign and domestic policy in the United States and abroad, as the result of gradual shifts in the organization of power, the role of the private sector and its relationship to the military, and America’s ‘imaginal image’ of itself through which it simultaneously self-defines as it projects itself onto the world. It is a no doubt quixotic task to underline and define all the ills which afflict not only the citizens of empire but those who live beyond its borders, however Wolin’s model provides a nonetheless salient and illuminating exploration which holds up to reason upon examination. The classical definition of totalitarianism essentially depicts a state in complete or ‘total’ control of all aspects of society, each of which are necessarily organized in support and furtherance of the needs and purposes of advancing state power, while reinforcing the supremacy of the state through the perpetuity of its ideology and romanticism. The best known of these are no doubt exemplified by the Nazi regime which was birthed out of the depressed Weimar republic in Germany after the first World War, also as reaction to the rising star of the Soviets to the east under Stalin. The descent into madness during the period known as World War II, nonetheless saw the gestation and refinement of some of the fundamental tenets of what would later become a more crystallized, streamlined, and silent totalitarianism. “War is the health of the State,” said writer and intellectual Randolph Bourne in his essay of the same title: “It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.” (Bourne, War is the health of the state, 1918) It was undoubtedly with this very ideology in mind, that Germany, Russia, and the United States sought to foist themselves out of the economic doldrums of the thirties, and rally the disparate voices of the public behind a single unifying venture, for which war provided the perfect opportunity. This period would also see the refinement of methods of swaying the public with the use of of propaganda and media manipulation as began during the first World War with Edward Bernay’s ‘Creel Commission’. Walter Lippmann took up the torch and continued to expound his particular brand of Hobbesian benevolent rulership, believing mankind to be a ‘bewildered herd’ which required that it be endlessly guided toward consensus, unable to cope with the necessarily accelerating complexity of the modern world. Lippmann believed that the public had no role to play in Democracy but rather they should act only as spectators, spoon fed their understanding of events and even their relationship to the world as a whole by a kind of ‘specialized’ or ‘guiding’ class. He presaged the rise of manipulation by emotional and symbolic appeal saying that people: “are more apt to believe the pictures in their heads” (Lippmann, 10). Author and journalist Chris Hedges noted in his book ‘Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”, the dangerous extent to which Lippmann’s philosophy has been put to use toward the creation of a ‘bread and circuses’ America. In an interview with Thomas Hartmann, Hedges describes an American public dispossessed of it’s ability to reason logically: “It’s the story of an America that has transferred its allegiance to spectacle, to pseudo events, that no longer can determine what is real—and what is illusion—that confuses how they’re made to feel with knowledge, that confuses propaganda with ideology, and that’s exceedingly dangerous, all totalitarian societies are image based societies, and that’s what our society has become.” (Thom Hartmann Program, 2009) After World War II, the returning American G.I.s and servicemen were ready to put behind them the horrors they had witnessed in Europe, only too happy to embrace the spectacle of a wholesome homeland, trimmed with the spectacle of movies, baseball and all the satiate certainty of suburban life’s dollhouse existence. It bears worth noting at this point, that this rosy promise, emblazoned on the American psyche like a sepia toned photograph, was from it’s inception, racially and financially motivated. One of the earliest and best known housing development projects of the post war era was Levittown, an idealized, racially sterile, housing project which provided cheap housing for returning veterans, provided they were the right shade of skin. This and other early and unabashedly racially motivated schemes of urban planning would serve to solidify and strengthen racial divides which would ultimately serve to alienate and weaken the political and social consciousness of the general public as a contiguous whole. This is a gross but nonetheless effective example of what would over the years become a much more insidious and subtle means of political disenfranchisement and manipulation of the public as whole, for all intents and purposes, employing the method of ‘divide and conquer’. As Sheldon Wolin describes in an interview with Chris Hedges, the idea of a cohesive public which can effectively assert itself politically in response to power, has all but dissolved into a state of near total parataxis: “There (existed) the notion (that) the public had always assumed a kind of cohesive character and some kind of set of commonalities that justified describing it as a public but I think that that day has long since gone because: the fragmentation of it--deliberate fragmentation of it--and the skill with which you can slice and dice the public into smaller fragments that can be appealed to while holding that fragment in relative isolation from what’s happening to the other fragments or to the society as a whole.” (Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? 2014) In addition to this machine-eyed procrustean regard which was now gestating into what would become the rise of the public relations industry, another highly significant shift was simultaneously taking place. The American factories which produced the bullets, shells, rifles, and vehicles of the war effort were still humming along diligently, continuing to churn out a steady stream of the profitable and highly marketable tools of death. In fact it wouldn’t be until the Cold War ideological stalemate between the United States and Soviet Russia was well underway that former general and president elect Dwight D. Eisenhower would raise objection to what he called the ‘rise of the military industrial complex’. In his 1961 farewell address, Eisenhower acknowledged the military’s justification for its rapidly burgeoning budget in American exceptionalism; the sometime philosophy sometime mythology, which advocates for an expansion of military power backed by the pure and undiluted moral righteousness of the spread of capitalism—delicately swaddled in the guise of Democracy. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address 1961) As Wolin, notes in his book ‘Democracy Inc.’, the Cold War era also indicated a high water mark in the protogenesis of America’s imaginal conception of itself on the path toward inverted totalitarianism, most specifically as a result of ‘the tidal wave of McCarthyism’ as he describes it. World War II provided a number of external challenges to the American identity, “there was no internal enemy to fight, no suspected disloyal elements to expose—this changed dramatically with the advent of the Cold War when the power imaginary turned inwards” (Wolin 35). The red scare of the post war years, saw America’s conception of itself as a beacon of democracy and capitalism, take on a messianic quality that began to form the blueprint of American exceptionalism and gradually the specter of inverted totalitarianism itself. At the same time the McCarthy era revealed a disturbing trend in America’s effort to define itself ideologically, politically and economically, in the absence of any clear external threat, new forms of thought policing, ‘consensus building’, and government overextensions of power turned inward upon itself with a kind of morbid rabidity, in a way that wouldn’t be seen again perhaps until the turn of the millennium. Never daring to risk outright war with Soviet Russia, the United States would instead favour a series of proxy wars throughout Asia and South America; propping up dictatorships who favorably acknowledged the necessity of ‘free markets’ and American influence. These skirmishes and backhanded dealings, displayed a United States foreign policy willing to make use of even the most loathsome foreign dictators—i.e. Diem, Pinochet, Duarte, Mubarak, and the Shah of Iran—all in the name of extending its sphere of influence and securing its place as a global superpower. Whether a pair of weaponized commercial airliners sailing one after the other into the world trade center’s towers on September 11, 2001, served to wake America from a dream, or plunge it further into a feverish nightmare, perhaps remains to be seen, what is clear is the immediate galvanizing effect it had on the now rapidly maturing totalitarian elements latent within America’s growing empire of economic and militarial influence. If the nineties represented a kind of naïve optimism about the possibilities inherent within the new technocratic globalized capitalist world, the post millennial dissent into what political philosopher and writer Dwight McDonald describes as the: “psychosis of permanent war”, represents a harrowing and painful revealing of the janusian dynamics of empire. 9/11 also represents one of the first and clearest instances of the mechanisms of empire turning upon itself, violence met with violence, on a grand and macabre scale. As Wolin also notes, this chapter of world history is privy to the fulfillment of Thomas Hobbes’ vision of absolute authority, which Hobbes outlined in ‘The Leviathan’. The parallels between Hobbes vision and Wolin’s assessment of inverted totalitarianism in America today, is sobering: “Hobbe’s crucial assumption was that absolute power absolutely depended not just on fear, but on passivity. Civic indifference was thus elevated to a form of rational virtue, the sovereign having established and maintained the conditions of peace that enable individuals to pursue their own interests in the sure knowledge that the law of the sovereign would protect, even encourage them. Virtually unlimited power, on the one hand, and on the other, an apolitical citizenry now assured of its security so that it can single-mindedly pursues private concerns: a perfect complementarity between apolitical absolutism and economic self-interest.” (Democracy Inc. Sheldon Wolin) When one considers the nature of the early 2000s it certainly reads like a descent into totalitarian rule—a descent into madness—with its absurd carnival of the macabre atmosphere of rigged elections, political parties bought and paid for wholesale, corporate greed run amok, the largest and most vocal anti-war rallies in history by sheer numbers in attendance—met by eerie silence from both media and government—not to mention the continued and sustained escalation of war in the Middle-East, the steady stream of reporting from the front lines listing the day’s body count, sterilizing events as they unfold using the sick and demented clinical euphemisms of wartime equivocation. This is perhaps the most defining aspect of the period immediately following 9/11. Emerging shell-shocked with it’s ears ringing, the American public found that despite any amount of vain shouting and arm waving, there was no longer anyone listening, the mic of public discourse had been switched off. This is the nature of inverted totalitarianism, which like a black hole, negates the vitality and effectiveness of social movements, flouts moral and ethical appeal, and silences dissent, all without force, without precedent, but by unspoken consensus. Like a black hole this brand of totalitarianism can only be tracked by the absence of light, the absence of political will and dissenting voices, the absence of sustained and marked resistance to political, governmental and corporate abuses of power. Where it has manifested itself—it is, in a sense—already to late, due to the fact that it propagates by silent consensus, requiring as Irish statesman Edmund Burke once famously noted: “only that good men do nothing.” Wolin describes inverted totalitarianism as “undramatic—without mass movements driving it, no putsches or Marches on Rome, no abrupt discontinuity,” (Wolin 66) “Inverted totalitarianism,” He states: “has emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation’s political traditions” (Wolin 46). Characterized by a kind of glacial or subterranean stealth, this gradual gestation and suffusion of Main St., Wall St. and Washington D.C. with the deadly unspoken consensus which has led to the inevitable terrible concrescence of numerous veins of political and economic power into the ‘Deep State’—which is similarly oriented to and shares many overlapping and interpenetrating features with the specter of inverted totalitarianism. In a sense inverted totalitarianism could be considered as the lifeblood of the beast, whose organs are defined within the body of the Deep State. Mike Lofgren, who spent close to 28 years as a Washington insider with top secret security clearance, borrowed the term ‘Deep State’ from John le Carré, the french spy novelist who shed plenty of ink over the clandestine machinations of Cold War spy intrigue. Over the years Lofgren began to see that a vast and sinister shell game was being played which had terrible and far reaching implications. As Lofgren notes: “The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.” (Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State, Mike Lofgren) This quiet backhanded, under the table, gentleman’s agreement, siphoning money and silent consent between Washington, Wall St. and the private sector, seems to grow bolder each year. The revolving door between positions in the United States military, private defense contractors, and Wall St. investment firms, paints a picture of a small but elite minority with clear designs unbeholden to political concerns, moral reservations, or national allegiances. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Lofgren describes the Deep State as: “-the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction” (Moyers & Co. interview with Mike Lofgren). In tandem with Wolin’s appraisal of inverted totalitarianism, operating essentially by unspoken agreement, Lofgren illustrates that the Deep State functions in much the same manner by a kind of ‘groupthink’ in which individuals are eventually subsumed by the status quo of operational protocol which defines their individual roles within a larger context. The result is an economy driven by war, a national government with its hands bound, and a military industrial apparatus which plunders, spies, threatens, disappears and murders anyone brave enough to blow the whistle or stand in the way. The cold calculation of capitalist logic has resulted in the long slow but inevitable decay of America from within, as industry is exported overseas at sweatshop wages, jobs become scarce, and America’s cities show clear signs of decline and fatigue. As the Roman historian Cassius noted, witnessing a no doubt similarly visible albeit gradual descent into the banal necessity and ubiquitous utility of war: “Our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust” (Cassio Dio, Book LXXII). As the drums of war continue to beat loudly from Washington D.C., played on every channel, day in day out, ad nauseum, the American people stand benumbed, unable or unwilling to respond, robbed of any political or moral agency. Robbed apparently even of the ability to consider the dire implications of their silence, or of the tide of violence ebbing across the borders of empire, lapping at its shores, permeating it from within. What is remarkably clear, despite the political doublespeak, despite the obfuscation, the labyrinth of lies and bureaucratic compartmentalization—which all in one form or another serve to perpetuate the supremacy of empire, enshrouded as it is within in the myth of democracy, humanitarianism, morality, and progress—is that the center cannot hold. Almost one hundred years ago, as the smoke cleared over the gray and twisted shadows of man’s cruelty in the aftermath of the first World War, W.B. Yeats noted prophetically the extent to which man would go, to bring violence upon one another, without consideration: The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (The Second Coming, excerpt, W.B. Yeats) As America approaches fifteen years of nearly perpetual war waged abroad, and acts of domestic terrorism and violence, bombings and shootings, become ubiquitous—the new normal—as battle lines and fronts are erased, and ideologies, identities, and allegiances seem to blur. The blood-dimmed tide is indeed loosed, in whose baptismal waters all are made complicit. No longer can America stand innocently by and wash itself clean of the blood which laps now on its shores, for the banality of evil, is found not within an act of violence, but in the absence of its challenge. Whether the voices of dissent are raised, the alarms rung, and the macabre hubris of empire are put in check, may yet determine the fate of all, and sooner perhaps, than we realize. |
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February 2017
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Meditations before a storm