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Note:
This text was written in October 2002, originally
posted at QuestionsQuestions.net and Indymedia. It attempts to place
the 9/11 attacks in their appropriate context, that is, as first
expressed in an earlier article by Kolskegg, as a desperate
attempt by US capitalist powers to launch a new global offensive
against the working class. (This article has been translated into Italian.)
It is time to
have a hard, clear-eyed look at our situation here
in this post-September 11 "brave new world order", on the brink
of a huge conflagration in the Middle East, with endless war beyond.
The Global Fascist Terror State has arrived, the fruit of decades
of planning, propaganda and provocation. September 11 was its
coming-out party, and for us, the last wake-up call. So now let's
face the facts. No more self-delusion, no more easy roads. The
reality is plain as day, and so therefore is our task.
The
rapidly-building worldwide anticapitalist movement (called
the "antiglobalization movement" by its enemies both right and
left) has forced the planners of capital's predations to abandon
all caution and launch, through provocation, a new phase of the
global class war. The worldwide revolt against capitalism and
the state, increasing inexorably year by year over the last decade,
and exemplified most visibly in Seattle, Prague and Genoa, added
a final intolerable pressure to the already dismal condition of
world capitalism. With profits collapsing, ever-worsening environmental
destruction, and looming resource (especially oil) depletion,
capital's prospects were poor in any case. Add in mounting autonomous
resistance throughout the world, highly conscious of the underlying
cause of the planet's many agonies and who is responsible, and
suddenly the whole structure is on the brink of collapse.
Provocation
and Fake Terror
Provocation and
fake terror as the pretext for a new assault
on capital's enemy, the working people of the world, is nothing
new; most wars of the last hundred years have started this
way. (Wars are, above all things, attacks on working people —
who fight them and die in battle, and are the vast bulk of the
"collateral damage" as well. In the last analysis, all wars are class
wars.) By "provocation" is meant the action of
an agent provocateur, on any scale: against a cop, or
against
a country. The purpose is to provide an attack that legitimizes
an aggressive response, an attack that otherwise would not occur.
When a cop dressed up as a black blocker throws a stone or molotov
cocktail at the police phalanx, he provides the pretext they wait
for to rush and crush the crowd. "Fake terror" is a type of
provocation
which selects the innocent, defenseless public as the specific
victim of the attack, to wreak maximum psychological damage on
the population and render them as putty in the state's hands.
In some cases
the provocation itself may be fake, a purely spurious
creation of the propaganda apparatus of government and its corporate
tool, the mass media. A good example was the Gulf of
Tonkin
"incident"; which led to the immediate granting by
Congress to President Johnson of vastly expanded war powers against
the Vietnamese people. In other cases the provocation may only
require facilitation of the schemes of a genuine enemy, creating
the conditions that make an attack of some sort inevitable, at
which point the pretext is provided for retaliation. Pearl
Harbor
would fall into this category. Similarly, the provocation
constituted by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was facilitated by the first
Bush regime, providing the pretext for the invasion
of the Persian Gulf so much desired by American imperial planners.
The attacks of
September 11 seem to have been an especially complex
mixture of modalities, in which the exact role of "the Arab
hijackers"
remains murky. Given the technological capability to crash Boeing
757s and 767s into buildings remotely,
it is possible that no "Arab hijackers" were involved. Certainly
no evidence has been presented of their actual boarding of the
planes; no photos of them at the boarding gates have been released,
and none of their names nor any Arabic names at all appear on
the passenger
lists from the flights. These facts are highly suggestive
of a pure case of "fake terror". But even if "the 19 Arab
hijackers"
did just what the official story says they did, committing suicide
for the glory of Allah and Osama, it does not for a moment prove
that their actions were not intentionally facilitated by U.S.
government operatives for purposes of provocation and domestic
state terror. Indeed, the vast evidence still unfolding of the
"incomprehensible" treatment afforded them for years prior to
9/11 by the FBI and CIA suggests nothing else.
Something like
September 11 was to be expected and was even predicted
by a few perceptive souls, given the return of the Bushmob to
the White House and the rapidly deteriorating condition of the
global control system. Nevertheless, it was a shock. The brutality
of the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings (at least four of
them) was unprecedented, exceeding even Pearl
Harbor in loss of life. But we must come out of the paralyzing
shock and squarely face the criminals who carried out the attack.
False
Opposition
The first task
is to think for yourself. The mainstream and to
a very large degree the "alternative" media have been a major
tool in the hands of the newly unveiled Global Fascist Terror
State. Through relentless propaganda, control of information,
suppression of the real facts and issues that we must face (and
these crimes against working people have been perpetrated by so-called
"progressive" media, including KPFA, Democracy Now and the rest
of Pacifica Radio, Common Dreams, and Z Magazine, demonstrating
a limitless capacity to bend over and accommodate power), the
established media of "Left", "Right" and
"Center" work overtime
to maintain illusions of "democracy" and reform and put people
back to sleep.
Calls for
Congressional investigations and campaigns to elect
Greens to city councils are attempts to contain us in a state
of passivity, so that those with a stake in this criminal order
can hold onto their privileges and push us ever further down.
The corruption on the (so-called) Left is so deep that its apparatchiks
like Medea Benjamin, Amy Goodman, David Corn, Michael Albert,
Larry Bensky, Dennis Bernstein and Norman Solomon, whether they
know it or not, now act out a script conceived by their CIA sponsors.
Their latest objection to war on Iraq is that it will "undermine
the War on Terrorism"! In a campaign apparently choreographed
from above, their assignment seems to be to float the next position
to be publicly taken by fellow radicals in the Democratic Party,
such as Al Gore. With "allies" like these
we are truly surrounded by enemies. We must remain awake
and actively defend ourselves!
The truth is we
now face an unending war on dissent and resistance
to capitalism, not on "terrorism". The White House and Congress
collude to pass totalitarian legislation such as the USA PATRIOT
Act to give the state unlimited powers to control our every breath
and thought. Corporate criminality is so vile that it can no longer
be hidden even by the media, illuminating the grotesque corruption
at the heart of capitalism, to which all established institutions
are dedicated. Government corruption and criminality know no bounds,
naturally, as the government is completely controlled by capitalists.
And now, as is revealed by the events of September 11, the unseen
puppetmasters hitherto satisfied to remain unsuspected in clandestinity
have sprung into full, open view as they launch a desperate and
final war against us. In the face of this reality our only option
is total refusal to cooperate, to play by the "rules". We must
fight them tooth and nail, to the last breath. And don't worry,
we will be given the opportunity, very soon.
Destination
Clandestine Nation
Let's not beat
around the Bush. It was not Osama bin Laden and
his minions who masterminded 9/11, it was the U.S. Government.
The attacks of that day required years of planning and preparation,
beginning long before the Florida Coup installed the current puppet
in the White House. It was a complex black operation carried out
by secret elements of the U.S. and subordinate foreign governments,
working in the interests, under the direction, and with the assistance
of the highest levels of corporate power. There is ample evidence
that the intelligence services of Israel, Pakistan
and the UK
were involved in supporting roles to the supervising CIA/FBI/
Pentagon team. Key members of the U.S. Congress were in on the
planning as well, and have assisted with the subsequent coverup.
But the main
players were "Special Operations" units run by the
CIA and the Pentagon. There are many types of Special Operations;
the term is usually used to denote highly localized military
interventions.
As elaborated by L. Fletcher
Prouty
in his two important books, The Secret
Team and Understanding
Special
Operations, the term is properly applied to larger-scale
operations as well, however, and can be synonymous with "Covert
Operations", which historically have been directed at domestic
U.S. as well as foreign targets (a good example is the assassination of
President Kennedy).
The provocation
on 9/11 was simply the biggest Special Operation
of all time. It was the logical, even predictable, outcome of
the development over more than half a century of a clandestine
(or "deep") political system where the most powerful members
of the capitalist ruling class vie for real power. Just as a wide
range of familiar means of government and corporate control via
coercion and propaganda directs the routinized, visible class
war of capitalist society, a host of techniques are available
to contenders within the clandestine political understructure:
coups, assassinations
,
kidnappings, disappearances, tortures, slanders, libels, humiliations,
disinformation campaigns, "psychological operations", mind control, death squads,
"suicides",
drug
smuggling, gun-running, money laundering, insider trading,
fraud, and most especially, provocations and fake "terrorism".
Clandestine
politics are not chaos. The clandestine political arena has
some rules, similar to the rules that strictly regulate the operations
of the classical Sicilian Mafia. Indeed, the Mafia
is one of the major contenders, along with the CIA
and other U.S and foreign secret services and intelligence agencies
(FBI,
NSA, DIA, ONI, DEA,
Mossad,
MI6,
FSB
etc.),
organized crime syndicates based
all over the world (dealing in high-return enterprises like drugs,
prostitution, slavery, child labor, weapons, gambling, money
laundering),
and the Vatican/Opus
Dei. This is by no means an exhaustive list. These entities
and others are able to count upon an unlimited supply of killers
and torturers and operational agents of all types from the endless
stock of brutalized psyches produced by capitalist society and
its infliction of war and poverty worldwide.
In the case of
September 11, special operational units at a very
high level in the command hierarchy of the CIA and Pentagon were
deployed to (1) hijack airliners, probably remotely,
to
use as missiles (the weapon selected for maximum
spectacular effect); (2) deactivate the air defenses of the
country,
to guarantee a stand-down
of fighters; (3) launch a cruise missile
at a
largely empty section of the Pentagon, to add
to the spectacle (perhaps felt necessary due to uncertainty whether
the attacks at the World Trade Center would be sufficiently horrific);
and (4) coordinate the massive, instantaneous media propaganda
campaign about Osama bin Laden and Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists.
The very
focussed special operations of September 11 required
years of advanced planning and preparation. False
identities for "the hijackers" had to be elaborately constructed
and time was needed for them to make spectacles of themselves
so they would be remembered to have been suspicious and crazed.
The entire saga
of
Osama bin Laden was cobbled together over years, always
suppressing his ongoing services to his controllers
in the
CIA. The Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorist
is a joint creation of the CIA and the Mossad, who have been running
such fake terror operations using Hamas
and Islamic Jihad for many years.
Testing,
testing ...
The ambitious
scheme carried out on September 11 required years
of testing of technical modalities and "dry runs". The bombing
of the World Trade Center in 1993 was an FBI provocation,
which
would not have happened without crucial
FBI facilitation and encouragement. It served to start the process
of domestic terrorization, and to prepare the public mind to see
the WTC as uniquely vulnerable to attack by crazed Arabs. The Oklahoma
City
bombing in 1995 was a major step forward in the construction
of the Terror State. The evidence that Timothy McVeigh was a patsy
who took the rap for the real perpetrators, the U.S. special operations
crowd, is abundant. The long series of bombings abroad blamed
on al-Qaeda, in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Yemen and elsewhere, built
up the reputation of Osama bin Laden and created the illusion
that he had become the deadly enemy of his former masters, the
U.S. government (while in fact he was still spending most of his
time training
and delivering fighters for the various local war operations
run by the CIA and Pentagon, in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo and
Macedonia).
The terrorists
at the heart of the U.S state/corporate monstrosity
recognize that they can learn lessons now and again from lesser
gangs. They learned much from the series of apartment
building
bombings in Russia carried out by the FSB, the Russian
secret service. Hundreds died, rather than thousands, but the
numbers were sufficient. The Russian government (cravenly supported
by the media) immediately pronounced the perpetrators to be Islamic
Fundamentalist Terrorists, and launched an invasion of Chechnya.
Russia proceeded to further refine techniques of population control
in occupied Chechnya, including helicopter-launched missile attacks
on residential buildings and summary executions of males, lessons
of great importance for Israel in determining what it could get
away with in its treatment of the Palestinians. The Russians,
in their response to U.S. covert operations in Chechnya, really
put it all together, and the provocateurs controlling the U.S.
government took copious notes, as September 11 has proven. Are
you still hoping to see a principled Russia stand up to the U.S.
and Israel over the coming war on Iraq/Iran/Saudi Arabia/Syria/Lebanon?
They're all playing the same game.
Viva Italia
Let's bring in
another set of important preparatory "trial
runs". The brutality of the fascist Carabinieri in Genoa in July, 2001,
less than two months before the attacks in New York and Washington,
had its exemplary value as well. (Spectacularly, the city
was widely proclaimed to be protected by ground- and ship-to-air
missile batteries to defend against the possibility that Islamic
Fundamentalist Terrorists might try to crash a hijacked plane
into the Ducal palace where the head criminals of the "G-8" were
partying. This promotional excess caused some embarrassment later
because it made highly implausible the claim by the FBI and CIA
that they simply hadn't expected such an attack in the U.S. before
September 11.) The Carabinieri had been the recipients of advanced
training from the Los Angeles Police Department in the runup
to the G-8 meetings. How did they use their new training? They
shot Carlo Giuliani in the head, planted fake evidence in the
Diaz school and then brutally attacked sleeping protestors, crushing
their skulls with truncheons as they lay in their sleeping bags
before hauling them off to dungeons for weeks of torture.
Was this a
shocking departure for civilized Italian society?
Well, not exactly. There were some prior incidents, for example
the long series of fake terror attacks, from 1969 into the mid-1980s,
overseen and directed by the CIA and run through the Italian secret
services, which killed hundreds of innocent people. At the time
the attacks were pinned on the anticapitalist movement. The Red
Brigades, early on a pathetic Leninist distortion of this movement,
was quickly taken over by the Italian secret services and then
run by them to escalate the "strategy of
tension", the CIA scheme of "stabilization through
destabilization".
(The "strategy of tension" is an especially hideous euphemism
for "strategy of mass terror through mass murder"; for some reason
it appealed to the Italian press and intellectuals. The "in-house"
CIA term "stabilization through destabilization" is shorthand
for "vast increases in state control over the population through
fake terror".) This initiative in Italy was undertaken before
the Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorist units had been developed,
that is, before the utility of a fake enemy had been fully
recognized.
At this early,
relatively unsophisticated period, the real enemy,
anticapitalists, were blamed directly for crimes of the state.
This caused no end of difficulties in court, where long legal
battles tended to end in acquittal or obvious frameups, and sometimes
even resulted in trials of the secret service operatives responsible
for the bombings. The whole story, including the CIA's direction
of the entire operation, and the established Left's corrupt silence
(so strikingly similar to today in the U.S.) can be read in exquisite
detail in two books, Puppetmasters
by Philip Willan, and On Terrorism and
the State by Gianfranco Sanguinetti.
A thread of
Willan's amazingly complex and convincing story has
special significance for us today, and suggests actual linkages
between the "strategy of tension" in Italy and currently ongoing
special operations. Willan turned up numerous indications that
the famed Toni Negri was indeed involved with the Red Brigades,
but most likely as an operative of the Italian secret services,
run by the FBI (not the CIA; apparently there was a bit of a turf
war going on between the two agencies. Just as the lie that the
CIA does not operate within the U.S. has been exposed, so too
has the notion that the FBI does not operate abroad). Although
now considered a "martyr" by the Left, a victim of a frame-up
by the Italian judicial system, the more likely fact is that Negri
is still working for the integrated U.S./NATO/Italian secret services,
as an informer and a "disinformation" agent. Isn't it amazing
that Harvard University Press has published his "bestseller" Empire
(co-authored with Michael Hardt) — Harvard publishes books by
convicted terrorists? Well, yes, maybe, if the publication is
part of a special operation to undermine the anticapitalist movement.
The book has been ably dissected
and exposed
for the objectively reactionary obfuscation that it is. Among
the crimes we know Negri is guilty of is successfully infecting
Marxian critique with postmodernism. It is probably no coincidence
that "autonomist Marxists"
refuse to see the real significance of September 11, and the coming
globalization of the "strategy of mass terror through mass
murder".
The New
and Improved Strategy of Terror
Essentially the
"strategy of tension" has gone global. As
before,
the perceived threat to which it is a response is a growing "crisis
of democracy", with working people increasingly demanding a full
say in the ordering of their lives and their societies, and rejecting
the exploitation and domination of capitalism. In Italy, the worldwide
events of 1968 set in motion a long period of radical questioning
and contestation by large sectors of the society, which profoundly
undermined the post-war regime installed by the U.S. Fear of where
the radicalism would lead and the complete inability to put a
stop to it in any other way led to the selection of a campaign
of fake terrorist bombings to provide the pretext for a massive
crackdown on dissent. For the purposes of the U.S. and the Italian
elite, direct naming of the enemy, communism, was sufficient.
Now, however,
in a similar, but global, situation, the planners
of world capitalism have come up with a more sophisticated and
flexible approach. The core elements are the same, fake terror
as the pretext for draconian measures, but the stakes and stage
are vastly expanded. Now the real enemy is not named, but a fake
enemy is substituted to cause maximal confusion and open up a
global theater of military operations. "Terrorists" are
everywhere;
they must be eliminated everywhere. The first phase in the "War
on Terrorism" is to go after the Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists
(that is, to go for the world's oil resources); later, the assault
on other kinds of terrorists, like anticapitalists, can get seriously
underway. The mass murders of September 11, the "war" in
Afghanistan,
and the coming U.S./Israeli attack on Iraq/Iran/Saudi
Arabia/Syria/Lebanon
demonstrate that there are simply no limits now on what measures
our rulers are prepared to take to crush our aspirations and actions
for a world worth living in for all, not just a few.
Planning
Their Future, Not Ours
Capital's
planners are "realists". Modern slash-and-burn
capitalism
is often criticized by liberals and leftists for its short-term
view, its fixation on near-term returns to the exclusion of concern
for the long-term sustainability of "healthy profits". As usual
the liberals and leftists don't understand what they presume to
speak about. Capitalists know, if they know anything at all, that
the primary directive of capital is maximized profit at every
moment, by any means fair or foul. Failure in this is failure.
But they also have shown themselves well aware of the need for
the long view, and have for well over a century devoted considerable
money and energy to the task of careful planning. There are both
visible and unseen bodies tasked with planning and implementing
capital's long-term strategies. The visible planning bodies include
the Council
on Foreign
Relations, the Trilateral
Commission, the Bilderberg
Group and innumerable thinktanks.
Visible implementation agencies include the World Trade Organization,
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European
Union, the G-8, the World Economic Forum, the North American Free
Trade Agreement/Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and on and
on.
All these
organizations meet in secret session and conspire against
the working people of the world. But they conspire openly; they
claim and are granted the right to conspire. "Establishment"
Leftists
criticize these agencies of capitalist planning for their exclusivity
and plead for the right to join them in their conspiracy, pretending
to themselves and others that their own presence at the planning
meetings as full conspiring members would mean long-term "healthy
profits". They believe they know better how to manage the crises
and contradictions of capitalism, and they promise to guarantee
greater social stability through their claim to represent the
interests of society as a whole. They can't understand why they
are invariably excluded from the real centers of capitalist strategy
formulation. And because they remain wannabe managers of capital
despite their rejection, because they are committed to capital
heart and soul, they consider it of the first importance to prevent
an understanding of the real facts and dimensions of capitalist
conspiracy against working people. Spurned as co-conspiritors,
they deny that conspiracy occurs. Evidently they believe that
if they successfully control all popular discussion and shut down
inquiry through censorship, character assassination and dishonesty,
they will prove themselves worthy of admittance into the secret
chambers where capital plans its next attacks.
A Nest of
Vipers
Alongside and
underneath these visible structures is a veritable
menagerie of secret planning cabals and "operational units" that
try to put the contending strategies of different power centers
of capital into effect. This is, broadly speaking, the principal
charge of the CIA, the biggest snake in the pit. The "Agency"
is precisely that; it is the active force that puts the plans
and schemes of the most powerful Wall Street, armaments and oil
interests into operation. Within the CIA the lines between the
state and private, corporate power are totally blurred, in fact
have melded into one.
The CIA was
conceived and created by Wall Street lawyers ("Wild
Bill" Donovan, the Dulles brothers, Frank Wisner, etc. [see The
Old Boys: the American Elite and the Origins of the CIA by
Burton Hersh]) in the immediate post-World War II period, and
has been controlled by the same financial powers throughout its
existence. A primary reason for the CIA's creation was to set
up the system of illegal laundering
of
profits from drug
smuggling, gun running, and other global criminal operations.
The CIA controls much of this activity over the world, and funnels
the money into Wall Street banks. Another principal purpose
of the Agency from the beginning has been to provide the U.S
capital/state
with the ability to control foreign governments, through whatever
means are found necessary — coups, assassinations,
illegal funding of political parties and individuals, subversion
by "freedom fighters", or campaigns of
terror.
Many people
still labor under the delusion that the CIA is a
governmental "intelligence agency", controlled by the President
and the National Security Council. In fact this is not true, or
is only sporadically and partially true. Because much (by no means
all) of the operational budget of the CIA comes from tax revenues,
there is a parallel, visible governmental control structure that
has some input into its operations. But the CIA is actually controlled
by a "secret team", to use Prouty's term, of corporate powers
who have placed CIA agents in all the branches and departments
of the federal government, as well as in state governments,
police departments, universities,
foundations
and media
corporations. These agents pursue the interests and
carry out the commands of the real control group, now widened
somewhat from its Wall Street origins, in the finance-, banking-,
oil- and armaments- sector-led Secret Team.
When the
President is trusted by the team, is essentially one
of the "old boys", all works seamlessly. When the President is
not trusted, or actually makes decisions they disapprove of, the
CIA stops working for him and may in fact "neutralize" him. Kennedy
was
"neutralized" by assassination
after proving lukewarm towards the CIA's pet Bay of Pigs fantasy;
Nixon, by exposure as a criminal after trying to wrest control
of the drug trade from the CIA; and Carter, by the October
Surprise, in revenge for having "cleaned
house" at the CIA when he came into office (he fired George Bush
as Director and hundreds of his loyal operatives) and to take
the White House back. Clinton's humiliation may not have been
a CIA operation; it's hard to figure why the controllers would
have been unhappy with him (the best guess would be that he was
too "multilateral" in his approach). Gore was neutralized by the Florida
Coup so that the real old boys in the Bush family could return
to their rightful place. (A chilling insider's view of how the
CIA "neutralizes" its political opponents is presented in The
Tatum Chronicles by Chip
Tatum,
a CIA agent who specialized in this line during
George H. W. Bush's term in office, and took orders directly from
Bush.)
The CIA is an
extremely complex entity, with many different operational
units, some of which may at times work at cross purposes because
directed by different controllers. L. Fletcher Prouty's two books,
mentioned above, go into considerable detail in laying out these
complexities. Prouty was for several years in the late '50s and
'60s the Air Force officer charged with facilitating Pentagon
support for covert CIA operations requiring Air Force equipment
or personnel. He describes the slow penetration of CIA agents
throughout the Pentagon and other departments of the federal
government,
who after a few years in place are well-positioned to advance
Secret Team objectives without the knowledge of their transient
appointed political superiors. The Secret Team, not the President
and NSC, is in charge.
It is important
to emphasize two points again: The real CIA permeates
all branches and departments of the federal government, and is
far larger than the agency described "on the books", and
furthermore
it is not exclusively a government agency at all, but is at least
equally a tool of private, unseen powers. These facts mean that
all agencies of the federal government conduct illegal covert
operations, and often contract with non-governmental criminal
organizations to carry out their schemes, under the direction
of their controllers in the CIA.
But the
situation is actually even more complex than this emphasis
on the CIA has suggested. The Agency has rivals, within as well
as outside the U.S. government. Other "intelligence agencies",
in the Pentagon (e.g., Defense Intelligence Agency, Office of
Naval Intelligence, National Security Agency), in the Justice
Department (e.g., FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement
Administration),
and in numerous other departments, run their own special operations,
often without coordination with the CIA and in rivalry to it,
and at other times as "joint ventures" between
"partners". Finally,
the special operations units spread throughout the government
never hesitate to contract for services from private criminal
and corporate cabals and structures, such as the numerous mafias,
cartels, terrorist cells, offshore banks and shell companies,
death squads, assassins, etc. A major activity usually farmed
out to private contractors is the elimination of operatives or
investigators who "know too much", usually by murder made to look
(or simply officially pronounced to be) accidents or suicides.
Excellent overviews of the breadth of these "governmental"
activities
are provided by Rodney Stich in Defrauding America
and
by Daniel Hopsicker in Barry
and
the Boys.
This system of
clandestine political control has determined the
course of post-World War II U.S. history to a very substantial
degree, and is more important to understand than the pendulum
swings of "liberal" and "conservative" politics (which
now, largely
due to this unexamined clandestine control, have been reduced
to the indistinguishable poles of "neo-liberal" and
"neo-conservative"
in any case). It has brought us the Vietnam War; the Bay of Pigs
fiasco; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin
Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Fred Hampton (and probably
Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman and Judi
Bari as well); Watergate and the fall of Nixon; the coup in Chile
and assassination of Allende; Operation
Condor,
the CIA-run continental sweep, torture and execution
campaign against the Left in South America; assassination
of
Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffitt in Washington D.C.,
not far from CIA Director George H.W. Bush's office; the October
Surprise in 1980; the Contra War; Iran-Contra; the stripping of
the Savings and Loans; the
BCCI
scandal; the invasions of Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf,
Yugoslavia and Afghanistan; the domestic terror operations at
the WTC in 1993 and Oklahoma
City in 1995; and the attacks of September 11, 2001, the "coming
out party" of the Secret Team.
In 1967 Jim
Garrison concluded that "In a very real and terrifying sense,
our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced
to a debating society". He, more than anyone else, saw that the
assassination of John F. Kennedy was a critical threshold for
U.S. society, the first "wake-up call"; all but a few rolled over
and went back to sleep. The ability of JFK's killers, a complex
joint operation organized by the Secret Team through the CIA,
to prevent a genuine investigation into their crime through their
control of the all three branches of the federal government as
well as the press, simply opened the door wide to their subsequent
domination of the country's horrific course.
The U.S.
government, now run in its entirety by the clandestine
power brokers, is nothing other than an organized
criminal syndicate, the biggest and bloodiest in the world.
The real politics of our day are hidden, and have been reduced
to secret deals or turf wars between rival criminal gangs. The
visible political system, called "Democracy" or "the
two-party
system", is a show for the zeks who are too stupid to know the
score, a spectacular, fake political process that suits the purposes
of all the hierarchical institutions of capitalist society, across
the spectrum from Right to Left.
The Global
Fascist Terror State
The resurgence
of the anticapitalist movement in the 1990s was
largely a response to major initiatives taken by the ruling class
in powerful states, against the wishes of their populations, led
by the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and the biggest multinational
corporations, to create a "New World Order" based not on the
sovereignty
of the nation state, but on one global corporate-dominated
"superstate".
Several rounds of "trade talks" resulted in formation of the World
Trade Organization, a closed, undemocratic mechanism designed
to eliminate all national sovereign powers over the terms of trade
and investment, allowing completely unconstrained penetration
and movement of capital and commodities as dictated by "market
forces".
The arrival of
the WTO on the scene symbolizes entry into the
final phase of the "real subsumption" of society by capitalism.
As the strongest vestigial precapitalist social form, the nation
state is the last to be completely transformed in the image of
pure, unfettered capitalist social relations. Other forms (the
family, the "professions", the individual human psyche) have long
been recast by capitalism. Now, finally, the roles of states and
corporations are to be reversed, with corporations setting the
rules by which nations will be regulated. States are to be reduced
to little more than population control units, essentially nothing
but domestic police agencies. With the right mix of propaganda,
soporifics, toys, and the threat of hunger, the wage slaves of
this new order will be kept in line. As the starry-eyed planners
of capital view it, a worldwide "level playing field" will come
into being, "harmonizing" the conditions of production and
profit-making,
to the benefit of the capitalist system and class as a whole.
This is the "egalitarian capitalist" utopia long envisioned by
planning bodies such as the Trilateral Commission, with members
from Japan and Europe as well as the U.S. The World Trade Organization
is their "hopeful monster". Perhaps the proper analytical term
to describe it is Bertram Gross' "friendly
fascism".
There is just
one problem, as the events of September 11 demonstrated.
The U.S. Secret Team and its lesser allied satellite groups, the
state/corporate criminal gang now in complete command of the U.S.
government after the seizure of power in 2000, have different
plans. They are well along in the realization of an alternative
vision of the capitalist future: the Global Fascist Terror State,
a "Fourth Reich" with the U.S. as its "capital". This
will indeed
be the "unfriendly" version of fascism, akin to that of the Nazis,
but updated and vastly expanded in its reach and power over the
whole planet. Hitler was a schoolyard bully compared to the mob
now in power.
The Bush
family has been deeply involved with the rise of fascism since
its early years. Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush, great-grandfather
and grandfather respectively of the current occupier of the White
House, were bankers for and business partners with the German
Nazi Party. The CIA milieu in which George H. W. Bush, with his
fine pedigree, first throve as an agent and rose to prominence
through the '50s and '60s, and then became Director in 1976, was
steeped in Nazis of all kinds, brought to the U.S. through the
CIA's Operation
Paperclip. Indeed, strong arguments have been put forward
that the CIA owes its origins as much to the efforts of Reinhard
Gehlen, the Nazi overseer of Eastern European intelligence and
special operations, as it does to his Wall Street partners. The
Germans lost World War II, but the Nazis didn't. They just went
"underground", until their services were wanted by the capitalists
again, and on a much larger stage, the world.
Analysts of
fascism frequently make the mistake of viewing it
as bound to the "stage" of "late monopoly capitalism",
in which
the concentration of ownership and wealth within narrow sectors
of the capitalist class has become so great that the trappings
of "democracy" must be dispensed with and totalitarian methods
employed to maintain social control. In fact this analysis is
false. Fascism is just one pole of capitalist political possibility,
available for selection by the ruling class for specific purposes
at specific times. The conditions in Germany, Italy, and Japan
in the '20s, '30s and '40s did not meet the conditions described
by the term "late monopoly capitalism"; compared to today, there
was nothing "late" about them.
In fact
fascism, a merging of the state with the dominant corporate
sectors — banks, finance, arms, energy — is just one
variety of a more broadly dominant form of capitalism during the
twentieth century, state capitalism, which existed in the
Soviet Union as well at the time (the similarities between Soviet
and fascist societies are not accidental!), and was experimented
with to a lesser degree even in the U.S., during the New Deal.
It is an option available to the ruling class to deal with a set
of issues that repeatedly become intractable as the crisis-ridden
history of capitalism stumbles on. Capitalism's crises —
wars, depressions, stripping of ecosystems — cause death,
disease, poverty and unemployment, homelessness and degradation,
among the working people of the world, and they are forced to
fight back. When the capitalist class gets especially frightened
(and they are usually frightened in any case, because of
their ineradicable guilt, which cannot be fully repressed) of
where resistance to their rule may lead, when they see no other
way to support their tyranny, they choose fascism: the police
state, concentration camps, wars of aggression, and elimination
of the shows of "democracy".
Working people
can't prevent this choice on the part of the ruling
class; we have no way to prevent it. It is a pole of political
organization always available to the modern capitalist class,
which they are free to choose. Because of this fact, the fight
against fascism is like the fight against Republicans. Putting
Democrats in charge just makes things look better, but there is
really no difference. Getting rid of fascism to restore fake democracy
is the same dilemma. The only
solution to the problem is the fight against capitalism.
September 11
announced the advent of the newly globalized "strategy
of tension", i.e., the strategy of mass terror through mass murder.
All limits on provocation, fake terror, war, propaganda and population
control have been removed. The imperial war juggernauts have already
said "Let's roll!" (surely you heard them), and started to
completely
redraw the world map. Soon it will be all one color, a dark blood
red. The level playing field doesn't interest them; they like
the set-up as it is, with all the advantage on their side. Forced
to the sidelines during the long Clinton/Gore period of fraternizing
with foreign rivals, the cabal grouped around George H. W. Bush
has returned with a vengeance.
This is the
reality behind the "shocking unilateralism" of the
Bushmob. There is only room for one top dog. The rest of the world
can go ahead and figure out how it plans to appease him. Do you
snarl and circle around for a few seconds before he pounces for
your throat, or do you lie down on your back and make your surrender
really clear? These may seem like pressing questions for a short
while, but the outcome is certain either way. The weaker
corporate/military
gangs in weaker countries will choose appeasement, by and large.
Look at the poodle Blair in "Great" Britain; the
"resistance"
put up by Schroeder, Chirac and Putin is pure show for the home
audience. Those unfortunate countries with resources of direct
and immediate interest to the now unleashed U.S. imperial pitbulls
will be slated for attack. The dogs of war have the smell of oil
in their snouts, and it drives them mad with bloodlust. Let the
killing resume; as Blair put it recently, let the "bloodprice"
be paid.
So the war will
first unfold in Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The map of the Middle East will be redrawn. The deal struck by
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ibn Saud in 1945, protection for
oil, is over. Now it is your oil or your life. Israel will circle
sneakily around the carnage and try to grab all the scraps it
can, say the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, maybe even Syria. As the
new situation congeals in a new "stability", the imperial hounds
will circle and turn their attention to Colombia and Venezuela.
No doubt numerous other regions will be considered and perhaps
attacked.
As the imperial
planners figure it, should the U.S. population
begin to weary of perennial war, one of the many special operations
units (or several of them in combination) will produce a provocation
or fake terror attack to whip them back into a frenzy of fear
and war hysteria. The concentration camps of Operation
Garden
Plot will fill with those who resist. The U.S. "Left"
leadership, funded by
the
CIA through the major foundations, as always, will
continue to shill for the "voices of moderation" in the Democratic
Party, who will have as much effect on the course of events as
the senators had in imperial Rome. Their disagreements will be
over methods, not goals; they are all in favor of the Fourth Reich,
although they may try to hide the fact from you. If you don't
agree with them that this is our inevitable future, it's up to
you to prove it to them.
Counter-Planning:
Our Future, Not Theirs
Our future is
in our hands. We vastly outnumber our totalitarian
capitalist masters, and can put a stop to their plans. But to
do so we will have to construct entirely new forms of organization
and action. The old methods won't work anymore. The old ideas,
held onto past their expiration date, will only confuse us as
new conditions unfold. We have to dare to think and act in new
ways.
Our greatest
strength is each other. We simply need to be honest
with and trust one another. Only two things are necessary to unveil
this honesty and develop this trust: we need to talk together
about our situation, and we need to treat each other as equals.
We must stop passively allowing a few people to become our leaders,
to do our thinking, talking and acting for us. We have to save
ourselves; no one will save us. If history teaches one thing,
it is that power always corrupts. Give a person power over others,
and that person will betray them for his or her personal advantage.
This proclivity may simply be a part of human nature, but it is
not our whole nature. We are social beings and can socialize in
infinitely various ways; an infinitely large subset of these ways
can be entirely benign for ourselves, other species and the glorious
living planet we share.
Our task is to
develop, as quickly as we can and under the spur
of stark necessity, ways to come together to discuss the reality
we face and organize our fight back. Given our conditioning —
our inculcated passivity (which empowers "leaders" to betray us
time and time again) and narcissism (which denies to others their
full human significance as our equals) — and our powerful adversaries
(from Right to Left), we face the greatest challenge ever presented
to any society. But our only hope lies in opening ourselves to
the difficulties and complexities of genuine deep dialogue and
successfully undertaking the "counterplanning" of our truly
collectively
envisioned future of a healthy, peaceful world of equals.
It should be
perfectly evident now that "electoral politics"
will not avail us. Congress is fully committed to the fascist
agenda; the only debates there relate to appearances and methods.
It is a fool's game to waste our precious and limited strength
on begging "representatives" to "look into the matter".
As the
course of U.S. history over the last forty years has shown (and
the Florida Coup most clearly), "representative democracy" is
a farce, and one that the controllers are now dispensing with
themselves. As they shift into rule by naked force, they make
our real situation brutally obvious. The necessity to take back
control of our own lives is now starkly plain to see. And again,
the fight must not be reduced to a fight against fascism. It must
be a fight against capitalism itself, and all of its institutions.
This movement
to counterplan our future against the plans of
the dominators amongst and over us has already begun inside and
outside the U.S. Millions of people around the world have undertaken
this long process in full recognition of the stakes. The Argentines
— now meeting face to face in general assemblies and taking
over the management of their daily lives from the corrupt
powers of the state, political parties and corporations which
have so desperately impoverished them — are showing us the
way forward. So too are the Mayan Indians in Chiapas who have
created and collectively directed the EZLN (the Zapatista Army
of National Liberation) to defend themselves against the predations
of the Mexican state and capital since New Year's Day, 1994.
People
worldwide, faced with the crisis of poverty, wage slavery
and ecocide which has been created by capitalism, are realizing
the necessity to organize as equals, keep their power in their
own hands, and act autonomously. All the hierarchical institutions
of capitalist society are set up to control and exploit us; this
is as true of leftist
parties and other "progressive" rackets as it is of states
and corporations. To save ourselves from the future the hierarchs
are planning for us, we must create new ways of coming together
and collectively deciding our own future, leaving the "leaders"
behind.
In the U.S. we
can organize, using the tool we still have at
our disposal, the internet, to begin the process of counterplanning.
Sites like the local indymedias allow us to communicate and set
up face to face meetings. We can come together in local groups
and collectively sort out all the facts and issues required for us to
plan our own future. We
can
decide what actions to take to bring this about. We will
need to start
from
scratch, because the structures of capitalist society
must be replaced wholesale. We see where they have led: the brink
of oblivion.
Needless to say
this counterplanning process will not be allowed
to proceed unhindered. The establishment "Left" will try to co-opt
it as soon as it gets off the ground, and the police state will
try to disrupt or repress it. Infiltrators will spy on us and
report our every word and plan, and lies and disinformation will
be spread about us. This means we will have to defend ourselves
— surprise! But that is precisely the key action we need
to take in any case. We are now where we are because we have failed
to defend ourselves. Our counterplanning will be above all things
a defense of ourselves and our world. We have no more time to
lose in denial or indecision.
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, the Dante of the Gulag, had a long time
to lament the passivity with which he and his fellow political
prisoners had allowed themselves to be seized in the middle of
the night by Stalin's secret police. He realized and wrote that
if every time the feared knock was heard the people inside had
taken up their axes or pokers or sticks and defended themselves
to the death, soon it would have been very hard to find police
willing to spend their nights rounding people up. This is a metaphor
of the stark reality we face. We need to be ready to fight back,
perhaps physically, perhaps tonight. If we do, we can put an end
to the deadly future being planned against us.
Our strongest
defense lies in our potential numbers. If we can
initiate a process of reaching out and connecting with ever larger
numbers of people, and can inspire this process with the truth
of our understanding and the beauty of our vision, we will be
unstoppable. Our enemies' ascendancy over us is due to the fact
that they are organized and we are not. But organized as full
equals, with our power in our own hands, we can do whatever needs
to be done to create a human society living responsibly with the
rest of ongoing creation.
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