Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

I happened to bookmark this thoughtful piece by Phil Rockstroh a couple of days ago (see PG Picks). Thanks to Phil sending it, I had the welcome opportunity to re-read it and I’m pleased to feature the full article and not just the link here.

By way of preamble, just in the last few days there have been a number of important articles about the continuing diminution of constitutionally-enshrined rights and the danger of martial law in the United States. Many of you will have seen, for example, Michel Chossudovsky’s piece in the Canadian site Global Research entitled Bush Executive Order: Criminalizing the Antiwar Movement.

In addition to this, see Kurt Nimmo’s Decider Guy Demands Further Erosion of the Fourth, James Bovard’s Martial Law: Waiting for the Clampdown, Dave Lindorff’s The Threat Of Martial Law Is Real, Paul Craig Roberts, My Wake-up Call: Watch For Another 9/11-WMD Experience and Ernest Partridge, A Republic, If We Can Keep It — but a sample of the wake-up call in the last couple of weeks alone.

The dangerous erosion of civil liberties is not of course limited to my dear friends in the States. Here in Australia at Empire’s Edge, and in the UK, draconian new “terror” laws are also being enacted, though the corrosion of constitutional democracy seems most marked in Empire’s Epicentre in the US. Nor is all this intended merely to depress us; rather, we are the informed citizenry upon which a healthy and genuinely functioning democracy depends, and we already have means available for redress and reclamation. The impeachment movement is a start that changes the players, there is more we can each do to better direct the system.

In Fascism Anyone? Lawrence Britt enumerates upon the fourteen common characteristics of fascist regimes (subsequently expanded upon and updated in Heather Wokusch’s Bush and the F-Word in 2006), and their prevalence today, identified as:

Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism; Disdain for the importance of human rights; Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause; The supremacy of the military/avid militarism; Rampant sexism; A controlled mass media; Obsession with national security; Religion and ruling elite tied together; Power of corporations protected; Power of labor suppressed or eliminated; Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts; Obsession with crime and punishment; Rampant cronyism and corruption; and Fraudulent elections.

On the US Constitution: GWB has said that its “just a goddamn piece of paper“ (Nov 2005).

In Friday’s LA Times too, Rosa Brooks recalls Ron Suskind’s oft-quoted passage in his book The One Percent Doctrine on imperial hubris in its presumption of the unilateral construction of reality (see A Really Bad Case of “Reality”; and the ‘aide’ quoted is widely tipped to be Karl Rove):

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.

He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

Phil Rockstroh captures the zeitgeist very well and addresses both the imperial imposition of (its version of) reality and its creeping fascism. He is a contributing editor to Cyrano’s Journal Online and is an auto-didactic poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.

Tales of Angst, Alienation and Martial Law: Roasting Marshmallows on the American Reichstag Fire to Come

by Phil Rockstroh

In this summer of angst and grim foreboding about what further assaults against common sense and common decency the Bush administration might inflict upon the people of the world, how many times during the day do those of us — still possessed of mind, heart and conscience — take pause, hoping we’ve seen the worst of it, then, fearing we haven’t yet, attempt to push down the dread rising within us, so that we might simply make it through the day and be able to rest at night?

Accordingly, those who have been paying attention are aware that the outward mechanisms of martial law are in place. We shudder knowing that Bush has issued an executive decree that grants him dictatorial power in the event of some nebulously defined national emergency. In addition, the knowledge nettles us that a vast network of internment camps bristle across the length of the U.S., standing at wait for those who might raise objections to the fascistic fury unloosed by the American empire’s version of the Reichstag fire.

Moreover, a closer look would reveal that the inner processes by which an individual begins the act of acceptance of authoritarian excess — the mixture of chronic passivity, boredom, low grade anxiety and unfocused rage inherent in the citizens/consumers of the corporate state that primes an individual for fascism — have been in place for quite some time within the psyches of the American populace, both elites and hoi polloi alike. Although, don’t look for torch-lit processions thronging the nation’s streets and boulevards; rather, look for a Nuremberg Rally of couch-bound brownshirts. Instead of ogling the serried ranks of jut-jawed, SS soldiers, a contemporary Leni Riefenstahl would be forced to film chubby clusters of double-chinned consumers, saluting the new order with their TV remotes. In the contemporary United States, the elation induced by the immersion of one’s individual will to the mindless intoxication of the mob might only be possible, if Bush seized dictatorial control of the state while simultaneously sending out to all citizens gift certificates to Ikea. Read the rest of this entry »