“Nothing like a little blast from the past, especially when it comes from a nearly 20-year-old Butthole Surfers album,” writes James Goodwell at the Left of the Dial blog.
There does indeed seem something strikingly Soviet about the US government as of late, as I and others have periodically noted over the past couple years. Among those who see the parallels is William Rivers Pitt, who writes in Bush’s Soviet State:
It’s funny in an awful sort of way. The defining events of the last fifty years all centered around the Cold War and the eventual demise of the Soviet system. Toward the end of the Soviet regime, their government was often forced to grossly overstate the size of grain harvests or the preparedness of their military in order to maintain an illusion of strength and order. In other words, intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy. In essence, fixing the facts became the policy. Self-deception was piled upon self-deception.
MORE BELOW:
Rather than address the systemic problems within the nation, the Soviet regime chose instead to massage the illusions until the problems became too huge to overcome. Pretending everything was fine became the chosen course of action, and the state’s ability to manufacture a pleasing reality became a perfect circle of inaction and delusion. By the time the tanks rolled and the Wall fell, the deal had already gone down. Sound familiar?
[…]
Willful blindness is an appropriate phrase. It captures not only the fact that we are manufacturing threats to our security every day we remain in Iraq, but the fact that virtually everything associated with Bush administration policy depends on self-delusion and the manipulation of data to fulfill political desires. Even the most fundamental underpinnings of conservative political philosophy have been ground up in the gears of this grand fantasy.
Truth no longer matters. Ethics no longer matter. Facts are there for the twisting. Decades-old conservative ideals regarding the budget and the size of the Federal government have been thrown under the bus because they are no longer convenient, and get in the way of the manufacture of reality. Soviet self-delusion led that nation into Afghanistan and disaster. The Bush administration’s self-delusion has led us into Iraq. Res ipsa loquitor.
The parallel between this Bush administration and the old, failed Soviet regime can be taken one step further. …
Read all of the Pitt excerpts at Left of the Dial blog.
Goodwell’s “”U.S.S.A. … U.S.S.R.” concludes:
As I mentioned in Consequences, this White House is hell-bent on maintaining its illusions at all costs. Their success in maintaining those illusions centers on maintaining control of the means of political discourse, power, and the means of communication. Indeed, one can make a good case that indeed this is the current sorry state of our nation. At some point, however, the illusions will be shown for what they are. It is only a matter of time. Eventually, the old Soviet politburo had to face the demise of the Berlin Wall and the complete collapse of its hold on power even within Russia’s borders.
Eventually, in Sartre’s No Exit, Garcin meets up with his Ines who tears away his mask of false bravado and reveals a life-long coward. Sooner or later, the same will happen with the White House and its inhabitants and with its enablers. Let’s hope for sooner rather than later – and let’s continue to work dredge up those inconvenient truths that our own politburo would just as soon not face.
IRRELEVANT BUT WHAT THE HECK COMMENT:
“Blast From the Past” is a great little movie … truly delightful.
the Soviets were a more apt comparison than fascists/Nazis.
Haven’t read the link yet, but the populace, too, is comparable. Off to read.
Left of the Dial has some great posts … I just checked up on the blogger. He’s a prof of psychology somewhere in Oklahoma. His essay yesterday, “Consequences,” is also a great read … he begins the Sartre references there.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Absolutely and across the board.
Everywhere, throughout all of recorded history.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This not just some empty old piece of folk wisdom, and now we see its truth once again.
The people who wrote the Constitution knew this, and…perhaps more successfully than any group of people before or since…wrote a document that served to work AGAINST the achievement of absolute power by any one group of people. The efforts of the corporate right that really began in the Reagan years are the first in over 200 years to successfully subvert that idea, and the linchpin of their efforts has been control of the press.
The media, in today’s world.
The founders of this country were VERY farsighted…but not so farsighted as to be able to see gigantic corporate money and its power.
THAT is why taking Rove down is so damned important. Cripple their power to deceive, and we are halfway there. AND…if we are at ALL successful in regaining power in this country, the very first order of business that should be on our agenda is foolproof anti-trust style legislation that will serve to break up the multinational corporate control of the media.
Permanently decentralize “news”.
A free press in the 1700s meant one that was not under direct control of the government.
NOW “the government” is liable to be under direct control of the corporations. Campaign financing reform should be the SECOND prong of an attack on this problem, but until information can be freely and equally propagated by all interested parties, that is not as important…it is a secondary consideration.
ROVE-24/7 until he is taken DOWN.
AG
Agree with your sentiments; I worship at the altar of balance.
Disagree with your priorities. First electoral reform, then campaign finance reform, then breaking up the media monopolies. I think the rise of the internet has bought us some time WRT the media.
Don’t think Rove really fits in there at all, really. He’s a sideshow, but will do for now until we can make progress on the goal you put forth and I expanded upon.
But focus on Rove? YES. How often do you get to indulge extreme yummy schadenfreudish personal satisfaction AND advance a pragmatic political goal?
He’s got the goods on the media. No other way to explain his success. Plus he leads right to the top of the pyramid.
AND…of course electoral and campaign funding reform are important. But how do you ACHIEVE those things…how do you reach enough currently totally misinformed and to some degree media-hypnotized Americans to get those things done…without a relatively free media?
You don’t think that the 10% or less of the people who actually use the internet as a valid source of information are going to be enough, do you? And as long as the corporate controlled media can successfully grab the minds of the majority of the American people, nothing that is perceived by corporate interests as not in THEIR best interests is going to happen.
ESPECIALLY not campaign finance reform.
BUT…prove that a Rove…or even (let us pray) a Bush and/or a Cheney can be taken DOWN by media attention, and there is a small hole in that wall.
I know these people…media people. Most of them are INDEED anti-right wing. Given a chance, most of them would LOVE to be free of corporate strictures. (Wouldn’t we ALL???) If we fight to free the media and succeed, everything else falls into place.
It is commonly said that this is “The Information Era.”
This is not quite true.
It is the DISINFORMATION Era right now, and its most powerful WMDs are:
Weapons of Mass Deception
Weapons of Mass Disinformation
and
Weapons of Mass Distraction
Disarm THOSE WMDs, and see what happens.
AG
The single most important reason that the United States BECAME so powerful, in my view, has been a free press.
More than natural resources, more than the continuing refreshment of the population by a steady stream of immigrants…the free press has raised the cry time and time again. Its many voices have argued things out in full view of the American people, and “correct” things got done, more often than not.
Slowly?
Yes.
But surely.
The last gasp of an effective free press happened during the Watergate/Pentagon Papers/Vietnam era…and even THEN it had been seriously co-opted, as its rollover on the assassinations of the ’60s will attest. A good argument can be made that even Watergate was a corporate controlled op through the Washington Post and its extensive CIA connections.
Now…FUGGEDABOUDIT!!!
Even the current emphasis on Rove and new anti-BushCo slant in the MSM is corporate.
They’re proving to be bad for business, these neo-con bullshitters, and BUSINESS is taking them down.
We’ve got our work cut out for us.
Or…1984 came a little late this year.
Our choice.
AG
The economy has evolved beyond our system’s ability to cope.
It copes very poorly with corporatization, which is unifying the leadership across all of society– including virtually all the economy (now that the family farm is effectively gone), culture and even religion–into a giant single-interest block whose interests are increasingly opposite to the peoples’.
In the corporate media, it seems to be not economically possible to operate a skeptical press that serves the whole electorate. We already see that nobody’s attempting to.
This is a circumstance the framers never anticipated, a day when the people no longer operated society themselves, when society itself has shut down the press and has become generally an adversary to the people.
At bare mimimum, we need to find some means of bringing Constitutional civilization to the mass media “spaces” so that the people and society have the same types of rights to assemble, to petition, to speak etc. that they have in physical spaces. It is beyond insane for them have none of these rights in the primary venue for political discourse and campaigning.
I don’t know if there is any way to create and run the type of press our framers clearly stated that our system requires.
this internet based form, if we can keep IT from being co-opted the 3ay the Daily Kos apparently has been…IS that way.
The beginnings of it, anyway.
Let us fight to preserve this freedom.
Fight against government regulation and/or taxation, and fight when special interest groups try to take over an existing open discussion forum or start one that is NOT truly open.
If they do…then like the guerrilla fighters of the American Revolution, let us simply open another front elsewhere.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, said Martin Luther King Jr.
I really do believe that.
Keep the faith.
However and wherever you can.
AG
Actually, the first part of Lord Acton’s quote was, “Power tends to corrupt…”
Frank Herbert said it better, though. It’s not merely that power tends to corrupt, but, “Power attracts the corruptible.”
But Lord Acton was in POWER. A Lord.
Equivocation being what it must be at the top.
Popular wisdom…the great editor.
AG
who was part of the anti-Milosevic(sp) youth group… I think it was called Optor, during the 90s.
He keeps careful watch on our politics, the interactions between the executive branch and the legislative and judicial branches and, of course, the military and other things… because he sees so many familiar things happening.
“Has this happened yet?” he’ll ask. And when I answer in the affirmative, he’ll go on to say “Watch for this or that to happen next.” And it does.
Any number of people who have lived under totalitarian regimes of one sort of another express worry at the unfolding (familiar, to them) events and laws here, and are giving warnings.
Not sure any of us really know what to do though.
This is one of my days, You All. I have to get away for my own sanity. I want to contribute but my computer is on overload right now. I find it totally mindboggling to even think about this matter! Anyhow, I do have a death in the family of which I have to attend to. NO one close up but needs my attention none the less. Will try to catch up later on tonight if possible. Love what all you have said here and intend to read more lateer on. Besides, hasn’t Jim Benjamin posted here?
Hugs, Brenda! We’ll miss you but I hope you’ll take time out to clear your head.
Do you mean James Goodwell? He does post here, I’m sure of it … but I don’t know his handle here.
Hi…I do post here as James Benjamin (my actual name). In fact I was going to suggest a quickie revision to your diary – maybe “James from Goodwell, OK” rather than James Goodwell – blogger.com makes things just a tad confusing looking.
Thanks for plugging my blog! You rock Susan!
The reason we look so similar to the U.S.S.R in its waning days is that our Press and Media prefer to maintain the preferred mythologies of our public discourse instead of questioning the very basis of these mythologies.As Alex Cockburn has pointed out, they understand that their job is to provide reassurance that all is well with our rulers, our dollar is strong, our motives are pure and even when we transgress, it is out of the most noble intentions.
So long as it pays to maintain those mythologies, we have no chance of ever becoming whole again.Nearly forty years after the beginning of Vietnam, we have been thrust into Iraq by men who have learnt nothing from the past except that if only we had more weapons and more dollars we could kill all the enemies and all will be well with the world.
The pervasive illusions of our administrations and the Press shills should come as no surprise to those of us who have labored for most of our careers in industry.In corporate life, the analogy to the USSR holds even more strongly than in government.If a new product or service is launched, the cubeslaves who usually do not have much of a say or input into such earthshaking endeavors, are required to fall in line and keep their mouths shut and not breathe a negative word about it.When the entire enterprise comes crashing, scapegoats will be found one way or another, except for the ones who made the decisions at the very top of the pyramid.
It is not for nothing that the biggest crash in our economy is going to occur at GM, the most top heavy organization where edicts come down from the top and the people below resemble nothing so much as sharecroppers afraid of their masters.