How did we get here?

Hey, Everyone~

I have a stack of things I wanted to post about, but I couldn't work up the energy to go into the kind of depth they probably deserve, so I thought we'd just converse a bit and I'd throw them out there.

Here's how things stand right now:

Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War on Iraq
- At Least 655,000 + +

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed In America's War On Iraq
(Officially acknowledged)
3,132

Cost of America's War in Iraq

$366,847,782,238

As of today, 23 states have passed resolutions in recent weeks opposing the escatlation of the Iraq war. Congress passed a non-binding resolution yesterday, and Nancy pretty much told Shrub that he didn't have the authority to attack Iran without Congress' approval. The question is, will he do it anyway? And if so, will Congress have the stones to impeach him? Will any of it matter? If we bomb Iran, will Iran wipe Israel off the map? Amedinejad(sp?) is itching to do just that.

The second problem involved in this is that there's apparently a perception within the Intelligence community that the idea of bombing Iran is so ridiculous that they won't even consider the possibility that Bush will actually do it. Let's look at all the things Bush has done that could never happen in America:

*Suspension of Habeas Corpus - American citizen Jose Padilla has been in military custody for 4 years
*Search and Seizure without warrants
*Wide-spread wire taps of private phones
*eMail is being monitored, and so are internet searches
*children and their parents are being held in concentration camps on American soil
*American soldiers and contractors paid with your tax dollars are committing war crimes
*Pallets carrying 373 TONS of CASH - approx. 1.6 Billion dollars in shrink-wrapped hundred dollar bills- was shipped to Iraq and no one knows what happened to it.
*Contractors are given no-bid contracts, and rewarded when they've been proven to be over-billing, providing soldiers with contaminated water and building buildings that are crumbling and rain feces from the ceilings. The company that built that last building - a jail, I think - was given a bonus.

Those sweetheart deals are a much bigger issue than most people realize. The Federal Acquisition Regulations are really strict and they never used to have any wiggle room at all. I've seen contractors get in trouble for checking the wrong box on a bid - claiming that the parts they were supplying were made in American instead of Korea - and that was on a small order of less than 25,000. The kind of bullshit going on with KBR/Halliburton is unfathomable to most people in contracting divisions.

PAY ATTENTION to what's going on in Congress. While Democrats were trumpeting their increase in the minimum wage, a Republican Senator Wayne Allard stealthily introduced a bill to completely abolish the minimum wage. He apparently felt he could go for broke since he's not seeking re-election, and we should take this as a clear indication of the lack of empathy felt by rich Republicans for the working poor. Remember that the minimum wage was suspended in New Orleans, at a time when people there desperately needed work and help - they still do - with the excuse that it would hasten the reconstruction. More accurately, it would hasten the loss of American labor advances.

Look at the the priorities set by this government - war on two fronts, everything in place for a third. An influx of criminals accepted in to the military. The Gulf Coast and her poor allowed to drown before the rest of us while the people who were supposed to be in charge pretended they didn't know what was happening when we all know that they watch CNN constantly. Increased housing foreclosures. So many people out of work for so long that they aren't counted in the unemployment stats anymore. Figure it out, people - they're creating desperate straits to drive the poor into the military, and whether New Orleans or Bagdad, the result is dead poor people. The surest way to decrease unemployment is to kill off a generation of potential workers. The best way to rid the country of "undesirables," i.e. brown and black people, is to let them drown in a flood from a Levy you had been warned was going to break or to put them in uniform and drop them in the middle of a meat grinder. If death is what they have in store for US citizens, can you imagine what it will be like for illegals immigrants?

There were legal citizens swept up in those recent round-ups staged by Homeland Security, and they're stilll in government funded but privately owned concentration camps in Texas and a few other places. No one is being deported. They're being illegally detained.

Things are changing, little by little, in an all too familar pattern. If you haven't read "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer, you need to because it's happening again!. If you think I'm paranoid, consider this excerpt from Mayer's book. It's very long, but you have to know this information:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."

"And the judge?"

"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know."

I said nothing.

"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

"Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

This is where we are. House Minority Leader John Boehner just suggested that anyone who opposes the administration's conduct of the war is aiding the terrorists. The Republicans have pretty much told us who they're going to scapegoat - gays, Mexicans, Pagans, Jews and other Liberals. They are systematically trying to suppress open debate in colleges; they're trying to put our school kids back into the dark ages by suppressing information about evolution; they'd rather your daughters die of cervical cancer or aids than let them have vaccinations and condoms. They're harrassing the same illegals they employ in their homes and their businesses.

This isn't the work of a few isolated nuts - it's a movement. It's tied in with the White Power movement and the Southern Baptist churches. It's racist, sexist, elitist and homophobic. It's judgemental and anti-democrtic. It exploits ignorance and the good intentions the poor and is deliberately moving us toward serfdom, where workers are shackled with debt, have no protection from the law and suffer the whims of white corporate masters. It's already happening in the Gulf Coast. Police in Texas recently beat and harrassed striking union workers. Black people are being prevented from returning to New Orleans - many were prevented from escaping the flood by private guards blocking the roads into white neighborhoods.

Conditions for the poor are worsening. A woman in New York accidentally smothered her baby last week trying to protect him from rats. Why would the city of New York be content to let its citizens live in such conditions? The city knew that the property wasn't safe and did nothing. Where's the outrage?

Believe me, I'm tired, too. It's like Chinese Water Torture dealing with the constant chipping away at our society that comes from the opposition, from every direction, continually, bit by bit. It's too big, it's too much, yet it's also too small. It's those tiny steps that the Germans went through, where it gets just a little worse, and a little more, but the great outrage that would galvanize the people never came, and soon you find yourself living in a different world. Are we going to be the ones who live in shame because we saw it happening and did nothing? If they come for your neighbor, will you speak up? What will you do when they come for you?

We can't afford the luxury of being feminists and African-Americans and Jews and gays and Hispanics - we have to be The People, in one voice saying NO to the tyranny of the Christo-Fascist movement. It's not about religion. It's about money and control being consolidated into the hands of a few families. Our wealth is moving upward, our rights are disappearing and we have to stop it.

Solidarity is the key.
The moment is now.