American Brownshirts

posted by Armadillo Joe

America is finally degenerating into the violent, balkanized quasi-fascist cesspool -- lorded over by rapacious corporations and their well-heeled beneficiaries with the help of a militarized police force and a violence-prone segment of the general populace -- that sci-fi writers have been predicting for decades.

The information campaign waged during the August recess to inform the public regarding the Democratic position on the health-care debate? Shouted down by American Brownshirts. We used to call them Nazis because it made us feel better, but these days I'm not so sure we have been exaggerating. These people are mixed-up, screwed-up cognitively dissonant malcontents who are capable of just the kind of ruffian street violence a political party needs to intimidate the opposition into cowed silence. Democracy is about the non-violent resolution of social conflicts. Their side seethes with the threat of imminent violence from Dixiecratic racist goobers, which operatives like Atwater and Rove and others of their ilk have been exploiting since the 1950's.

Funnier still is the fact that these people are financed by health-care companies -- a private brownshirt brigade sent to shout down and shut down the civil discourse needed for a well-functioning democracy. In the wake of the awful shooting at the fitness club in Pittsburgh, one wonders how long til one of these townhells ends in a bloodbath? In five, four, three, two...

And speaking of privately-funded violence aimed at political ends, Eric Prince and Blackwater Xe are truly little more than a private army whose leadership is sympathetic to the political aims of one party and diametrically opposed to those of the other. The Nazi SS Divisions, despite the way many historians talk about them, were not part of Germany's national army, the Wehrmacht, they were a separate and distinct organization: the militarized wing of the National Socialist Party. They were Hitler's private army. Only the most fanatical Nazis were invited to join the Schutzstaffel and in many cases these men had never even been in the regular army, being drug-addicts or degenerates or just plain ol' bug-fuck nuts, they were frequently judged to be utterly unfit for duty in Germany's very disciplined and highly professional Wehrmacht.

Anyone see parallels to Blackwater Xe? How long til a corporation hires these goons to close down by any means necessary some large-scale political function (like a mass rally or a March on Washington) they deem a threat?

Who would really stop them if they did? Our mass media would cluck their tongues at how all those foul-mouthed, dirty fucking hippies made those goons hit or shoot them and then they'd talk about how sad it is that we all can't just get along by not provoking the racist vigilantes into acting out, the socio-political equivalent of shhhh - don't make daddy mad - you know how he gets! The police themselves? The post-Reagan's-War-on-Drugs militarized police force with their Taser guns on a hair-trigger and general political proclivities completely unsympathetic to things like the First or Fourth Amendments? We're more likely to see them loan their billy clubs to the goons from Blackwater Xe.

Just remember who's really in charge in this country. We may have the inter-webs as our conduit for organizing and the tremendous amount of energy and willpower we collectively expended during the Long Nightmare of the Bush Dystopia may have gotten our guy into the White House, but the last time we had someone who gave people this kind of hope and this level of optimism in power his motorcade left Dealy Plaza in Dallas with his brains all over the trunk lid and we ended up with Nixon's breeding ground for everything nefarious and sleazy to slime and slither its way through American politics for the next 40 years, including that greasy meat-puppet from California: Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun.

In short, folks, I'm just afraid that even if we win this health-care fight -- and right now I'm fairly certain we won't -- the potential for violence from that armed, resentful, persecution-complexed segment of the population, goaded as they are by the monied interests (with an assist from their brain-dead cronies and other assorted functionaries in the Congress and the media) into doing their bidding against all those noisome DFH's, makes me afraid for what could happen to our un-white president and those of us who put him there.

Read this link and then discuss.