COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RINF
Bob Woodward is not speaking for the larger interests.
He never has. He demonstrated that during the horrible Bush
administration when he slithered around on his belly, flattering and giving
favorable publicity to George Bush, the most incompetent and destructive
president in memory.
America's recent Supreme Court has been a disaster.
Money is free speech? That’s what it ruled, and the results
are disastrous.
That view does not earn you freedom, it earns you slavery.
Slavery to a plutocracy.
That is what America has become.
Woodward also always subtly represented the interests of the
Israel Lobby. They like things the way they are with America being aggressive
across the globe keeping Israel afloat.
And that view shares many aspects with the views of
America's super-rich crowd.
It is ordinary Americans and others who suffer from the
current set-up.
Scalia was a basic building block in creating the mess we
have. His views were narrow and often uninformed, and over time he said some
just plain dumb things.
His views and words on gays and gay marriage were intolerant
and disgraceful, just serving to highlight his backwardness and lack of
leadership.
The trouble with a lot of what is carelessly labeled as
conservatism in America is that it actually supports fascism and the
plutocratic crowd. I think many do not appreciate this, but it is painfully true.
There is a natural border between these two, but it is easily violated and in today’s
America virtually does not exist..
A number of Americans are convinced that Scalia's views on
guns were vital, but the net effect of his views is part of the explanation for
the hopeless situation in America today.
Just think of America's horrible, aggressive, poorly-trained,
and murderous police who cause many Americans literally to live in fear. They
killed more than a thousand of their own people last year, as they do every
year, a performance putting any so-called terrorists to shame.
Scalia supporters may not see a connection, but there very
much is one. The police always have the excuse that they thought the person was
armed, and it is an excuse which continues to work perfectly because a huge
number of Americans are armed.
The plutocrats love things the way they are: murderous
police keep the mob in order. Most of these people or corporations live in what
are effectively gated communities, and they have very little interaction with
the mess “out there.” They just want to see it quiet where they live.
And here it is no accident that large numbers of American
police now receive training in Israel, Israel being a place in which a privileged
group also wants to live in quiet and security and a place where almost half
the population are terrorized by police and army. Israel itself is becoming one
giant gated community, and ordinary Israelis themselves do not have a great
life. Israel’s equivalent of America’s plutocracy – some being Americans with
dual citizenship - is the group making the rules. Thus there is a natural fit
with present-day America in many aspects of life.
Scalia was not about freedom. He was about its opposite,
slavery.
He reminded me of Thomas Jefferson in his thinking.
No, Jefferson was a thousand times more eloquent, but his
seemingly freedom-loving words were not about freedom. Most people who quote
them have no idea about the kind of man they are quoting. He actually used
words as a kind of self-written legacy, a vast advertising campaign which was
about sympathetic-sounding things the real Jefferson was not about.
Jefferson was quite backward in many things. While
superficially interested in science, he had some remarkably unscientific views,
like the healing properties of soaking his feet in cold water each morning or
his interpretation of some fossils found in Virginia which was quite silly.
He was a strong, life-long supporter of slavery. Even when
he was President he opposed the rebellion of slaves in Haiti and supported
Napoleon’s efforts to crush them. After the French failed, he made sure to have
nothing to do with Haiti. His dreamy thoughts about freedom died instantly
anytime black slaves were involved.
Jefferson absolutely believed in black inferiority, and we
have his own embarrassing words on the subject. This despite his long sexual
relationship with a mulatto slave, Sally Hemmings, said to have been fathered
by Jefferson’s dead wife’s father. That relationship started when Sally was
thirteen. Today we would say Jefferson was a pedophile, and that’s hardly about
freedom. He fathered children by Sally – we have the sworn testimony of her
adult son on this, no matter what some of Jefferson’s Caucasian descendants
claim in order to protect his legacy – and Jefferson did little to improve
their lot.
Jefferson rather bizarrely hated industry and wanted only a
nation of stout yeomen farmers, something, which if you analyze it, greatly
resembles the views of someone like Pol Pot. His vision of stout yeoman farmers
of course is completely oblivious to the industrial revolution and the new
prosperity coming to some societies.
Jefferson, despite his wealth and over 200 slaves, was never
able to support himself. He died a bankrupt. His love of things like fashions
and luxury imports was such he was regularly borrowing from friends, some of
whom he cheated, never paying them back. He was not a man of his word.
When Jefferson, as President, decided that America must
boycott Britain, he was ruthless against American businesses suffering from the
policy. His program put many of them under, and he used substantial force to go
after any who were not complying. None of this corresponds to today’s fantasy
ideas, or Jefferson’s own words, about freedom.
Jefferson as Governor, at the drop of a hat, was ready to
have Virginia secede from the Union. He anticipated the entire Confederacy, and
that is not an idea of freedom in keeping with a wholesome, democratic society.
It’s a version of – what some American plutocrats do today – taking your
marbles and running.
Jefferson opposed the Supreme Court even having the very
powers which men like Scalia later exercised. He wanted no interpretation of
the Constitution. He wanted it to have no force at all in the individual states.
His vision much resembled anarchy. He was extremely provincial and ruthless about
states’ interests when a Governor, views which were bent completely around when
he had other needs as President. Consistency was not a Jefferson strong point.
Jefferson’s words about free expression were extremely
hypocritical. When he was Secretary of State under Washington, he secretly
hired some nasty scribblers to attack the President and his policies, always
pretending he knew nothing about the source of the libels.
Despite Jefferson's many pretentious words about bloodshed
and regular revolutions, he proved in the Revolutionary War a complete coward.
He rode so hard away, never stopping for a long time, from some approaching
British - a quite small force under the dashing Banastre Tarleton - that there
were jokes and laughter about it long afterward by colonists as well as by the British.
When Jefferson was first considered as the colonies’
ambassador in Europe, he wouldn't go. He was afraid to sail and perhaps be
captured by British ships. That didn't stop old Ben Franklin, who went instead
and served well.
Jefferson’s overall impact on the shape of today’s America
is extremely negative, despite all the fine words. Ironically, for American
conservatives, what I’ll call the Jefferson Myth, was revived by Franklin
Roosevelt’s government when they built the memorial in Washington. They were
laying false claim to aspects of his legacy for political purposes.
And just so, the acts of many American so-called conservatives
like Scalia which ultimately are destructive and divisive and anti-freedom in
nature, just as Jefferson was once ready to divide the young country or
violently suppress those who disagreed with his presidential policies.
It is all an extremely confused and confusing legacy, and a
dangerous one.
America’s armed forces and secret security apparatus today
are killing people in at least half a dozen places. America supports torture
and illegal imprisonment and suppression in many parts of the world, from
Israel to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. America’s police, in many parts of the
country, literally terrorize their own citizens. America’s secret security
forces spy on everyone in the false name of protection from terror. And, all
the while, we hear slogans – completely empty slogans about freedom and
democracy. And the great plutocrats that Scalia represented think nothing of
moving an entire company abroad, destroying jobs and communities, while
enhancing their own wealth.
