John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY REPUBLISHED IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“An apology & Explanation, Two Years On”
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/29/an-apology-and-explanation-two-years-on/
“Facts and logic no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent.”
Indeed.
And I think that reflects the general decline and corruption of the United States’ establishment. The observations are not just things found in the country’s politics or journalism.
Look at the long record abroad of wars and coups, killing millions and serving no good purpose, plus all the lying and hypocrisy required to support them.
Are they the handiwork of a sound, productive society? Of enlightened leadership? Of strong national values? Respect for the rule of law?
America's establishment – which consists of both political parties plus their financial supporters and the corporate press plus other institutional helpers - really no longer has a lot worth saying to anyone.
It does pretty much as it pleases with little regard for the bulk of American citizens and none at all for the other 95% of humanity.
Only the existence of a small number of other fairly powerful states prevents it becoming completely tyrannical.
It is a global version of what the French Aristocracy was in the late 18th century, an era of immense privilege and abuse.
Any notions of dedication to democratic ideals are fanciful. People with that kind of power don’t give it up, either through elections or principled acts.
And agencies like the Pentagon and the CIA and the FBI operate under principles the polar opposite of democracy. The more pervasive and powerful they are in a society, the less it can possibly be democratic.
America’s establishment serves a plutocracy, the people who pay its bills.
At home, it runs an elaborate and costly political system which has some appearance of democracy but with a basic unspoken rule that most of the establishment and all of the plutocratic corporations and individuals cannot be replaced or adversely affected.
There is a corollary rule that indeed nothing in the society is to be greatly changed.
But in its imperial efforts abroad – its wars, its coups, its sanctioning, its threatening – even that pretence of democracy is dropped.
How can you be democratic and treat countless millions and their governments as though they were your property? Perhaps the attitude that you can is a holdover from America’s long years of slavery?
The parties impose empire on the world and shovel money at destructive, completely anti-democratic institutions like the Pentagon and CIA and FBI who are their willing helpers.
Change will only come with decline and replacement by new global arrangements whose sketchy outlines already are to be seen.
