Andrew Sullivan on "The Rhetoric of the Right"

I am not horrified by the rhetoric and love of violence on the far right because I have some attachment to the Democrats. I am horrified because it is horrifying, because for years now, this kind of thing has become commonplace at the very top of the conservative political apparatus, and because the invocation of violence in a political context is inherently corrosive of democratic values. When you add to this a party committed to the use of military force as almost a first option, and to torture as a legal method of interrogation, it is irresponsible not to worry about where this is headed.

- Andrew Sullivan, "The Rhetoric of the Right"

I profoundly agree with his analysis. 

Paid partisans in the corporate media, want us to accept the incredulous claim that the right-wing is simply engaging in vociferous arguments to further democracy and freedom of speech.  They make the equally absurd claim that this hatred and climate of intolerance is bi-directional and Mr. Obama, himself, has been a conduit for the current atmosphere.  Their immediate response was to call all criticism of their daily vitriol "stupid." Their second act was to feign victimization and demand that all further insinuations stop, because it's starting to hurt their feelings that people may actually see them for the depraved and immoral sociopaths they are.

For the greater part of two decades, there has been proclivity on the right to dehumanize their opponents and marginalize any criticism of their complicity in debasing the public sphere. I have listed numerous cases (here, here, and here) arising in the past two years, where America's right-wing, in a petulant hissy-fit, demands that the world conform with their unstable worldview. The ultimate result will be that the nation will continue its current decline, will eventually falter in a fatal manner, and will end up as every empire that has existed before it.

Iran's Green Revolution Continues

Six months ago I started this blog to document the indolence of the mainstream press and the vast hypocrisy and duncery that masquerades as civil society across the world.  At the moment of this blog's inception the theft of the Iranian election by the Mullahs was presenting itself. The clerics terrified at their own dwindling domestic support, handed their lackey Ahmadinejad the election and brutally suppressed student protesters, reform minded civilians, and even former colleagues of the 1979 Iranian revolution, who disagreed with the Mullahs maniacal objectives.

Today I return to Iran, where thousands of people have rallied together in the face of certain prosecution, incarceration, torture, and possible death via the police forces that serve the criminal theocrats in Tehran.  Again, the slothful mainstream press have done a stupendous job at not providing coverage, insightful commentary, or acknowledging the seriousness that this revolution may portend to global politics.  Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, who in this particular case have replaced the MSM, has an excellent on-the-ground compilation of twitter, you-tube, and individual first-hand accounts by protesters from across Iran.

To contextualize this uprising further, one should first remind oneself that if the neo-conservatives of America and their belligerent and bellicose accomplices in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon had had their way, these very protesters -who are striving for Western ideals of freedom and liberty- would lay bloody and bleeding, not from the truncheon or pistol of the Iranian stormtroopers, but from American heavy armaments.  The nascent struggle for individual liberty against the corrupt and incompetent rule of the Mullahs would have been aborted, leaving the Islamic regime even more powerful.  Instead, the theocrats are now deprived of the old canard that the evil Satan, in the form of the Americans, the British, and the BBC, are stirring dissent and chaos within their borders.

In addition, it should be understood that the moral vacuousness and intellectual dishonesty of the neo-cons, which has been apparent for all to observe since the Iraq fiasco detonated in their collective faces, has an equivalent in the autocratic and murderous actions of the Iranian theocrats.  The leaders of the American war machine and the murderous Mullahs are the same: greedy, pugnacious old-men bereft of civil decency, who are dedicated to maintaining their own power at the cost of innocent lives.

***

I have a series of earlier blog posts that explain the origins of dictatorships, outline the original rationals about the election fraud committed by the Mullahs (here and here), and the propaganda model as it relates to Western media (here).

Chinese Democracy: Happiness through Slavery

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/671645

Much continues to be said about the Great Chinese economic 'Miracle'. Wondrous growth, unprecedented wealth production, and terrific everyday savings for you Walmart shoppers!

The primary reason that I believe that China is incapable of becoming a world power, much less a force for international stability, is it's inability to address internal criticism and the extreme levels of corruption that have manifested itself throughout the Communist Party and virtually all state apparati. An example of this behavior is illustrated in the above linked Toronto Star article. Jiang Weiping, a former Chinese journalist, served five years incarceration for the following:

Jiang published – in a Hong Kong magazine in 1999 – an expose of high-level corruption: The deputy mayor of a city had used state funds to buy cars and apartments for his 29 mistresses. Another from another city had gambled away $3 million from state funds at the casinos of Macau. A powerful provincial governor, Bo Xilai, the son of an even more powerful party elder, was covering up corruption among cronies.

Whilst we in the West are certainly not immune to criminality and public corruption, as this blog amply illustrates, the standard authoritarian model of jailing dissidents and punishing those who embarrass the ruling criminal junta, belies not a growing and tolerant state, but a petulant and unstable regime that needs to extinguish all criticism in order to persist. Despite what we are constantly told by propagandists on both sides of the Pacific, these are hardly the attributes of a flourishing and benevolent state.

The reason for dictatorships...

"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."
-1984, George Orwell

Therein lies the gist of all so-called political revolutions. Nary one has occurred that didn't descend into a state of cronyism, criminality, and towards their end a persistent and extreme proclivity towards incompetence. Of course for the casual observer, one would say, "That's why it's called a revolution." You simply replace the current existing strata or ruling class with whatever group that happens to toil on the periphery of power. History also tells another story in which sooner or later the new organs of power will become diseased and the rot pervasive. Its all happened before and will happen again. Benjamin Franklin said this about the American revolution and the newly adopted constitution in 1787:

Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

Therefore with western eyes it comes as no surprise when the Chinese roll tanks into Tiananmen Square to butcher students, when Burmese Generals slaughter peasants and Buddhist monks and hold kangaroo courts against opponents, or as today has it, the Mullahs of Iran so fearful of transcendent change they dismiss the presidential elections as merely an academic exercise in public opinion management.

It's very simple to loath the "mad-Mullahs" and other religious-fanatics during these times. Theologically ordained gangsters, who issue fatwas declaring death to authors who fictionalize their precious religious mythology, permit rape and murder of foreign journalists who question their brutality, and execute children, can generally be described at their best as being detestable. On the economic front 82% of Iran's exports reside in oil and gas which flow East to China (another dictatorship) and Japan; inflation is listed at 25% per annum; and the state subsides gas, electricity, and a variety of consumer products. As all tyrants they claim divine right to authority, because they alone are the protectors of the sacred and defenders of society's integrity.

The early Romans, already well craft in Machiavellian arts, knew too well the religious undercurrents involved in subjugation, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” Thus when Iranians who lead the coup against the Shah are asked if the revolution has been betrayed, they respond begrudgingly with a stern no. They know very well that this was how the revolution was always meant to be; a dictatorship of frauds masquerading in clerical robes. With the apparatus of the secret police under their control and the military as their eager partner in crime, the dictatorship was always guaranteed.

Unlike Western democracies where the forces of propaganda are far more sophisticated, Asian despots have no use in subtleties. Rather, heavy-baton weilding shock-troops and the public fear of torturous incarceration are their modus operandi. A compliant populace can also be obtained when economic growth, prosperity, and materialism rise and substitute for individual liberty and freedom. The Chinese, for example, have found a way to have a shiny happy dictatorship that the ruling class, the local communist chieftains, and the nouveau-rich masses can support. This however, is not the situation in Iran or for most dictatorships. There exists in each historical case a universal want for power. It is an unquenchable devotion that manifests itself in the relentless pursuit towards dominion over others and in a cruel desire to punish the populace for the slightest of inconveniences. This is not a practice that will lead to prosperity, but instead collapse, revolution, and cyclical historical repetition.