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Edited on Tue Jan-31-06 12:06 AM by arendt
Did I ever tell you that Solzhenitsyn makes Hannah Arendt look like a
sunny day? But, Hannah was able to critique the system from the outside.
We are now in the belly of the beast, and would do well to take some
lessons from a man who has been there and lived to tell the tale.
-------------
The NADs must Go
by arendt
"How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain,
when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared?...
"you must put your cozy past firmly behind you...you must say to yourself:
'My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about
it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die - now or a little
later. But, later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the
better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have
died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and
alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important
to me.'
"Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"The Gulag Archipelago", Vol 1.
I am not qualified to sit in judgment upon the 19 Not-A-Democrats (NADs) who
voted with the Republicans for cloture for Injustice Elito. Although I must live with
the consequences of their betrayal of their oath to preserve and protect
the Constitution, the worst I have the evidence to say of them is that they have
been weak. They have tried to bargain with their torturers. The payoff for their
bargaining will be further requests to betray their cause, their allies, their own
principles; and each additional request will be hammered home by the argument
that they have already compromised themselves beyond redemption.
It is clear to me that the establishment of a Gulag in America (a country without
a tradition of torture, dungeons, and secret police) must begin with the highest
ranking officials of the opposition. By breaking them and then putting their self-
confessions before the public as cynical political theatre, they simultaneously rout
the leadership of their opposition; and they sow the seeds of distrust and fear amid
their rank and file opponents. Of course, a Gulag for NAD politicians more resembles
one of those "sharakshas" (science labs staffed by prisoners) than a true gulag. Still,
for the rest of us, the train ticket is going to say Guantanamo or "extraordinary rendition".
In the dungeon of secrecy, wiretapping, and informants that the Bush cabal
has constructed in fundamentalist-occupied America, we can only guess
what mixture of truths, half-truths, bribes, promises, threats, appeals to vanity,
and extortion were used behind closed doors to pressure NAD senators into
committing mass suicide on behalf of both their governmental branch and their
political party. I withhold judgment because I lack the personal experience of life
in the GOP Lubyanka that is the Congress today.
What must it be like for a formerly powerful official to be completely ignored except
when called before interrogator Frist to vote sight-almost-unseen on legislation that
is little more than a death warrant for middle class America? What must it be like to be
ordered, under pain of campaign fund starvation and media torture, to sign your name
to the lifetime appointment of a lying autocrat who calls dictatorship "the unitary
executive"? - as if an Orwellian phrase makes a damn bit of difference; but totalitarian
states are always huge on obeying the forms while violating the spirit:
"We can learn the important principles involved in (the trials).. For example,...
the Prosecutor General informs us that the All Russian Central Executive
Committee had the right to intervene in any judicial proceeding. 'VTsIK
pardons and punishes, at its own discretion without any limitation whatsoever.'
...All of this...'shows the superiority of our system over the false theory of the
separation of powers, that is, the theory of the independence of the judiciary...
It is good that the legislative and executive power are not divided by a thick
wall as they are in the West. All problems can be decided quickly.' Especially
on the phone."
-A. Solzhenitsyn, ibid.
----
However, things are not that bad. Yes 18 or so NADs have sold their soul for better
jail conditions. But 24 true Democrats have kept the faith; and they know and we
know that they did. Polls show that 90% of Democratic voters opposed Elito; but
only 60% or so of Democratic senators voted that way. We now have the evidence that
pod people are alive and well in our own party. This vote is like that moment in John
Carpenter's classic movie "They Live", when Roddy Piper blows up the media
camoflauge system and reveals which politicians are really aliens in disguise.
We can now hammer the shit out of the DNC to defund these pitiful, fallen weaklings.
We can demand that the DNC run candidates against them in the primaries if they
do not step down or admit they are nothing but GOP tools. And, we can learn to, as the
Russians say, "trust, but verify" the loyalty of the remaining faithful Democrats. (Make
no mistake, those 24 will be vilified like they were the instigators of the Attica Prison
Riot. The temptation to sell out will be strong.)
It will be very important to know who is a patriot and who is a police informer, because as
soon as Elito is confirmed, the nature of this political fight to the death (waged, to date, only
by the GOP) will change. This cloture has knocked out the last vestige of conventional political
power of the anti-GOP forces. The GOP has total control of media and all three branches of
government. They will now declare political opposition to be treason, political dissent to be
a crime, and the Bill of Rights to be a joke.
In the brief moment before Elito's decisions begin the Draconian enforcement of the
police state, we need to take a play from Saddam's irregular forces playbook. Its time to start
distributing the equipment for resistance. Someone needs to teach people how to make
Improvised Media Events, how to assemble and disperse flash mobs, how to infiltrate the
nascent political police so that they can be neutralized. Political dissent will have to be
organized on the tried and true methods of individual cells and leaderless resistance.
So, DUers, its time to sanitize your past and sign up for the nearest Fatherland Security
"nacht und nebel" squad.
And, if I'm wrong, so what? It does no harm to prepare to be a more effective political
organization. It is, so far, not illegal, to advocate the prosecution of politics to the maximum.
If it were illegal, the entire GOP would be breaking rocks in Alabama.
In closing, as a true see-both-sides, ineffectual liberal, I leave you with the most famous
quote from the GA, in which Solzheitsyn cautions us to "know ourselves":
"If only it were all so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing
evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. (Sadistic
fucks like Cheney and Rumsfeld have no hearts. - arendt) And who is willing to destroy a
piece of his own heart?
"During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeeze one
way by exuberant vil and sometimes it shifts to allow space for good to flourish. One and
the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstance, a totally different
human being...But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot
good and evil."
We cannot return evil for evil and, thereby, rid our society of lunatic fundies and sociopathic
warmongers. Neither can we tolerate their leaders to have their way. This is the predicament
of honest and decent human beings throughout history. We must separate the duped followers
from the lying leaders. I will be looking for ways to do that. And, at least, I no longer have to
be bound by loyalty to the wreckage of the Democratic Party leadership.
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