Blog For Arizona

The Apparat

Jerry Landay, writes in Media Transparency about The Apparat, the Soviet-style political agit-prop establishment of think tanks and research foundations that the Right Wing has established to subvert American politics. As liberals we all realize that a left leaning media is a thing of the distant past. What we may not realize, is how organized, well-financed, and singularly motived these organizations are. They are intimately connected to the GOP; one might even say the RNC has become nothing more than a tool for the Nomenklatura of Right Wing ideologues, wealthy patrons, and grassroots organizers who control the Apparat.

We have to throw off the blinders that the "vast Right-Wing conspiracy" claque have placed upon us. Millions flow from from trusts and industrialists every year into the Apparat for one purpose only; to attack the enemies of the radical right and to keep their subversion of the political process quiet. The results are all around us; a Federal government dominated by facsists, a rolling assault on the independence of the judiciary, a concerted effort to pervert the nation's media, and a political climate in which fear, recrimination, personal attacks, and dirty tricks are the only weather.

The security state consumes over half the Federal budget every year, with no rational accounting for our money, yet we don't even question it. Those within its military-industrial warrens act extra-constitutionally to eliminate governments and leaders overseas that it does not like. We just witnessed the handiwork of the security state in Haiti, yet few, even on the left, will believe it, let alone care. Those very same unaccountable people formed the Office of Special Plans to cook Iraqi intelligence and frog marched the world to war in Iraq.

There is a an unbroken thread of causation between these events that we must recognize and talk about. Only when normal, everyday people point out the unbelievable hiding in plain sight, cloaked only by its own improbability, will people be empowered to see the obvious, and immediate threat to our way of life posed by the Bush Administration and his Right Wing puppeteers.

If Bush wins re-election I firmly believe that it will signal the end of meaningful democracy in America. We may continue to have elections as a mummery show for the masses, but they will mean nothing. The Soviet Union, too, had regular elections, which achieved nearly 100% turn out rates, yet meant absolutely nothing. We will be plunged into new, ruinous wars across the globe to protect the markets and perogatives of multinational and American corporations and to feed the appetites of war profiteers. The violence and frequency of attacks on the American people will escallate, and there will be no incentive to protect us so long as we can be made to direct our hatred and fear outward. Dismantling the capacity of self-governance and the social state that built the middle-class will continue apace. Our people will slide further into debt, be forced to compete ever-more abjectly with third-world labor, be stripped of ever more of our economic and constitutional rights, and slide ever further into poverty to enrich a tiny few, while our children are deprived of the services they need to become the informed, educated, healthy and self-confident citizens of tomorrow.

Don't think that the Right Wing's assault on our children is a simply a by-product of a cruel and irresponsible philosophy. No, like so much else that we dare not acknowledge, it's just part of the plan. What better way to subjugate a population permanently than to begin their degradation at the root of a new generation, while they are still children, and thus will not yearn so much for freedom, having never tasted it?

posted by Michael Bryan @ 3/20/2004 07:17:00 PM