Showing posts with label technocracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technocracy. Show all posts
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Technocracy And The Making of China
It was no mistake of history that China transformed from a Communist dictatorship into a neo-authoritarian Technocracy.
In this regard, the influence of the Trilateral Commission, its members and policies on the world stage can hardly be quantified. The Commission, founded by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973, drew membership from North America, Europe and Japan. Out of approximately 300 members, only 86 were originally from the United States, and yet they corporately devised and pushed policies that suited the entire membership, and did so under a virtual cloak of invisibility that lasts even into 2013.
Today, we reap the “benefits” of Trilateral manipulation. The European economy is trashed, Japan’s economy is still smoldering from the mid-1990’s and the U.S. is much worse off today than in the late 1960’s. But, the political systems of these countries are not much better off than their economies. The fruit of decay in the United States is painfully evident with a fractured and contentious politic that defies reconciliation on even the most minor issues.
Read moreTuesday, October 21, 2014
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, Cybernetics, and Skynet
After you watch that cutsie liberal minded "technology is your friend" video, then watch this.
A slightly more conservative perspective on how this shit could go down.
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Sunday, May 4, 2014
The Sustainable Development Deception: A United Nations Plan for America
So where do WE THE PEOPLE get to live? This map is part of a project to convert massive amounts of land in America to open space where grazing and farming and living is PROHIBITED. It's private property being converted to useless land at a time when food prices are rising 10-15% every year.
There are farmers, ranchers, homeowners, and small businesses on this land. This is a crime. Led by public private partnerships of large corporations and regional and Federal government entities, it is a land grab disguised as a biodiversity and sustainable development program.
If you have not seen the documentary "Farmageddon" you need to stop reading and watch it now.
On Saturday, May 3, 2014 I had the honor and privilege to meet some amazing people fighting the regionalization of power and authority in the United States at the "Globalization of California" forum on Treasure Island near San Francisco. State legislatures are being circumvented by unelected, unaccountable regional quasi-government entities that are better described as "private-public partnerships".
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The Globalization of California:
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Forum Presenters:
Patrick Wood: Co-author of Trilaterals over Washington,
Economist and Financial Analyst speaks on the emergence of Technocracy,
the political-economic design of a planned coming scientific
dictatorship.
Debbie Bacigalupi:
General election Congressional candidate (2012) and expert on Agenda
21, provides background information on the ongoing transformation of our
government.
Heather Gass: Leader of the East Bay Tea Party and Agenda 21 expert, shows how ABAG's One Bay Area is designed to herd Bay Area residents into stack and pack housing, get them out of their cars and more.
Rosa Koire: Author and former state appraiser, speaks on Agenda 21 implementation around the world and the pending lawsuit to halt the One Bay Area plan.
Michael Shaw: Self-employed
businessman, a founder of FreedomAdvocates.org, and long standing
opponent of Agenda 21 and Regionalism, discusses the political
underpinnings of Regionalism and what individuals can do to restore
local government and preserve the American experiment.
Also,
elected officials from around the state discuss how local government
has been submerged by the federalized Regional COG system of governance
designed to overtake the whole of the Country. These individuals are:
Matt Grocott - City Council - San Carlos, CA (SF Peninsula)
Mike Munzing - City Council - Aliso Viejo, CA (Orange County) Steve Brandau - City Council - Fresno, CA (Central Valley) |
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For more information visit:www.GlobalizationofCalifornia.com |
This is no conspiracy theory. No amount of mainstream media propaganda can debunk this story. Pay attention to this video taken from the floor of Congress. The so called left and right get along wonderfully to pass legislation facilitating the implementation of a United Nations operational plan called "Agenda 21". It is the implementation of this plan in part that has lead various alphabet soup list of Federal government agencies such as BLM, and USDA to confiscate the private property of honest landowners, farmers, ranchers, and food cooperatives in such as way that could only be described as extortion, an exercise in authoritarian fascism, witnessed in history under the Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini regimes (all of which were funded by globalist bankers, but that is another story).
In the coming months and years it will be of paramount importance for American, young and old, urban and rural, to TAKE ACTION to stop this operational plan. It will not be easy. Every President of the United States since Jimmy Carter has signed onto and accelerated this agenda. Every town in America is threatened to one degree or another and the health and safety of our children is at stake.
The video below is an excellent artifact to share with public officials in your city. This will help bring the ICLEI operations to the forefront. Send this to media in your town as well.
More to come in the days ahead. Stay tuned.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
The Green Agenda - Subversion, Global Warming, and the Oligarchs
“The
common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself."
- Club of Rome
The First Global Revolution
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself."
- Club of Rome
The First Global Revolution
The
environmental movement has been described as the largest and most
influential social phenomenon in modern history. From relative
obscurity just a few decades ago it has spawned thousands of
organisations and claims millions of committed activists. Reading the
newspaper today it is hard to imagine a time when global warming,
resource depletion, environmental catastrophes and 'saving the
planet' were barely mentioned. They now rank among the top priorities
on the social, political and economic global agenda.
Environmental awareness is considered to be the mark of any good honest decent citizen. Multi-national companies compete fiercely to promote their environmental credentials and 'out-green' each other. The threat of impending ecological disasters is uniting the world through a plethora of international treaties and conventions. But where did this phenomenon come from, how did it rise to such prominence, and more importantly, where is it going?
While researching for these articles, and during my academic studies, I have come across many references to the The Club of Rome (CoR), and reports produced by them. Initially I assumed that they were just another high-level environmental think-tank and dismissed the conspiracy theories found on many websites claiming that the CoR is a group of global elitists attempting to impose some kind of one world government.
I am not a conspiratorial person by nature and was faced with a dilemma when I first read their reports. But it's all there - in black and white. The CoR claims that "we are facing an imminent catastrophic ecological collapse" and "our only hope is to transform humanity into a global interdependent sustainable society, based on respect and reverence for the Earth." In the end I came to the conclusion that there are two possibilities – either the CoR wrote all these reports and setup a vast network of supporting organisations just for fun or they actually believe what they have written and are working hard to fulfill their role as the self-appointed saviours of Gaia.
Based on my close observation of their actions, and watching the recommendations made by the CoR many years ago now being adopted as official UN and government policy – well, I have become personally convinced that they are deadly serious. On this website I try to use quotes and excerpts as much as possible and let the reader reach their own conclusions.
So, what exactly is the Club of Rome and who are its members? Founded in 1968 at David Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, the CoR describes itself as "a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity." It consists of current and former Heads of State, UN beaureacrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.
The Club of Rome subsequently founded two sibling organizations, the Club of Budapest and the Club of Madrid. The former is focused on social and cultural aspects of their agenda, while the latter concentrates on the political aspects. All three of these 'Clubs' share many common members and hold joint meetings and conferences. As explained in other articles on this website it is abundantly clear that these are three heads of the same beast. The CoR has also established a network of 33 National Associations. Membership of the 'main Club' is limited to 100 individuals at any one time. Some members, like Al Gore and Maurice Strong, are affiliated through their respective National Associations (e.g. USACOR, CACOR etc).
I would like to start this analysis of the Club of Rome by listing some prominent members of the CoR and its two sub-groups, the Clubs of Budapest and Madrid. Personally it isn’t what the CoR is that I find so astonishing; it is WHO the CoR is! This isn’t some quirky little group of green activists or obscure politicians. They are the most senior officials in the United Nations, current and ex-world leaders, and the founders of some of the most influential environmental organisations. When you read their reports in the context of who they are – its gives an entirely new, and frightening, context to their extreme claims.
Some current members of the Club of Rome or its two siblings:Al Gore – former VP of the USA, leading climate change campaigner, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Academy Award winner, Emmy winner. Gore lead the US delegations to the Rio Earth Summit and Kyoto Climate Change conference. He chaired a meeting of the full Club of Rome held in Washington DC in 1997.Javier Solana – Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, High Representative for EU Foreign Policy.Maurice Strong – former Head of the UN Environment Programme, Chief Policy Advisor to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit, co-author (with Gorbachev) of the Earth Charter, co-author of the Kyoto Protocol, founder of the Earth Council, devout Baha’i. Mikhail Gorbachev – CoR executive member, former President of the Soviet Union, founder of Green Cross International and the Gorbachev Foundation, Nobel Peace Prize winner, co-founder (with Hidalgo) of the Club of Madrid, co-author (with Strong) of the Earth Charter.Diego Hidalgo – CoR executive member, co-founder (with Gorbachev) of the Club of Madrid, founder and President of the European Council on Foreign Relations in association with George Soros.Ervin Laszlo – founding member of the CoR, founder and President of the Club of Budapest, founder and Chairman of the World Wisdom Council.Anne Ehrlich – Population Biologist. Married to Paul Ehrlich with whom she has authored many books on human overpopulation. Also a former director of Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, and a member of the UN's Global Roll of Honor.
Hassan bin Talal – President of the CoR, President of the Arab Thought Forum, founder of the World Future Council, recently named as the United Nations 'Champion of the Earth'.
Sir Crispin Tickell – former British Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Permanent Representative on the Security Council, Chairman of the ‘Gaia Society’, Chairman of the Board of the Climate Institute, leading British climate change campaigner.Kofi Annan – former Secretary General of the United Nations. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.Javier Perez de Cuellar – former Secretary General of the United Nations.
Gro Harlem Bruntland – United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Change, former President of Norway
Robert Muller – former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, founder and Chancellor of the UN University of Peace.
The Dalai Lama – The 'Spiritual Leader' of Tibet. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
Father Berry Thomas – Catholic Priest who is one of the leading proponents of deep ecology, ecospirituality and global consciousness.
David Rockefeller – CoR executive member, former Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, founder of the Trilateral Commission, executive member of the World Economic Forum, donated land on which the United Nations stands.Stephen Schneider – Stanford Professor of Biology and Global Change. Professor Schneider was among the earliest and most vocal proponents of man-made global warming and a lead author of many IPCC reports.Bill Clinton – former President of the United States, founder of the Clinton Global Iniative.Jimmy Carter – former President of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.Bill Gates – founder of Microsoft, philanthropist
Garret Hardin – Professor of Human Ecology. Originator of the 'Global Commons' concept. Has authored many controversial papers on human overpopulation and eugenics.
Other current influential members:(these can be found on the membership lists of the COR (here, here, and here), Club of Budapest, Club of Madrid and/or CoR National Association membership pages)
Ted Turner – media mogul, philanthropist, founder of CNN
George Soros – multibillionare, major donor to the UN
Tony Blair – former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Deepak Chopra – New Age Guru
Desmond Tutu – South African Bishop and activist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Timothy Wirth – President of the United Nations Foundation
Henry Kissinger – former US Secretary of State
George Matthews – Chairman of the Gorbachev Foundation
Harlan Cleveland – former Assistant US Secretary of State and NATO Ambassador
Barbara Marx Hubbard – President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution
Betty Williams – Nobel Peace Prize LaureateMarianne Williamson – New Age 'Spiritual Activist'
Robert Thurman – assistant to the Dalai Lama
Jane Goodall – Primatologist and Evolutionary Biologist
Juan Carlos I – King of Spain
Prince Philippe of Belgium
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands
Dona Sophia – Queen of Spain
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero – current Prime Minister of Spain
Karan Singh – Former Prime Minister of India, Chairman of the Temple of Understanding
Daisaku Ikeda – founder of the Soka Gakkai cult
Martin Lees – CoR Secretary General, Rector of the UN University of Peace
Ernesto Zedillo – Director of The Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Frithjof Finkbeiner – Coordinator of the Global Marshall Plan
Franz Josef Radermacher – Founder of the Global Marshall Plan
Eduard Shevardnadze – former Soviet foreign minister and President of Georgia
Richard von Weizsacker – former President of Germany
Carl Bildt – former President of Sweden
Kim Campbell – former Prime Minister of Canada and Senior Fellow of the Gorbachev Foundation
Vincente Fox – former President of Mexico
Helmut Kohl – former Chancellor of Germany
Romano Prodi – former Prime Minister of Italy and President of the European CommissionVaclav Havel – former President of the Czech Republic
Hans Kung – Founder of the Global Ethic Foundation
Ruud Lubbers – United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Mary Robinson – United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Jerome Binde – Director of Foresight, UNESCO
Koïchiro Matsuura – Current Director General of UNESCO
Federico Mayor – Former Director General of UNESCO
Tapio Kanninen – Director of Policy and Planning, United NationsKonrad Osterwalder – Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations
Peter Johnston – Director General of European Commission
Jacques Delors – Former President of the European Commission
Domingo Jimenez-Beltran – Executive Director of the European Environment Agency
Thomas Homer-Dixon – Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Toronto
Hazel Henderson – Futurist and 'evoluntionary economist'
Emeka Anyaoku – former Commonwealth Secretary General, current President of the World Wildlife Fund
Wangari Maathai – Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, founder of the Green Belt Movement
and many more….
The concept of 'environmental sustainability' was first brought to widespread public attention in 1972 by the Club of Rome in their book entitled The Limits to Growth. The official summary can be read here. The report basically concluded that the growth of the human population, and an increase in prosperity, would cause an ecological collapse within the next hundred years:
“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
“It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.”
“The overwhelming growth in world population caused by the positive birth-rate loop is a recent phenomenon, a result of mankind's very successful reduction of worldwide mortality. The controlling negative feedback loop has been weakened, allowing the positive loop to operate virtually without constraint. There are only two ways to restore the resulting imbalance. Either the birth rate must be brought down to equal the new, lower death rate, or the death rate must rise again.”
“The result of stopping population growth in 1975 and industrial capital growth in 1985 with no other changes is that population and capital reach constant values at a relatively high level of food, industrial output and services per person. Eventually, however, resource shortages reduce industrial output and the temporarily stable state degenerates.”
“Man possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a totally new form of human society - one that would be built to last for generations. The two missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term goal that can guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the Human Will to achieve that goal.”
“Without such a goal and a commitment to it, short-term concerns will generate the exponential growth that drives the world system toward the limits of the earth and ultimate collapse. With that goal and that commitment, mankind would be ready now to begin a controlled, orderly transition from growth to global equilibrium.”
So as you can see the even back in 1972 the Club considered modern industrial society to be completely unsustainable. They state that even if population was frozen at 1975 levels, and industrial activity at 1985 levels, then the earth’s ecosystems would still ultimately collapse. The CoR has not changed these views in the slightest, in fact, in the last three decades their warnings have become increasingly more urgent and alarmist. They call this imminent collapse the ‘World Problematique’ and their proposed solution the ‘World Resolutique.’
The Limits to Growth is considered to be the most successful environmental publication ever produced and propelled the Club of Rome to its current position of an environmental thought-leader and a major consultant to the United Nations. It has been translated into more than forty languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Throughout the 1970s and 80s the concept that humanity was irreparably damaging the earth gained popularity and facilitated the formation of mainstream and activist environmental groups.
All meetings of the CoR are held ‘behind closed doors’ and no public records are kept. However the Club does produce many ‘discussion reports’ that can be found on its website. The United Nations contracts the Club of Rome to prepare ‘Policy Guidance Documents’ which it uses in formulating its policies and programmes. A quick search for Club of Rome on the UNESCO publications site reveals 250 such documents. There are many other documents there authored by CoR members acting in other capacities. As many high ranking UN officials are actually CoR members, this is like a man asking himself for advice, and then agreeing with that advice. Not very objective! Various UN organisations also hold joint conferences with the CoR.
While checking the Club of Rome website this morning the first item in their ‘current news’ section refers to a briefing delivered by the CoR to G8 officials in preparation for the upcoming G8 meeting. The second item is a summary report from the Club of Romes ’strategy planning retreat’ with 150 senior UNESCO officials. The joint CoR/UNESCO communique states:
“We are at the end of an era – a turning point in history. We are approaching the threshold of runaway climate change. We underline the urgency of radical action to reduce emissions, by both immediate action and longer-term measures; to stress to political leaders the non-linear nature of the processes at work which will generate sudden change; and to assert that the overriding priority must be to avert the impending risk of catastrophic climate change.” - CoR/UNESCO communique
Twenty years after the Limits to Growth the CoR published another major report that became an instant best-seller. In The First Global Revolution the Club of Rome claimed that the time to act had run out. It was now or never. Delay in beginning corrective measures will increase the damage to the world ecological system and ultimately reduce the human population that will eventually be supportable. They also stated that democratic governments are far too short-sighted to deal with the ‘problematique’ and new forms of governance are urgently required.
In order not too violate any copyright protection I will not reproduce the text of the book on this site. However, it is permissible for me to quote a brief excerpt in the context of this wider discussion. The complete text (third ed.) can be read and searched online at Google Books. As you read the following quote (from page 75, first ed.), please remember the names of the leaders listed above. This is not some quirky little cult. This is the stated agenda of the leaders of the environmental movement:
“This is the way we are setting the scene for mankind’s encounter with the planet. The opposition between the two ideologies that have dominated the 20th century has collapsed, forming their own vacuum and leaving nothing but crass materialism.
It is a law of Nature that any vacuum will be filled and therefore eliminated unless this is physically prevented. “Nature,” as the saying goes, “abhors a vacuum.” And people, as children of Nature, can only feel uncomfortable, even though they may not recognize that they are living in a vacuum. How then is the vacuum to be eliminated?
It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose.
New enemies therefore have to be identified.
New strategies imagined, new weapons devised.
The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.
The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation
Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”So, long before Global Warming became a well known issue Al Gore and his Club of Rome colleagues stated that they would use the threat of global warming to unite humanity and "set the scene for mankind's encounter with the planet." In the same way that shamans and sooth-sayers in medieval times used their advance knowledge of when eclipses would occur to control and terrify their followers, they would use a natural phenomenon as their 'enemy' to achieve their objectives. But then they state that although Global Warming would be presented as the initial enemy, the real enemy of humanity would be portrayed as man himself. I am already noticing how frequently the terms climate change and overpopulation are being uttered in the same breath.
Having discovered that all these influential environmental leaders were associated with the Club of Rome I set about reading all the reports, lectures and speeches on their website as well as the reports commissioned by the UN. I was amazed to find that they lay out their entire agenda for anyone who has eyes to see. Exactly the same themes, concepts and phrases are repeated continuously throughout their publications. They are full of references to 'imminent collapse', 'dying planet', 'our mother Gaia', 'wrenching transformation', 'united global society', 'global consciousness', 'new forms of governance' etc. They truly intend to bring about the world's First Global Revolution.
The Kosmos Journal provides perhaps the best insight into their worldview. This Journal was founded by the Club of Rome in partnership with with several of its sibling organizations. As described in my article, The Green Web, the CoR has established a network of supporting organizations, each focusing on a different aspect of their agenda. The Kosmos Journal contains many articles written by CoR members. The basic premise of their worldview is:
"Modern industrial civilisation is fast outstripping the Earth's natural regenerative and life-supporting capacity..."
"At current rates of resource depletion and environmental degradation a near complete collapse of ecological integrity will occur within the next 100 years..."
"Gaia, our Mother, who nutured humanity for countless millenia within her womb of evolution, is dying..."
“A small window of opportunity now exists to transform humanity into a sustainable global interdepedant society based on respect and reverence for Earth..."
"A radical change from the current trajectory is required, a complete reordering of global society..."
"Humans only truly unite when faced with a powerful external enemy..."
"At this time a new enemy must be found, one either real or invented for the purpose..."
"Democracy has failed us, a new system of global governance, based on environmental imperatives, must be implemented quickly..."
Now that Obama is firmly ensconced in the White House the Club of Rome and its affiliates are swinging into high gear. The CoR recently unveiled a new 3-year programme entitled A New Path for World Development. The Club of Madrid has launched the Road to Copenhagen, a joint programme with the UN Environment Programme intended to facilitate a binding global climate change treaty in 2009. Perhaps most interesting is the State of Global Emergency declared by the Club of Budapest in October 2008. The declaration states that we only have four or five years to prevent a total collapse of the Earth's ecosystems. To quote from the document:
“If we continue on our present unsustainable path, by mid-century the Earth may become largely uninhabitable for human and most other forms of life. Such a total systems collapse could occur much sooner, however, due to runaway global warming or other ecocatastrophes, and/or by nuclear wars triggered by religious, ethnic or geopolitical conflicts or access to diminishing natural resources. The macro-trends driving these global threats and challenges have been apparent for decades and are now building toward a threshold of irreversibility. The scientific modeling of complex systems shows that when systems reach a state of critical instability, they either break down to their components or break through to a higher order of integral functioning. At these “points of no return” maintaining the status quo, or returning to a previous mode of organization and functioning, are not a feasible option.
The acceleration of critical trends and cross-impacts among them indicates that the ‘window of opportunity’ for pulling out of the present global crisis and breaking through to a more peaceful and sustainable world is likely to be no more than four to five years from the end of 2008. This is close in time to the Mayan 2012 prophecy for the end of the current world. The period around the end of 2012 is likely to be a turbulent one for this and other reasons. Predictions coming from the physical sciences foresee disturbances in the geomagnetic, electromagnetic and related fields that embed the planet causing significant damage to telecommunications and impacting many aspects of human activity and health. For the esoteric traditions the end of 2012 will be the end of the known world, although the more optimistic intepretations speak of a new world taking the place of the old.”
This may seem very strange – a group of prominent world leaders talking about ancient Mayan prophecies, but as I describe in my article, Gaia's Gurus, many leading global warming activists openly advocate earth-reverence and other New Age philosophies. Gaia, Global Warming, and Global Governance are intricately entwined, if one truly believes in Gaia, and that she is being fatally harmed by the current system, then a new system of global governance and control would appear to be the only answer. Global Warming provides the ideal 'enemy' to bring about this objective. It is easy for these global elitists to talk about sacrifice, wrenching transformation, population reduction and eliminating the use of fossil fuels but the implications are truely horrendous.
Even if you think this is all nonsense I would ask you to at least read these quotes and excerpts, and think about the implications of their agenda. Everyday I am amazed at how quickly things are changing. It is coming hard and fast. It's almost like reading a book and then watching the television adaptation, except that this adaptation is not a movie - it's on the evening news. As Al Gore said in the closing sentence of his statement after he won the Nobel Peace Prize ... "This is just the beginning."
Environmental awareness is considered to be the mark of any good honest decent citizen. Multi-national companies compete fiercely to promote their environmental credentials and 'out-green' each other. The threat of impending ecological disasters is uniting the world through a plethora of international treaties and conventions. But where did this phenomenon come from, how did it rise to such prominence, and more importantly, where is it going?
While researching for these articles, and during my academic studies, I have come across many references to the The Club of Rome (CoR), and reports produced by them. Initially I assumed that they were just another high-level environmental think-tank and dismissed the conspiracy theories found on many websites claiming that the CoR is a group of global elitists attempting to impose some kind of one world government.
I am not a conspiratorial person by nature and was faced with a dilemma when I first read their reports. But it's all there - in black and white. The CoR claims that "we are facing an imminent catastrophic ecological collapse" and "our only hope is to transform humanity into a global interdependent sustainable society, based on respect and reverence for the Earth." In the end I came to the conclusion that there are two possibilities – either the CoR wrote all these reports and setup a vast network of supporting organisations just for fun or they actually believe what they have written and are working hard to fulfill their role as the self-appointed saviours of Gaia.
Based on my close observation of their actions, and watching the recommendations made by the CoR many years ago now being adopted as official UN and government policy – well, I have become personally convinced that they are deadly serious. On this website I try to use quotes and excerpts as much as possible and let the reader reach their own conclusions.
So, what exactly is the Club of Rome and who are its members? Founded in 1968 at David Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, the CoR describes itself as "a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity." It consists of current and former Heads of State, UN beaureacrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.
The Club of Rome subsequently founded two sibling organizations, the Club of Budapest and the Club of Madrid. The former is focused on social and cultural aspects of their agenda, while the latter concentrates on the political aspects. All three of these 'Clubs' share many common members and hold joint meetings and conferences. As explained in other articles on this website it is abundantly clear that these are three heads of the same beast. The CoR has also established a network of 33 National Associations. Membership of the 'main Club' is limited to 100 individuals at any one time. Some members, like Al Gore and Maurice Strong, are affiliated through their respective National Associations (e.g. USACOR, CACOR etc).
I would like to start this analysis of the Club of Rome by listing some prominent members of the CoR and its two sub-groups, the Clubs of Budapest and Madrid. Personally it isn’t what the CoR is that I find so astonishing; it is WHO the CoR is! This isn’t some quirky little group of green activists or obscure politicians. They are the most senior officials in the United Nations, current and ex-world leaders, and the founders of some of the most influential environmental organisations. When you read their reports in the context of who they are – its gives an entirely new, and frightening, context to their extreme claims.
Some current members of the Club of Rome or its two siblings:Al Gore – former VP of the USA, leading climate change campaigner, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Academy Award winner, Emmy winner. Gore lead the US delegations to the Rio Earth Summit and Kyoto Climate Change conference. He chaired a meeting of the full Club of Rome held in Washington DC in 1997.Javier Solana – Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, High Representative for EU Foreign Policy.Maurice Strong – former Head of the UN Environment Programme, Chief Policy Advisor to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit, co-author (with Gorbachev) of the Earth Charter, co-author of the Kyoto Protocol, founder of the Earth Council, devout Baha’i. Mikhail Gorbachev – CoR executive member, former President of the Soviet Union, founder of Green Cross International and the Gorbachev Foundation, Nobel Peace Prize winner, co-founder (with Hidalgo) of the Club of Madrid, co-author (with Strong) of the Earth Charter.Diego Hidalgo – CoR executive member, co-founder (with Gorbachev) of the Club of Madrid, founder and President of the European Council on Foreign Relations in association with George Soros.Ervin Laszlo – founding member of the CoR, founder and President of the Club of Budapest, founder and Chairman of the World Wisdom Council.Anne Ehrlich – Population Biologist. Married to Paul Ehrlich with whom she has authored many books on human overpopulation. Also a former director of Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, and a member of the UN's Global Roll of Honor.
Hassan bin Talal – President of the CoR, President of the Arab Thought Forum, founder of the World Future Council, recently named as the United Nations 'Champion of the Earth'.
Sir Crispin Tickell – former British Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Permanent Representative on the Security Council, Chairman of the ‘Gaia Society’, Chairman of the Board of the Climate Institute, leading British climate change campaigner.Kofi Annan – former Secretary General of the United Nations. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.Javier Perez de Cuellar – former Secretary General of the United Nations.
Gro Harlem Bruntland – United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Change, former President of Norway
Robert Muller – former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, founder and Chancellor of the UN University of Peace.
The Dalai Lama – The 'Spiritual Leader' of Tibet. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
Father Berry Thomas – Catholic Priest who is one of the leading proponents of deep ecology, ecospirituality and global consciousness.
David Rockefeller – CoR executive member, former Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, founder of the Trilateral Commission, executive member of the World Economic Forum, donated land on which the United Nations stands.Stephen Schneider – Stanford Professor of Biology and Global Change. Professor Schneider was among the earliest and most vocal proponents of man-made global warming and a lead author of many IPCC reports.Bill Clinton – former President of the United States, founder of the Clinton Global Iniative.Jimmy Carter – former President of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.Bill Gates – founder of Microsoft, philanthropist
Garret Hardin – Professor of Human Ecology. Originator of the 'Global Commons' concept. Has authored many controversial papers on human overpopulation and eugenics.
Other current influential members:(these can be found on the membership lists of the COR (here, here, and here), Club of Budapest, Club of Madrid and/or CoR National Association membership pages)
Ted Turner – media mogul, philanthropist, founder of CNN
George Soros – multibillionare, major donor to the UN
Tony Blair – former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Deepak Chopra – New Age Guru
Desmond Tutu – South African Bishop and activist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Timothy Wirth – President of the United Nations Foundation
Henry Kissinger – former US Secretary of State
George Matthews – Chairman of the Gorbachev Foundation
Harlan Cleveland – former Assistant US Secretary of State and NATO Ambassador
Barbara Marx Hubbard – President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution
Betty Williams – Nobel Peace Prize LaureateMarianne Williamson – New Age 'Spiritual Activist'
Robert Thurman – assistant to the Dalai Lama
Jane Goodall – Primatologist and Evolutionary Biologist
Juan Carlos I – King of Spain
Prince Philippe of Belgium
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands
Dona Sophia – Queen of Spain
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero – current Prime Minister of Spain
Karan Singh – Former Prime Minister of India, Chairman of the Temple of Understanding
Daisaku Ikeda – founder of the Soka Gakkai cult
Martin Lees – CoR Secretary General, Rector of the UN University of Peace
Ernesto Zedillo – Director of The Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Frithjof Finkbeiner – Coordinator of the Global Marshall Plan
Franz Josef Radermacher – Founder of the Global Marshall Plan
Eduard Shevardnadze – former Soviet foreign minister and President of Georgia
Richard von Weizsacker – former President of Germany
Carl Bildt – former President of Sweden
Kim Campbell – former Prime Minister of Canada and Senior Fellow of the Gorbachev Foundation
Vincente Fox – former President of Mexico
Helmut Kohl – former Chancellor of Germany
Romano Prodi – former Prime Minister of Italy and President of the European CommissionVaclav Havel – former President of the Czech Republic
Hans Kung – Founder of the Global Ethic Foundation
Ruud Lubbers – United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Mary Robinson – United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Jerome Binde – Director of Foresight, UNESCO
Koïchiro Matsuura – Current Director General of UNESCO
Federico Mayor – Former Director General of UNESCO
Tapio Kanninen – Director of Policy and Planning, United NationsKonrad Osterwalder – Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations
Peter Johnston – Director General of European Commission
Jacques Delors – Former President of the European Commission
Domingo Jimenez-Beltran – Executive Director of the European Environment Agency
Thomas Homer-Dixon – Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Toronto
Hazel Henderson – Futurist and 'evoluntionary economist'
Emeka Anyaoku – former Commonwealth Secretary General, current President of the World Wildlife Fund
Wangari Maathai – Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, founder of the Green Belt Movement
and many more….
The concept of 'environmental sustainability' was first brought to widespread public attention in 1972 by the Club of Rome in their book entitled The Limits to Growth. The official summary can be read here. The report basically concluded that the growth of the human population, and an increase in prosperity, would cause an ecological collapse within the next hundred years:
“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
“It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.”
“The overwhelming growth in world population caused by the positive birth-rate loop is a recent phenomenon, a result of mankind's very successful reduction of worldwide mortality. The controlling negative feedback loop has been weakened, allowing the positive loop to operate virtually without constraint. There are only two ways to restore the resulting imbalance. Either the birth rate must be brought down to equal the new, lower death rate, or the death rate must rise again.”
“The result of stopping population growth in 1975 and industrial capital growth in 1985 with no other changes is that population and capital reach constant values at a relatively high level of food, industrial output and services per person. Eventually, however, resource shortages reduce industrial output and the temporarily stable state degenerates.”
“Man possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a totally new form of human society - one that would be built to last for generations. The two missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term goal that can guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the Human Will to achieve that goal.”
“Without such a goal and a commitment to it, short-term concerns will generate the exponential growth that drives the world system toward the limits of the earth and ultimate collapse. With that goal and that commitment, mankind would be ready now to begin a controlled, orderly transition from growth to global equilibrium.”
So as you can see the even back in 1972 the Club considered modern industrial society to be completely unsustainable. They state that even if population was frozen at 1975 levels, and industrial activity at 1985 levels, then the earth’s ecosystems would still ultimately collapse. The CoR has not changed these views in the slightest, in fact, in the last three decades their warnings have become increasingly more urgent and alarmist. They call this imminent collapse the ‘World Problematique’ and their proposed solution the ‘World Resolutique.’
The Limits to Growth is considered to be the most successful environmental publication ever produced and propelled the Club of Rome to its current position of an environmental thought-leader and a major consultant to the United Nations. It has been translated into more than forty languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Throughout the 1970s and 80s the concept that humanity was irreparably damaging the earth gained popularity and facilitated the formation of mainstream and activist environmental groups.
All meetings of the CoR are held ‘behind closed doors’ and no public records are kept. However the Club does produce many ‘discussion reports’ that can be found on its website. The United Nations contracts the Club of Rome to prepare ‘Policy Guidance Documents’ which it uses in formulating its policies and programmes. A quick search for Club of Rome on the UNESCO publications site reveals 250 such documents. There are many other documents there authored by CoR members acting in other capacities. As many high ranking UN officials are actually CoR members, this is like a man asking himself for advice, and then agreeing with that advice. Not very objective! Various UN organisations also hold joint conferences with the CoR.
While checking the Club of Rome website this morning the first item in their ‘current news’ section refers to a briefing delivered by the CoR to G8 officials in preparation for the upcoming G8 meeting. The second item is a summary report from the Club of Romes ’strategy planning retreat’ with 150 senior UNESCO officials. The joint CoR/UNESCO communique states:
“We are at the end of an era – a turning point in history. We are approaching the threshold of runaway climate change. We underline the urgency of radical action to reduce emissions, by both immediate action and longer-term measures; to stress to political leaders the non-linear nature of the processes at work which will generate sudden change; and to assert that the overriding priority must be to avert the impending risk of catastrophic climate change.” - CoR/UNESCO communique
Twenty years after the Limits to Growth the CoR published another major report that became an instant best-seller. In The First Global Revolution the Club of Rome claimed that the time to act had run out. It was now or never. Delay in beginning corrective measures will increase the damage to the world ecological system and ultimately reduce the human population that will eventually be supportable. They also stated that democratic governments are far too short-sighted to deal with the ‘problematique’ and new forms of governance are urgently required.
In order not too violate any copyright protection I will not reproduce the text of the book on this site. However, it is permissible for me to quote a brief excerpt in the context of this wider discussion. The complete text (third ed.) can be read and searched online at Google Books. As you read the following quote (from page 75, first ed.), please remember the names of the leaders listed above. This is not some quirky little cult. This is the stated agenda of the leaders of the environmental movement:
“This is the way we are setting the scene for mankind’s encounter with the planet. The opposition between the two ideologies that have dominated the 20th century has collapsed, forming their own vacuum and leaving nothing but crass materialism.
It is a law of Nature that any vacuum will be filled and therefore eliminated unless this is physically prevented. “Nature,” as the saying goes, “abhors a vacuum.” And people, as children of Nature, can only feel uncomfortable, even though they may not recognize that they are living in a vacuum. How then is the vacuum to be eliminated?
It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose.
New enemies therefore have to be identified.
New strategies imagined, new weapons devised.
The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.
The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation
Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”So, long before Global Warming became a well known issue Al Gore and his Club of Rome colleagues stated that they would use the threat of global warming to unite humanity and "set the scene for mankind's encounter with the planet." In the same way that shamans and sooth-sayers in medieval times used their advance knowledge of when eclipses would occur to control and terrify their followers, they would use a natural phenomenon as their 'enemy' to achieve their objectives. But then they state that although Global Warming would be presented as the initial enemy, the real enemy of humanity would be portrayed as man himself. I am already noticing how frequently the terms climate change and overpopulation are being uttered in the same breath.
Having discovered that all these influential environmental leaders were associated with the Club of Rome I set about reading all the reports, lectures and speeches on their website as well as the reports commissioned by the UN. I was amazed to find that they lay out their entire agenda for anyone who has eyes to see. Exactly the same themes, concepts and phrases are repeated continuously throughout their publications. They are full of references to 'imminent collapse', 'dying planet', 'our mother Gaia', 'wrenching transformation', 'united global society', 'global consciousness', 'new forms of governance' etc. They truly intend to bring about the world's First Global Revolution.
The Kosmos Journal provides perhaps the best insight into their worldview. This Journal was founded by the Club of Rome in partnership with with several of its sibling organizations. As described in my article, The Green Web, the CoR has established a network of supporting organizations, each focusing on a different aspect of their agenda. The Kosmos Journal contains many articles written by CoR members. The basic premise of their worldview is:
"Modern industrial civilisation is fast outstripping the Earth's natural regenerative and life-supporting capacity..."
"At current rates of resource depletion and environmental degradation a near complete collapse of ecological integrity will occur within the next 100 years..."
"Gaia, our Mother, who nutured humanity for countless millenia within her womb of evolution, is dying..."
“A small window of opportunity now exists to transform humanity into a sustainable global interdepedant society based on respect and reverence for Earth..."
"A radical change from the current trajectory is required, a complete reordering of global society..."
"Humans only truly unite when faced with a powerful external enemy..."
"At this time a new enemy must be found, one either real or invented for the purpose..."
"Democracy has failed us, a new system of global governance, based on environmental imperatives, must be implemented quickly..."
Now that Obama is firmly ensconced in the White House the Club of Rome and its affiliates are swinging into high gear. The CoR recently unveiled a new 3-year programme entitled A New Path for World Development. The Club of Madrid has launched the Road to Copenhagen, a joint programme with the UN Environment Programme intended to facilitate a binding global climate change treaty in 2009. Perhaps most interesting is the State of Global Emergency declared by the Club of Budapest in October 2008. The declaration states that we only have four or five years to prevent a total collapse of the Earth's ecosystems. To quote from the document:
“If we continue on our present unsustainable path, by mid-century the Earth may become largely uninhabitable for human and most other forms of life. Such a total systems collapse could occur much sooner, however, due to runaway global warming or other ecocatastrophes, and/or by nuclear wars triggered by religious, ethnic or geopolitical conflicts or access to diminishing natural resources. The macro-trends driving these global threats and challenges have been apparent for decades and are now building toward a threshold of irreversibility. The scientific modeling of complex systems shows that when systems reach a state of critical instability, they either break down to their components or break through to a higher order of integral functioning. At these “points of no return” maintaining the status quo, or returning to a previous mode of organization and functioning, are not a feasible option.
The acceleration of critical trends and cross-impacts among them indicates that the ‘window of opportunity’ for pulling out of the present global crisis and breaking through to a more peaceful and sustainable world is likely to be no more than four to five years from the end of 2008. This is close in time to the Mayan 2012 prophecy for the end of the current world. The period around the end of 2012 is likely to be a turbulent one for this and other reasons. Predictions coming from the physical sciences foresee disturbances in the geomagnetic, electromagnetic and related fields that embed the planet causing significant damage to telecommunications and impacting many aspects of human activity and health. For the esoteric traditions the end of 2012 will be the end of the known world, although the more optimistic intepretations speak of a new world taking the place of the old.”
This may seem very strange – a group of prominent world leaders talking about ancient Mayan prophecies, but as I describe in my article, Gaia's Gurus, many leading global warming activists openly advocate earth-reverence and other New Age philosophies. Gaia, Global Warming, and Global Governance are intricately entwined, if one truly believes in Gaia, and that she is being fatally harmed by the current system, then a new system of global governance and control would appear to be the only answer. Global Warming provides the ideal 'enemy' to bring about this objective. It is easy for these global elitists to talk about sacrifice, wrenching transformation, population reduction and eliminating the use of fossil fuels but the implications are truely horrendous.
Even if you think this is all nonsense I would ask you to at least read these quotes and excerpts, and think about the implications of their agenda. Everyday I am amazed at how quickly things are changing. It is coming hard and fast. It's almost like reading a book and then watching the television adaptation, except that this adaptation is not a movie - it's on the evening news. As Al Gore said in the closing sentence of his statement after he won the Nobel Peace Prize ... "This is just the beginning."
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
The End of America Revisited - 10 Steps to Fascism - New Hampshire Liberty Forum 2014 - Naomi Wolf
From Huffington Post Article on the End of America and 10 Steps to Fascism:
It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here.
And that we are further along than we realise Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda has noted, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2 Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3 Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5 Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." "That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7 Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8 Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9 Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors". And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10 Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
From "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," Chelsea Green Publishing, Sept 2007
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