Sleepwalking into disaster, the human race appears to have crossed the point of no return in more than one area:
- The American people are playing with fire by supporting religious extremist and political dunce Sarah Palin - and they will get burned.
- In the process they may also burn a considerable portion of the rest of the world.
- Synchronously, the financial system gets the last, gentle push over the abyss; hungry and poor people will provide lots of excuses for fascism - some will even ask for it.
- The climate is acting up, as it usually does during this time of the year, but the Sun is not behaving according to expected cycles, and together with a few clues here and there, we wonder if something in the cosmic/geophysical system has not changed for good.
Hockey Mom Fascism
Here's the big ominous news of the month: A fundamentalist, hawkish, power-hungry, far-right, predatory-capitalist and not very bright woman; rumored to be racist and proven to care naught for the environment, with disturbing links to sinister Christian extremist churches has been tapped as the Republicans vice presidential nominee. She happens to be pleasant enough to the eye (more than John McCain anyway) and calls herself a "hockey mom" and, wonder of wonders, that's all the qualifications the American people seem to need to swing massively to her camp. Indeed, just when everyone was counting on modern messiah Obama to come and 'save us' from George & Dick (there's no chance of that, but never mind), along comes Sarah Palin with all the appeal that John McCain (a man who displays all the charisma of an Egyptian mummy) lacks.
Which is worse - what will happen to the US and the world if the Republicans remain in the White House (as they most probably will), or the fact that a zombie nation is fast asleep while this is happening? And where did we see this very same script before?
Oh, yes, it was the 1930s and a blue collar little (one could say funny) man, with certain religious views, and an army of Aryan soldiers ready to die for his pathological paramoralisms, was rising to power in Germany. A few people were able to see Hitler for who he was and what the consequences of his reign would be. Among them was a journalist named Fritz Gerlich, who paid with his life for his work, and Sebastian Haffner, who lived to tell us the story in a manuscript found and published by his son after his death, titled Defying Hitler. Haffner, with great insight paints a vivid portrait of "what led so many ordinary Germans to join with or acquiesce to the Nazi program", placing personal responsibility on each German citizen for the consequences of this action or inaction. He wrote:
"... It may seem a paradox, but it is nonetheless the simple truth, to say that on the contrary, the decisive historical events take place among us, the anonymous masses. The most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large... Decisions that influence the course of history arise out of the individual experiences of thousands or millions of individuals."We know what happened in Nazi Germany, yet today we complacently wonder to ourselves: "how could the German people have allowed Hitler to do what he did? How cruel and inhuman were they to allow the Nazis to perpetrate such horrendous crimes!"
Perhaps some of you think we are being too alarmist or pessimistic about Palin. After all, the Republicans haven't won the election yet and although they did creep ahead in the polls for a while, Obama seems to be back on top, right? And if he wins, who knows, maybe he could turn out to be a man of the people who plays the game well enough to get into a position from which he could do some good?
We at SOTT have a problem with this view. Experience has taught us that there are no real elections in modern Western Democracies, and that the American people in particular do not have the luxury of actually electing anyone at this point in time. By now, the means and methods for stealing elections have been perfected by the right wing Christian fundies, and they are planning to do it again. Yes folks, election theft for 2008 is already underway!
Since the McCain ticket was not doing that well (how to convince the people that McCain won if he is so far behind Obama?) they brought out the 'heavy weapons', the mom of our worst nightmares, in the hope that she will appeal to all other mothers and women. McCain and Palin are playing the 'Sisterhood' card with barely-disguised cynicism. As if normal women share any kind of real femininity with Ms. Pitbull. When the final results are known, we'll probably be told that McCain and Palin won by a short margin, and the media commentators will tell us that the "hockey mom" factor convinced those few who did not make up their minds until the last minute.
So there you have it. The only thing they really need to establish during the campaign is a plausible explanation for a 'victory', and they can only do so if the masses are asleep. It is in the sense of being awake (or not) that we, the anonymous masses, are responsible for the outcome. People who are awake and aware are immune to fraud.
Palin, if nothing else, stands for everything that is against true femininity and motherhood. She and that army of trained faithful warriors are ready to give their lives for paramoralisms and psychopathic dogmas, spreading death and destruction on their path. Sound familiar?
Palin is a member of a cult with laughable beliefs, yet the bunch of them have, over the last two decades, infiltrated the American political sphere, and turned the country, slowly but surely, into a police state. They took over the media and for years have been brainwashing millions of people, remembering all the while, that "education" starts at a young age.
Palin, their blue-collar muse, believes that the war in Iraq is an act of God, and proudly sends her son to do God's will, because, "Hey! It's about time for that Rapture and only we, the 'Chosen' will be saved, but those others have to go". Those 'others' by the way, include the vast majority of ordinary people, people like you and me. Behind Palin are the same hands that have been playing Bush all along - the Dominionists .
To put it charitably, Palin is a woman of dubious intelligence. She can't answer a question that is not in her script and believes that the earth is 6000 years old, despite all geological, scientific evidence. She is clearly dangerously delusional.
This mean, cruel woman's policies favor killing endangered animals and destroying Mother Earth.
This inhuman woman, incapable of empathy, voted that the raped women of Alaska had to pay for their own forensic examinations. Her right-wing fundamentalist policies are against families and women in general.
This hypocritical woman uses people to achieve her goals and took the hard-earned money of Alaskans to spend it on her cult, as reported here.
And she has a good chance of becoming the president of the US. McCain is too old and has health issues, and yes, everything shows that he will win. Hear it from the mouth of an expert. Besides, the Rothschild family - the system's ultimate insiders - do not bet on a horse to see it lose the race. And it seems that they are betting a bundle on McCain.
Another alarming aspect is that we are seeing a lot of pressure being put on women in these elections. As the Women's Voices, Women Vote put it:
[...] unmarried women "have the potential to elect the next President." In an email, WVWV writes that "While married women favored McCain over Barack Obama by 49 to 42 percent, unmarried women supported Obama over McCain by 60 to 30 percent...Numbering 53 million, these single, separated, divorced and widowed women represent 26 percent of the voting age population." Add to this that for the first time in history, almost as many adult American women are unmarried as married, and we can see why Sarah Palin may have been a political choice for the GOP.We wonder whether these women will be the scapegoats when the rigged election results show that the next four years will be even worse than the eight previous ones with Bush; "Hey, they were the ones responsible, not the Diebold machines". All these millions of "single, separated, divorced and widowed women".... Uppity women, anyone?
We wonder also whether most of them will wake up and realize that while Palin is marketed as being the female and the mother, in reality her being and core beliefs are slaying everything feminine. Some already have.
Will the rest of us? Will we heed Haffner's words and allow our decisions to change the course of history? Because as is shown below, in all respects, the world is currently not a happy-go-lucky place at all!
Welcome to Gilead, Governor Palin!
If you've ever read Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, you will recall the key role that was played by the women assigned to be the "Aunts." The story revolves around a futuristic American society in which fundamentalist Christians install a gender-based caste system where each woman is assigned a specific societal function. It is a commentary on the dangerous erasing of the line between church and state in the contemporary United States.
The merging of religion and government is carried out by a group of older, white male "commanders" whose propaganda demands that citizens be constantly terrorized into submission and obedience. The resulting regime is Atwood's vision of the worst-case scenario: an American police-state theocracy where every woman's identity is reduced to her sexual attributes, and each is assigned to a category based on her physical qualifications. Subtle references to racist philosophy are mixed into the literalist religious rhetoric.
The attractive young women of reproductive age are the "handmaids"; the attractive but infertile middle-age women are the "wives"; the dark-skinned women of any age are domestic servants, and so on. All women are forbidden from reading or writing. The country is renamed the Republic of Gilead, a reference to the biblical homeland of the patriarchs. And the Aunts - who are middle-aged white women of some previous prestige and education - are especially sinister characters. The primary job of the Aunts is to keep the handmaids (the childbearers) subservient.
They go about this by convincing the handmaids that they are powerless and can only contribute to society when they fulfill their God-given responsibility to serve the commanders. The Aunts' job, put simply, is to exploit other women by keeping them submissive and telling them that it's for the good of all (and even more insidiously, that in obeying, the handmaids "empower" themselves.) What makes the Aunts so remarkable is their collective failure to realize that they are simply being used by the commanders to keep other women in line, and their willingness - glee, even - at doing so is simultaneously sad and terrifying.
So what compels the Aunts to become traitors to both their sex and their country? First, they believe that their contribution to the repressive social order is righteous, and second, they've found that under this rigid system of social control, they have the illusion of a tiny bit of power.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Governor and Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is the Gileadian "Aunt" manifested. Her sudden emergence onto the American political scene, accompanied by a burst of enthusiasm on the part of many American women, is a surreal example of life imitating art. Much of Palin's rhetoric, tactics and personal philosophy seem to be taken directly from the Auntie training manual.
By accepting the position on the GOP ticket despite her astonishing lack of qualifications, Palin signaled that she was prepared to be used - on the basis of her sex alone - in exchange for the promise of status and power.
Refer to Palin's RNC convention speech, which was mostly a fawning homage to McCain's patriotism and leadership, sprinkled with condescending references to Obama as "our opponent." Although the lines were delivered with Palin's own folksy vernacular and over-enunciation, it was not Palin, but McCain - or more accurately, the GOP elders at whose feet he finds himself on election eve - who wrote the speech and whose voice echoed through the hall that night in St. Paul. Women who find themselves drawn to Palin because they think she epitomizes the classic "woman who has it all" might want to take a closer look. Sarah Palin was picked for the ticket solely because of - not despite - the fact that she is female. By keeping her sequestered from the media, McCain has confirmed he does not have faith in an unscripted Palin's ability to represent the campaign to the world.
By going along with it, Palin is telling us that she's perfectly fine with being controlled by her male superiors. And by portraying herself as the candidate of the empowered woman (while simultaneously promoting policy that is openly hostile to the interests of working and middle-class American women), she reveals the sad truth about how little progress we've actually made.
Lest we think that Senator McCain is hesitant to keep pushing this stereotype in the face of abysmal performances by Palin in news interviews, the most recent reports reveal that his campaign intends to hype the expected wedding between Palin's pregnant daughter and her boyfriend, the date of which is apparently being set just prior to the November election - with McCain and Palin sitting in the front row.
Is it possible that Sarah Palin is just blissfully un-self-aware, or is it that she so eager for any illusion of power that she'll allow herself to be marketed no matter what the cost to the dignity of all women? If Palin were truly an empowered woman, she would have refused to allow herself and her daughter to be used in this manner - to assist a party whose rhetoric and imagery promote the ideal woman as deferential to established norms rather than acting as an independent - or critical - thinker.
If her selection was intended to signal to American women that empowerment is possible, why is Palin being kept under lock and key? Clearly, this is not an individual whose intelligence or perspective McCain respects, or else he would permit her to speak for herself. To continue pretending that Palin's selection was anything other than an attempt to manipulate the voting public on the basis of a straitjacketed view of sexual roles is a dangerous lie that no American of any gender can afford to abide.
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