How We Can Find Our Freedom by John Judge 3 January 2003 How we lost our freedom 911 And JFK - An American Lament by John Kaminski, rense.com, 28 December 2002 http://www.rense.com/general33/howe.htm Friends, This article by Kaminsky is a perfect example to me of the emerging mix of legitimate research and questions raised by progressives, and their co-optation by a right wing anti-government but basically corrupt political analysis into commentary that proceeds without proof (save for the credibility of the cases we actually researched), highlighting only the attacks on "patriots" (note the complaint about how we "harp" on the genocide of native people while ignoring Waco, etc.), and spreading a sort of hopeless cynicism mixed with an "I told you so" egotism. This stuff is all over the net. Half of what he says has merit, but not on the basis of his claiming to know it without proof or foundation. Just because someone rightly tells you that the government is lying to you it does not mean they are telling the truth. What is happening is that an astute progressive analysis of the rise of fascism here and of government covert operations and assassinations is being adopted by right wing spokespeople to gain credibility with a suspicious but ultimately disinformed and gullible public so that they can then sell their depoliticized message that the public are dumb sheep ("except for you and I of course") who have already lost the battle for their freedom and who therefore deserve what they are about to get. There is no political comprehension of real historical trends, of class analysis, of fascism itself, or even of real democracy (save for their sacralization of "America" and the Constitution and "founding fathers"), much less any way out of it except to point at scapegoats whose removal is then supposed to restore real security. They adopt the rhetoric of the left to sell a right wing line (see Spotlight or LaRouche on foreign wars for instance), because they know that is what wins the public. The sad reality is that by abandoning honest historical analysis of conspiracy and the inevitable rise of fascism within all corporate, globalized, and wealth-concentrated states, the left leaves these cogent and critical issues to the right to raise. Instead the left focuses constantly on issue-by-issue reforms, opposition to specific foreign or domestic policies, and a focus on organizing labor and putting progressive candidates into office. Never on what is really needed to change consciousness, move into the 21st century reality of surplus economy and the realization of human and planetary potential, and the creation of real democracy and liberation. Know-it-all cynicism is cheap. They didn't get away with the Kennedy assassination, but they want us to feel powerless about it anyway. The vast majority of the people of this country, as miseducated and ahistorical as they are, still think as we do about the critical issues, but they do not see how to implement their decisions within this obsolete and bankrupt system of non-representative non-democracy. Finally, the rich do not "wholly own" the mass media, save for the printing presses, because the electronic media are still legally and technically a commonwealth. They are working to privitize it like they do all commonwealth but we have the tool to take the licensing away from their monopolization if we wish to assert it. That one struggle alone would do more for all our issues than working against ourselves on each one does. We must envision our own liberation. It will not come from "patriots" mired in racism, reaction, cynicism and the bankrupt past of patriarchy and genocide. It must come from the hearts and minds of the diversity that now makes up modern society in this, the top of the industrial heap. The liberation of America will be the liberation of the rest of the world. The current genocidal machinery in place can only be stopped by the American people now. The Industrial Age removed human musculature from production. The Information Age is removing our nervous system. The need for labor is approaching zero, as are all the ills of subsistence history, hunger, illness, aging, destruction of the ecosystem for short term gain, war, and even social alienation. The question is will 2% of our population, which is only 4% of the world's population, control 90% of the wealth and resources here (which means most of 65% of the total resources worldwide), creating the pressure for genocide, and the uselessness of labor (read humans), or will the other 98% of Americans join cause with 96% of the human race, and all other species and the planet itself to use the current technology of surplus to create a world that sustains the ecology while it feeds, clothes, houses, transports, communicates, entertains and opens the full potential of human creativity and love with much less time spent on labor? That is the real crossroad we now face. The nightmare path or the liberation of our potential. Kaminsky will sit and moan, unable to change his own consciousness much less others'. If another world is possible, then we must imagine it and build it so that others can see it. We must learn how to change consciousness, because political power comes from the ability to define a situation, not from the barrel of a gun. We must learn to use the power of creative non-violence and truth force to build human community in concert with nature. We must change the rules of the game in order to win it. And we must eschew power or centralization of control as any solution, and instead learn to empower all of us in making decisions that affect our lives. We must envision the future, not bemoan the past. There is very little time. Shall we be about it?