|
It’s Munich In America. There Will Be No Normandy.
By David Michael Green
02/22/06 "ICH"
-- --
This is it, folks. This is the scenario our Founders lost sleep
over. This is the day they prepared us for.
Outside the Philadelphia convention Benjamin Franklin was asked
what sort of government he and his colleagues were crafting. His
reply? “A republic. If you can keep it.” And that is just the
question at issue today. Can we keep it?
Sure, it can sound melodramatic to use the f-word (no, not the
one Churlish Cheney hurled at Patrick Leahy), and I have mostly
avoided doing so for just that reason. Especially where the
politically less informed are concerned, arguing that America is
slipping into fascism can be the first and last point they’ll
hear you make.
But, nowadays, even George F. Will is worried. You know you’re
in a seriously bad place when that happens.
America may not be a fascist country today, but it’s not for
want of trying. I have no question but that through Dick
Cheney’s dark heart courses the blood of Mussolini. No wonder
the damn thing’s so diseased. And I have no doubt that Karl Rove
has only admiration and envy for Joseph Goebbels. Hey, why can’t
we do that here? (Hint: We are.)
America is not a fascist country (if it was, you wouldn’t be
reading this), but pardon me if I don’t defer to Bush defenders
and ringside Democrats who consider me hysterical for worrying
about the direction in which we’re heading.
These are the same people who’ve spent the last two decades
denying the existence of global warming, while we now learn with
each passing week how much worse than we had ever imagined is
that environmental wreckage. These are the same people who said
Iraq would be a cakewalk, and planned accordingly. These are the
same people who prepared us for 9/11, the Iraq occupation,
Hurricane Katrina and the prescription drug plan, and who have
set new records for ineptitude in responding to those crises.
These are the people who can’t get body armor on our troops,
three years after launching the war, and who are getting
flunking grades in terrorism preparation from the 9/11
Commission four years after that attack. These are the same
people who have turned a massive surplus into a record-setting
debt, and coupled it with equally breathtaking trade deficits.
And now they want to cut federal tax revenue even more.
Yes, he is the president, but golly gee, Sargent Carter, he sure
seems to make an awful lot of mistakes!
So forgive me if I don’t trust their judgement on matters of
rather serious importance. Forgive me if I don’t stand by hoping
they’re right as the two hundred year-old experiment in American
democracy goes down the toilet. Besides, I thought being a
conservative meant taking the prudent course, anyhow. Even if
there was only a one in a hundred chance that a grenade was
live, would you play with it? Wouldn’t it have been better to
have acted ‘conservatively’ with the fate of the planet at
stake, and assumed that global warming might be real? And,
likewise, shouldn’t we worry about what is happening to American
democracy now, while we still can?
The truth is, there is a government in office which seeks such
complete power and dominance that even some conservatives have
started to notice. Too blind to see the true intentions of this
bunch, they can at least figure out that an imperial presidency
created by George Bush might one day be inherited by Hillary
Clinton (complete with her plans for a revolutionary
dope-smoking lesbian Marxist state and global UN domination,
enforced by an armada of black helicopters), so now even these
fools are getting nervous about where this goes. They know that
the only difference between the monarchism our Founders so
reviled and contemporary Cheneyism is that the technology of our
time allows George Bush to turn George III into George Orwell.
It’s Munich in America, people. We can dream the pleasant dream
that if we just stand by quietly while the Boy King gobbles up
some of our liberties, he won’t want any more, but that would be
a lot like Chamberlain dreaming that a chunk of Czechoslovakia
would be enough to appease Hitler. It wasn’t, and it won’t be.
Do I overstate the concern? The New York Times recently
editorialized “We can't think of a president who has gone to the
American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them
to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the
balance of powers – and just trust him. We also can't think of a
president who has deserved that trust less.” The Times should
know. Between rah-rah’ing the war for Bush, sitting on the
Downing Street Memos as if they were banana import trade policy
documents, and covering for Judith Miller while she covered for
The Cheney Gang, they have about as much blood on their hands as
does Donald Rumsfeld. But if even the Times can work up the
concern to print a line like that, we’re in a world of hurt.
And we are, in fact, in a world of hurt. Those shreds of
parchment on the floor of the National Archives aren’t from Mrs.
Washington’s shopping list, I’m afraid to say.
It is true, of course, that other presidents – even the best of
them – have taken enormous liberties with the Constitution,
especially during wartime. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, FDR
jailed Americans on the West Coast for the crime of having
Japanese ancestry, Truman and Eisenhower stood by while
McCarthyism ripped a gaping hole through American civil
liberties, and Nixon and his plumbers went to work on his
political enemies in the name of national security. Of course,
we now look back on those episodes as among the most shameful in
American history. But the present crew is even more dangerous
for their intentions of creating permanent war to justify
permanent repression.
Already they’ve torn large chunks out of the Constitution.
Article One creates the legislative branch, that which the
Founders intended to be the most powerful and consequential.
Today, we have a president who makes the stunning assertion that
he is the “sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs”. This
Congress seems mostly to agree, even though the Founders gave
them the power to declare war, to fund all governmental
activities, to ratify treaties and to oversee the executive.
Who, us? Bye-bye Article One.
Article Three creates a Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes
(especially over governmental powers) and to protect the
Constitution. But BushCo can’t be bothered to follow even the
Court’s tentative interventions into due process concerning
Guantánamo and beyond. And why should it? By the time they get
done with loading the damn thing up with ‘unitary executive’
fifth-column shills like Roberts and Alito, it will be a moot
court, just like the ones in law school. Once the Supreme Court
becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of the executive branch (about
one vote from now), it’s bye-bye Article Three.
The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble in
protest. But protest is a joke in Bush’s America. People are
kenneled off into pens so far from the president he is never
confronted with any contrary views at all, apart from the odd
funeral he has to show up at but Rove can’t script. The halls of
Congress are ground zero for American democracy, much boasted
about at home and jammed down the throat of the world (except
when the results don’t favor American corporate or strategic
interests). But go there and sit in the balcony wearing a
t-shirt with the number of dead soldiers in Iraq printed on it
and see how fast you get a lesson in Bush’s interpretation of
the Bill of Rights. And that little display at the state of the
union address was no freak event, either. That kind of thing
happened all the time during the 2004 campaign. At Bush rallies,
people were getting arrested for the bumper-stickers on their
cars.
The First Amendment also protects freedom of the press. That
freedom has not been eliminated, per se, but it has been
effectively neutered beyond effectiveness. Between the White
House intimidating most of the press, coopting the rest,
stonewalling information requests, planting stories in the
American and foreign media, and buying off journalists, today’s
mainstream media has too often become a pathetic megaphone for
White House lies, and that includes those supposed bastions of
liberalism, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bye-bye
First Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees “against unreasonable searches
and seizures” and requires that “no warrants shall issue, but
upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation”. Can you
say “NSA”? “Guantánamo”? “Abu Ghraib”? It’s bad enough that Bush
has authorized himself to bug anybody, arrest anybody, convict
anybody and silence anybody, but his NSA chief doesn’t even
appear to have read the Fourth Amendment. That whole thing about
probable cause was lost on him, as he and his president
simultaneously trampled the separation of powers and checks and
balances doctrines by eliminating two out of three branches of
government from their little surveillance loop.
Meanwhile, informed estimates repeatedly assert that the
majority of detainees rotting away in Guantánamo are there
either because they were standing in the wrong place at the
wrong time simply and got swept away like so much garbage into a
dustpan, or were reported as al Qaeda so that one Afghan clan
could use the US military to burn another. And so there they
sit, unable to be charged, to be tried, to exercise habeas
corpus, to have representation, to confront witnesses – unable
now even to starve themselves to death in protest. If this
wasn’t precisely the fear of the Founders when they put this
language into the Constitution, then Dick Cheney is a poster boy
for the ACLU. Strike the Fourth Amendment.
And take with it the Fifth (no one shall “be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law”), the Sixth
(“the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury”,
the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the
accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to
have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor,
and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense”), and the
Eighth, providing against “cruel and unusual punishments”).
Boom, boom, boom.
In a disgusting display of legal sophistry, the administration
would argue that these provisions don’t apply because of
jurisdiction, which of course was the entire purpose for putting
their gulag in Guantánamo in the first place. As if it is not
American territory since we ‘lease’ it from Cuba. As if Castro
could send in the police to clean up the open sore of Bush’s
human rights travesty there, and the US could do nothing about
it, since it is Cuban land. Right.
But even if Fun With Domestic Jurisprudence is to be their game,
the actions of the administration also represent a massive
breach of international law, since the Geneva Conventions
prohibit precisely these sorts of horrors which the Creature
from Crawford has visited upon the poor SOBs caught in his
dragnet.
Your scissors are probably getting a bit dull by now, but this
means that not only is international law in scraps, but you can
also go ahead and cut out Article Six of the Constitution as
well, which provides that “all treaties made, or which shall be
made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the
supreme law of the land”. Ah, how ‘quaint’. How very ‘obsolete’.
Such treaties may be the supreme law in some land, but
apparently not in Bush Land. Or, at least not if you don’t mind
another cute legal charade, in which a new category of POWs
called “unlawful combatants” is fabricated with the intention of
rendering – with disingenuousness extraordinaire – the detainees
as falling outside the Geneva provisions.
That’s precious, as if a ‘lawful’ Bush all of a sudden got
religion for the fine points of international jurisprudence.
Except, of course, when it came to the need for obtaining a
Security Council resolution to invade Iraq. Except when it comes
to the International Criminal Court, which the Bush junta has
been desperately trying to undermine at every opportunity (gee,
I wonder why, given the Court’s mandate to prosecute war
criminals). Except for nuclear nonproliferation. Except for the
use of white phosphorus in Falluja. Apparently the only legal
distinctions these guys follow are the ones Bush orders Alberto
Gonzales, that paragon of legal independence and the rule of
law, to create for him out of whole cloth. That international
law.
There’s not much left of the Constitution now that these guys
have tortured it as if it were some personal project in Lynndie
England’s basement. Of course, they’ve made damn sure that the
Second Amendment is fully protected, to the point where John
Ashcroft wouldn’t investigate the gun purchase records of the
9/11 hijackers. You gotta love that. I wish they gave the rest
of the Bill of Rights a tenth of the attention the Second
Amendment gets. Heck, for that matter, I wish they’d even
interpret the Second Amendment properly. Maybe in my next
lifetime.
Meanwhile, arguably the three most brilliant inventions of the
Constitution are separation of powers, the guarantee of civil
liberties, and federalism. Even the latter – which has least to
do with foreign affairs or checking executive power, and
therefore has been least assaulted – is under duress as the Bush
Gang attack state power any time it strays from their regressive
political agenda, for instance with respect to euthanasia,
medical marijuana or affirmative action.
In fact, all three of these key constitutional doctrines are
suffering under a brutal assault from a regime which finds
democracy and liberty fundamentally inconvenient to their
aspirations for unlimited power. The administration absurdly
claims to be bringing democracy to the Mid-East. (After that
whole WMD thing went MIA, and Saddam’s links to al Qaeda proved
equally credible, what the hell else were they going to say?).
But far from the ludicrous claims that they are agents for the
spread of democracy abroad, they are busy unraveling it with
furious industry here at home.
It is, I’m afraid, Munich in America, and now we must decide
whether to appease the bullies and pray for happy endings, or
fight back to preserve a two hundred year-old experiment in
democracy. Despite all its flaws and failures, Churchill was
still right about it: Democracy is the worst system of
governance except for all the others. And that makes it worth
fighting for.
But the spot we’re in now is actually worse than Munich, because
there will be no Normandy in this war, and no Stalingrad. No
country with the deterrent threat of a nuclear arsenal can ever
be invaded by another country or group of countries, regardless
of the magnitude of the latter’s own military power.
That means we’re on our own, folks. If we flip completely over
to the dark side, nobody will be storming our beaches and
scrambling up our cliffs to liberate us from our own folly.
Hell, if they weren’t so worried about the international menace
we represent, they’d probably be laughing at us, anyhow,
thinking how richly we deserved the government we got.
But there’s nothing funny about this situation. Hitler dreamed
of a thousand year reich, but didn’t count on the resilience of
an endless army of Slavs, or the technological prowess of a
nation of shopkeepers’ great-grandchildren hammering his
would-be millennium down to a decade. If the US goes
authoritarian (or worse), on the other hand, who will play
Russia or America to our Germany? The answer is no one, and it
is not apocalyptic paranoia to fear a very, very long period of
unrelenting political darkness, once the curtain comes down.
Is this the beginning of the end for American democracy? Maybe.
I have no doubt that unchecked Cheneyism intends precisely that.
It’s therefore up to the rest of us to stop it. It’s up to us to
say yes to Philadelphia, and no to Munich. Because there will be
no Normandy.
Now we find out if we can keep Mr. Franklin’s republic, after
all.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at
Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive
readers' reactions to his articles (pscdmg@hofstra.edu), but
regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to
respond.
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
