N O RTH
C O A ST
VO L27N O 5 50C EN TS
TIM E S
EA G LE
JABRUARY 2006
‘In a dark time the eye begins to see ’
-THEODORE ROTHKE
NEW
WORLD
DISORDER
DRAWING BY DALE FLOWERS
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
A paradox that underlies history is that the eras of
greatest creativity and discovery are also the most dangerous.
The six decades since World War 2 are unparalleled in advances
of knowledge and productivity, comparable to the entirety of the
previous ten millennia, and human culture has consequently
structured technologies that are disintegrating civilization even
as civilized life owes its existence to them.
Seers of government and industry patronize the public
with visions of increasing affluence and certain virtually painless
technological solutions to deadly problems caused by technol
ogy. The flimsy assumption is that the haves will be able to
endlessly amuse themselves to death. A persistent irony that
a world in which at least half its human population is threatened
with death every day because it has scarcely enough with which
to survive, is that the portion that has much more than it knows
what to do with is strangling on the effluence of its affluence.
Science and its handmaiden technology modernized
civilization by routinely ripping away its fabric without making
much effort to repair it in a kaleidoscopic surge into an incom
prehensible future. This is the point at which history is declared
dead, without significant meaning except as memory and latent
nostalgia because it is claimed to no longer have any bearing or
effect on present or future, the race is to the swift who disregard
consequences; the present is patently obsolete as it careens into
the future.
Although progress is generally measured through
technical achievement, it should at least be as important to
concentrate on the contradictory evolution of political liberty and
the slow development of a world civilization. Marx anticipated
such a civilization in the 19th century, the two world wars of the
20th century made the concept impossible to resist. The great
contradiction lies with the rights and liberties of individuals and
minorities, and with former colonies of disintegrated empires that
reassert their claims as separate and independent peoples while
genociding themselves with internal feuds and virulent ethnic
cleansing. Everything points to human rights and the reversion
to the age-old struggle of rich against poor; whatever masks or
complexities surround ideologies, their design is to either protect
privilege and power or to establish and extend rights and liberties
to the powerless.
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Capitalism and democracy are not synonymous
During the half century Cold War with Russia they were equated
with each other, but since the dissolution of soviet communism
the old antipathy between power at the top and the struggle for
freedom at the bottom has accelerated in the United States.
The top capitalists do not believe in democracy: they believe in
predatory capitalism and in their own sovereign right for power
over the rest of the people. They publicly proclaim capitalism
coexistant with democracy to mollify the masses, and elections
are held; but their wealth hand-picks and elects their chosen
candidates. The only real politics in the country are between the
Rich Party and the Poor Party: the so-called New World Order
the nation’s plutocrats currently manifest in the name of demo
cracy is a direct schism between the affluent and impoverished,
domestically and globally
America is always at war with itself. It is a battleground
of disparity. Political equity and liberty have not been easy
achievements nor justice anything but a bloody war between
those who would extend democracy and those who would limit
it. The nation’s founders insisted that these rights and liberties
would be fought for here — but anyone who smugly assumes
that the United States and its citizens are exclusively the seeds
of liberty for the rest of the world is wrongheaded in a most
sublime degree. The USA is not a triumphant example of the
historical struggle for democracy but a perpetual work in
process; of necessity the people of this country must always
be in revolution as well as civil war about the very fundaments
of democracy or it will stagnate and be suppressed.
Yet the USA seems hell-bent to throw off its last vestiges
of democratic government and reemerge as a militant theocratic
corporatocracy. The rights and equities of common citizens are
in peril. Discrimination against distinct groups is redirected at
members of those groups who refuse to assimilate into the main
stream. Dissent in opposition to the nation’s militaristic response
to 9/11 and subsequent attempts at suspension of civil liberties
is harshly criticized and whoever protests unilateral seizure of
power by the nation’s current leaders is vilified and spied upon
— and apparently everybody else, which not only erodes privacy
but violates the cornerstone agreement between government
and people that no one should be treated as a criminal (or traitor)
until it is proven they are. Also freedom of religion is certain to
be a major casualty as all religions other than a (corporate) state
sanctioned creed will inevitably be subsumed or liquidated.
The current political climate in the United States is one
of incendiary reversion, of savage descent to public ignorance
and intolerance, which are generally present but not always
given the respect or power of recent years. Serious, almost
morbid attention is paid to the pathological pieties and simpli
fications of religious zealots, racial supremacists and far-right
ideologues who act at the extreme edge of our anxieties and
reduce the national dialogue to a medieval level while manip
ulating the democratic process to ultimately destroy it.
The presidential administration of George W. Bush is
the most culturally and politically repressive in the short history
of the American republic. A few white men of wealth have made
an intolerable grab for power and ordination of a country club
apartheid that has severely eroded much of the basic fiber of
democracy, replacing it with a grim and malignant vision of
apocalyptic governance that excludes diversity, intelligence and
imagination and promotes laws that deny anyone disagreeable
or threatening to them any rights as citizens They are relentless
in their attempts to subvert the wracked remnants of democracy
and intend that those who have never quite enjoyed its fruits
shall never grasp the inspired liberation it is rooted in.
The unelected President and his hard-right adminis
tration of corporate neo-Federalists are the very people the
nation’s revolutionary ancestors warned against and tried to
prevent with Constitutional government and separation of
powers — as well as the series of initial addenda known as
the Bill of Rights which clearly and concisely spell out the
rights and responsibilities of the people.
President Bush and his agents might have been, if not
harmless at least contained in peacetime, but war (which they
claim in Orwellian cant as perpetual) has set them loose on the
Constitution, and they represent the worst danger this nation
faces, considerably more of a threat than the terrorism they
exploit as a shield and raison d'être for annulling the very
freedoms they shamelessly pretend to protect.
The issue is not whether the American people think it is
a good idea to deny or abrogate certain liberties but whether the
President can bypass Congress and the courts and dramatically
alter the legal system by himself—the unilateral dismemberment
of civil liberties and Presidential assault on due process and
Constitutional law in general.
The obsession for world power, America’s self-declared
“manifest destiny," has given it the pyrric paradox of global
supremacy and internal deterioration. Although military power
has been the matrix of the USA’s ascendancy, it has been at the
expense of domestic priorities that until they are debauched act
as the cultural glue holding the country together.
The military/industrial mafia of interlocking corporations
and the Pentagon has created a black hole into which everything
is eventually drawn and disappears, such as the nation’s wealth
and resources, with neither replaced And amidst the flaming
testosterone of a new world order managed by the USA, the
infrastructure of American society has declined with ever larger
numbers of the nation’s most useful citizens sinking deeper
into unemployment and poverty. Freedom and liberty, always
tenuous and unfairly distributed, shrivels under assault by the
privileged who maliciously loot the nation’s substance and spirit
as well as its fiscal treasure
This new era of a rhetorical New World Order’ — a term
used by the 20th century's worst citizen Adolf Hitler to describe
his own world vision — is an awesomely lopsided proposition in
which the USA as the last reigning superpower (excluding China
for the moment) moves to impose its jingoistic purpose economi
cally and militarily upon the world: a distorted vision of a single
nation possessing an immense arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction dominating the planet through fear and repressive
avarice disguised as democracy and liberation.
Yet nuclear power, the fortress of nationalism, has
rendered it obsolete. Nationalism, capitalism, democracy,
socialism and communism are no more than parts of a process
of human development that is always evolving into something
else. Ideals, which are usually expressions of concern that
people have about the welfare of others, develop into ideologies
that separate them as enemies Ideologies do not translate
well into realities. Governments generally violate their charters,
and no matter how they wish to be considered, are most often
oppressive to their populations and aggressive with their
neighbors. Political rights or liberties hardwon by one generation
are usually eroded by successors who take them for granted
without realizing how necessary and rare they are Calculated
fears of enemies leads to abrogation of civil rights. Dialogue
succumbs to what is safe to say or think Demagogues thrive in
atmospheres of fear and despair; without the cooperation of the
populations they arouse and repress, they would have no power
Communism and socialism, the failed creeds of the last
century, were rooted in community and society; not so capital
ism, a word and concept as cold and brittle as a coin The raw
excesses of corporate capitalism in its quest to dominate world
trade, commerce and all exploitable resources since the end of
the Cold War, are under siege by a rising turbulence caused by
intense pressure from below, the bottom of the resources trickle-
down, which is uniting the majority of overcrowded humanity that
struggles for a decent living on the planet This upheaval collates
every previous civil rights and working class struggle It might
very well readjust the center of power and pioneer the firs, true
universally human community in its long evolution
I, would be a grotesque irony that humanity might perish
because it is unable to resolve conflicts from its earliest history,
hopelessly mired in the irredeemable pas, and thus patently self-
destructing its future
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