8. Religion and Government Intertwined Part 3: The Occult

It Wasn't His Fault

Belief in the occult is neither fascist nor Libertarian.  My purpose here is to not place disbelief on anybody’s religious or spiritual beliefs, but to bring into question many of the political beliefs expressed by some occult groups.  Quite often belief in the occult goes hand in hand with oppression.  The Treaty of Versailles triggered a renewed nationalism in the German people.  German Rosicrucians reexamined the ancient German myths and ancient runic alphabets to create a revived Teutonic religion that celebrated German history and culture.  Many Nazis came out of these alternative religions, but the religions themselves were not fascist.

The Sixties gave rise to a pagan renaissance in the United States, now called Neo-Paganism.  The mainline and Pentecostal churches’ open support for the Vietnam war and the Nixon Administration gave rise to a matriarchal paganism that was imported from England.  Neo-Paganism became a direct challenge to established religion when a psychotherapist calling herself Starhawk published a book called The Spiral Dance. Starhawk introduced a consensus-driven religion without dogma or hierarchy. This idea proved so popular copycat books were picked up by mainstream publishers.  Starhawk’s Wicca took the country by storm.

Without structure or form, Wicca became another victim of the American religion.  As independent Wiccan covens popped up across the country, people imposed the familiar structures of the American Religion upon it.  Not able to understand the lack of hierarchy, “High Priestesses” become absolute dictators.  Not being able to understand a religion without sin or enforced morality, both concepts are replaced with “The Three Fold Law.” The High Priestess is the absolute judge as to what is and what is not a violation of the “Three Fold Law.”  Starhawk’s Wicca has as great a potential of being a tool of oppression as it does of being a means of liberation.

It only makes sense that Libertarianism would find suitable mates amongst the Neo-Pagans.  Libertarians claim to be about Liberty, but actually protect and defend corporate oppression.  Many Neo-Pagan groups claim to be about liberation actually reinforce the American Religion.  These Libertarian Neo-Pagan groups include rigid conformity and morality, the absolute belief in a mythic history, and a rigid hierarchy.  They pretty much reduce their mother goddess to Jesus Christ in drag.

One such Neo-Pagan group which I have had a chance to observe first hand is Church of all Worlds.  CAW predates Starhawk by a good ten years.  It began around the time that Buckland and Sanders were introducing the idea of Paganism.  It was based on the book Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.  Starting out as just another sex, drugs, and rock and roll cult of the Sixties, CAW jumped on the Neo-Pagan band wagon after The Spiral Dance.  In the late Seventies they joined in with Karl Hess’s New Left, and now call themselves a “Libertarian Pagan Church”.

Rather than adopt the anarchist consensus-based structure proposed by Starhawk, CAW has a very rigid Freemason-like hierarchy.  They have a rigid morality based on polyamory and group sex.  Unfortunately, it is a morality based on patriarchal male dominance.  Bisexuality is encouraged amongst the female members, but not the males.  Women having sex together is a turn on for many men.  Women also do not have the same rights to turn down sex as men do.  I know several women, some underage, who had been sexually assaulted at CAW events, and it was the CAW women who were most active in protecting the perpetrators.  That is certainly rigid conformity in morality. CAW insist on the literal truth of their matriarchal mythical history, and apply the Three Fold Law as another incarnation of the Protestant Work Ethic.  In other words if something bad happens to you, it was because you disobeyed the High Priestess or did something to piss off the group.

What I find the most interesting about CAW is their insistence that the rest of the world hates them.  They treat the rest of the world as Evangelical Christianoids simply because we are not interested in their version of the true faith.  The fact of the matter is that most of us don’t give a fiddler’s damn who they pray to or who they screw.  Rather than to stand up for their legal rights, CAW members prefer to consider society “evil” and the government the “black empire” and drop out of society.

This dovetails nicely with Libertarian thought, which also sees the government as evil.  Neither Libertarians or CAW members feel any responsibility towards their fellow citizens or the government that is supposed to be representing them.  They see any sort of structure as a threat to their freedoms.  It never occurs to them that they can work to change these structures.  We will go into this in more detail as we examine the protection of corporate power in the next post.

He Should Have Picked a Pretty Girl

5. Rampant Sexism

Early Heinlein Heroine

The world is changing and not even the Born Again Christians have been able to stem the tide of changing sex roles.  The steady decline in the standard of living have made the two salary household a necessity.  As Born Again Churches have to bow to this necessity, so does the Libertarian movement.  This does not mean that Libertarians have abandoned sexism.  Sexism is alive and well and living in the Libertarian movement today.  Only it is a sexism more in tune with today’s world than the ancient sexism in the Nazi Party… or is it?

Fascism has an element of hypocrisy which cannot be disguised.  While pretending to be progressive, fascism promotes reactionary principles.  Mussolini’s Corporationism pretended women’s suffrage while pandering to the Catholic Church and its misogynistic teachings.  German fascism outright admitted that women were for producing more soldiers.  Libertarians have to be a lot more subtle.

Libertarian sexism can be found in the works of Robert A. Heinlein.  The late Heinlein was a political reactionary of the Goldwater school.  This gave him much in common with Karl Hess. Hess was a professional Pubic Relations agent who had been Barry Goldwater’s speech writer.  Hess was one of the fathers of the Libertarian Movement.  Heinlein’s stories dovetailed perfectly with Hess’s “New Left” which rehabilitated Heinlein from a dangerous reactionary to a shining progressive.

Heinlein’s characterizations defined Libertarian sex roles.  His men were tall, strong, shot straight, and never asked the government for anything.  In his earlier works, his women all wanted to have babies. Then, in the early 1960s, Heinlein complicated his female characterization with Stranger in a Strange Land.  In that book, women could have multiple sex partners, but did so to satisfy a Martian cult leader.  Later works removed the religious angle but maintained the basic sexism. Homosexuality was mentioned but rarely portrayed.  Women ran their own businesses, but only to maintain their true role as baby machines.

Confusing political progressivism with sexual progressivism is the hallmark of Libertarian sexism.  It is also the hallmark of Libertarian class distinctions.  It is perfectly acceptable to screw like mad minks if you can afford to raise the babies.  If you cannot, then reproduction and sex itself is closed to you.  Wealth becomes an important part of the Libertarian sexual identity.  The main difference between European fascism and Libertarianism is the outright classism.  You are not fully a man or a woman unless you are wealthy.

Gays and Lesbians are granted equal rights with the same lack of interest that Libertarians give junkies. Libertarians do not accept gays and lesbians as true equals, and place them within the same lower class as poor people who cannot afford to raise children according to Libertarian standards, or drug addicts.  This is not to say that there are no gay or lesbian libertarians, but that gays and lesbians are not welcome into Libertarian society as full members.  Traditional ideas of sexual morality are maintained in Libertarian society.  The difference is that straight men have even more rights than anyone else.

An excellent example of this would be The Church of All Worlds.  CAW identifies itself as a Libertarian church based on the works of Robert A. Heinlein.  CAW encourages promiscuity amongst its members. Indeed, they discriminate against members who prefer to maintain an exclusive relationship.  Homosexuality amongst male CAW members simply does not happen. I have only heard of one male CAW member who identified as bisexual.  Bisexuality amongst females is encouraged as it is a turn on for the men.  Men certainly do not put on little sex shows for the women.  Full lesbians are not welcome amongst CAW.  After all, men have no power over lesbians.  I will be mentioning CAW again in the section about religion and fascism.

So that pretty much describes sex roles amongst Libertarians.  Men are straight-jacketed into traditional stereotypes, while women are now the mutual property of the men, and their sexual freedoms stop where the male sex fantasies end.  When you stop and think of it, Libertarians have a lot in common with Joseph Smith’s Mormon movement in the 19th Century.  Women are still seen as baby machines for the state. The main difference is that now women have to earn half the salaries and remain second class citizens and sex objects.

No Girls Allowed

2. Disdain for Human Rights Part 2: The Minutemen

Nazi Minuteman

There is no branch of the Libertarian Party that shows its true fascist colors better than the Minutemen. That they are tolerated within the ranks of the Libertarians is proof that the Libertarians have absolutely no respect or regard for the Constitution they claim to be defending. The Minutemen are the Libertarian version of the Nazi Brown Shirts. Rather than tormenting Jews, the American Fascists are tormenting undocumented workers. Their actions vary from posting bizarre paranoid articles on the Internet to threats of actual violence and bodily harm to Mexican immigrants; documented and undocumented alike.

Claiming 2^nd Amendment rights, The Minutemen are armed and claim that they are a legal and well regulated militia. They are not legal. Minutemen exist in defiance of the 14^th Amendment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Everybody within the borders of the United States has the same legal protections. Undocumented workers have the same rights to legal protection for their lives and property as American citizens. Undocumented workers have the same rights of due process and a jury of their peers. So far, the Minutemen have contented themselves with blowing off a lot of hot air. They do some counter protesting, or they swill beer in their yards while watching the border. So far there has been no violence. Once the Minutemen harm an undocumented worker, they will prove themselves to be an illegal organization and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The Minuteman are a perfect illustration of the mindless nationalism which dominates the entire Libertarian movement. It is reminiscent of Nazi Aryan superiority. To the Libertarians, only American citizens have the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Apparently Constitutional rights are so rare that there are not enough to share with guests. The very name “Minutemen” brings to mind the Revolutionary War and Paul Revere’s famous ride. It is a chilling reminder of the Brown Shirt’s association with the Teutonic Knights and the Vikings. The Minutemen evoke mythic history to confront their make-believe danger.

Indeed, undocumented workers pose no danger to either the American economy or the tax payer’s money. Undocumented workers take jobs that the average Libertarian spits upon, and the undocumented worker’s role in agriculture is the only thing that keeps the small farmer competitive with the agromonopolies. In a healthy economy, the cost of medical and social services are easily absorbed through the intelligent investment of our tax money. True, right now we do not have a healthy economy. Thanks to the Neocons and their Libertarian lap-dogs, we have a very sick economy. Still, that is no excuse for ignoring the 14^th Amendment.

This brings us to the Libertarian disdain for human rights. Just like the Nazi Brown Shirts, the Minutemen exist only to deny rights to a minority. In this specific case, to a brown skinned Spanish speaking minority. You might notice that the Minutemen are not that active at the Canadian border, even though we do get our share of undocumented Canadians. I have not heard of the Minutemen protesting the undocumented Irish in San Francisco. The Minutemen are simply an expression of economic white elitism that is one of the cornerstones of the Libertarian movement.

In my next post I will be describing scapegoating in Libertarianism, and then we will return to the subject of the Minutemen.

Change You Can Predict

1. Powerful and Consuming Nationalism Part Two: The Myth of Government Spending

The Face of Freedom in Corporate America

Corporations are leeches sucking the life’s blood out of any government which allows them to grow out of control. Many of the people who penned the Constitution knew this. This is why the Constitution grants we the people the rights and powers to regulate corporations. This is why Libertarian propagandists keep quoting the Federalist Papers instead of the actual Constitution. When confronted with the actual Constitution, the Libertarian propagandists claim that the Founders didn’t really want government regulation of corporations. So Libertarians simply ignore the parts of the Constitution they don’t like.

The problem with corporations is that they are clever and adaptive parasites that rarely kill their hosts the same way twice. Nationalism is a form of protective coloring that helps corporations fool their victims into thinking that they are benign entities. In Germany, the corporations wrapped themselves in the trappings of socialism. They even called their political instrument the National Socialist Party and sucked out government money in the name of the people. The Nazis funded the construction of the Volkswagen factories, but it was Henry Ford who pocketed all the profits. Hitler began a program of guaranteed employment, but it was the government that was actually paying the salaries. The corporations were getting free labor.

American corporations are living in hog heaven. They have no less than 50 individual governments to suck dry, but they are held back by the Federal Government. For instance, in order for Enron to have ripped off the State of California as badly as they did, they had to trick the California voters into deregulating the state power industry and take it away from federal oversight. Once the feds were no longer monitoring its bookkeeping, Enron stole with impunity and then used Federal bankruptcy regulations to steal from their employees. This is the true purpose of the Libertarian party. The idea is to so weaken the Federal Government so that it can no longer regulate the corporations and Enron scams can become common business practices.

Having no real Constitutional means to deregulate themselves, the corporations rely on deception. The biggest lie that they are telling their true believers is the myth of government spending. According to the myth of government spending, all our tax money is stuffed into a giant mattress, and then parceled out by a Scrooge-like treasurer. I think that it is a major failure in our public school system that anybody would fall for that whopper.

The truth of the matter is that our tax money is an essential and irreplaceable part of our national economy. Our tax money is not stuffed into the Presidential mattress. Our tax money should be put to work keeping America healthy, working, and strong. Our tax money should be invested in industries which are on American soil and paying living wages to Americans. Our tax money should be invested in small business loans to guarantee competition in a capitalist economy, mortgages for affordable housing, and into other interest accumulating and profit making investments to assure the health of the American economy.

We do not spend our tax money. It is the interest on our tax money that is spent. Spending more money than is taxed is a sign of a healthy economy. After nearly 30 years of Neocon rule, we have an extremely sick economy. We have massive unemployment and homelessness which succeeds in keeping wages down for the few service jobs left in the U.S. Corporations are sucking out billions in profits while Americans are losing their homes, and the Libertarians blame the victims.

The idea behind all this is to so weaken the Federal Government that it will never again be an effective public guardian. The Libertarians wrap themselves up in the flag to pretend they act in the public interest. They make up evidence that the income tax is illegal and unAmerican; ignoring both the 18^th Amendment and the Administrative Law Act which certainly makes the income tax legal. 30 years of Neocon rule has left the Federal Government too broke to effectively monitor corporate crime, and the corporate criminals who fund the Libertarian Party like that just fine. The fact that Libertarians, Born Again Christians, and the Neocons are all telling the same lie shows that they are all working for the same corporations.

Cleaning Up After Bush

1. Powerful and Consuming Nationalism Part One- Overview

The True Face of Libertarians Today

Libertarianism is fascism tarted up in the American Flag. The original name for fascism was corporationism because fascism is rule by the corporations. Hopefully, the discerning reader will see the parallels between Libertarianism and Neoconservatism, and realize that they are two faces of the same worthless coin. Libertarianism organizes non-conformists to support Neoconservative goals, and those goals are no less than the corporate tyranny of the United States.

This is not to say that there are not major differences between American fascism and German fascism, but the Libertarians have adopted the basic structure. For instance, the Nazis had a very subtle propaganda method based on their public school system. The Libertarians have adopted the very same propaganda method, and why not? The American public school system is based on the German one. This method can be described as a direct and shameless appeal to national pride.

Fascist propaganda reduces history to bedtime stories. The Nazis treated the legends of Charlemagne as if they were real. They spoke of a time when Germany was united behind the Kaiser, and all of Germany lived under the code of chivalry. Hitler promised the German people that he would turn the clock back to a time that never happened. The Libertarians are making the same promise.

Here in America, Libertarian propaganda is a shameless appeal to elementary school stories. George Washington and the Cherry Tree becomes more real than the fact that Washington was a slaveholder. Everyone is supposed to forget that John Adams was a royalist who wanted the president addressed as “Your High and Mightiness”, and as president, Adams had a reporter jailed for criticizing him. Libertarians who oppress undocumented workers call themselves Minutemen.

The American founders are reduced from being real people to puppets mouthing whatever the Libertarians want them to mouth. They serve the same purpose Charlemagne served for the Nazis. The American Founders are presented as prophets whose words are sacred and not to be questioned. This places the Federalist Papers as the last word in American Politics instead of the Constitution. The Constitution gives the American people the right to limit the power of the corporations while the Federalist Papers were written to convince corporate officers to accept the Constitution. This is why Libertarian propagandists constantly confuse the Federalist Papers with the Constitution, which will better serve the cause of corporate tyranny.

American fascism promises to turn back the clock back to a revised history where the Federal Government did not tax the citizens. This is patently untrue, because the first thing Tom Jefferson did was impose federal taxes. George Washington put down a rebellion over whiskey taxes. Libertarians want to ignore the entire second part of the Constitution. This is the part that gives the American people the power to enforce laws to regulate corporations. For instance, Libertarians claim to be against censorship, but oppose laws to prevent Fox McNews from lying. They would confuse the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers to justify allowing corporate propaganda.

In short, Libertarians want to further corporate tyranny by ignoring any part of the Constitution that limits corporate power. They use the Founders as puppets to justify their emasculation of the Constitution. Is it any wonder that George W. Bush called the Constitution “just a god damned piece of paper”? This is how Libertarians use rampant nationalism to trick us out of our right to stand up to the corporations. We’ll come back to this in the next post.

Vote for the Corporate Approved

Government of the Corporations by the Corporations and for the Corporations

The Face of Capitalism

This Post is for my friend Mikki.

Capitalism did not exactly take the intellectual world by storm. The intellectual elite and Bohemians of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries found it to be as bad an idea as Royalty. After all, Henry VIII began ennobling Capitalist burghers back in the 1600s. By the time the U.S Constitution was ratified, European Royalty were entirely capitalists and worked in tandem to keep the commoners out of commerce. By the early 1800s, the European intellectuals were waiting for the new American capitalists to become as corrupt and effete as European royalty.

One of the new Capitalist institutions that scared European thinkers the most was the concept of the corporation. Corporations were seen as monsters ravaging the lives of Europeans and Americans alike. Corporations were institutions where the wealthy could pool their resources and be treated as a single entity. Corporations were considered legal individuals under the law, were subjected to special lower taxes, and commanded resources well beyond the capability of individual mortals. Corporations could turn their vast financial powers against smaller and vulnerable individual business people. Corporations were so hated that Mary Shelley wrote a book about them. It was called Frankenstein.

An animated soulless corpse mindlessly destroying the countryside was indeed an apt simile to describe the corporations. The fledgling United States soon found them to be the greatest enemy of individual freedom and a healthy economy ever faced. President Jackson was forced to impose laws to prevent corporations from price fixing, salary fixing, and destroying competition. The corporations responded by trying to have Jackson impeached and removed from office for accepting a hogshead of cheese. They failed and the rest of the history of the United States can be seen as the federal government protecting the freedoms of its citizens from the depredations of the corporations.

The early 20^th Century saw the next phase of the corporate attack on human rights and freedoms. It was called Fascism. Fascism is a system of government where the natural resources and production strength of a nation is held in trust for the corporations. Mussolini coined the phrase fascism because his friends did not like his original name for the philosophy: Corporationism. In Fascism the government removes all laws regulating the behavior of corporations, while maintaining the laws which protect corporations from individuals. For instance, in Nazi Germany, the Volkswagen corporation was privately held but was subsidized by German tax money. All corporations enjoyed the same rights to the point where there was no real competition in Germany and the corporations were dictating policy to Hitler and the Reichstags. The fact is that Germany fell long before the allies invaded Berlin, the corporations ate Germany like a cancer.

Indeed, we frequently go through periods when the corporations destroy us like a plague of locusts. The last time resulted in the crash of 1929. This time we are going through a series of crashes which are doing more long term damage to our economy than corporations have ever done before These crashes are not prevented because we have our own fascist movement which is very active in the United States today. It is misnamed The Libertarian Party and it is working hand in hand with the neocons to deprive us all of our rights and our freedoms.

Over the next two weeks I will be examining the Libertarian party in light of the 14 points of fascism. I will show how the Libertarians are pursuing the same goals and intentions of the Nazi party and how they are using the same propaganda and misdirection that the Nazis used to take power. I do so in hopes that people will see through the lies of the Libertarian corporate lap-dogs and in hopes that the citizens of the United States will take back their government before it is too late.

One Born Every Minute