Votescam and the War Party: A Few Thoughts

Source: Giza Death Star
Dr. Joseph Farrell

Well, this one says it all, and I find myself in a great deal of agreement with the sentiments expressed in it:

Voting Out the War Party?

Now, what epitomized my own political bi-partisanship was this telling paragraph; indeed, I had to re-read it, for it perfectly expressed my own cynicism to the American political “process”:

“If we project the case of Maine’s disappearing voters nationwide, onto all states holding caucuses instead of primaries, then the fraud takes on a scale that threatens to delegitimize the entire process. This at a time when the entire political system is distrusted and even disdained by large portions of the electorate: turnout in the GOP primaries has been significantly lagging this time around, hardly what one would expect from the rank-and-file of a party supposedly eager to overturn the Obama administration. With billionaires buying elections, and both parties under the thumb of the Money Power, ordinary Americans just don’t take elections that seriously anymore. The idea that the electoral process confers any kind of real legitimacy on the victors is a fast-dissipating myth. “

Then there was this:

“What, then, should anti-interventionists do – what should be our attitude toward electoral politics, and what are the implications for a larger strategy for social change?

“Activists have to understand that we’re in this for the long haul: the battle for peace and liberty is bound to be a protracted conflict, one in which we’re going to have to utilize every weapon at our disposal. The idea that we’re going to make an electoral breakthrough, and accomplish much of our agenda in one fell swoop, is wishful thinking: success, when it comes, is going to be incremental. Additionally, it is going to come not as a result of five-second “sound bites” and glitzy campaign ads, but as a consequence of a sustained educational campaign that aims at raising awareness of the vital issues. “

I am bold to suggest, however, that America’s problems go much deeper. We have become victims, as the article suggests, of our own propaganda. We believe we’re the best at everything (and we’re not…and if you have any doubts about that, stick around for a couple more generations when you see what the country is like being run by the products of our “education” system).

The fault of American politics is that we are seeking political solutions to a cultural and spiritual problem: corruption, and materialism. Frankly, the American Empire cannot survive, and the elites are trying mightily to replace it with a global one, and that won’t work either, for the cultural problem will remain, the culture of corruption and materialism is, after all, the culture they have created. While I agree with Raimondo, that success will be incremental, and over the long term, I believe that success can only come as Americans realize their institutions are corrupt because they no longer take control of their own education, of their own thoughts, and literally own the culture.

Back when another global empire was in the final stages of collapse, it was up to local cultural institutions to pick up the cross of handing on culture and learning, but that didn’t work too well either, as the one institution – the Roman Church – that was in a position to do that turned to hate and repression and tyranny. We see the same race to fundamentalisms and similar institutions within our own country. It was only in the Renaissance that Western Europe began to wake up and gradually, painfully, throw off those institutions of “thought police.” It is not for nothing, as our Amerikan Empire enters the final phases of corruption, that we see politicians of both the right and the left racing to wrap themselves in the flag and a thin veneer of religiosity.

What we need now, is not more religion or “edgycashun”, but a kind of Renaissance of culture and learning, of the free exchange of ideas and information, especially of those threatening to any emergent tyrannies.  This is what the talking heads on the television and radio media don’t get about Ron Paul. Congressman Paul knows he doesn’t stand a chance of winning the presidency. But that isn’t, in the final analysis, what his candidacy is about. It’s about ideas, about calling into question the institutions (like the Federal Reserve) that have been grafted on to our republic to transform it into an empire. It’s about calling into question the idea of that empire itself. And in the final analysis, it’s about planting ideas for the long term. I may disagree with some of the Congressman’s notions, and I do. But at least he’s raising the bar of the debate. And young people, bored with the same old crapola spewing out of the mouths of Obama, Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney, are listening.