The Trouble With Tribbles (plus Kochs, Fascists, Etc.)

[Snarkoleptic]

Here's an interesting Facebook rant from David Gerrold, author of The Trouble With Tribbles and much more.

I haven't done this rant in a while, and now is as good a time as any.

Back in the fifties, when I was in high school, I was in a circle of friends, all of whom were voracious in our political studies. We read Conscience Of A Conservative, Das Kapital, The Blue Book (and The Black Book) of the John Birch Society, Profiles In Courage--anything and everything. A couple of us even attended a Birch Society meeting. It was all old people with hardened faces looking at us suspiciously.

The Blue Book (and later on the Black Book) were particularly horrifying. They read like they had been translated from the German. Robert Welch, the author, said that democracy was mobocracy and that the govt needed a strong leader (dictator) and a monolithic ideology.

He laid out his plan to take over the US govt by creating cells (study groups), phony periodicals, phony institutions, etc. They would take over local govts, school boards, appoint their own people as judges, etc. etc. It was a pretty comprehensive plan for subverting the nation.

After JFK was shot, the Birchers went underground and a lot of people thought they had disappeared. No. They became a stealth movement, renaming themselves, creating false fronts everywhere.

But where did the money come from?

Ahh, this is where it gets interesting.

There was a fellow named Fred C. Koch. He made a fortune in the oil industry. (Supposedly he was a relative of the notorious Ilse Koch, nazi war criminal.) (And according to one account, he sold oil to the Third Reich for a while.) He was rabidly anti-communist and was a primary founder of the John Birch Society.

From Wiki: (Koch) claimed that the Democratic and Republican Parties were infiltrated by the Communist Party, and he supported Mussolini's suppression of communists. He wrote that "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America," and that public welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks and Puerto Ricans to Eastern cities to vote for Communist causes and "getting a vicious race war started."

Koch and his wife had four sons, Frederick, Charles, David, and William....

Now, let's talk about context for a bit. During the first half of the twentieth century, the western world was having an identity crisis as all the different -isms fought for dominance. There was British Colonialism, American Capitalism, Russian Communism, and German and Italian Fascism. Here in the US, there was also a growing Socialist movement, which the Capitalists confused with Communism.

But let's talk about Fascism. As practiced, Fascism is the idea that government should serve capital--ie. business, ie. corporations. Those were the people who brought Hitler to power in Germany, and if you step away from the horrors of the Holocaust and simply look at the mechanics of it, the entire Holocaust was about looting the wealth of 13 million people (Jews and others). The Holocaust wasn't simply about mass murder -- it was about the seizure of property, money, gold, silver, real estate, artwork, jewelry, furniture, homes, carpets, pianos, clothing, eyeglasses, and even gold teeth. The architects of the Holocaust even figured out how much work they could get out of a slave before he was too weak to work. And it wasn't just the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals and etc. The Nazis also imported thousands and thousands of Poles as slave laborers for their factories.

Under that form of Fascism, unions were illegal. Workers had to have work permits signed by their employers before they could quit a job, so they were effectively enslaved too.

And the German businessmen were fat and happy because they were feudal lords ruling over an enslaved working class.

Ahh, now let's come back to Fred Koch, who funded the John Birch Society -- what he wanted was to bring German style Fascism to America.

Koch died in 67, but the wheels he set in motion are still turning. Larry Kramer reports in one of his books that at the end of the sixties, nine of the wealthiest conservative families met and decided that they would never allow the sixties to happen again. Thus began the funding of the radical right takeover of America.

The various right-wing think tanks, publications, front organizations, political campaigns, didn't occur out of a natural conservatism. They were seeded by big money with the intention of propagandizing the national conversation into an insanely polarized view.

The failure of American journalism has been a failure to connect these dots. The failure of our elected officials has been cowardice -- a refusal to recognize that there is a well-funded monolithic operation at work, designed to shut down the United States government so completely that they can seize complete control and reinvent the kind of Fascism that destroyed Germany.

Yes, I know -- this all sounds like some whack-job conspiracy theory -- but in the immortal words of Deep Throat, "Follow the money." Where is the money coming from to fund all these insane tea party candidates? Where is the money coming from to fund the challenges to moderate republicans? Hmmm.

The Koch brothers have effectively seized control of the republican party, and they have done a marvelous job of capturing local and state govts across the nation.

Will their movement succeed? In the long run, no. They've forgotten the lesson of the French Revolution.

Their "movement" will not outlive them. Rupert Murdoch will drop dead eventually. Rush Limbaugh is already in the process of imploding. The Koch brothers get booed in public and will probably not last another 10 or 15 years. When the people of the United States get tired enough of the bullshit, there will be push-back. It's already starting. The internet is the global conversation that makes it impossible for any propaganda campaign to brainwash a nation.

A hundred years ago, this nation rebelled against the robber barons and corporate fat cats. The Great Depression created the opportunity for real social reform. While I hope we never have another such financial crisis -- the irresponsibility of Wall St. is still driving the ship of state straight toward another iceberg. Whether the next revolution is peaceful or violent, it is going to happen -- because the history of the United States is a history of revolutions, both failed and successful, both peaceful and violent, over and over again. It's inevitable because this nation is still an adolescent, still growing, still unsure of its own identity. The current political madness will end. Not soon enough, but it will end.

IMHO.

More on Gerrod-

David Gerrold (born January 24, 1944 in Chicago, Illinois[1][2][3]) is an American science fiction screenwriter and novelist known for his script for the popular original Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles", for creating the Sleestak race on the TV series Land of the Lost,[4] and for his novelette The Martian Child, which won both Hugo and Nebula awards, and was adapted into a 2007 film starring John Cusack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gerrold

[d_r]

1. Sleestak!

Now, let's talk about context for a bit. During the first half of the twentieth century, the western world was having an identity crisis as all the different -isms fought for dominance. There was British Colonialism, American Capitalism, Russian Communism, and German and Italian Fascism. Here in the US, there was also a growing Socialist movement, which the Capitalists confused with Communism.

Colonialism, Capitalism, Communism, Fascism.

All of these - to a lesser extent colonolism, but I would argue it was empowered by it - were allowed by the industrial revolution than began in the late 18th century and continued in to the 19th. It was driven by fossil fuels. We were using the energy that had been stockpiled on this planet for millions of years, and the human population skyrocketed incredibly past any sustainable levels. Before that, the primary -ism in most of the world (Europe, Africa, Asia) was Feudalism. Before that Empires. The industrial revolution, the use of fossil fuels, the population explosion spelled the end of Feudalism.

All of these - colonialism, capitalism, communism, fascism, feudalism, were structures to maintain social order while moving the majority of resources to a few elites and away from the masses.

Capitalism, communism, fascism are products of the industrial revolution and the use of fossil fuels that made them possible. They are 19th and 20th century ideas that didn't make sense before and won't make sense much longer.

[Snarkoleptic]

3. Thanks for the context.

Teabaggers have devolved to the point where most of the -ism's are now hollow insults to be thrown at liberals.

[Berlum]

2. "Smirk." - Corpor-O-Fascists, Inc. (R)

?itok=Y1LODeL3

[Snarkoleptic]

4. Kind of a frightening image!

Seems we've made great strides in exposing this cadre of anti-American fascists, but Uncle Rupert just won a big one in Australia.
Australia is is on the brink of it's lost Bewsh-decade, IMHO>