This week’s column is being written on November 4, 2014, the election day of the most propagandistic, most costly, most wasteful mid-term American political campaign of all time, bar none.
It‘s obvious to me that the worst of the venom and untruths in the political ads have been coming from anonymous wealthy, (mostly right-wing) political, economic or religious groups or from the political action committees run by cunning political operatives like the NeoConservative Republicans Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and others. (Adelson is the multibillionaire gambling empire magnate and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, who has endorsed the likes of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, flushing down the toilet hundreds of millions of his and his corporation’s dollars in campaign “contributions” to right-wing politicians.)
The final results of this sobering circus, where the two major political parties have spent billions of desperate dollars mindlessly purchasing expensive TV commercial time (to the delight of television executives), will not be tabulated by column deadline tonight. So there is no point in my trying to help voters discern – this time around – what parties or candidates might be best for them, their children, our terminally-ill planet, our rapidly disappearing democracy, or our corrupted economic system that is being strangled by extremist forces on the right-wing fringes of the political spectrum.
The moneyed interests of powerful right-wing think tanks have cunningly been trying to influence our votes with the lavish help of the corporate-controlled major media outlets that are virtually all owned by the super-rich 1% who care greatly about their bottom line but not about the common good.
What Should Pro-democracy Antifascists be Doing Between Now and the Next Election Cycle?
Unless readers of this column have been living under a rock or have been using FoxNews and other hate- and fear-mongering talk shows as their major source of information, they will understand that our democracy is being threatened, just like the Weimar Republic, by any number of other authoritarian, non-democratic entities that are being heavily funded by billionaires and the corporations who have the propaganda power of the press.
The groups that want us to believe the myth that capitalism and democracy are one and the same include the following non-democratic, chain-of-command institutions, where group decisions are not made democratically, voting doesn’t happen and where unconditional obedience to powerful elites is demanded of subordinates. That includes such entities as the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, multinational corporations, religious institutions, some educational institutions, police departments, and parents who utilize punitive parenting tactics (where parental cruelty easily spreads contagiously through the generations with disastrous social, political and spiritual consequences for both the individual and the society).
Let us naïve voters beware, especially us liberals who tend to wear rose-colored glasses, wanting to believe our elected or unelected leaders in the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and the corporate media. I would advise progressives, who may have the most to lose, to start preparing for the next election cycle right now, working to expose, and then correct, the tyranny of the Federal Reserve Board, the Wall Street financiers, the Security and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, Citizens United, ALEC, the right-wing political action committees and the corrupting influence of multibillionaires like the Koch Brothers and others of their ilk..
I recommend that progressives start organizing right away, no matter who declares victory tonight or what party controls next year’s legislative or executive branches of government. Progressives need to learn how to sniff out the crypto-fascists, the plutocrats, the charlatans and the psychopaths among us who are wearing sheep’s clothing. We need to learn how to recognize propaganda wherever it exists and learn how to read between the lines. We need to always question authority figures, and we need to speak out consistently when injustice occurs anywhere.
And then, between now and the next election cycle, we may actually be able to identify the Friendly American Fascists among us as well as the paymasters of any psychopathic politician that wants to take control of our democracy, our government, our judicial system, our military or our economy.
And, above all, we need to keep in mind that, like all hungry wolves in sheep’s clothing, they are always on the lookout for their next meal.
Dr Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, Minnesota who practiced holistic (non-drug) mental health care for the last decade of his career. He is involved in peace, nonviolence and justice issues and often writes about mental ill health, toxic food issues, corporate pollution, the corporate-controlled media, corporate-controlled politics, crony capitalism, militarism, racism, fascism, imperialism, totalitarianism, economic oppression, anti-environmentalism and other violent, unsustainable, anti-democratic movements.
