Happy New Year all!
Yes, that's a typo, since one Bush is standing near him when he said it. Watkins line should read "... going to get the President out of the way ...
Rumsfeldia: Fear and Loathing in the Decade of Tears
- Thread starter Drew
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Happy New Year all!
Yes, that's a typo, since one Bush is standing near him when he said it. Watkins line should read "... going to get the President out of the way ...
Just Governor Rarick's Louisiana. Of course, they could always release Rummy at Barksdale AFB and have the local sheriff lock him up. Rummy on a chain gang?
The idea was that he was in possession of an illegal substance, or could be shown to have been in possession of one, thus violating the law, thus providing a quick ground for impeachment that even the harshest law and order type would find hard to dismiss.
manav95
Banned
Honestly in this scenario, I'd be fine with America reuniting with Britain........ we had 200 years for the "American experiment" and it failed. I for one would gladly submit to the rule of the Queen, drink tea and crumpets, and yell at chavs all day long. Clearly our Constitution has failed and our Revolution was all for naught.........
Or we can embrace Communism, which would be even better. I for one would enjoy free healthcare, a classless society, a guaranteed job, and my own private dacha out in Florida. Ofc that would be a little extreme, but the Commies might be our late hope against Rumsfeld.
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
I must say, I have never looked forward to an update like I have been looking forward to the next one. Things are going to get good.
Frances
Banned
Great TL.
Just a note if it hasn't come up:
"Ms." is strictly a creation of the seventies.
Incidentally, "Mrs. Margaret Thatcher" is also post-seventies - before that it would have been strictly "Mrs. Denis Thatcher" - that's why the feminists hated "Mrs." - because the woman lost her whole identity. The proper form of "Mrs." is no longer used much, except in wedding invitations.
Just a note if it hasn't come up:
"Ms." is strictly a creation of the seventies.
Incidentally, "Mrs. Margaret Thatcher" is also post-seventies - before that it would have been strictly "Mrs. Denis Thatcher" - that's why the feminists hated "Mrs." - because the woman lost her whole identity. The proper form of "Mrs." is no longer used much, except in wedding invitations.
Rummypedia
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.” – Plato
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” - Winston Churchill
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” - Thomas Jefferson
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” - Thomas Jefferson
“We haven’t ever known our past,” Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, said last week. “Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents.” He pointed out that the first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976.” - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/27/anyone-anyone
“The impressive demonstrations the camera has recorded in Germany, Italy, Russia and China ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Communist, Nazi nor Fascist victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation of the many; all were achieved by small, disciplined, principled, fanatical bodies.” - Crane Briton, Anatomy of a Revolution.
“The American fascist would prefer … to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how to best present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. They claim to be super patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesman for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.” - Henry A. Wallace
Liberty Battalions
Though officially a private organization (or more correctly a network of many state [and some multi-state] organizations) the Liberty Battalions were fashioned on the model of the American Protective League (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Protective_League). They were financed by corporate donations, and in many cases became entwined with local business, and in some localities even supported themselves with extortion rackets.
The Liberty Battalions were raised to support the Rumsfeld Administration and to “protect freedom” against the “communist and liberal threat [to] freedom and the free market.” They largely came out into the open, and wide public attention, during the campaign for ratification of the twenty-eight amendment to the Constitution (the so-called Rumsfeld amendment). For the Liberty Battalions favorite targets were media outlets they decided were too “liberal”, charities (which were deemed “un-capitalistic” because of their non-profit status and thus a threat to the free market) and libraries. Liberty Battalions often organized the burning of books and materials they considered “leftist” or “anti-free-market.” This could include a wide swath of materials not necessarily considered overly liberal, except by those who had never read them. So in addition to works by Marx, Upton Sinclair (just as examples) works that were burned included The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (proclaimed foreign and anti-business), Plato, Aristotle (denounced as Communists), Charles Dickens (for the allegation that A Christmas Carol was anti-capitalist and therefore anti-American: the charge against this work being used to tar all other of Dickens’ work) and Mark Twain. One hundred-and-twenty years after the end of slavery in the United States, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was gleefully burned as seditious and anti-capitalistic. Economics textbooks and medical textbooks joined the pyres, not to mention works of paleontology and other sciences in general. People with the last name Darwin were attacked in public (even some who were eager members of the Liberty Battalions). The works of Dr. Benjamin Spock and Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) came in for particularly harsh treatment, and in some areas even some non-King James versions of the Bible – such as the New American Standard Bible – were burned as “blasphemous.” The book burnings has a magnifier effect on the general level of hysteria, and the Liberty Battalions watched closely to see who participated – and who didn’t, marking out dissenters, whether their resistance was active or simply passive, for retribution.
Star Trek became a particular target of the LB’s. Star Trek conventions were broken-up. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Deforest Kelley and George Takei were all personally attacked. Nichelle Nicols took refuge in the United Kingdom. James Doohan and Shatner returned to their native Canada, and Nimoy chose to re-settle in Israel for relative safety. Walter Koenig died under circumstances in 1985 which were never fully explained. Grace Lee Whitney became a Rumsfeld spokesperson and actively denounced Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry wrote and spoke against the regime, right up until he suffered a nervous breakdown. His wife, Majel Barrett, fled to Canada.
Libraries, bookstores, scientific centers at Universities and associated institutions were attacked, often after a loud demonstration staged by the Liberty Battalions. Opponents had their rallies infiltrated, and they often descended into violence, which were broken-up by police who arrested the organizers for “inciting a riot.”
Liberty Battalions appeared in many communities, and made efforts (often successful) to recruit from local law enforcement officials. Simply declining to join could make a person a target of their local LB in its quest to uncover subversives. The Liberty Battalions came to include members of other, longer-term organizations with violent histories such as the Ku Klux Klan and even Irish-American sympathisers with connections to the IRA. Local criminals found that giving cash and lending muscle to their local LB chapter could wash away their sins.
Liberty Battalions also went after low level criminals and drifters, who were or could be made out to be, the source of petty, violent crime in local neighborhoods. Such vigilante justice often reduced (or was said to reduce) crime rates, or to “solve” particularly notorious crimes which local police had been unable to solve. Inevitably, local criminals found that joining their local LB was a good way to get a leg-up on their competitors. They also received an unofficial license to victimize those who resisted the LBs. This in turn helped increase LB membership among those who had previously scorned the LBs.
While some States Attorneys-General tried to do something about this, they were frustrated by the lack of co-operation by Federal authorities, and by some of their counterparts in other States (some of whom were members of a local LB chapter – often for political reasons). Early in 1985 President Rumsfeld signed an executive order preventing federal agencies from investigating the LB, one which his Secretary of National Intelligence Coordination and Oversight William Casey sought to enforce with zeal (by 1985 the SNICO had eclipsed the Attorney-General as the Cabinet officer with direct control over most federal law enforcement).
Though largely secular organizations, the Liberty Battalions were early-on targeted by the Christian Values movement for recruitment and penetration. Thus an evangelical corps quickly developed within the LBs’ leadership corps, and they worked to consolidate their hold over the various organizations.
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It’s a Wonderful Life (1946 – Liberty Films)
This film, produced just after the end of the Second World War, had by the time of Rumsfeld’s Presidency become a Christmas classic. From a cultural point of view it was an American alternative to the Dickens A Christmas Carol fable, featuring as it did the wholesome, Midwestern everyman character of actor Jimmy Stewart in the place of the dour English Scrooge. Unlike Scrooge, Stewart’s character – George Bailey – was never mean. He did suffer a crisis of faith and attempted suicide, the avenue through which he, like Scrooge, encountered a supernatural guide who showed him the error of his ways – but in a lighter, more optimistic (and therefore “more American”) way than Ebenezer Scrooge’s encounters (especially with his own grave). Bailey did learn from his near death experience, but he never lost faith in the capitalist system of which he, as a banker, was a part.
It’s a Wonderful Life became even more important in American popular culture as the Dickens Scrooge tale came under attack for supposedly promoting anti-capitalistic values. George Bailey’s business practices do not change, so the economic philosophy under which he operates is never seriously challenged by his spiritual awakening. By Christmas 1985 most television stations preferred to show it’s a Wonderful Life and pass on any film versions of the Dickens story (the majority of which were British films). The Rumsfeld Administration supported this, in as much as the film seemed to promote the conservative values they preferred, and the aging Jimmy Stewart was himself still associated with the Republican Party.
What the Rumsfeldians missed – but their opponents didn’t – was the hidden message in It’s a Wonderful Life which was used to communicate an anti-Rumsfeldian message, specifically to communicate to wider audiences what Rumsfeld’s America was becoming.
After George Bailey attempts to commit suicide, an angel takes him back to his home town – Bedford Falls - to show him what it would be like if he had never been born. There the principle villain of the film, Henry Potter, has unchallenged control over the town, which in this reality has been renamed Potterville. In Bedford Falls George Bailey had acted as a check on some of Potter’s avaricious and cruel schemes through his kind-hearted approach to business (he would give poor people generous mortgage terms, and in so doing frustrate Potter’s attempts to foreclose on their home and acquire the land for his own schemes). Potter was the true Scrooge of the piece, and with Bailey never having been born in the reality the angel shows him, he has built a town in which his avarice, and resulting power, have made the once bright, welcoming town, into a cold, dark place lacking in compassion and opportunity for most of its residents, who are forced to work for Potter in poor conditions in order to survive. In the film, seeing this alternate reality motivates Bailey to return to his life and ultimately defeat Potter.
It is unclear who first came to understand that this film had a potent anti-Rumsfeld message, but by Christmas of 1985 signs began appearing around the country, and especially at various anti-twenty-eight amendment rallies, which proclaimed “Potterville” (sometimes written over a photo of the President). The message being communicated was that Rumsfeld was the living embodiment of Potter, and that his administration had turned the United States into a Potterville. Potterville rallies and Potterville allusions were used as a covert means of communicating anti-Rumsfeldian sentiment in a way which the authorities were slow to catch on to. What was more, because the film received regular television airings until 1987, without being censored, it invited those who were otherwise cut-off from a full flow of information about what was happening in the country, to make a comparison between Potterville and Rumsfeldian America. The point was reinforced by a Liberty Spark campaign which broadcast the message “Are you living in Potterville?” for people to consider. A growing number came to see the point, although by the time this came to fruition it was already too late.
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News Media
From a dynamic and highly investigative industry, the American television news was tamed by the Rumsfeld Administration between 1984 and 1986. On the ABC network, anchor Al Gore Jr., the son of a liberal U.S. Senator of the 1960’s, had been highly critical of Rumsfeld. Gore, perhaps alone among the major network anchors, had tried to shine a light on Dick Cheney and some of the other murky figures in Donald Rumsfeld’s White House Staff. He famously exposed early-on, well before anyone was looking at them, the infiltration of Christian Values evangelicals into Rumsfeld’s inner circle. Gore began to ask what their agenda was. The Rumsfeld White House took particular exception to this. Behind the scenes arrangements were made for a cartel headed by TRW to gain control of ABC’s shares, enough that a TRW appointed management team could take over ABC and fire Gore, and convert ABC to more Rumsfeld friendly message. Eventually, by early 1987, ABC was effectively part of the Hughes Network, although the legal fiction of a separate network operation was maintained.
The Hughes Network had become popular in the late 1970’s in the more conservative parts of America with its largely populist and pro-Reagan programming. Spiro Agnew’s nightly attacks on the Wallace Administration had revived the disgraced former President’s political career. Hughes was pro-Rumsfeld from the time he defeated Reagan for the 1980 Republican nomination. During the early years of the Rumsfeld Administration Hughes continued to expand, and it gained inroads into the evangelical community (the supporters of the Christian Values movement) through active collaboration with the Christian Broadcast Network (CBN). While Hughes’ leading spokesman Geraldo Rivera gained an audience share among evangelicals, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell both had regular programs on a secular broadcaster, with a built-in audience of more conservative viewers given access to their message. It was all pro-Rumsfeld, all the time.
As Hughes grew, and especially once ABC was defanged, NBC and CBS were both challenged by the growth of the “Hughes demographic”. NBC tied to walk a middle line, in a vain effort to keep a liberal audience, while stealing market share from Hughes. It alienated the first and failed in the second with this policy. NBC was also cowed when a TRW lead investor group bought a significant number of shares, and it further “neutralized” its Rumsfeld coverage in an effort to prevent a take-over and meeting the same fate as ABC.
Only CBS remained unapologetically anti-Rumsfeld throughout, with the result that it became the target of liberal baiting and smears by Hughes. CBS also suffered from financial difficulties as it was forced to buy in several thousand shares of its own stock as a defense against outside take-over. Even with the help of friendly investors, this proved to be a strain on CBS resources, and as a consequence the news department’s budget suffered. CBS also suffered in other ways: the federal government no longer gave it news, and the network lost access for its White House correspondent, and every other federal department correspondent. The only upside in this was that the BBC allowed CBS to re-broadcast its material in the United States while waving any royalty payments or licensing fees. Consequently, CBS became the only source for global news. This however worked against CBS, as Hughes branded CBS an agent of foreign interests, while the federal government investigated the arrangement with BBC was “possible collaboration with a foreign power aimed at subverting the United States government.” The U.S. government argued that since the BBC was a British State Agency, it was effectively an arm of the British government, and as such had involved CBS in foreign intrigue that the administration equated with espionage and deliberate disinformation. Hughes made many lurid allegations around this point to further discredit CBS.
The news on Hughes was completely devoid of foreign content (unless that content served Hughes’ editorial needs – usually by showing a foreign government or political figure in a bad light), while NBC tread a careful set of guidelines provided by the White House in its coverage.
Hughes completed its expansion by acquiring and absorbing CNN in 1986 in a hostile takeover facilitated by a series of sham tax indictments against CNN founder, media mogul Ted Turner. Turner had the distinction of being one of the few business tycoons during the Rumsfeld years to be prosecuted on tax charges and jailed for tax offenses (crimes and statutes which were largely being dismantled by the Rumsfeld Administration at the same time Turner was being prosecuted).
The Rumsfeld Administration made Hughes’ market acquisition task easier by heavily regulating the assignment of frequencies and cable access in most markets (a highly regulatory move by this most free-market of administrations), often reducing access in any given market to two networks. Hughes would invariably be one, and either ABC or NBC were given the other slot. CBS’s market share was further reduced, and often confined to major urban markets where Rumsfeld had little political support to begin with. In this way, for much of Middle America, access to unbiased news was cut-off.
National Public radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, after being subjected to much negative attention by Hughes, were denied funding, and dismantled as “agents of anti-free-market propaganda.”
By 1987 much of America’s competitive media had been silenced. No accurate polls are available to determine what the true public reaction was, but many comments were heard (no doubt coached by Hughes) about how “wholesomeness” and “order” (as opposed to confusion caused by diversity of reporting) had been returned to the nightly news.
Regional and local radio networks remained in-tact, as did smaller scale newspaper syndicates, and some of them were outspokenly anti-Rumsfeld (those which didn’t fall victim to “correction” by local Liberty Battalions) but their localized nature blunted a national impact. In the event they could be shouted down by Hughes, which had a bottomless pit of resources and became practically the Rumsfeld Administration’s State broadcasting service.
Newspapers also underwent a restricting process. The anti-Rumsfeld New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution and Chicago Tribune all found their ability to distribute their newspapers outside of their home state curtailed by regulations imposed on them by the Interstate Commerce Commission. These papers had their circulation reduced to their home states of publication, which adversely effected their bottom lines (even as they spent large sums on legal appeals against the ICC). Others were threatened with corporate takeovers (and Hughes went into the newspaper business too – they bought USA Today and Newsweek), which cowed many into towing the line. Others who resisted suffered the wrath of vandalism of their facilities and attacks upon their personnel by the Liberty Battalions.
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Coal Power
One of the hallmarks of the Rumsfeld Administration was its anti-environmentalist ideology. The President set the tone when he declared the environmental movement to be a Communist conspiracy and pushed to have concern for the environment to be declared a mental disorder.
In this regard the Rumsfeld Administration gave free-reign to the coal producing industry, giving little concern for the distinction between “clean” and “dirty” coal. At first coal was used to alleviate the chronically high price of oil, and as such in the early Rumsfeld years cheap coal energy produced a mild economic recovery due to lessening energy costs. The drawback was pollution, which became quite intensive as new coal burning plants were opened and more homes and public buildings came to rely on coal burning furnaces. Ever the opportunist, Rumsfeld used the pollution problem to stimulate an increase in jobs in cleaning-up some of the mess (driven strictly by the free market though, and not government mandate). Coal was also used to produce synthetic fuel for automobiles and other internal combustion engine vehicles, adding to the pollution issue. Rumsfeld called pollution a sign of “free market progress” and again dismissed pollution concerns as “subversion.” Liberty Battalions were then tasked to organize local ‘Pro-Coal Day” demonstrations.
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Free Market Day
Until the Rumsfeld Administration the first Monday in September had been a holiday called Labor Day, held to celebrate the American labor movement. Labor Day was dedicated to the social and economic achievements of workers. It constituted a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers had made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of the country.
The Rumsfeld Administration replaced it with a Capitalist Day, which later was re-named Free Market Day. The point was to create a day to celebrate the achievements of the free market system, and to glorify unfetter capitalism. Organized labor was vilified as anti-market in these holidays, and later, under the watchful eye of the Liberty Battalions “Labor Hatred” demonstrations were organized. Investment was prized over labor, and the idea of wage labor was cast in a negative light (as opposed to profit sharing and investment income). FDR and the New Deal, and LBJ and his Great Society, were also the targets or repeated vilification on this holiday. Both were blamed for “fifty years of American liberal-union tyranny” from which Donald Rumsfeld had single-handedly saved the nation. This was the foundation of a cult of personality being built around the President.
The Resistance
In its original form the resistance to the Rumsfeld regime was more diverse, and therefore less organized than the Liberty Battalions which were organized along paramilitary lines with full federal government complicity. The nation’s Roman Catholic Bishops were strong resisters in the beginning, and they were encouraged in this by Pope Pius XIII. This proved to be a mistake, as Rumsfeld and the Hughes Network soon painted the political Catholics as foreign agents. The Pope, who had been elected Pope while languishing in a Portuguese Communist jail, was vilified by Hughes as a Communist agent and his anti-capitalistic statements received much attention from Hughes to support this distorted argument [his anti-Communist speeches were never reported].
Dan Quayle, the former Indiana National Guard officer who had lead a resistance against Agnew’s war policy in Vietnam, organized a grassroots movement that drew heavily from center-left opponents to the regime, and included many Hollywood celebrities. Hillary Rodham-Turner, a civil rights lawyer, noted liberal Republican, and wife of media mogul Ted Turner, later author of Where was the Outrage?: A critical examination of American political culture during the Rumsfeld years and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry were both outspoken anti-Rumsfeld speakers and writers long after it became unsafe to do so. Rodenberry ended-up in one of America’s overflowing asylums, while Rodham-Turner chose to flee the country. In Rodham-Turner’s case, she later wrote that she had to give-up the speaking tours because the Liberty Battalions made it unsafe for her audiences. It was that threat of violence, not necessarily against them but against their audiences, which shut down many of the anti-Rumsfeld speakers.
Ralph Nader spoke out on environmental as well as democratic issues, but undercut his own efforts by being equally critical of his opposition contemporaries as he was of Donald Rumsfeld and his administration. As a result it became unclear who Nader was really against, since he was likely to eviscerate Rumsfeld’s other opponents in the same speech where he condemned Rumsfeld’s polices. Nader’s particular concern, carried almost to the extent of paranoia, was that all of the other opposition figures were straw people for the corporate conspiracy backing Rumsfeld and, if Rumsfeld stumbled in some way, they were merely replacement dictators waiting in the wings. For a time the Rumsfeld Administration left Nader alone, as he was causing more dissention among Rumsfeld’s foes. But in time the Liberty Battalions were turned on him too. Nader was accidently shot and killed by nervous Canadian troops guarding the border crossings during the Detroit riots in 1987. In a fitting irony, President Rumsfeld then used Nader’s death to make a series of jingoistic threats against Canada, which for a time made the Canadians nervous about their Southern neighbor.
Eventually, the civilian resistance (as distinguished from the military coup plotters lead by Alexander Haig – the two groups had some overlap but were separate) had no choice but to go underground and, out of the same necessity, became an insurgent movement that decided Rumsfeld could only be removed by force – or as they put it – by a new American Revolution. They began this by broadcasting their messages across television screens and through fax machines using Bill Gates Liberty Spark program which allowed them to hack into cable and telephone communication networks.
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From The Shadow Master: Dick Cheney and the abuse of American Power by Barack H. Obama
To begin to understand what was at work here, we have to examine the task from Cheney’s strategist mind. First and foremost this was not an election, so the idea that a popular mass had to be won over was out the window. During the period leading-up to the ratification of the twenty-eight amendment the United States had 7,214 elected state legislators. Not all state legislatures were the same size, but figuring thirty-eight states (38/50=76%) were required for ratification, we can reason that approximately (7,214*0.76) 5,483 individual legislators were required, plus the support or acquiescence of 38 Governors, or a total of 5,521 individuals, all politicians. Where any delegates to constitutional conventions were required, we can extrapolate from the rolls that most were either drawn from these state legislature numbers, or associated with state and local Republican and Christian Values organizations which supported the amendment. In a number of cases the chosen delegates were enthusiastic supporters than the state legislators who made their nomination necessary. Extrapolating from the contemporary records, we find a total of 3,211 delegates in addition to the already accounted for legislators: a total of 8,732 individuals who had an actual vote in this process.
My point is that 8,732 individual state politicians and activists is not just a manageable number, but for someone with the resources of the Federal government to back them, it can produce a manageable target list. Even if four times the number of individuals were to be target (figuring a one-in-four success rate of getting a favorable response) we still get a list of less than 35,000 people, or the population of a mid-sized town. But one-in-four overstates the case: in practice Cheney’s operation had a success rate of closer to one-in-two. A defined list of legislators and delegates gave the FSB a unique opportunity to delve into every corner of the target’s lives, and those of their close family members, to produce a list of hot button issues which would work for each target.
In fact Cheney’s odds were significantly improved because in the ten states of the former Confederacy, plus New York and Pennsylvania (in these two Northern States the We The People and Democratic split had worked especially to give conservative Republicans near majorities) he had to expend next to no effort to achieve his result. In the old Confederacy he had the Christian Values networks to do his work for him, while in New York and Pennsylvania his operatives could focus on as few as ten to twelve swing legislators to achieve his ends. In a further ten states (Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota, California and Hawaii) his forces expended no effort at all, since victory was early on determined to be unlikely.
Incidentally, the absence of an organized campaign in these states effectively removed the Constitutional amendment from the everyday lives of approximately one hundred million Americans. These states, where the strongest opposition might expected to be organized, saw an absence of focus and civic unrest related to the amendment. It is no coincidence that these ten states in turn tended to have the most liberal and anti-Rumsfeld, and anti-Christian Values, populations, and were home to the largest mainstream media markets where the Hughes Network had the lowest hold on any segment of the viewing population. Here the struggle was more academic or removed, and that sense of remoteness tended to blunt the ability to raise protestors and opponents who would have to be bussed to another State to stage a meaningful protest (though a number of demonstrations and rallies were organized in these states, but they had the effect of one hand clapping in those states where the fight was truly underway). By contrast, the thirty-six states out of thirty-eight of his greatest activity were places where Hughes, especially when working in concert with CBN, had the largest segments of viewers.
New York and Pennsylvania stand out as the greatest anomalies, with of course New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Albany and Buffalo representing media markets and demographics with a majority unsympathetic to the Rumsfeld line. But here the key tactic was to play the more conservative rural and semi-urban areas off against the core urban areas that tended to be more liberal.
But something else happened here, especially in New York City, Buffalo and Philadelphia, which tended to blunt any edge these urban areas had in carrying votes against the amendment. Though not announced by Hughes at the time (for obvious reasons) significant scholarship has since unearthed a secret accord between the Rumsfeld Administration and the dominant organized crime mafia clans in these cities. What the organized crime hierarchy received in return for their co-operation is unclear, though we must assume it was some sort of license to operate with government sanction. What the organized crimes had to offer was a corrupted political network in these cities, which it could influence to vote in favor of the amendment. (Mob bosses who owned businesses might also have enjoyed the irony of being able to cast a vote through their business front). This seriously challenged the liberal opposition in these two states.
An interesting echo was seen in Illinois, where Chicago political bosses with organized crime ties delivered support that, when united with significant pro-Rumsfeld support from the more rural downstate areas, moved Illinois into the pro-amendment column. Ohio proved to be the only significant industrial state with large liberal enclaves to resist this pressure, a further irony when both the Governor and Secretary of State were pro-Rumsfeld Republicans.
Once he defined the playing field, and realized where his advantages lay, Cheney formulated a master strategy which identified who would be casting the votes he needed, and developed detailed dossiers on each and every one. He then had the luxury of focusing his task.
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From Where was the Outrage? By Hillary Rodham-Turner
A British academic, a former member of parliament, once asked me how an average voter, with even a modicum of intelligence, and not even with much understanding of history, could possibly have been brought to support such a lop-sided amendment. I replied with an anecdote which went like this:
In the 1920’s Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson was Governor of Texas, and she opposed a movement to allow students of Mexican parents to receive schooling in Spanish. “Ma” Ferguson opposed the idea, and famously said, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” The idea that Jesus spoke English at all is, of course, an absurdity, but at the same time “Ma” Ferguson’s audience accepted it as a reasonable answer to the situation.
Why? Not through ignorance, as many of Governor Ferguson’s later critics assumed. All but the most uneducated must have realized that Jesus did not speak English. But, the message, couched in a quasi-religious language very common in that region at that time, resonated with her audience. The absurdity of Jesus speaking a language not yet invented in his lifetime (and which, if he had spoken it, would have made him unintelligible to his contemporaries) was not the point. Most opposed the teaching of Spanish in schools, and Governor Ferguson had articulated their feeling with the authority of her office which – however absurd the premise – gave sanction to their feeling. Governor Ferguson had in effect sanctified what may have been regarded as an intolerant view as “the right one” for that community at that time.
What the critics of Donald Rumsfeld – in particular those whose criticism bends to the irrational in a personal antipathy or hatred toward the Rumsfeld period – have a hard time grasping is that, outside of the nation’s centers of legal scholarship and liberal culture, the twenty-eight amendment felt right. Its presentation appealed to a sense of originalism, however distorted, and seemed anti-politician and pro-business, both of which were good ideas in non-liberal America. In some sense – and the Hughes Network played this point (while distorting the history) – it was a fulfillment of the messages of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (though ironically both were enemies of the Rumsfeld regime by this point). Smaller government, closer to the people (Senators removed as an independent political class) and a recognition that business was more important than welfare (by giving business a vote). Many business men after all argued – ad nausea on Hughes and like-minded outlets – that the right to express their views at the ballot box (and it was their Constitutional right, wasn’t it?) was the “pathway to more and better jobs in a surging economy.” It became the modern day version of “Ma” Ferguson’s English speaking Jesus: even if the form didn’t sound quite right – the underlying idea sounded good, at that time and in that place.
On the stump “Ma” Ferguson was appealing to a largely un or semi-educated class of rural or semi-urban citizens whose experience of the world was often limited by place and circumstance, and who were schooled in a culture that emphasized religiosity and “plain values,” often derived from biblical values taught at Sunday school and reinforced by their ready acceptance of the society around them. Stories of those who had taught themselves to read by reading the Bible were not uncommon in “Ma” Ferguson’s Texas.
What was the common – and especially Middle class – experience of Rumsfeld’s America, especially in the thirty-eight states in question? Beginning in the mid-1960’s and extending for at least fifteen years American society had experienced tremendous social upheaval, followed by the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Reaction in the suburbs and “Middle Class” American had been revulsion at the New Left culture of the sixties, which in Peoria, Tulsa, Phoenix and many other such places had seemed like nothing less than an invitation to anarchy combined with a total disrespect of the accepted values of American society. Richard Nixon had used it as his way into the White House, and both George Wallace and Ronald Reagan had stoked the fires of heartland discontent in their campaigns. Donald Rumsfeld certainly used it, as did the most prominent (in the heartland) dissident actors in the system, the Christian Values Movement and the Libertarians. Both the Christian Values and Libertarians agreed on a vision that linked the discord of the 1960’s with the economic depression of the 1970’s, though they diverged when it came to their rationalization of that connection. The main point was that the America of the 1950’s, the stable, prosperous, Middle Class (or Petty Bourgeois if you prefer Marxist analysis) world had been torn asunder.
Prosperity for the white Middle Class seemed endangered, and not least by the emergence of the We The People Movement on both coasts and in big cities like Chicago. Its progressive platform seemed to promise more of the same, and served to remind the heartland that the radicalism of the recent past was not dead. The white Middle Class, challenged as never before, drew up behind its walls (literally as walled “security communities” became all the rage in suburban housing). George Wallace and Ronald Reagan stoked it for their own political purposes.
Under these circumstances Donald Rumsfeld seemed to be the fulfillment of many of this heartland demographics prayers (at least that part of it that had not signed-up with the Christian Values or the Libertarians). A kind of economic order and stability returned under the first Rumsfeld Administration, at least one where economic backsliding was halted and, for a while, unemployment became less of an immediate threat. Americans in this group had a reason to be grateful to President Rumsfeld, in many cases a very personal reason in the form of a job, or a guarantee that their mortgage was not going to be foreclosed on, or a chance for their kids to get out of the basement and find work. If they noticed the other harsh measures of the early-to-mid Rumsfeld years, these were minor inconveniences in their lives. They themselves were not being disappeared, and those who did were remote political figures who, in some cases, a significant portion of this demographic would have agreed deserved what they got.
This was an overwhelmingly white, middle aged demographic that had endured the sixties and seventies, often born in the Great depression of the 1930’s, and imbued in their youth with the values of thrift and fundamental obedience characteristic of the Depression-World War II generation that had raised them. Some were veterans of World War II, many were veterans of the Korean War. They may not have been a majority of the American population, but they were a significant majority of those who voted in elections – especially at the state level. Much more than the political figures in Congress, their state level politicians reflected their biases and values. This group, joined by evangelicals (who added a special fervor to the cause) formed the principle membership of the groups which loudly protested in favor of the amendment in state capitals and outside convention halls.
But what of other demographic groups? Among whites over 60, and especially those over 65, Rumsfeld had substantial support as he was perceived to have restored order to the streets. His Social Security reforms as introduced had specifically excluded all those over 45 at the time of their introduction, effectively negating their impact on those already retired and collecting Social Security retirement benefits, or those expecting to collect them before 2007.
Blacks were largely antithetical to the Rumsfeld program already, as were a majority (though not all) voters of Hispanic ethnicity (with pro-Rumsfeld support higher among Cuban-Americans). Since Rumsfeld did not have much support from this group, he felt little problem in alienating them. Equally, and based largely on his tough law-and-order policies Rumsfeld had strong support among first-generation Asian immigrants, many of whom benefitted from his pro-business policies as well, while that support fell off among second and third generation Asian-Americans.
There was also a cohort of 30 – 45 younger adults, many of whom were veterans of either the counter-culture movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s, or military service in either Vietnam or Syria. Many of the counter-culture group were life-long “hippies” for whom the revolution had never really stopped, especially after President Agnew had re-committed U.S. forces to Vietnam in 1973. They had been politically active in the McGovern campaign of 1972, and a substantial number had found a political voice in George Carlin’s eccentric 1976 Presidential campaign. After that the politically active had migrated to the We The People Movement and to the Socialist Workers Party, both of which represented their progressive ideals. Others lived on the margins of society, largely in poverty, or had left the United States for other countries. The counter-culture 30-45 group provided many of the foot soldiers for the anti-amendment demonstrations, but their radical politics and non-conformist appearance and dress served to give visual substance to their opponents’ charges that they were anarchists and communist dupes, whose beliefs were a threat to middle-class (white) values.
The military veterans by contrast were more conservative, and for a variety of reasons tended to be less politically active in this period. By 1985 a message had come across that the Rumsfeld Administration was ready to cut-of the veteran’s benefits of any who opposed their political program. This had a chilling effect on dissent. Equally, this group was a prime recruiting ground for the Liberty Battalions, which provided a social support for many veterans who felt alienated, and whose anger could be turned by the Liberty Battalions on the counter-culture group, who were blamed in the pro-amendment propaganda for the decline of the nation since 1964. (A not co-incidental date, since it implied that both the Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the beginning points of the “decline of America”).
One common thread between the counter-culture and the veteran group was a significant incidence of drug addiction in both groups. Many of these people had become hooked earlier in life and had been the main customer base of the great heroin epidemic of the late 1970’s. Although the heroin supply had decreased since the fall of the Lesser Mao (increasing the price at street level but by no means eliminating the supply) it still had a grip on this demographic.
The young, meaning the 18-30 cohort (those born between 1955 and 1967) were described as the “burned-out” generation. Due to the precarious economy, many had not held jobs. Many had seen their parents lose jobs and homes, and had been forced to move in with grandparents or other older relatives. The saying at the time went that “they went into the basement, and conditions kept them there.” College enrollments significantly declined between 1973 and 1983, as funding for higher education and family support was not available.
A large sub-set of this group found their only path forward through the military where, by 1984, Rumsfeldism was strongly enforced. These recruits provided the foot soldiers for the South African and Chinese campaigns, and were deployed in security operations once they returned home. The main outcome was to harden these veterans, some of whom turned to drugs, while others entered the Liberty Battalions, which were far less restrictive about the use of personal violence than the military had been. Many more toed the Rumsfeld line in order to stay in the military, because the armed services provided the only economic and personal security that many of these people had known. They were thus loath to jeopardize that by engaging in political activity (other than that approved by the Rumsfeld Administration).
Others lived in a landscape of despair and few prospects. Some gravitated to the We The People movement and the Socialist Workers Party for their progressive social views (and since they offered a form of organized rage against the system) and others sought the same in the Libertarian Party. Most, to use the 1960’s expression, dropped-out, though unlike the 1960’s generation, their dropping out had little to do with flower power and idealism, and more to do with hard drug addiction, petty crime and a sense of hopelessness.
By the mid 1980’s many from this group had entered the evangelical movement – largely because the evangelicals were moving through the areas where these people were to be found and engaging in “rescue missions.” Those recruited by evangelical offers of food, shelter, drug treatment and a useful role in life (either as a rescuer, or as part of some other evangelical enterprise – which included the Christian Values political movement) became a substantial, and energetic, army of foot soldiers for the CV’s lobbying and demonstrations outside of State legislatures and convention halls seeking to influence passage of the twenty-eight amendment. There was also a substantial cross-over between the evangelicals and the Liberty Battalions.
As many survivors of the period were to testify in later inquires, for all but those committed to the far-left, there seemed little alternative to the Liberty Battalions, the Christian Values movement and Rumsfeldian Republicans. The Libertarians, who opposed the twenty-eight amendment, refused to co-operate with the We The People and Socialist Workers Party for ideological reasons. Some Libertarians did argue for a practical re-examination of this particular policy, and this served to fracture the Libertarian focus.
The Democrats were hopelessly fractured, and despite the efforts of Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown, their various wings refused to coalesce into an organized front of political resistance. Many of the Democratic Party’s most progressive voices had, by this point, defected to the We The People movement, as had George McGovern. Many old time Liberal Democrats of the New Deal and Great society eras hesitated, and in some cases actively resisted, efforts to bring the Democrats into closer alignment with the WTP (which for its own reasons was critical of the Great Society legacy of the Party). Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who represented the remaining social conservatives in the Democratic Party, still referred to the WTP as “unwashed hippie freaks,” when in fact its membership had outgrown that stereotype. Others like Carter and Brown were trying to draw the WTP back into the Democratic Party, which was resisted by both establishment Democrats and the WTP alike (the WTP leadership added to the problem by adopting the belief that they could replace the Democratic Party as the other major party in U.S, politics, and as such saw no advantage in working with that they saw as a dying relic of a by-gone era). In all of this the national Democratic Party – what was left of it – failed to articulate a vision that could have stirred the middle class away from either passive acceptance or active support for Rumsfeldism.
The other factor was that the Rumsfeld Administration actively sought to destroy the Democratic Party. The two mechanisms it used was to deny the Democrats funding (by drawing away their business donors and criminalizing their former support by organized labor) and by prosecuting Democratic office holders (mostly at the State level) for even minor offenses. This was how Assistant Attorney-General Kelsey Grammer acquired the sobriquet Malleus Democrats (hammer of the Democrats). It was more than just a play on the man’s name: it represented a strategy to slowly criminalize the party itself by undercutting the State and local organizations that supported it.
By contrast the We The People movement and the Socialist Workers Party were largely left alone to go about their business. Why? They were the opposition Rumsfeld wanted – specifically too radical and too urban for the large constituency of white, middle class suburban and rural voters who were the supporters of Rumsfeldism. Although large, this group was not a majority, and that was why Rumsfeld hitched his star to the Christian Values movement as a back stop. They too were encouraged by having the radical leftist groups to use as scapegoats and “enemies” with which they could stir their supporters into action. Overall, while dedicated, WTP and the SWP could not overtake the Republicans and the CV in electoral politics, but enough of their members could be elective office at various levels to provide a loud and radical opposition. Rumsfeld could then use the threat of their gaining power as a club with which to beat support (or at least acquiescence) out of moderates.
It is worth noting that one of the reasons that Rumsfeld came to increasingly rely more on the Christian Values movement was that he did not have an iron control of the Republican Party. Unlike Hitler, with whom he is often compared, Rumsfeld never had an iron grip over the rank-and-file of the Republican Party or its office holders. Pete McCloskey had been a Republican once, and several significant figures of the resistance would be former Republicans themselves. The only living former Republican President, Richard Nixon, denounced Rumsfeld regularly from his Oxford exile, where he was joined by a former Republican presidential candidate and one-time leader of the conservative wing of that party, former California Governor Ronald Reagan. George Romney spoke out, until he was silenced. Barry Goldwater had been arrested. Even Spiro Agnew, now the Mayor of New York City, was less than full-throated in his support of his former Chief of Staff. Most significant of all, Jack Edwards, Rumsfeld’s first Vice President and a conservative Republican of long standing, was willing to support a coup against the President.
The Republican Party therefore could have been the source of a major dissent movement against Rumsfeld by denying him a political instrument of support. Why it didn’t can’t be fully explained, though much of it had to do with political opportunism by some of its members, and the effective use of the Christian Values movement by Rumsfeld to coerce many incumbents into cooperation (least they fall victim to CV inspired candidates in primaries). Bribery and blackmail (often of family members rather than the office holder themselves) were rife, and there is substantial evidence that several were murdered – as object lessons to the rest. As the Administration progressed and gained more power, and other moderate bodies of opposition were compromised or disappeared, Rumsfeld divided it by engineering the election of a large body of supporters who could cow the majority into acquiescence (often by providing a binary choice between Rumsfeld or the WTP and SWP, both of which made even liberal Republicans uneasy in terms of being potential allies). And, of course, Grammer could hammer Republicans too.
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The Text of the Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (The Rumsfeld Amendment):
1. The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is repealed in entirety.
2. Each state shall have two United States Senators, and no State may lose or gain any number of Senators without its explicit consent. In the manner of appointment, the President of the United States shall select and nominate a slate of United States Senators to fill the vacancies in every second election cycle, beginning in 1986. There shall be no confirmation, save that each Senator so nominated shall meet the qualifications for membership in the United States Senate listed under Article I of this Constitution. In the alternating cycle, beginning in 1988, the Executive of each of the several States shall appoint a United States Senator as provided for by the law in each of the several States, subject to the qualifications listed under Article I of this Constitution.
3. Nothing in this amendment shall alter the term of office for a United States Senator as prescribed under Article I of this Constitution. Any United States Senator elected under the provisions of the Seventeenth Amendment and currently serving an elected term at the time of the adoption of this Amendment shall continue to serve through the completion of his or her elected term.
4. The Executive of each of the several states shall continue to exercise the power to appoint interim Senators in the event of vacancy, and such interim Senators shall serve until the expiration of the term for which they are appointed.
5. The Uplifting Corporations as the Engine of Our Economy and the Creators of Prosperity Act shall be incorporated as a separate article of this Constitution.
6. The Religious Liberty Act shall be incorporated as a separate article of this Constitution.
7. No organization or person shall have their right to participate in the political process, including the raising of funds, nor their right to express an opinion under the First Amendment of this Constitution, abridged due to any circumstance relating to political, religious or tax-exempt status. Congress and the several States shall be barred from setting fundraising limits on any organization or person.
8. Clause seven (7) of this amendment shall not apply to those persons or organizations deemed by the Secretary of National Intelligence Coordination and Oversight to be subversive or anti-free market. The Secretary shall annually draw-up and publish a list of all organizations and persons deemed to be subversive and anti-free market. The rights described within the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments of this Constitution shall be held to not apply to those persons and organizations so named on the Secretary’s list. Inclusion or exclusion from the list shall remain at the sole discretion of the Secretary, or as may be directed by the Executive authority of the United States.
9. The Secretary of National Intelligence Coordination and Oversight shall be placed second in the line of Presidential succession, immediately after the Vice President of the United States. The Secretary of National Intelligence Coordination and Oversight shall be deemed the senior officer of the Cabinet, and shall have precedence before any Executive Branch official, save the President and Vice President of the United States.
10. Sexual assault shall in all instances be considered a grave violation of the civil rights of the assaulted and an attack upon the general welfare of all citizens of the United States. Accordingly there shall be one penalty in all the States for sexual assault, and that penalty will be death.
11. The right to own and freely enjoy lawfully acquired property shall not be denied to any citizen of the United States, nor shall it be abridged for reasons of environmental regulation.
12. The family being the foundation of good citizenship, and good citizenship being the foundation of a prosperous and bountiful republic, the right of parents to raise, educate and discipline their children according to the lights of their faith and reason shall not be abridged by any State law, and especially no State shall mandate or proscribe any manner of disciplinary correction which a parent may deem appropriate to the governance of order and discipline within the family.
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Thursday, May 16, 1985
President Rumsfeld calls for the repeal of:
Rivers and Harbors Act (1899)
Lacey Act (1900)
Weeks Act (1911)
North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911 (1911)
National Park Service Organic Act (1916)
Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918)
Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act (1934)
Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act (1954)
Fish and Wildlife Act (1956)
Clean Air Act (1963, 1970)
National Environmental Policy Act (1970)
Clean Water Act (1972)
Environmental Protection Agency (1972)
Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (1972)
Noise Control Act (1972)
Endangered Species Act (1973)
Safe Drinking Water Act (1974)
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976)
Toxic Substances Control Act (1976)
Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977)
CERCLA (Superfund) (1980)
He holds a ceremonial burning of those acts in the rose garden.
President: “For too long we have allowed anti-freedom forces to use false arguments about saving the environment, the so-called ecology movement, to hi-jack the economy of America. Today that ends. Freedom is restored and business is free to prosper and create jobs once more. While we await Congress’ swift action to do the right thing and sweep these relics of socialist tyranny into the ash can of history, I have issued Executive Orders directing the relevant agencies to disregard these acts, in short to no longer enforce them, as if Congress had already acted for freedom by repealing them.
“The best pollution control is a successful business. Don’t give an inch to the environmental conspiracy. When a tree-hugger speaks-up, tell him or her that you’re for jobs and your family’s economic future and against communistic environmentalism.”
Another Rumsfeld comment (concerning coal pollution): “They tell me that burning coal will heat-up the Earth, creating a kind of global warming. Well, if the world is getting warmer, isn’t that a good thing? I mean that’ll open-up the Arctic. Wouldn’t it be great if we could populate the great interior of Alaska as if it were Kansas or Texas? It certainly would make getting the oil and gas and other mineral wealth out of there so much easier. So, if there is this – global warming – then I say great; let’s have more of it.”
Ralph Nader: “My God, will this nation never wake up? Rumsfeld has just thrown out a century of environmental stewardship in exchange for what? The open sewer, the strip-mined landscape barren of life, the black cloud enveloping our cities with air so toxic human life as we know it becomes impossible! Beware as you sleep tonight in the White House Rumsfeld, the wrath of Teddy Roosevelt will not be contained, not even by the grave.”
A number of anti-Rumsfeld demonstrations are held in many major cities, many of which are broken up by Liberty Battalion lead counter demonstrations. These scenes descend into violence, providing a pretext for forceful police intervention, usually against the environmental demonstrators. Curfews and semi-martial law follow – to “enforce peace and order.”
Governor Pete McCloskey (D-CA): “As a former prosecutor, I say this. Today, hearing this, I hereby indict President Donald Rumsfeld for the murder of the United States. I indict him for murdering our land and our water. I indict him for murdering our Constitution. The America we grew-up in has been utterly destroyed by this man. He has murdered our identity as a people. As should be the case for all murderers, I call for his trial, his conviction and his incarceration. I can no longer call him my President as, by his own actions, he has forfeited all claim to that once respected title. God bless California, and God help the United States of America.”
The controversial California ordinance of secession, still being debated in the state assembly, now gains a new momentum. Even areas of rural California, identified as largely pro-Rumsfeld, are dismayed at this new round of anti-environmental legislation.
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Sunday, January 5, 1986
The United States “exile” population is estimated close to one million in the United Kingdom, and around the same number in France. Australia reports up to five hundred thousand refugees from the United States, and around seven hundred thousand are thought to be resident in Mexico*. Canada has one million Americans taking up residence, with more coming over the border every day. While many of these refugees are highly educated and tend to be center to left-of-center in their political views, their numbers are beginning to overwhelm the support infrastructure in these countries, especially as a many cannot bring their full assets out of the United States with them and are dependent on public support on the part of the host countries.
*= Although some to the U.S. refugees to Mexico are gringo, the overwhelming majority are Mexican Americans (U.S. citizens, often for several generations, as opposed to Mexican citizens returning from the United States, which is a separate demographic increase in Mexico) seeking refuge in their ancestral homeland. Since the flow of illegal aliens decreases, and the tide seems to be going the other way, President Rumsfeld uses this statistic to claim that his Administration has solved the illegal immigration problem. (The Mexican border statistics are publicized, the more general outflow numbers are not).
A further irony develops in the United Kingdom, where many left-of-centre American refugees, who supported Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Birch Bayh, Hugh Carey and Pete McCloskey in past U.S. Presidential elections, band around an exile advocacy group based in Oxford headed by Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
Both Reagan and Nixon receive protection from Special Branch out of concern that the Rumsfeld Administration might target them.
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Still working on the coup and California’s secession and, hint, California is not the only one.
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.” – Plato
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” - Winston Churchill
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” - Thomas Jefferson
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” - Thomas Jefferson
“We haven’t ever known our past,” Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, said last week. “Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents.” He pointed out that the first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976.” - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/27/anyone-anyone
“The impressive demonstrations the camera has recorded in Germany, Italy, Russia and China ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Communist, Nazi nor Fascist victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation of the many; all were achieved by small, disciplined, principled, fanatical bodies.” - Crane Briton, Anatomy of a Revolution.
“The American fascist would prefer … to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how to best present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. They claim to be super patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesman for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.” - Henry A. Wallace
Liberty Battalions
Though officially a private organization (or more correctly a network of many state [and some multi-state] organizations) the Liberty Battalions were fashioned on the model of the American Protective League (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Protective_League). They were financed by corporate donations, and in many cases became entwined with local business, and in some localities even supported themselves with extortion rackets.
The Liberty Battalions were raised to support the Rumsfeld Administration and to “protect freedom” against the “communist and liberal threat [to] freedom and the free market.” They largely came out into the open, and wide public attention, during the campaign for ratification of the twenty-eight amendment to the Constitution (the so-called Rumsfeld amendment). For the Liberty Battalions favorite targets were media outlets they decided were too “liberal”, charities (which were deemed “un-capitalistic” because of their non-profit status and thus a threat to the free market) and libraries. Liberty Battalions often organized the burning of books and materials they considered “leftist” or “anti-free-market.” This could include a wide swath of materials not necessarily considered overly liberal, except by those who had never read them. So in addition to works by Marx, Upton Sinclair (just as examples) works that were burned included The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (proclaimed foreign and anti-business), Plato, Aristotle (denounced as Communists), Charles Dickens (for the allegation that A Christmas Carol was anti-capitalist and therefore anti-American: the charge against this work being used to tar all other of Dickens’ work) and Mark Twain. One hundred-and-twenty years after the end of slavery in the United States, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was gleefully burned as seditious and anti-capitalistic. Economics textbooks and medical textbooks joined the pyres, not to mention works of paleontology and other sciences in general. People with the last name Darwin were attacked in public (even some who were eager members of the Liberty Battalions). The works of Dr. Benjamin Spock and Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) came in for particularly harsh treatment, and in some areas even some non-King James versions of the Bible – such as the New American Standard Bible – were burned as “blasphemous.” The book burnings has a magnifier effect on the general level of hysteria, and the Liberty Battalions watched closely to see who participated – and who didn’t, marking out dissenters, whether their resistance was active or simply passive, for retribution.
Star Trek became a particular target of the LB’s. Star Trek conventions were broken-up. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Deforest Kelley and George Takei were all personally attacked. Nichelle Nicols took refuge in the United Kingdom. James Doohan and Shatner returned to their native Canada, and Nimoy chose to re-settle in Israel for relative safety. Walter Koenig died under circumstances in 1985 which were never fully explained. Grace Lee Whitney became a Rumsfeld spokesperson and actively denounced Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry wrote and spoke against the regime, right up until he suffered a nervous breakdown. His wife, Majel Barrett, fled to Canada.
Libraries, bookstores, scientific centers at Universities and associated institutions were attacked, often after a loud demonstration staged by the Liberty Battalions. Opponents had their rallies infiltrated, and they often descended into violence, which were broken-up by police who arrested the organizers for “inciting a riot.”
Liberty Battalions appeared in many communities, and made efforts (often successful) to recruit from local law enforcement officials. Simply declining to join could make a person a target of their local LB in its quest to uncover subversives. The Liberty Battalions came to include members of other, longer-term organizations with violent histories such as the Ku Klux Klan and even Irish-American sympathisers with connections to the IRA. Local criminals found that giving cash and lending muscle to their local LB chapter could wash away their sins.
Liberty Battalions also went after low level criminals and drifters, who were or could be made out to be, the source of petty, violent crime in local neighborhoods. Such vigilante justice often reduced (or was said to reduce) crime rates, or to “solve” particularly notorious crimes which local police had been unable to solve. Inevitably, local criminals found that joining their local LB was a good way to get a leg-up on their competitors. They also received an unofficial license to victimize those who resisted the LBs. This in turn helped increase LB membership among those who had previously scorned the LBs.
While some States Attorneys-General tried to do something about this, they were frustrated by the lack of co-operation by Federal authorities, and by some of their counterparts in other States (some of whom were members of a local LB chapter – often for political reasons). Early in 1985 President Rumsfeld signed an executive order preventing federal agencies from investigating the LB, one which his Secretary of National Intelligence Coordination and Oversight William Casey sought to enforce with zeal (by 1985 the SNICO had eclipsed the Attorney-General as the Cabinet officer with direct control over most federal law enforcement).
Though largely secular organizations, the Liberty Battalions were early-on targeted by the Christian Values movement for recruitment and penetration. Thus an evangelical corps quickly developed within the LBs’ leadership corps, and they worked to consolidate their hold over the various organizations.
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It’s a Wonderful Life (1946 – Liberty Films)
This film, produced just after the end of the Second World War, had by the time of Rumsfeld’s Presidency become a Christmas classic. From a cultural point of view it was an American alternative to the Dickens A Christmas Carol fable, featuring as it did the wholesome, Midwestern everyman character of actor Jimmy Stewart in the place of the dour English Scrooge. Unlike Scrooge, Stewart’s character – George Bailey – was never mean. He did suffer a crisis of faith and attempted suicide, the avenue through which he, like Scrooge, encountered a supernatural guide who showed him the error of his ways – but in a lighter, more optimistic (and therefore “more American”) way than Ebenezer Scrooge’s encounters (especially with his own grave). Bailey did learn from his near death experience, but he never lost faith in the capitalist system of which he, as a banker, was a part.
It’s a Wonderful Life became even more important in American popular culture as the Dickens Scrooge tale came under attack for supposedly promoting anti-capitalistic values. George Bailey’s business practices do not change, so the economic philosophy under which he operates is never seriously challenged by his spiritual awakening. By Christmas 1985 most television stations preferred to show it’s a Wonderful Life and pass on any film versions of the Dickens story (the majority of which were British films). The Rumsfeld Administration supported this, in as much as the film seemed to promote the conservative values they preferred, and the aging Jimmy Stewart was himself still associated with the Republican Party.
What the Rumsfeldians missed – but their opponents didn’t – was the hidden message in It’s a Wonderful Life which was used to communicate an anti-Rumsfeldian message, specifically to communicate to wider audiences what Rumsfeld’s America was becoming.
After George Bailey attempts to commit suicide, an angel takes him back to his home town – Bedford Falls - to show him what it would be like if he had never been born. There the principle villain of the film, Henry Potter, has unchallenged control over the town, which in this reality has been renamed Potterville. In Bedford Falls George Bailey had acted as a check on some of Potter’s avaricious and cruel schemes through his kind-hearted approach to business (he would give poor people generous mortgage terms, and in so doing frustrate Potter’s attempts to foreclose on their home and acquire the land for his own schemes). Potter was the true Scrooge of the piece, and with Bailey never having been born in the reality the angel shows him, he has built a town in which his avarice, and resulting power, have made the once bright, welcoming town, into a cold, dark place lacking in compassion and opportunity for most of its residents, who are forced to work for Potter in poor conditions in order to survive. In the film, seeing this alternate reality motivates Bailey to return to his life and ultimately defeat Potter.
It is unclear who first came to understand that this film had a potent anti-Rumsfeld message, but by Christmas of 1985 signs began appearing around the country, and especially at various anti-twenty-eight amendment rallies, which proclaimed “Potterville” (sometimes written over a photo of the President). The message being communicated was that Rumsfeld was the living embodiment of Potter, and that his administration had turned the United States into a Potterville. Potterville rallies and Potterville allusions were used as a covert means of communicating anti-Rumsfeldian sentiment in a way which the authorities were slow to catch on to. What was more, because the film received regular television airings until 1987, without being censored, it invited those who were otherwise cut-off from a full flow of information about what was happening in the country, to make a comparison between Potterville and Rumsfeldian America. The point was reinforced by a Liberty Spark campaign which broadcast the message “Are you living in Potterville?” for people to consider. A growing number came to see the point, although by the time this came to fruition it was already too late.
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News Media
From a dynamic and highly investigative industry, the American television news was tamed by the Rumsfeld Administration between 1984 and 1986. On the ABC network, anchor Al Gore Jr., the son of a liberal U.S. Senator of the 1960’s, had been highly critical of Rumsfeld. Gore, perhaps alone among the major network anchors, had tried to shine a light on Dick Cheney and some of the other murky figures in Donald Rumsfeld’s White House Staff. He famously exposed early-on, well before anyone was looking at them, the infiltration of Christian Values evangelicals into Rumsfeld’s inner circle. Gore began to ask what their agenda was. The Rumsfeld White House took particular exception to this. Behind the scenes arrangements were made for a cartel headed by TRW to gain control of ABC’s shares, enough that a TRW appointed management team could take over ABC and fire Gore, and convert ABC to more Rumsfeld friendly message. Eventually, by early 1987, ABC was effectively part of the Hughes Network, although the legal fiction of a separate network operation was maintained.
The Hughes Network had become popular in the late 1970’s in the more conservative parts of America with its largely populist and pro-Reagan programming. Spiro Agnew’s nightly attacks on the Wallace Administration had revived the disgraced former President’s political career. Hughes was pro-Rumsfeld from the time he defeated Reagan for the 1980 Republican nomination. During the early years of the Rumsfeld Administration Hughes continued to expand, and it gained inroads into the evangelical community (the supporters of the Christian Values movement) through active collaboration with the Christian Broadcast Network (CBN). While Hughes’ leading spokesman Geraldo Rivera gained an audience share among evangelicals, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell both had regular programs on a secular broadcaster, with a built-in audience of more conservative viewers given access to their message. It was all pro-Rumsfeld, all the time.
As Hughes grew, and especially once ABC was defanged, NBC and CBS were both challenged by the growth of the “Hughes demographic”. NBC tied to walk a middle line, in a vain effort to keep a liberal audience, while stealing market share from Hughes. It alienated the first and failed in the second with this policy. NBC was also cowed when a TRW lead investor group bought a significant number of shares, and it further “neutralized” its Rumsfeld coverage in an effort to prevent a take-over and meeting the same fate as ABC.
Only CBS remained unapologetically anti-Rumsfeld throughout, with the result that it became the target of liberal baiting and smears by Hughes. CBS also suffered from financial difficulties as it was forced to buy in several thousand shares of its own stock as a defense against outside take-over. Even with the help of friendly investors, this proved to be a strain on CBS resources, and as a consequence the news department’s budget suffered. CBS also suffered in other ways: the federal government no longer gave it news, and the network lost access for its White House correspondent, and every other federal department correspondent. The only upside in this was that the BBC allowed CBS to re-broadcast its material in the United States while waving any royalty payments or licensing fees. Consequently, CBS became the only source for global news. This however worked against CBS, as Hughes branded CBS an agent of foreign interests, while the federal government investigated the arrangement with BBC was “possible collaboration with a foreign power aimed at subverting the United States government.” The U.S. government argued that since the BBC was a British State Agency, it was effectively an arm of the British government, and as such had involved CBS in foreign intrigue that the administration equated with espionage and deliberate disinformation. Hughes made many lurid allegations around this point to further discredit CBS.
The news on Hughes was completely devoid of foreign content (unless that content served Hughes’ editorial needs – usually by showing a foreign government or political figure in a bad light), while NBC tread a careful set of guidelines provided by the White House in its coverage.
Hughes completed its expansion by acquiring and absorbing CNN in 1986 in a hostile takeover facilitated by a series of sham tax indictments against CNN founder, media mogul Ted Turner. Turner had the distinction of being one of the few business tycoons during the Rumsfeld years to be prosecuted on tax charges and jailed for tax offenses (crimes and statutes which were largely being dismantled by the Rumsfeld Administration at the same time Turner was being prosecuted).
The Rumsfeld Administration made Hughes’ market acquisition task easier by heavily regulating the assignment of frequencies and cable access in most markets (a highly regulatory move by this most free-market of administrations), often reducing access in any given market to two networks. Hughes would invariably be one, and either ABC or NBC were given the other slot. CBS’s market share was further reduced, and often confined to major urban markets where Rumsfeld had little political support to begin with. In this way, for much of Middle America, access to unbiased news was cut-off.
National Public radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, after being subjected to much negative attention by Hughes, were denied funding, and dismantled as “agents of anti-free-market propaganda.”
By 1987 much of America’s competitive media had been silenced. No accurate polls are available to determine what the true public reaction was, but many comments were heard (no doubt coached by Hughes) about how “wholesomeness” and “order” (as opposed to confusion caused by diversity of reporting) had been returned to the nightly news.
Regional and local radio networks remained in-tact, as did smaller scale newspaper syndicates, and some of them were outspokenly anti-Rumsfeld (those which didn’t fall victim to “correction” by local Liberty Battalions) but their localized nature blunted a national impact. In the event they could be shouted down by Hughes, which had a bottomless pit of resources and became practically the Rumsfeld Administration’s State broadcasting service.
Newspapers also underwent a restricting process. The anti-Rumsfeld New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution and Chicago Tribune all found their ability to distribute their newspapers outside of their home state curtailed by regulations imposed on them by the Interstate Commerce Commission. These papers had their circulation reduced to their home states of publication, which adversely effected their bottom lines (even as they spent large sums on legal appeals against the ICC). Others were threatened with corporate takeovers (and Hughes went into the newspaper business too – they bought USA Today and Newsweek), which cowed many into towing the line. Others who resisted suffered the wrath of vandalism of their facilities and attacks upon their personnel by the Liberty Battalions.
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Coal Power
One of the hallmarks of the Rumsfeld Administration was its anti-environmentalist ideology. The President set the tone when he declared the environmental movement to be a Communist conspiracy and pushed to have concern for the environment to be declared a mental disorder.
In this regard the Rumsfeld Administration gave free-reign to the coal producing industry, giving little concern for the distinction between “clean” and “dirty” coal. At first coal was used to alleviate the chronically high price of oil, and as such in the early Rumsfeld years cheap coal energy produced a mild economic recovery due to lessening energy costs. The drawback was pollution, which became quite intensive as new coal burning plants were opened and more homes and public buildings came to rely on coal burning furnaces. Ever the opportunist, Rumsfeld used the pollution problem to stimulate an increase in jobs in cleaning-up some of the mess (driven strictly by the free market though, and not government mandate). Coal was also used to produce synthetic fuel for automobiles and other internal combustion engine vehicles, adding to the pollution issue. Rumsfeld called pollution a sign of “free market progress” and again dismissed pollution concerns as “subversion.” Liberty Battalions were then tasked to organize local ‘Pro-Coal Day” demonstrations.
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Free Market Day
Until the Rumsfeld Administration the first Monday in September had been a holiday called Labor Day, held to celebrate the American labor movement. Labor Day was dedicated to the social and economic achievements of workers. It constituted a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers had made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of the country.
The Rumsfeld Administration replaced it with a Capitalist Day, which later was re-named Free Market Day. The point was to create a day to celebrate the achievements of the free market system, and to glorify unfetter capitalism. Organized labor was vilified as anti-market in these holidays, and later, under the watchful eye of the Liberty Battalions “Labor Hatred” demonstrations were organized. Investment was prized over labor, and the idea of wage labor was cast in a negative light (as opposed to profit sharing and investment income). FDR and the New Deal, and LBJ and his Great Society, were also the targets or repeated vilification on this holiday. Both were blamed for “fifty years of American liberal-union tyranny” from which Donald Rumsfeld had single-handedly saved the nation. This was the foundation of a cult of personality being built around the President.
The Resistance
In its original form the resistance to the Rumsfeld regime was more diverse, and therefore less organized than the Liberty Battalions which were organized along paramilitary lines with full federal government complicity. The nation’s Roman Catholic Bishops were strong resisters in the beginning, and they were encouraged in this by Pope Pius XIII. This proved to be a mistake, as Rumsfeld and the Hughes Network soon painted the political Catholics as foreign agents. The Pope, who had been elected Pope while languishing in a Portuguese Communist jail, was vilified by Hughes as a Communist agent and his anti-capitalistic statements received much attention from Hughes to support this distorted argument [his anti-Communist speeches were never reported].
Dan Quayle, the former Indiana National Guard officer who had lead a resistance against Agnew’s war policy in Vietnam, organized a grassroots movement that drew heavily from center-left opponents to the regime, and included many Hollywood celebrities. Hillary Rodham-Turner, a civil rights lawyer, noted liberal Republican, and wife of media mogul Ted Turner, later author of Where was the Outrage?: A critical examination of American political culture during the Rumsfeld years and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry were both outspoken anti-Rumsfeld speakers and writers long after it became unsafe to do so. Rodenberry ended-up in one of America’s overflowing asylums, while Rodham-Turner chose to flee the country. In Rodham-Turner’s case, she later wrote that she had to give-up the speaking tours because the Liberty Battalions made it unsafe for her audiences. It was that threat of violence, not necessarily against them but against their audiences, which shut down many of the anti-Rumsfeld speakers.
Ralph Nader spoke out on environmental as well as democratic issues, but undercut his own efforts by being equally critical of his opposition contemporaries as he was of Donald Rumsfeld and his administration. As a result it became unclear who Nader was really against, since he was likely to eviscerate Rumsfeld’s other opponents in the same speech where he condemned Rumsfeld’s polices. Nader’s particular concern, carried almost to the extent of paranoia, was that all of the other opposition figures were straw people for the corporate conspiracy backing Rumsfeld and, if Rumsfeld stumbled in some way, they were merely replacement dictators waiting in the wings. For a time the Rumsfeld Administration left Nader alone, as he was causing more dissention among Rumsfeld’s foes. But in time the Liberty Battalions were turned on him too. Nader was accidently shot and killed by nervous Canadian troops guarding the border crossings during the Detroit riots in 1987. In a fitting irony, President Rumsfeld then used Nader’s death to make a series of jingoistic threats against Canada, which for a time made the Canadians nervous about their Southern neighbor.
Eventually, the civilian resistance (as distinguished from the military coup plotters lead by Alexander Haig – the two groups had some overlap but were separate) had no choice but to go underground and, out of the same necessity, became an insurgent movement that decided Rumsfeld could only be removed by force – or as they put it – by a new American Revolution. They began this by broadcasting their messages across television screens and through fax machines using Bill Gates Liberty Spark program which allowed them to hack into cable and telephone communication networks.
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From The Shadow Master: Dick Cheney and the abuse of American Power by Barack H. Obama
To begin to understand what was at work here, we have to examine the task from Cheney’s strategist mind. First and foremost this was not an election, so the idea that a popular mass had to be won over was out the window. During the period leading-up to the ratification of the twenty-eight amendment the United States had 7,214 elected state legislators. Not all state legislatures were the same size, but figuring thirty-eight states (38/50=76%) were required for ratification, we can reason that approximately (7,214*0.76) 5,483 individual legislators were required, plus the support or acquiescence of 38 Governors, or a total of 5,521 individuals, all politicians. Where any delegates to constitutional conventions were required, we can extrapolate from the rolls that most were either drawn from these state legislature numbers, or associated with state and local Republican and Christian Values organizations which supported the amendment. In a number of cases the chosen delegates were enthusiastic supporters than the state legislators who made their nomination necessary. Extrapolating from the contemporary records, we find a total of 3,211 delegates in addition to the already accounted for legislators: a total of 8,732 individuals who had an actual vote in this process.
My point is that 8,732 individual state politicians and activists is not just a manageable number, but for someone with the resources of the Federal government to back them, it can produce a manageable target list. Even if four times the number of individuals were to be target (figuring a one-in-four success rate of getting a favorable response) we still get a list of less than 35,000 people, or the population of a mid-sized town. But one-in-four overstates the case: in practice Cheney’s operation had a success rate of closer to one-in-two. A defined list of legislators and delegates gave the FSB a unique opportunity to delve into every corner of the target’s lives, and those of their close family members, to produce a list of hot button issues which would work for each target.
In fact Cheney’s odds were significantly improved because in the ten states of the former Confederacy, plus New York and Pennsylvania (in these two Northern States the We The People and Democratic split had worked especially to give conservative Republicans near majorities) he had to expend next to no effort to achieve his result. In the old Confederacy he had the Christian Values networks to do his work for him, while in New York and Pennsylvania his operatives could focus on as few as ten to twelve swing legislators to achieve his ends. In a further ten states (Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota, California and Hawaii) his forces expended no effort at all, since victory was early on determined to be unlikely.
Incidentally, the absence of an organized campaign in these states effectively removed the Constitutional amendment from the everyday lives of approximately one hundred million Americans. These states, where the strongest opposition might expected to be organized, saw an absence of focus and civic unrest related to the amendment. It is no coincidence that these ten states in turn tended to have the most liberal and anti-Rumsfeld, and anti-Christian Values, populations, and were home to the largest mainstream media markets where the Hughes Network had the lowest hold on any segment of the viewing population. Here the struggle was more academic or removed, and that sense of remoteness tended to blunt the ability to raise protestors and opponents who would have to be bussed to another State to stage a meaningful protest (though a number of demonstrations and rallies were organized in these states, but they had the effect of one hand clapping in those states where the fight was truly underway). By contrast, the thirty-six states out of thirty-eight of his greatest activity were places where Hughes, especially when working in concert with CBN, had the largest segments of viewers.
New York and Pennsylvania stand out as the greatest anomalies, with of course New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Albany and Buffalo representing media markets and demographics with a majority unsympathetic to the Rumsfeld line. But here the key tactic was to play the more conservative rural and semi-urban areas off against the core urban areas that tended to be more liberal.
But something else happened here, especially in New York City, Buffalo and Philadelphia, which tended to blunt any edge these urban areas had in carrying votes against the amendment. Though not announced by Hughes at the time (for obvious reasons) significant scholarship has since unearthed a secret accord between the Rumsfeld Administration and the dominant organized crime mafia clans in these cities. What the organized crime hierarchy received in return for their co-operation is unclear, though we must assume it was some sort of license to operate with government sanction. What the organized crimes had to offer was a corrupted political network in these cities, which it could influence to vote in favor of the amendment. (Mob bosses who owned businesses might also have enjoyed the irony of being able to cast a vote through their business front). This seriously challenged the liberal opposition in these two states.
An interesting echo was seen in Illinois, where Chicago political bosses with organized crime ties delivered support that, when united with significant pro-Rumsfeld support from the more rural downstate areas, moved Illinois into the pro-amendment column. Ohio proved to be the only significant industrial state with large liberal enclaves to resist this pressure, a further irony when both the Governor and Secretary of State were pro-Rumsfeld Republicans.
Once he defined the playing field, and realized where his advantages lay, Cheney formulated a master strategy which identified who would be casting the votes he needed, and developed detailed dossiers on each and every one. He then had the luxury of focusing his task.
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From Where was the Outrage? By Hillary Rodham-Turner
A British academic, a former member of parliament, once asked me how an average voter, with even a modicum of intelligence, and not even with much understanding of history, could possibly have been brought to support such a lop-sided amendment. I replied with an anecdote which went like this:
In the 1920’s Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson was Governor of Texas, and she opposed a movement to allow students of Mexican parents to receive schooling in Spanish. “Ma” Ferguson opposed the idea, and famously said, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” The idea that Jesus spoke English at all is, of course, an absurdity, but at the same time “Ma” Ferguson’s audience accepted it as a reasonable answer to the situation.
Why? Not through ignorance, as many of Governor Ferguson’s later critics assumed. All but the most uneducated must have realized that Jesus did not speak English. But, the message, couched in a quasi-religious language very common in that region at that time, resonated with her audience. The absurdity of Jesus speaking a language not yet invented in his lifetime (and which, if he had spoken it, would have made him unintelligible to his contemporaries) was not the point. Most opposed the teaching of Spanish in schools, and Governor Ferguson had articulated their feeling with the authority of her office which – however absurd the premise – gave sanction to their feeling. Governor Ferguson had in effect sanctified what may have been regarded as an intolerant view as “the right one” for that community at that time.
What the critics of Donald Rumsfeld – in particular those whose criticism bends to the irrational in a personal antipathy or hatred toward the Rumsfeld period – have a hard time grasping is that, outside of the nation’s centers of legal scholarship and liberal culture, the twenty-eight amendment felt right. Its presentation appealed to a sense of originalism, however distorted, and seemed anti-politician and pro-business, both of which were good ideas in non-liberal America. In some sense – and the Hughes Network played this point (while distorting the history) – it was a fulfillment of the messages of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (though ironically both were enemies of the Rumsfeld regime by this point). Smaller government, closer to the people (Senators removed as an independent political class) and a recognition that business was more important than welfare (by giving business a vote). Many business men after all argued – ad nausea on Hughes and like-minded outlets – that the right to express their views at the ballot box (and it was their Constitutional right, wasn’t it?) was the “pathway to more and better jobs in a surging economy.” It became the modern day version of “Ma” Ferguson’s English speaking Jesus: even if the form didn’t sound quite right – the underlying idea sounded good, at that time and in that place.
On the stump “Ma” Ferguson was appealing to a largely un or semi-educated class of rural or semi-urban citizens whose experience of the world was often limited by place and circumstance, and who were schooled in a culture that emphasized religiosity and “plain values,” often derived from biblical values taught at Sunday school and reinforced by their ready acceptance of the society around them. Stories of those who had taught themselves to read by reading the Bible were not uncommon in “Ma” Ferguson’s Texas.
What was the common – and especially Middle class – experience of Rumsfeld’s America, especially in the thirty-eight states in question? Beginning in the mid-1960’s and extending for at least fifteen years American society had experienced tremendous social upheaval, followed by the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Reaction in the suburbs and “Middle Class” American had been revulsion at the New Left culture of the sixties, which in Peoria, Tulsa, Phoenix and many other such places had seemed like nothing less than an invitation to anarchy combined with a total disrespect of the accepted values of American society. Richard Nixon had used it as his way into the White House, and both George Wallace and Ronald Reagan had stoked the fires of heartland discontent in their campaigns. Donald Rumsfeld certainly used it, as did the most prominent (in the heartland) dissident actors in the system, the Christian Values Movement and the Libertarians. Both the Christian Values and Libertarians agreed on a vision that linked the discord of the 1960’s with the economic depression of the 1970’s, though they diverged when it came to their rationalization of that connection. The main point was that the America of the 1950’s, the stable, prosperous, Middle Class (or Petty Bourgeois if you prefer Marxist analysis) world had been torn asunder.
Prosperity for the white Middle Class seemed endangered, and not least by the emergence of the We The People Movement on both coasts and in big cities like Chicago. Its progressive platform seemed to promise more of the same, and served to remind the heartland that the radicalism of the recent past was not dead. The white Middle Class, challenged as never before, drew up behind its walls (literally as walled “security communities” became all the rage in suburban housing). George Wallace and Ronald Reagan stoked it for their own political purposes.
Under these circumstances Donald Rumsfeld seemed to be the fulfillment of many of this heartland demographics prayers (at least that part of it that had not signed-up with the Christian Values or the Libertarians). A kind of economic order and stability returned under the first Rumsfeld Administration, at least one where economic backsliding was halted and, for a while, unemployment became less of an immediate threat. Americans in this group had a reason to be grateful to President Rumsfeld, in many cases a very personal reason in the form of a job, or a guarantee that their mortgage was not going to be foreclosed on, or a chance for their kids to get out of the basement and find work. If they noticed the other harsh measures of the early-to-mid Rumsfeld years, these were minor inconveniences in their lives. They themselves were not being disappeared, and those who did were remote political figures who, in some cases, a significant portion of this demographic would have agreed deserved what they got.
This was an overwhelmingly white, middle aged demographic that had endured the sixties and seventies, often born in the Great depression of the 1930’s, and imbued in their youth with the values of thrift and fundamental obedience characteristic of the Depression-World War II generation that had raised them. Some were veterans of World War II, many were veterans of the Korean War. They may not have been a majority of the American population, but they were a significant majority of those who voted in elections – especially at the state level. Much more than the political figures in Congress, their state level politicians reflected their biases and values. This group, joined by evangelicals (who added a special fervor to the cause) formed the principle membership of the groups which loudly protested in favor of the amendment in state capitals and outside convention halls.
But what of other demographic groups? Among whites over 60, and especially those over 65, Rumsfeld had substantial support as he was perceived to have restored order to the streets. His Social Security reforms as introduced had specifically excluded all those over 45 at the time of their introduction, effectively negating their impact on those already retired and collecting Social Security retirement benefits, or those expecting to collect them before 2007.
Blacks were largely antithetical to the Rumsfeld program already, as were a majority (though not all) voters of Hispanic ethnicity (with pro-Rumsfeld support higher among Cuban-Americans). Since Rumsfeld did not have much support from this group, he felt little problem in alienating them. Equally, and based largely on his tough law-and-order policies Rumsfeld had strong support among first-generation Asian immigrants, many of whom benefitted from his pro-business policies as well, while that support fell off among second and third generation Asian-Americans.
There was also a cohort of 30 – 45 younger adults, many of whom were veterans of either the counter-culture movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s, or military service in either Vietnam or Syria. Many of the counter-culture group were life-long “hippies” for whom the revolution had never really stopped, especially after President Agnew had re-committed U.S. forces to Vietnam in 1973. They had been politically active in the McGovern campaign of 1972, and a substantial number had found a political voice in George Carlin’s eccentric 1976 Presidential campaign. After that the politically active had migrated to the We The People Movement and to the Socialist Workers Party, both of which represented their progressive ideals. Others lived on the margins of society, largely in poverty, or had left the United States for other countries. The counter-culture 30-45 group provided many of the foot soldiers for the anti-amendment demonstrations, but their radical politics and non-conformist appearance and dress served to give visual substance to their opponents’ charges that they were anarchists and communist dupes, whose beliefs were a threat to middle-class (white) values.
The military veterans by contrast were more conservative, and for a variety of reasons tended to be less politically active in this period. By 1985 a message had come across that the Rumsfeld Administration was ready to cut-of the veteran’s benefits of any who opposed their political program. This had a chilling effect on dissent. Equally, this group was a prime recruiting ground for the Liberty Battalions, which provided a social support for many veterans who felt alienated, and whose anger could be turned by the Liberty Battalions on the counter-culture group, who were blamed in the pro-amendment propaganda for the decline of the nation since 1964. (A not co-incidental date, since it implied that both the Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the beginning points of the “decline of America”).
One common thread between the counter-culture and the veteran group was a significant incidence of drug addiction in both groups. Many of these people had become hooked earlier in life and had been the main customer base of the great heroin epidemic of the late 1970’s. Although the heroin supply had decreased since the fall of the Lesser Mao (increasing the price at street level but by no means eliminating the supply) it still had a grip on this demographic.
The young, meaning the 18-30 cohort (those born between 1955 and 1967) were described as the “burned-out” generation. Due to the precarious economy, many had not held jobs. Many had seen their parents lose jobs and homes, and had been forced to move in with grandparents or other older relatives. The saying at the time went that “they went into the basement, and conditions kept them there.” College enrollments significantly declined between 1973 and 1983, as funding for higher education and family support was not available.
A large sub-set of this group found their only path forward through the military where, by 1984, Rumsfeldism was strongly enforced. These recruits provided the foot soldiers for the South African and Chinese campaigns, and were deployed in security operations once they returned home. The main outcome was to harden these veterans, some of whom turned to drugs, while others entered the Liberty Battalions, which were far less restrictive about the use of personal violence than the military had been. Many more toed the Rumsfeld line in order to stay in the military, because the armed services provided the only economic and personal security that many of these people had known. They were thus loath to jeopardize that by engaging in political activity (other than that approved by the Rumsfeld Administration).
Others lived in a landscape of despair and few prospects. Some gravitated to the We The People movement and the Socialist Workers Party for their progressive social views (and since they offered a form of organized rage against the system) and others sought the same in the Libertarian Party. Most, to use the 1960’s expression, dropped-out, though unlike the 1960’s generation, their dropping out had little to do with flower power and idealism, and more to do with hard drug addiction, petty crime and a sense of hopelessness.
By the mid 1980’s many from this group had entered the evangelical movement – largely because the evangelicals were moving through the areas where these people were to be found and engaging in “rescue missions.” Those recruited by evangelical offers of food, shelter, drug treatment and a useful role in life (either as a rescuer, or as part of some other evangelical enterprise – which included the Christian Values political movement) became a substantial, and energetic, army of foot soldiers for the CV’s lobbying and demonstrations outside of State legislatures and convention halls seeking to influence passage of the twenty-eight amendment. There was also a substantial cross-over between the evangelicals and the Liberty Battalions.
As many survivors of the period were to testify in later inquires, for all but those committed to the far-left, there seemed little alternative to the Liberty Battalions, the Christian Values movement and Rumsfeldian Republicans. The Libertarians, who opposed the twenty-eight amendment, refused to co-operate with the We The People and Socialist Workers Party for ideological reasons. Some Libertarians did argue for a practical re-examination of this particular policy, and this served to fracture the Libertarian focus.
The Democrats were hopelessly fractured, and despite the efforts of Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown, their various wings refused to coalesce into an organized front of political resistance. Many of the Democratic Party’s most progressive voices had, by this point, defected to the We The People movement, as had George McGovern. Many old time Liberal Democrats of the New Deal and Great society eras hesitated, and in some cases actively resisted, efforts to bring the Democrats into closer alignment with the WTP (which for its own reasons was critical of the Great Society legacy of the Party). Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who represented the remaining social conservatives in the Democratic Party, still referred to the WTP as “unwashed hippie freaks,” when in fact its membership had outgrown that stereotype. Others like Carter and Brown were trying to draw the WTP back into the Democratic Party, which was resisted by both establishment Democrats and the WTP alike (the WTP leadership added to the problem by adopting the belief that they could replace the Democratic Party as the other major party in U.S, politics, and as such saw no advantage in working with that they saw as a dying relic of a by-gone era). In all of this the national Democratic Party – what was left of it – failed to articulate a vision that could have stirred the middle class away from either passive acceptance or active support for Rumsfeldism.
The other factor was that the Rumsfeld Administration actively sought to destroy the Democratic Party. The two mechanisms it used was to deny the Democrats funding (by drawing away their business donors and criminalizing their former support by organized labor) and by prosecuting Democratic office holders (mostly at the State level) for even minor offenses. This was how Assistant Attorney-General Kelsey Grammer acquired the sobriquet Malleus Democrats (hammer of the Democrats). It was more than just a play on the man’s name: it represented a strategy to slowly criminalize the party itself by undercutting the State and local organizations that supported it.
By contrast the We The People movement and the Socialist Workers Party were largely left alone to go about their business. Why? They were the opposition Rumsfeld wanted – specifically too radical and too urban for the large constituency of white, middle class suburban and rural voters who were the supporters of Rumsfeldism. Although large, this group was not a majority, and that was why Rumsfeld hitched his star to the Christian Values movement as a back stop. They too were encouraged by having the radical leftist groups to use as scapegoats and “enemies” with which they could stir their supporters into action. Overall, while dedicated, WTP and the SWP could not overtake the Republicans and the CV in electoral politics, but enough of their members could be elective office at various levels to provide a loud and radical opposition. Rumsfeld could then use the threat of their gaining power as a club with which to beat support (or at least acquiescence) out of moderates.
It is worth noting that one of the reasons that Rumsfeld came to increasingly rely more on the Christian Values movement was that he did not have an iron control of the Republican Party. Unlike Hitler, with whom he is often compared, Rumsfeld never had an iron grip over the rank-and-file of the Republican Party or its office holders. Pete McCloskey had been a Republican once, and several significant figures of the resistance would be former Republicans themselves. The only living former Republican President, Richard Nixon, denounced Rumsfeld regularly from his Oxford exile, where he was joined by a former Republican presidential candidate and one-time leader of the conservative wing of that party, former California Governor Ronald Reagan. George Romney spoke out, until he was silenced. Barry Goldwater had been arrested. Even Spiro Agnew, now the Mayor of New York City, was less than full-throated in his support of his former Chief of Staff. Most significant of all, Jack Edwards, Rumsfeld’s first Vice President and a conservative Republican of long standing, was willing to support a coup against the President.
The Republican Party therefore could have been the source of a major dissent movement against Rumsfeld by denying him a political instrument of support. Why it didn’t can’t be fully explained, though much of it had to do with political opportunism by some of its members, and the effective use of the Christian Values movement by Rumsfeld to coerce many incumbents into cooperation (least they fall victim to CV inspired candidates in primaries). Bribery and blackmail (often of family members rather than the office holder themselves) were rife, and there is substantial evidence that several were murdered – as object lessons to the rest. As the Administration progressed and gained more power, and other moderate bodies of opposition were compromised or disappeared, Rumsfeld divided it by engineering the election of a large body of supporters who could cow the majority into acquiescence (often by providing a binary choice between Rumsfeld or the WTP and SWP, both of which made even liberal Republicans uneasy in terms of being potential allies). And, of course, Grammer could hammer Republicans too.
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The Text of the Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (The Rumsfeld Amendment):
1. The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is repealed in entirety.
2. Each state shall have two United States Senators, and no State may lose or gain any number of Senators without its explicit consent. In the manner of appointment, the President of the United States shall select and nominate a slate of United States Senators to fill the vacancies in every second election cycle, beginning in 1986. There shall be no confirmation, save that each Senator so nominated shall meet the qualifications for membership in the United States Senate listed under Article I of this Constitution. In the alternating cycle, beginning in 1988, the Executive of each of the several States shall appoint a United States Senator as provided for by the law in each of the several States, subject to the qualifications listed under Article I of this Constitution.
3. Nothing in this amendment shall alter the term of office for a United States Senator as prescribed under Article I of this Constitution. Any United States Senator elected under the provisions of the Seventeenth Amendment and currently serving an elected term at the time of the adoption of this Amendment shall continue to serve through the completion of his or her elected term.
4. The Executive of each of the several states shall continue to exercise the power to appoint interim Senators in the event of vacancy, and such interim Senators shall serve until the expiration of the term for which they are appointed.
5. The Uplifting Corporations as the Engine of Our Economy and the Creators of Prosperity Act shall be incorporated as a separate article of this Constitution.
6. The Religious Liberty Act shall be incorporated as a separate article of this Constitution.
7. No organization or person shall have their right to participate in the political process, including the raising of funds, nor their right to express an opinion under the First Amendment of this Constitution, abridged due to any circumstance relating to political, religious or tax-exempt status. Congress and the several States shall be barred from setting fundraising limits on any organization or person.
8. Clause seven (7) of this amendment shall not apply to those persons or organizations deemed by the Secretary of National Intelligence Coordination and Oversight to be subversive or anti-free market. The Secretary shall annually draw-up and publish a list of all organizations and persons deemed to be subversive and anti-free market. The rights described within the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments of this Constitution shall be held to not apply to those persons and organizations so named on the Secretary’s list. Inclusion or exclusion from the list shall remain at the sole discretion of the Secretary, or as may be directed by the Executive authority of the United States.
9. The Secretary of National Intelligence Coordination and Oversight shall be placed second in the line of Presidential succession, immediately after the Vice President of the United States. The Secretary of National Intelligence Coordination and Oversight shall be deemed the senior officer of the Cabinet, and shall have precedence before any Executive Branch official, save the President and Vice President of the United States.
10. Sexual assault shall in all instances be considered a grave violation of the civil rights of the assaulted and an attack upon the general welfare of all citizens of the United States. Accordingly there shall be one penalty in all the States for sexual assault, and that penalty will be death.
11. The right to own and freely enjoy lawfully acquired property shall not be denied to any citizen of the United States, nor shall it be abridged for reasons of environmental regulation.
12. The family being the foundation of good citizenship, and good citizenship being the foundation of a prosperous and bountiful republic, the right of parents to raise, educate and discipline their children according to the lights of their faith and reason shall not be abridged by any State law, and especially no State shall mandate or proscribe any manner of disciplinary correction which a parent may deem appropriate to the governance of order and discipline within the family.
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Thursday, May 16, 1985
President Rumsfeld calls for the repeal of:
Rivers and Harbors Act (1899)
Lacey Act (1900)
Weeks Act (1911)
North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911 (1911)
National Park Service Organic Act (1916)
Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918)
Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act (1934)
Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act (1954)
Fish and Wildlife Act (1956)
Clean Air Act (1963, 1970)
National Environmental Policy Act (1970)
Clean Water Act (1972)
Environmental Protection Agency (1972)
Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (1972)
Noise Control Act (1972)
Endangered Species Act (1973)
Safe Drinking Water Act (1974)
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976)
Toxic Substances Control Act (1976)
Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977)
CERCLA (Superfund) (1980)
He holds a ceremonial burning of those acts in the rose garden.
President: “For too long we have allowed anti-freedom forces to use false arguments about saving the environment, the so-called ecology movement, to hi-jack the economy of America. Today that ends. Freedom is restored and business is free to prosper and create jobs once more. While we await Congress’ swift action to do the right thing and sweep these relics of socialist tyranny into the ash can of history, I have issued Executive Orders directing the relevant agencies to disregard these acts, in short to no longer enforce them, as if Congress had already acted for freedom by repealing them.
“The best pollution control is a successful business. Don’t give an inch to the environmental conspiracy. When a tree-hugger speaks-up, tell him or her that you’re for jobs and your family’s economic future and against communistic environmentalism.”
Another Rumsfeld comment (concerning coal pollution): “They tell me that burning coal will heat-up the Earth, creating a kind of global warming. Well, if the world is getting warmer, isn’t that a good thing? I mean that’ll open-up the Arctic. Wouldn’t it be great if we could populate the great interior of Alaska as if it were Kansas or Texas? It certainly would make getting the oil and gas and other mineral wealth out of there so much easier. So, if there is this – global warming – then I say great; let’s have more of it.”
Ralph Nader: “My God, will this nation never wake up? Rumsfeld has just thrown out a century of environmental stewardship in exchange for what? The open sewer, the strip-mined landscape barren of life, the black cloud enveloping our cities with air so toxic human life as we know it becomes impossible! Beware as you sleep tonight in the White House Rumsfeld, the wrath of Teddy Roosevelt will not be contained, not even by the grave.”
A number of anti-Rumsfeld demonstrations are held in many major cities, many of which are broken up by Liberty Battalion lead counter demonstrations. These scenes descend into violence, providing a pretext for forceful police intervention, usually against the environmental demonstrators. Curfews and semi-martial law follow – to “enforce peace and order.”
Governor Pete McCloskey (D-CA): “As a former prosecutor, I say this. Today, hearing this, I hereby indict President Donald Rumsfeld for the murder of the United States. I indict him for murdering our land and our water. I indict him for murdering our Constitution. The America we grew-up in has been utterly destroyed by this man. He has murdered our identity as a people. As should be the case for all murderers, I call for his trial, his conviction and his incarceration. I can no longer call him my President as, by his own actions, he has forfeited all claim to that once respected title. God bless California, and God help the United States of America.”
The controversial California ordinance of secession, still being debated in the state assembly, now gains a new momentum. Even areas of rural California, identified as largely pro-Rumsfeld, are dismayed at this new round of anti-environmental legislation.
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Sunday, January 5, 1986
The United States “exile” population is estimated close to one million in the United Kingdom, and around the same number in France. Australia reports up to five hundred thousand refugees from the United States, and around seven hundred thousand are thought to be resident in Mexico*. Canada has one million Americans taking up residence, with more coming over the border every day. While many of these refugees are highly educated and tend to be center to left-of-center in their political views, their numbers are beginning to overwhelm the support infrastructure in these countries, especially as a many cannot bring their full assets out of the United States with them and are dependent on public support on the part of the host countries.
*= Although some to the U.S. refugees to Mexico are gringo, the overwhelming majority are Mexican Americans (U.S. citizens, often for several generations, as opposed to Mexican citizens returning from the United States, which is a separate demographic increase in Mexico) seeking refuge in their ancestral homeland. Since the flow of illegal aliens decreases, and the tide seems to be going the other way, President Rumsfeld uses this statistic to claim that his Administration has solved the illegal immigration problem. (The Mexican border statistics are publicized, the more general outflow numbers are not).
A further irony develops in the United Kingdom, where many left-of-centre American refugees, who supported Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Birch Bayh, Hugh Carey and Pete McCloskey in past U.S. Presidential elections, band around an exile advocacy group based in Oxford headed by Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
Both Reagan and Nixon receive protection from Special Branch out of concern that the Rumsfeld Administration might target them.
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Still working on the coup and California’s secession and, hint, California is not the only one.
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So the US is eating up chunks of Canada and the Rumsfeld regime is still going strong into at least 1987?
Huh.
Huh.
Jesus H. Christ! I thought Rumsfeld was evil enough, but he's a full-blown American Zhirinovsky now!
Although, does that make Edwards Alexander Lebed with less string-pulling?
Although, does that make Edwards Alexander Lebed with less string-pulling?
Would Canada still exist if Rumsfeld forces it to give up BC, Alberta, and the Yukon? I'm surprised he isn't attempting to anschluss Canada by forming Liberty Battalions (maybe its Calgary chapter will be led by one Stephen Harper).
Whatever happens next, Canada will have no choice but to develop a nuclear deterrent and introduce conscription to preserve what's left.
It's interesting the Roman Catholic Church opposed Rumsfeld from the very beginning, when it tends to unfortunately be manipulated by right-wing dictatorships who pay lip service to family values and morals. What happened to the many protestant churches which will surely become hubs of resistance?
Whatever happens next, Canada will have no choice but to develop a nuclear deterrent and introduce conscription to preserve what's left.
It's interesting the Roman Catholic Church opposed Rumsfeld from the very beginning, when it tends to unfortunately be manipulated by right-wing dictatorships who pay lip service to family values and morals. What happened to the many protestant churches which will surely become hubs of resistance?
Nobody fucks with Canada. We're like the Finland of the Americas.
Congressman
Banned
Shit, the United States is now a place Adolf Hitler would have been proud of.
I have a feeling (from reading the text and Drew's comments on more tears) the coup fails and leads to a massive crack down. And I think genocide breaks out in California.
So, what happened to George Romney? And George Wallace. Why didn't he run for reelection again?
And what about South Africa and Israel?
I have a feeling (from reading the text and Drew's comments on more tears) the coup fails and leads to a massive crack down. And I think genocide breaks out in California.
So, what happened to George Romney? And George Wallace. Why didn't he run for reelection again?
And what about South Africa and Israel?
I imagine that Israel may absorb the vast majority of America's Jewish community by the end of the 1980s (perhaps with the quiet backing of this administration, which would see the departure of most Jewish-Americans as another way to weaken the political left). With the Constitution being shredded, books being torched, and a still bad economy on top of all that, I suspect that it wouldn't take a lot of persuasion on the part of the government to push people to leave.
Am I terribly far off the mark Drew?
Of course, the arrival of four to five million new immigrants to Israel in less than a decade would challenge (and transform) Israel significantly compared to our world...
Speaking of Israel and the wider Jewish world in TTL (and I apologize if you touched upon or clarified these issues earlier), has Israel taken in the Beta Israel (the Ethiopian Jews) as of yet? And what of the Soviet Jews--has immigration been completely halted?
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Probably she will born from the increasily integration at both economic (EEC) and military (EDC) level, with people deciding to unite both side in a single organization (EU), expecially with the UK in the fold and without any illusion of 'special relationships' with the USA.
Military spending will be higher than OTL with Rumsfy playing dangerous games and now openly transforming the USA in a dictatorships...and frankly there is still the need to look strong for the Soviet (nobody will trust them 100%).
Request for memberships will be high, just to be safe in numbers and avoid another event like the Malta blockade (Sweden, Austria, Yugoslavia, even Turkey will ask memberships for all the organizations, while moderate arab nations like Tunisia and Morocco, will try some associations with the EEC).
Greece will remain a point of contention, with Rumsfy supporting a side of the civil war and the soviet help the others, the rest of the European nations will feel a little too in the middle, expecially if/when the situation will spill over the border...and frankly the TRW mercenaries will probably cause a lot of problem for the neighbours countries).
Unilateral nuclear disarmament is out of the question, expecially after Canada forced to cede some provinces (this event alone will make everybody decide that a strong military is indispensable to avoid Hitler 2.0)
So how long until the 13th Amendment gets repealed? I wouldn't be shocked by this point.
Good update as always Drew.
Good update as always Drew.
- Status