HEAT WAVES: BURNING OFF THE FOG OF FISA FIASCO
By Chris Floyd/June 23, 2008   

Arthur Silber brings the heat in his latest posts on the FISA "compromise." He cuts through the surface outrage over the Democratic-led, Obama-approved evisceration of the Constitution to expose the even deeper outrages beneath. And he takes on those progressive enablers who denounce critics of Obama's position for their "freshman dorm cynicism" – i.e., calling a shameful action a shameful action, and decrying the Democratic candidate's active collusion in undermining freedom.

But first, I urge you to get on over to Arthur's site right now and put something in the hat for the man. As we've noted often before – and as Silber explains here – the website is his only means of support. He lives on a perilous margin, with failing health, in constant pain, in brutal poverty, yet still manages to produce insightful, eloquent and illuminating essays at an astounding rate. We cannot afford to lose this unique voice and vision. So give whatever you can.

I.
Silber's latest gives us the grim word that "FISA is Only the Prelude to Nightmare." As he puts it [see the original for links]:

He then quotes Jack Balkin's pertinent observation that Obama approves the compromise because he very much wants to have those broad powers when he is president. As Balkin notes, it is the unheralded part of the bill -- which vastly expands "the executive's ability to wiretap and engage in much broader searches of communications than were permissible under the law before" -- that is actually its most egregious and far-reaching element. The legal immunity for telecoms that helped Bush violate the law is but the icing on this poison cake. Obama can score political points by criticizing this element of the bill, because it doesn't really matter. It's almost impossible that immunity will be stripped from the final bill, as Democratic leaders have already admitted.  The big corporations will be protected, and President Obama will have those expanded powers in hand -- to be used only for good, of course.

Silber then moves to a telling point that he has hammered home many times before: the FISA law itself -- not just this "compromise" -- is a forceful, brutal rape of the Constitution, a shocking outrage against liberty that has been going on for decades:

Watch the layers peel away. The FISA compromise bill is abominable, without question; anyone who supports it cannot possibly be regarded as a serious believer in constitutional democracy. Yet behind this truth is another one, noted above: the FISA system itself is an abomination for a free people. And behind this comes yet another, grimmer truth: the FISA system, either old-style or the new Obama-abetted version, is just a miniscule part of the "endless array of weapons" at the disposal of the National Surveillance State:

Silber then goes through just a handful of these sinister instruments, garnered from a few moments of web research, detailing their forceful penetration into every aspect of our lives. In conclusion, he quotes the credo of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which tries to keep track of ever-spreading ooze of the Surveillance state, a 1928 quote from Justice Louis Brandeis: "The right to be left alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people." Silber concludes:

Hot enough for you out there? Go read the whole thing, and you'll really start to sweat.

II.
As noted above, Obama has taken some heat for his embrace of the Democrat's deadly FISA farce. Disappointment, even anger, is certainly rife across the progressosphere. For some stalwarts, it has induced a new sense of grim realism, ranging from "ya gotta do what ya gotta do, and I'm glad our guy's got the balls to do what he gotta do" offered by Jonathan Leigh Solomon, to the strange blast produced by Digby, which Silber, in another piece, rightly describes as "We're 2% less shitty than Pure Evil! It's all we've got!"

Digby too has criticized Obama's FISA move, albeit with the usual "I just can't figure out why he would do such a thing" trope, which she has had to apply to virtually every action taken by the Democrats in recent years. [The answer, of course, as Silber has often noted, is plain: they "do it" – sell out to corporations, to warmongers, to authoritarianism and unaccountable power – because they want to do it. It's what they believe in.] Her disappointment in Obama is palatable. Yet in responding to unnamed persons who have apparently deluged her with comments along the line of "a plague on both your houses," she comes back with this:

So if you are someone like – well, like me, for instance – who says that Obama's actions and choice of advisers seem to suggest that he will not overturn, roll back or seriously challenge the long-running liberty-devouring, militarist, corporatist trends of the American Imperium, and could possibly even augment some of them – then you're just a German commie from 1932.

Well, I never. And here all this time I thought I was a Buddhist Jacobin in the Reconstruction Era – which is about as historically coherent as her allusion.

Digby seems to think that it was stay-at-home, stick-in-the-mud German Communists who somehow let Hitler obtain power in 1932. She also seems to think that the German Reds were some sort of starry-eyed, impotent "third party" sitting on the sidelines twiddling their thumbs while the Nazis strutted into office. In fact, the Communists were the second largest party in the country in the 1932 Reichstag elections. And in the last free election that year (or relatively free; a succession of right-wing governments had already introduced many of the authoritarian measures that the Nazis later extended), the Communists were gaining support, while the Nazis were losing voters. The Reds were also in the streets, battling it out with Brownshirts, putting their bodies on the line, and paying a heavy price – both then and later. Of course, this kind of thing is not real activism, not like, say, blogging, or clicking a "donate" button at barackobama.com. Still, "ineffectual whining" or even "starry-eyed impotence" might not be the best descriptors for people who were beaten, stabbed, shot and later put into concentration camps for fighting fascism.

What really opened the door to Hitler's rise to power was the collapse of the centrist parties' belief in democracy, and their acquiescence – and sometimes active collusion – in tyrannical measures that eviscerated the republic. Here one might attend to The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans, a work described by top historian Ian Kershaw as "the most comprehensive history in any language of the disastrous epoch of the Third Reich."

At one point, Evans describes the events of July 1932, when Nazi stormtroopers invaded a working-class town outside Hamburg which heavily supported the Communists. The ensuing violence – when those impotent Red whiners poured out to defend the community – gave the increasingly authoritarian central government of Chancellor Franz von Papen an excuse to seize control of the "progressive" state government of Prussia – which covered more than half the country – and impose military rule there. Evans notes:

Historical analogies are just that: analogies, not exact parallels. Still, if one wanted to toss around comparisons between America today and Germany in 1932, one could do worse than point to the way that centrist parties – even "progressive" parties, like the Social Democrats – failed to stand up for democracy in the face of authoritarian encroachments. That would actually make more sense that comparing a few unnamed malcontents to a fantasy image of "starry-eyed," fence-sitting, marginalized German commies of yore.

But Silber finds implications beyond mere historical inaccuracy in Digby's piece:

Silber later notes in an aside:

Silber also contrasts the "frantic activity" and "frenzied motions" surrounding the entirely predictable Democratic complicity in the FISA bill – including energetic campaigns that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars almost instantly to mount election challenges to Democratic supporters of the bill – with the near silence, and total non-action, that has greeted attempts to head off a war with Iran. Silber long ago proposed a plan for a national media campaign to rouse public opposition to military aggression against Iran. He undertook to carry out most of the work himself, or freely turn it over to others with better ideas and more resources – if even a modicum of proper financial backing for such a campaign could be found. With just a couple of posts, any one of the major progressive blogs could have generated sufficient funds to begin such an effort – as we have seen in just the past few days. None did.

That's their right, of course. Everyone is free to choose their own priorities. For some, it's stopping an act of mass murder that could lead to catastrophic suffering and upheaval on a global scale for decades to come. (An act which Obama has continually and forcefully – some might say maniacally – insisted that he is more than willing to perform.) For others it's holding the Democrats' feet to the fire – over and over and over again – in the wistful hope that they will perhaps someday be marginally less evil in their weak and corrupt undermining of freedom than the Republicans are. Whatever gets you through the night, I guess.

But let's end with a question. Which of these priorities is actually much more positive than the other, imbued with a much greater belief in democracy, in hope and change, in the infinite possibilities of the human spirit, in the efficacy of political activism? The one that accepts weakness, corruption and the undermining of freedom as a basic principle, the best we can do, "all we've got"? Or the one that calls upon the better angels of our nature to stop needless suffering – and to end our acquiescence in a system that depends on perpetual war and authoritarian power to maintain its engines of injustice and domination?