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Title: Question Authority
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: November 6, 2006
Language: en
Topics: Elections, United States of America, anti-authoritarianism
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/11/question-authority-obligatory-election.html

Kevin Carson

Question Authority

Three very loosely connected items:

1. “Did You Know?”

Those three words should always raise a red flag. They indicate that

you’re in the process of being manipulated by your mortal enemy.

Whenever I see a propaganda poster or a public service announcement that

starts out asking “Did you know?”, my immediate response is “No--and I

still don’t.” Any time anyone in a position of authority wants you to

believe something, the wisest course is to assume it’s a damned lie

until proven otherwise.

2. “As Bad as Hitler.”

Any time the corporate media echoes the government’s talking points on

how horrible, awful, and thuggish some foreign leader is (I’m talking

about the Saddam trial here, obviously), you can safely assume that

you’re being manipulated into supporting somebody’s agenda. I figure

Saddam probably really did a lot of the wicked stuff he’s accused

of--although I’ve seen accounts that cast considerable doubt on the

“people shredders” and “rape rooms,” and make me suspect those stories

belong in the same category as Belgian nuns and Kuwaiti incubator

babies. But if he did do those things, he was doing them for years

before the orchestrated demonization campaign began in the fall of 1990.

Saddam was torturing and murdering people a long time before 1990, it’s

just that you didn’t hear about it. Why not? Because he was following

orders.

Here’s a typical scenario. Satan is on the CIA’s payroll. All the

arch-demons are getting sent to Ft. Benning for training in the latest

torture techniques at the SOA/WHISC. Then Satan stops obeying orders

from Washington and outlives his usefulness. The next day, Tony Snow is

up at the podium announcing in horrified tones all the awful things they

suddenly just “discovered” that are going on in Hell. Then the first

pictures surface of Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Devil back in 1983.

The CIA and U.S. armed forces have installed some of the bloodiest

murders in history into power. But you almost never hear about them in

the mainstream media so long as the murderers are doing their jobs,

murdering the people that U.S. corporate-state elites want murdered.

3. What are the most important issues in American politics?

The ones you never hear about because the two major parties agree on

them. And who are the only candidates who are not total manufactured

fakes? The third party candidates who can afford to be genuine because

they know they haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected.

In the microcosm of Arkansas politics, that’s illustrated by all the

candidates for statewide office who agree on the priority of “economic

development” through special incentives to “bring business into the

state”--i.e., try to lure businesses here by offering a better corporate

welfare deal than other states. If you suggest that the best form of

economic development is through flourishing, diversified local

economies, owned by the local population, and that the best way there is

to stop subsidizing the big corporations that colonize those local

economies; or if you suggest that most of our economic problems are

caused by the fact that big business already pays too few of the costs

it imposes on society... well, needless to say, that puts you somewhere

on the outer fringes.

Locally, I’ve noticed that just about every single City Council

candidate is agreed that the top priority should be to “relieve

congestion” by building more roads (in Springdale, that means especially

the big east-west corridors through town and the Hwy 412 bypass north of

town. Anyone who thinks building more and bigger roads will relieve

congestion is delusional. It’s understandable, though, that the

political establishment has absorbed the conventional wisdom of the

local Growth Machine. In fact, though, building more roads just

generates more congestion. That bypass and those east-west corridors

will just be filled up with the new traffic generated by all the new

subdivisions and big box stores built along those subsidized roads.