An intriguing, if not topical issue, is the mooted proposal to create an American Union out of the current NAFTA partners. This union would create one truly free market in goods, capital and labour, a single North American currency, and some inevitable joint political institutions. While America’s current insularity and global odium renders this project very unlikely in the short-term, many including this writer, believe its completion is not only inevitable but desirable.

Predictably in America’s current political climate, characterised by border fences and wrathful xenophobia, the proposal has its militantly passionate detractors, some of whom are decidedly apoplectic. I believe they would better serve humanity by resisting their unworthy xenophobia, and instead appraise the proposed situation with rational open minds.

There were those who strenuously resisted the liberation of slaves in America, enfranchisement of women, racial desegregation and NAFTA. The ‘reasons’ usually emit from an instinctive fear and loathing of change, of foreigners, and the unfamiliar. At every historical juncture, there are those who unworthily hold progress back.

The Euro has not only been a sterling economic success; the underlying project of political unification is the most noble political enterprise in history. The idea of the nation state is the root of international warfare, restricted trade and limited personal opportunity. The Euro consolidation promises: larger markets for all enterprises, meaning larger profits, tax revenues and employment oppurtunities; a more flexibly labour market, with optimum wage levels and workers able to go where their skills are most needed; and best of all, political unity, the only dependable final solution to the history of intra-continental warfare in Europe.

The American project promises akin benefits. One Cyclopean market means more wealth for legacy Canadians, Mexicans and Americans. One labour market means enterprises are matched with workers in the most efficient way. Political cooperation is a source of strength, resulting from an even mightier entity than the USA. What is so loathsome about a super state, mightier, wealthier, and more diverse than any of its legacy entities? Is the strongest argument against it that it is different from what we are familiar with?

There will always be those that baulk when poised on the cusp of history. Where are those that campaigned against desegregation, the manumission of slaves, or the Euro? Relegated to the wrong side of history is the answer. Those who let their trepidation at change, their paucity of vision and aversion for the man of a different colour determine their actions, will be similarly consigned to historical ignominy and eventual oblivion.

There comes a time when one has to make a choice about the country in which they live. In the case of Canada, or the United States, that choice is between true democracy or the plutocratic faux democracy that has crookedly grown out of a truly remarkable idea. Unfortunately, when it comes to making this choice, there is no middle ground. There exist no factors that must, or should, be taken into consideration before one decides which they are to support. That is the trick of the easy conscience, that there is middle ground to be found in our hearts and minds between what is inherently right and what is easy.

The Constitution of the United States, for example, is a living document, one that has been amended, challenged, and even disregarded. But it remains the basis of an idea, one which promises something truly revolutionary, perhaps outdone only by the Magna Carta itself – that all people, no matter their creed or religious inclinations, no matter their class or pedigree, have equal rights under the law, are protected from persecution for their beliefs and, most importantly, count equally when it comes to their voice being represented in the houses of government.

At what point is the power of the people diminished to such an extent that it becomes a meaningless thing? What would your reaction be were you to discover that the belief of many supposedly learned individuals throughout modern democratic history is that the people are, and always have been, too ignorant to trust, let alone be fully granted their representational rights? What if the basis of our supposed democracies are simply based on the recreation of a society in which aristocrats guide policy and complicate the waters of government to such an extent that only they can navigate them? Most importantly – why is it considered naïve to view government in base terms, those in which it was initially created? In the case of the United States, the creation of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency following the Second World War speaks to the ability of democratic governments to use national security justifications not to simply further dilute the public’s roll in the democratic process, but begin the accelerated erosion of democracy itself by employing protectionism as justification for it. That, in and of itself, greatly effects the landscape of the Canadian military establishment, which has certainly been demonstrated since our roll in Afghanistan began, not to mention throughout the Cold War.

But what if Americans were to discover that both the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency actually operate outside of the Constitution? That, in fact, since their inception, they always have? Chalmers Johnson address this very point in Sorrows Of Empire, so I’ll not do it here, but it is a revelation that can also be addressed by the afore mentioned question: why is it considered naïve to view government in base terms?

Because both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense were created to fulfill protectionist rolls (or at least carry on where earlier, less developed, departments had once existed), then how can they really be challenged simply by asking straightforward questions about their activities? Beyond being branded a traitor (and tarred and feathered), why is it that ordinary citizens, whose roll in government is, according to the function of democracy itself, paramount, cannot ask to have the unaltered spending of these government apparatuses disclosed to their elected representatives?

National security has, and will always be, the response of those that do not possess the vision to see the democratic process for what it must be – transparent. The United States remains the foremost global model of a police state that operates, for lack of a better term, ‘in the black’. It is a nation of, for the most part, highly insulated people who, despite their government being the most influential and militaristic in the world, are oblivious to the majority of its actions and the operations of its foreign services. What your average American cannot contextualize becomes justification for both anger and vengeance – look no further than the repercussions of 9/11 for proof positive.

There has always been a great deal of talk about the use of fear as a controlling mechanism. What there has rarely ever been are serious discussions about overcoming that fear, of deconstructing the apparatuses that currently exist to facilitate the ability of those in power to influence. Ironically, it took the greatest terrorist attack in US history to wake many Americans up to the fact that fear is the most valuable currency to any government, be it democratic or otherwise, the world over. 9/11 succeeded on so many different levels that it’s difficult to examine them without spending a considerable amount of time doing it, but it should not be overlooked that the reaction at the highest and most influential levels of government, almost immediately after the attacks, was to attack a country that had nothing to do with it while exonerating one from which the majority of the attackers came.

Again, the use of fear as political currency is something not interrupted, only amplified if the possibility presents itself. The attacks of September 11th did just that, providing individuals within the Bush administration the ability to start spending it on the convolution of not only the American people, but their very rights.

In a recent article for Harpers, Daniel Ellsberg, writing about the responsibility of employees within the defense establishment to come forward with information that could possibly avert disastrous military actions (in the case of the article, plans for attacking Iran), mentioned something that Richard Clark had exclaimed…

“Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.???

Both Ellsberg and Clark possessed enough information before military action commenced (Vietnam and Iraq respectively) to expose the government’s true intentions. Of his own inaction Ellsberg writes…

“My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of war. His colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that the president sought “no wider war??? and had no intention of expanding hostilities without further consulting them. They believed that they were simply expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam three days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had told them were in “retaliation??? for the “unequivocal,??? “unprovoked??? attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers “on routine patrol??? in “international waters.???

Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That they were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public seven years later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, several thousand pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that I had released to the press. The very first installment, published by the New York Times on June 13, 1971, had proven the official account of the Tonkin Gulf episode to be a deliberate deception.???

With regards to Iran, Ellsberg goes on to write…

“We face today a crisis similar to those of 1964 and 2002, a crisis hidden once again from the public and most of Congress. Articles by Seymour Hersh and others have revealed that, as in both those earlier cases, the president has secretly directed the completion, though not yet execution, of military operational plans—not merely hypothetical “contingency plans??? but constantly updated plans, with movement of forces and high states of readiness, for prompt implementation on command—for attacking a country that, unless attacked itself, poses no threat to the United States: in this case, Iran.

According to these reports, many high-level officers and government officials are convinced that our president will attempt to bring about regime change in Iran by air attack; that he and his vice president have long been no less committed, secretly, to doing so than they were to attacking Iraq; and that his secretary of defense is as madly optimistic about the prospects for fast, cheap military success there as he was in Iraq.

Even more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported in The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President Cheney’s office had directed contingency planning for “a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons??? and that “several senior Air Force officers??? involved in the planning were “appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objection.???

Daniel Ellsberg is right when he says…

“Simply resigning in silence does not meet moral or political responsibilities of officials rightly “appalled??? by the thrust of secret policy.???

The thing is, it doesn’t begin and end with people who happen to be in the position to leak sensitive materials that expose government fraudulence. It is the responsibility of us all, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, to never forget that the base reality of any democracy is that the people, for better or worse, are the masters of their own destiny, and not simply numbers used to help propagate the policies of elites. Unless, that is, you would rather rely on an easy conscience to help navigate you through the ever muddying waters of this profound dissolution of ours. Then, by all means, grab a shovel and start helping dig the grave that must, inevitably, accommodate us all.

In January of 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis remarked “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died Of A Theory???.

Interestingly put.

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By Matthew Good
matthewgood.org