"Terrorist" designation by our Corporatist and Unionist neo-fascist rulers a ploy to preserve power, silence critics and dissent

From:
Is the U.S. a Fascist Police-State?
(zerohedge.com) -- by Tyler Durden --

But with yesterday’s Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project decision (No. 08-1498, also 09-89) of the Supreme Court, coupled with last week’s Arar v. Ashcroft denial of certiorari (No. 09-923), the case for claiming that the U.S. is a fascist police-state just got a whole lot stronger.

First of all, what is a “fascist police-state”?

A police-state uses the law as a mechanism to control any challenges to its power by the citizenry, rather than as a mechanism to insure a civil society among the individuals. The state decides the laws, is the sole arbiter of the law, and can selectively (and capriciously) decide to enforce the law to the benefit or detriment of one individual or group or another.

In a police-state, the citizens are “free” only so long as their actions remain within the confines of the law as dictated by the state. If the individual’s claims of rights or freedoms conflict with the state, or if the individual acts in ways deemed detrimental to the state, then the state will repress the citizenry, by force if necessary. (And in the end, it’s always necessary.)

What’s key to the definition of a police-state is the lack of redress: If there is no justice system which can compel the state to cede to the citizenry, then there is a police-state. If there exists a pro forma justice system, but which in practice is unavailable to the ordinary citizen because of systemic obstacles (for instance, cost or bureaucratic hindrance), or which against all logic or reason consistently finds in favor of the state – even in the most egregious and obviously contradictory cases – then that pro forma judiciary system is nothing but a sham: A tool of the state’s repression against its citizens. Consider the Soviet court system the classic example.

A police-state is not necessarily a dictatorship. On the contrary, it can even take the form of a representative democracy. A police-state is not defined by its leadership structure, but rather, by its self-protection against the individual.

A definition of “fascism” is tougher to come by – it’s almost as tough to come up with as a definition of “pornography”.

The sloppy definition is simply totalitarianism of the Right, “communism” being the sloppy definition of totalitarianism of the Left. But that doesn’t help much.

For our purposes, I think we should use the syndicalist-corporatist definition as practiced by Mussolini: Society as a collection of corporate and union interests, where the state is one more competing interest among many, albeit the most powerful of them all, and thus as a virtue of its size and power, taking precedence over all other factions. In other words, society is a “street-gang” model that I discussed before. The individual has power only as derived from his belonging to a particular faction or group – individuals do not have inherent worth, value or standing.

Now then! Having gotten that out of the way, where were we?

Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project: The Humanitarian Law Project was advising groups deemed “terrorists” on how to negotiate non-violently with various political agencies, including the UN. In this 6-3 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court ruled that that speech constituted “aiding and abetting” a terrorist organization, as the Court determined that speech was “material support”. Therefore, the Executive and/or Congress had the right to prohibit anyone from speaking to any terrorist organization if that speech embodied “material support” to the terrorist organization.

The decision is being noted by the New York Times as a Freedom of Speech issue; other commentators seem to be viewing it in those terms as well.

My own take is, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project is not about limiting free speech—it's about the state expanding it power to repress. The decision limits free speech in passing, because what it is really doing is expanding the state’s power to repress whomever it unilaterally determines is a terrorist...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

The Left-Right, Statist-Corporatist monolith that is ringing the American people dry for its own self-serving, parasitical purposes will go to any lengths, no matter how murderous, to preserve its stranglehold over our country. Notice how the Obama administration has picked right up on the Bushcon War on Terror as a useful pretext for intimidating critics and dissidents, and suppressing free speech. Without the War on Terror constantly being thrown in our faces as the remedy to the supposedly biggest threat Americans face, none of these anti-Constitutional power grabs, nor their intellectual rationales (which are laying the bureaucratic groundwork for an ever-tightening noose around Americans' individual and civil rights) would be possible, or accepted.

No wonder Obama refuses to bring our troops home, and is instead escalating American wars in the Middle East. In fact, AntiWar.com today is reporting that Obama has essentially characterized those Americans who want him to fulfill his campaign promises to begin a final drawdown of U.S. troops in the Middle East as neurotics addicted to an unhealthy "obsession."

Speaking today in the wake of the G20 Summit, President Barack Obama criticized what he called “a lot of obsession” about ending the war in Afghanistan and withdrawing some 100,000 American troops from the nation.

Obama insisted that instead of considering if and how the war will ever come to some sort of end, his “focus right now is how do we make sure that what we’re doing there is successful, given the incredible sacrifices.”

The US initially invaded Afghanistan in late 2001. The number of troops in the nation has rising precipitously since President Obama took office in 2009, inheriting a war with 30,000 troops and turning it into a war with 100,000 troops.

Obama’s comments reflect those he made earlier this week, disavowing his pledge to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July of 2011. Now President Obama says that date is just the “beginning of a transition phase” and there is no particular timeline for leaving Afghanistan.

Just as the Bushcons who ran and were elected on campaign promises of shrinking the State and ending a corrupted America's proclivity for authroitarian social-engineering and "nation building" around the world went back on their promises and wound up growing the State and its global reach more than any regime since that of LBJ under the pretext of a global War on Terror, so too have the Obamunists pulled a bait and switch on the voters who swept them into office on a popular anti-war, anti-Empire backlash against the treacherous Bush administration. The Obama regime clearly never intended to pull America from the bog in the Middle East any more than the Bush regime ever intened to shrink Big Government.

The packaging may change, but the Statist-Corporatist-Unionist kleptocracy hell-bent on enriching and empowering itself by ringing America until final collapse remains the same.