-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.instantmag.com/main6.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.instantmag.com/main6.htm";>INSTANT Magazine Online</A> ----- Political Entanglements #16 An Interview With David McGowan by Shawn Setaro ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This issue I speak with David McGowan. David is the author of the great book Derailing Democracy [Common Courage Press, 2000] and the as-yet-unpublished Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion. He is also a prolific essay writer. The book manuscript and all of his essays are available at his web site, jokingly called the Center for an Informed America (note the acronym), which is located at www.davesweb.cnchost.com. David is a fascinating and comprehensive chronicler of the intelligence services and a vigilant fighter against fascism in all its forms, including its myriad appearances in this country. He lives in Los Angeles, California, where I spoke to him via telephone in the late summer. INSTANT: The first thing I wanted to talk about was that you openly call America a fascist state. Now, I know you spent a book-manuscript-length paper explaining that, but can you perhaps give a capsule version for people who might be surprised to hear that? Also, how did you feel when you first figured that out? DAVE MCGOWAN: How did I feel? That�s a good question. I had a very rough time with it. I�ve always considered myself to be well politically informed. I�ve always known that the "mainstream media" was lying to me, but I always assumed that I was getting something fairly close to the straight story from more alternative media sources. It wasn�t really until I started getting very in-depth with the research for my book that I began to see how many issues and how much information is not being addressed by any of the venues of the media. � I had a very difficult time with it psychologically. It�s like waking up one day and realizing that everything you take to be the truth is a lie. It�s like all of sudden black is white and up is down. It was tough. One of the hardest parts was having to acknowledge to myself that many of the people that I had looked up to as mentors and idols � watching them drop by the wayside as I realized that there was just so much information that was not getting through, and that it is readily available information that should be getting out there and is not. I went through a very tough period for a year or so, where I just had to acknowledge to myself that a lot of what I had taken all of my life to be the truth was not. That�s the best I can answer that part of the question. � As far as, how did I come to that conclusion as to what America is, like you say, that is covered in the manuscript of my hopefully forthcoming, but as of yet unpublished book. How to summarize that � that�s a tough one. I don�t even know where to begin, really. INSTANT: Well, we can put that aside for a minute. One of the more fascinating ideas you�ve dealt with is the notion that there are no real political parties in this country and at the upper levels at least, if not further down, it�s all conscious elite posturing. What makes you think that? DAVE MCGOWAN: There�s a lot of talk lately about that � labeling the two parties the "Republicrats" has become the catchphrase. I think it really goes deeper than that. I don�t think it�s so much that the two parties have kind of merged in the center, which is what we�re supposed to believe. Both parties have actually gone considerably to the right. � I don�t believe that there have been two parties in this country for at least my lifetime, and probably for at least this century. It�s all a game; it�s all a fa�ade. That is, it�s a show put on for the American people to project the idea that there�s a legitimate choice politically, that there are actually competing political ideologies in this country and deep divisions within Congress and in Washington over policy decision. I no longer believe that to be the case. I believe that there�s only one agenda that�s being pursued, and that all the rest is smoke and mirrors to create the image of this tug-of-war. We�re supposed to believe that the U.S. government works as a system of give and take between the "liberal" and the "conservative" ideology and that all the policy decisions that are made are ultimately the result of a give and take and political in-fighting between these opposing camps. That explanation doesn�t really fly when you start getting seriously into researching these things. It�s pretty clear that one single agenda is being pursued, and the two parties consist of a bunch of actors. It�s a stage play where there�s an unspoken agreement � or maybe a spoken agreement, I don�t know � between the powers that be that some of them are going to pose as the Democrats and some of them are going to pose as the Republicans. INSTANT: What are the key points of the agenda, so far as you can make them out? DAVE MCGOWAN: To push the country further and further into the direction of an overtly fascist political system � a police state mentality. What fascism is by definition is an authoritarian capitalist system. Most people don�t realize that. We are conditioned from birth to view fascism as a socialist system, and that�s due to a number of reasons, one of which is that fascist movements generally cloak themselves in the garb of socialism. Hitler dubbed his party the National Socialist Workers Party. But adopting a name and adopting an ideology are two very different things. It�s all well and good to call yourself the National Socialist Workers Party, but that doesn�t make you a socialist any more than naming your party the Reform Party makes you a reformer. It�s co-opting a name to promote a fascist agenda. � The vast majority of Americans do not understand what fascism is. They lump it in the same category as communism. What we refer to as communism is an authoritarian socialist system. The whole way that Westerners and Americans view the world is as a black-and-white dynamic. There�s our side, which is democracy, which we consider to be synonymous with capitalism, and the other side, which is the godless Communists. And since there�s only us and them, we put lump fascism in with the communist camp. I�ve had any number of well-educated, rational people tell me that Hitler and Stalin represent two of the prime examples of the excesses of the "Communist state". INSTANT: This ties in with your idea that the worst lost to political discourse through this kind of propaganda is the idea that a democratic socialism is possible. DAVE MCGOWAN: Exactly! It is completely shut out from our whole mental process. We�re not even allowed to think in that framework. We�re taught that there�s only one form of capitalism, and that is democratic capitalism; and we�re taught that there is only one sort of socialism, which is authoritarian socialism, and that the two are opposing. � The truth is that there are two separate scales � the political scale and the economic. On the political scale you have capitalism, which is private ownership of the means of production, at one end; and socialism, which is the social ownership of the means of production at the other end. On the political continuum, you have democracy at one end, which is rule of, by, and for the people; and authoritarianism at the other end, which is rule by the few at the expense of and by the oppression of the many. It�s how these two somewhat separate, parallel frameworks come together that determines the political system. � So you have four possibilities. You have democratic capitalism, you have democratic socialism, you have authoritarian capitalism, and authoritarian socialism. But we only recognize two of those squares �democratic capitalism, which is what we refer to as "democracy" or "The Free World", and authoritarian socialism, which is what we refer to as "communism". INSTANT: I know you have a degree in psychology. But for someone who does have a degree in it, you�ve been unrelentingly critical of the field, calling it a way of getting rid of dissenters and pointing out its links to fascism and mind control. When and how did you really start to turn on your college major? DAVE MCGOWAN: I questioned a lot of it as I was learning it, but I couldn�t really put my finger on why. Looking back at my whole educational experience in high school and college, I always knew that something was wrong. I always had this nagging belief that the pieces just didn�t fit together, that I could not synthesize all this material in my mind, because it didn�t make sense. The pieces of the puzzle just didn�t fit together. Our education is based on not connecting the dots. We�re supposed to absorb these little bits and pieces of unconnected information and regurgitate them out at the proper time, but we�re not supposed to analyze it and try to draw any connections or detect any patterns. � When you do, that�s when you start getting into trouble, because you realize that the pieces of the puzzle don�t fit together. I always questioned it to some extent, but I didn�t have the information at my disposal to know why it didn�t make sense. It wasn�t until many years later, when I started more independent research on my own, that I finally could really make sense of why I had had such misgivings about it back in the school days. So it�s a process of connecting the dots. I said earlier that I had gone through this psychological trauma when I realized the full extent of how much I was being lied to. But there�s a feeling of relief ultimately in that the world finally makes sense. Once you accept that America is indeed not what it pretends to be at all � that it�s not even close to what it pretends to be; that there�s not just a few little minor problems with the system that need tweaking, but the entire system itself is corrupt � it�s only then that things start making sense and that as you observe new events unfolding, they make sense in a way they never did before. INSTANT: Along those lines, I wanted to ask you something about the Internet. You wrote briefly about its history as an intelligence tool, and it�s creation by military intelligence, and point out that correspondence and shopping and tax information are all easier to track on-line. Is this a reason for the recent popularity of the Internet and dot.com businesses? Is that climate fostered by the intelligence instead of or in addition to what we�re normally taught to think, which is the free market? DAVE MCGOWAN: Yeah, I think in a big way it is. The Internet was designed as a tool of the intelligence community. It was originally called the ARPAnet � Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been identified by any number of researchers as a CIA front from its inception, and the National Science Foundation, which was the other key player in that, has also been identified as an intelligence front. So it was definitely developed as an intelligence tool and functioned as an intelligence tool for a couple of decades at least, before it was magically reborn as this great boom to us civilians. Of course, the company that was primarily responsible for repackaging it was AOL, which as you mentioned has been the subject of considerable debate among researchers over whether it is an intelligence front itself. � The Internet was very much foisted on the American people as an information-gathering tool to gather information about the users of the Internet, even as they are using it to gather information for their own purposes. It�s a double-edged sword. I got questions about this from audiences when I was doing my book signings. They asked me, isn�t it kind of ironic that you have attacked the Internet, but it was that very Internet that allowed your book to come into being, because a lot of this information was accessed from various news sources on the Internet? So yeah, it is a double-edged sword. But in the final analysis, I think it is an intelligence tool that is designed to foster the surveillance state that we are steadily drifting into, in conjunction with various other technologies that have eroded personal privacy. That�s one of the subjects that is covered in my book. � It serves another intelligence function as well, in that it serves to further isolate people. Contrary to its reputation as creating a quote-unquote "global community", it draws people more into their own shell. People are more and more interacting with the world through their Internet. There have been calls for on-line voting and all these various things. They serve two purposes. One is the information-gathering function, and the other is to further fragment society. That is one of the ultimate goals; to fragment society as much as possible, and to reduce us all to our own little island and destroy any kind of sense of community and group cohesiveness. That�s an agenda that has been pursued in numerous other ways as well. INSTANT: I was going to get to that. You actually talk about events that seem to be unrelated, like the Kennedy assassination and the Littleton shooting, and put them all in the category of events tended to inflict, as you put it, "blunt force trauma on all of American society". Now, assuming this is the case, why is it necessary to have that in the range of tactics? Why not rely on more subtle methods, like the one you were just talking about of isolating people? Why go all the way to this violent, blunt force action? DAVE MCGOWAN: I don�t know. It�s certainly effective, though. If that is indeed the tactic, it has certainly been an astoundingly successful one, dating back at least as far as the Kennedy assassination. If you look at public opinion polls before and after the Kennedy assassination, there was a profound change in the American psyche that followed the Kennedy assassination. People felt much more isolated and helpless and they�d been traumatized in a very big way. The country�s never really fully recovered from that. One of the reasons that it hasn�t is because there have been repeated episodes of that nature ever since then. So it�s certainly an effective tactic. � Whether it is necessary or whether we would ultimately evolve to the same point through more subtle strategy, I don�t really know. I would say that that is probably one of the quickest ways to achieve the desired goal. The more the people are huddled in their own little fearful corner, afraid of crime, and the more they are socially isolated within their own little sphere of existence, the better that serves the interest of the corporate state, because a people that are divided among themselves cannot rally together to find common cause to wage war against the real enemy. It�s the old divide-and-conquer strategy. The more methods can be employed to achieve that end, the better, from the point of view of those who are pursuing that agenda. INSTANT: The final thing that I wanted to ask you was: you spend a lot of time outlining the creeping global fascism � what it looks like, who the players are, how it works. Do you have any suggestions or ideas for combating it? DAVE MCGOWAN: A lot of people have told me, you do a good job of identifying the problems, but you�re not offering us any solutions. The problem is, when most people ask that question, they want to hear easy solutions. They want to hear the Ariana Huffington kind of solutions, where if you write letters to your Congressman, let him know what you want, and you write letters to your paper and support a third-party candidate and wage your own candidacy and get involved with some local environmental causes, that everything�s going to be okay. That is simply not true. You can write letters to your Congressman till the cows come home and it�s not going to do any good. You can write letters to your newspaper, and they�re not even going to publish them � believe me, because I�ve tried! � So the solutions that people want, these easy, low-effort kind of simple solutions to very complex problems, they�re simply not going to work. When the entire system is as fundamentally corrupt as it is in my view, which I think I build a pretty convincing case for in my various writings, you cannot fix the system by tweaking a few little controls here and there. You cannot wage a campaign for campaign finance reform and think that that�s going to be a cure-all to fix the system. Personally, I don�t think that the system can be fixed. I don�t believe that any amount of tinkering with it is going to solve the deep-rooted problems that we have in this country. The system has to be trashed. It has to be brought down. That would be about the only solution I could give you. � How does that come about? I have no idea. The first step, I suppose, is awareness. I�ve had a number of people tell me that the situation won�t get better until it gets worse, until people can see how bad it is. And my response to that is that the system is already far worse than you think, and it doesn�t need to get any worse. People just need to be made aware of how bad it already is. So the first stage is awareness. Enough people have to be made aware of what we are and where we stand as a nation before we can even begin to think about forming some kind of a movement to effect serious change in this country. � How we get to that point? I really don�t know. I really don�t know. I could tell you that it�s very difficult to get your voice heard � again, referring to Ward Churchill�s interview, he said something to the effect of, you have free speech in this country only to the extent that nobody�s listening. That�s very true. I have the right to publish my book, but that doesn�t mean anybody�s going to read it. If nobody in the media acknowledges that your book exists, then it doesn�t do a lot of good to have it published. � I thought that was the big hurdle. I was shocked that I got it published. I was floating on cloud nine. I couldn�t believe that they would actually publish it, considering it had several strikes against it � the subject matter and coming from an unknown author. I quickly realized that that was far from being the final hurdle. It does absolutely no good to have a book published if nobody will acknowledge that it exists, so that people are aware of it. I can�t even get a bad review. I�d be thrilled just to have somebody trash it, as long as you acknowledge that it actually exists. � So how do you go about getting this kind of information out to enough people to make a difference? I really don�t know. I wish I had an answer to that question, but I don�t. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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