I often decry the call of "Munich" on foreign policy. It’s not 1938. Our foreign enemies are not Hitler. They don’t have his kind of power, and don’t pose his kind of threat.
But domestically, it has been 1938 in this country for a long time, and most Democrats have been Neville Chamberlain before it.
They constantly assume goodwill toward democracy, and to the basic rights of a free society, which Bush, Cheney, and their whole crowd do not share. The Administration uses this assumption of goodwill against them in ways large and small, in their ruthless campaign for absolute power — not just political power, but personal power, financial power, and judicial power.
It’s only the DFHs of the Netroots, the ones called "extreme" by the mainstream press, who are playing Churchill here. They seem easy to dismiss. In the short run, they are. If these people had realized earlier this year they were, in fact, the majority, as they claimed they were, they wouldn’t be in this mess.
But let me leave the financial scandals, the power grabs, the planetary destruction and the sick foreign policy for a moment. Let’s talk about this in terms of something I know well, the Internet.
Tim O’Reilly wants to play good cop. We agree on the nature of the Internet’s problem. We agree that Verizon and AT&T are trying to close it down.
But O’Reilly seems to believe in magic. Here is how he concludes his sunny New York Times piece on the subject:
In short, the race is on for competitive advantage in the truly open
cellular phone network of the future. Verizon hasn’t moved far enough —
yet. If the cellular carriers don’t act, Google and its partners will
beat them to the prize.
There’s a false assumption here, that Google and its partners will be permitted to claim the prize, that Verizon and AT&T are not cooperating in a scheme to prevent it by any means necessary.
Have the last 7 years taught Tim O’Reilly nothing? Is he really blind to the quid pro quo of total surveillance exchanged for monopoly, the dance between Washington and San Antonio which has been going on ever since this Junta took power in their 2000 coup? Sure, some of the phone guys, sometimes, start to feel a little guilty. That’s why Joe Nacchio is sitting in the slammer rather than sitting on his yacht!
The quid of this pro quo are the elimination of wired competition to the two giants’ Internet systems, and "auction" rules which guarantee the licenses are worth far more to the monopolists than they can be to any competitor. Everything else is details. Everything else is a dance. Everything else is done just to fool people like Tim O’Reilly.
The greatest advantage a tyrant has over those who believe in democracy is their belief that others hold the same faith. All a tyrant has to do is pretend to hold that faith, and those who believe in democracy will divide among themselves, giving the tyrant all the rope he needs to hang them, one by one. This is what conservatives are constantly harping on, this is John McCain’s endless repetition when it comes to foreign policy.
But the same is true domestically, and we have been blind to it too long. That is the nature of the crisis currently before America.
That’s how great countries go from the light into the darkness. Don’t assume that everyone who pretends goodwill has it. Don’t assume that all our enemies are foreign. Some really are domestic, and only by giving them no quarter, only by using their own ruthlessness, can they ever be defeated.
How much further down this road will men of goodwill go before they wake up to the reality? It’s not 1938 over there.
It’s 1938 over here.
