Anti-War Website Operator Threatened By Armed Thugs

Reading Mike Whitney’s account of the harassment of Tom Feeley, the editor and publisher of the Information Clearing House website, I am once again reminded that it is a few minutes before midnight (see Paul Joseph Watson’s account as well). As the clock strikes midnight, our brownshirts will rush in like a plague of locusts, or more accurately an invasion of cockroaches. America will become Nazi Germany, it will become Chile under Pinochet, it will be transformed into a fascist dictatorship. Most of us, distracted by bread and circuses, numbed by incessant propaganda, don’t realize how close at hand this reality is. It is now emerging from the shadows, as Mr. Feeley no doubt understands.

George Grosz: A Writer, Is He? 1934-35.

Nazi Germany, of course, is not an exact parallel. In 1921 Adolf Hitler formed his own private army called Sturm Abteilung, German for Storm Section, and the SA was instructed to disrupt the meetings of political opponents. In large part the SA was comprised of former members of the Freikorps, reactionary thugs organized into gangs after the First World War. As Spartacus Educational explains, Freikorps thugs “had considerable experience in using violence against their rivals” and were inspired after Hitler’s speeches to hunt down, brutalize, and even murder their opponents. Later, select members of the SA would be organized into the Gestapo SS.

Bush’s neocons are nowhere nearly as organized and vicious as the SA brownshirts, although the demented passion and violence is there, the desire to deal with opponents severely is thinly masked, ready to emerge given the right situation. Bush, however, is not Hitler, although his grand daddy helped facilitate Hitler’s crimes. Unlike Hitler, Bush’s neocons do not have at their disposal a mass fascist organization and cannot dispatch paramilitary goon squads and knuckle draggers to deal with opponents. In America, circa 2008, we have yet to experience organized gangs of neocon thugs attacking antiwar activists and truth movement patriots. In America, circa 2008, the intimidation and violence operates in the shadows… for the moment.

It is not clear who exactly threatened and intimidated Tom Feeley and his wife, although a few educated guesses come to mind. It is a matter of documented history that the FBI and recruited local police, under COINTELPRO, used “extralegal” force and violence against opponents of government policies. Such tactics included break-ins, vandalism, assaults, beatings, and — in the case of the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement — murder.

“Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that,” reported the Church Committee back in the mid-1970s, “the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.” In essence, the FBI served as America’s secret police then and continue to do so now. It also on occasion served as an assassination team assigned with taking out leaders like Martin Luther King.

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was no such thing as the Patriot Act, nothing approaching the Military Commissions Act, and certainly nothing of the draconian character of PDD51, basically a plan to declare martial law and implement a dictatorship, provided the right situation or, as in the case of 9/11, the right “terrorist event.” Nixon’s declared “silent majority” pales when compared to Bush’s neocon minority, a gaggle of reactionaries hysterically calling not only for nuking Iran but also rounding up the growing opposition, tasering and beating them, and marching them off to freshly constructed concentration camps built under government contract by Halliburton.

But maybe I am biased, as I have personally experienced the insane wrath of these people. Compared to Mr. Feeley, however, I am fortunate — no thugs showed up uninvited in my kitchen. Instead, they repeatedly emailed and blogged death threats and made harassing telephone calls to my place of employment. Unlike Alex Jones, I was not physically attacked, or did a thug block in my car and demand I forget about the First Amendment. I am fortunate to have only experienced minor harassment.

If you can tell which way the wind is blowing, though, you will realize time is short. It is eleven fifty eight and twenty seconds.

It is no mistake that candidate Obama calls for a “National Security Force” as large and well-funded as the U.S. military, and candidate McCain calls for troops to lock down cities and conduct raids to “fight crime.”

REX-84 was no mistake and the long-standing plans for FEMA detention camps are not happenstance. Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are not the idle meanderings of pencil-necked geeks at the Pentagon. Former Gen. Tommy Franks was serious when he said the Constitution will be jettisoned after the next false flag terror attack. Exercise Vigilant Shield and dozens of other “exercises” conducted by U.S. Northcom, the DHS, and local, state and other federal “responders” has less to do with natural disasters than gearing up for martial law. It’s no mistake the local cops, the National Guard, and Blackwater — under the aegis of FEMA — confiscated firearms in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Likewise, it was no mistake local cops, the Kansas Highway Patrol, ATF, FEMA, and the National Guard confiscated firearms in the aftermath of a tornado in Greensburg, Kansas. Both were incubator studies in tyranny.

No, the Nazi SA comparison does not work — not in America, circa 2008. Tom Feeley and Alex Jones were not kidnapped in the dead of night and found the next morning executed in typical death squad fashion. But after martial law is declared — after the next attack, an attack repeatedly promised by no shortage of government officials and experts — the machinery is firmly in place to turn America into a fascist dictatorship that will make the Nazi corollary pale by way of comparison with its scientific precision.

In the meantime, keep your eye on the clock.