Paranoia Strikes Deep...Again
In Repeating The Historical Parallels of 1968, America Has One More Chance To Choose True Freedom And Enlightenment, Or Paranoia, War, And Fascism
Photo by Mario Heller on Unsplash
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
It's time we stop
Hey, what's that sound?
Everybody look, what's going down?
What a field day for the heat (Ooh ooh ooh)
A thousand people in the street (Ooh ooh ooh)
Singing songs and they carrying signs (Ooh ooh ooh)
Mostly say, "Hooray for our side" (Ooh ooh ooh)
It's time we stop
Hey, what's that sound?
Everybody look, what's going down?
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the men come and take you away
We better stop
Hey, what's that sound?
Everybody look, what's going down?
Songwriters: Stephen Stills © Cotillion Music Inc., Springalo Toones, Ten East Music, Richie Furay Music
For many people in my generation, at least those who have tuned out and rejected the purposefully warped, agenda-driven corporate media narratives, the sense of déjà vu must be uncanny.
In 1968, there were only three or four individuals, in the arguably dominant medium of communication at the time, television, bringing you the “news.”
They were middle-aged white men somberly relaying the rising death tolls and atrocities from the blood-soaked battlefields of Vietnam on a nightly basis. It soon became impossible for the public to ignore the horrible reality.
Despite the good intentions and integrity of men like Walter Cronkite, who, arguably, planted the seeds that turned the government’s pro-war narrative on its head, there was little to no chance of hearing the views of protestors, much less learning about the culture of the people being bombed out of existence.
The panic and alarm now broadcast unceasingly by the legacy media, (and in the case of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, that the brutal police response is for “student safety”) implying that student occupation of buildings is far more damaging to society than US-sponsored war and genocide in the long term, is easily disproven by historical precedents.
As you can see from the newsreel footage above, the police response to protestors was as brutal then as it is today.
Vietnam, the government claimed, was a necessary evil to thwart the spread of Communism, in reality, it was no more than another American-sponsored genocide of innocents:
“The My Lai massacre was one of the most horrific incidents of violence committed during the Vietnam War. A company of American soldiers brutally killed most of the people—women, children and old men—in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. More than 500 people were slaughtered in the My Lai massacre, including young girls and women who were raped and mutilated before being killed. U.S. Army officers covered up the carnage for a year before it was reported in the American press, sparking a firestorm of international outrage. The brutality of the My Lai massacre and the official cover-up fueled anti-war sentiment and further divided the United States over the Vietnam War.”
All that has changed with the advent of social media and the internet, where the power of even one voice is now magnified to a level of influence the legacy media once held exclusively.
If there was ever a more surreal denial and deflection of current reality in the last week of April, it might be the elite, annual circus that is The White House Correspondents Dinner. This affair, populated by media executives and courtesan stenographers in ball gowns and tuxedos, destroys the illusion that there is any adversarial relationship left between the “fourth estate” and the power structures of government.
The legacy media, now an irrelevant shell of its former self in the era of Cronkite, did its best to hide the visible protest as the attendees, some white-knuckling their cell phones as they tersely walked through the gauntlet of protestors (the latest avoidance tactic by Washington pols who won’t engage) uncomfortably stepped past protestors shouting “Shame!”
In some cases, activists like Medea Benjamin of Code Pink were unnecessarily brutalized for vocal, non-violent peaceful protest.
Inside, as a Biden-financed police crackdown on young college protestors was ramping up that would continue through the week, various speakers lamented journalists who sacrificed their lives or currently remain imprisoned for the cause of freedom of information and the public’s right to know.
Notably absent from the tributes were the obvious, inconvenient exceptions, Julian Assange, imprisoned by Western power elites for five years to date, for exposing their war crimes, and over one hundred Palestinian journalists and media workers who have been killed since October 7th, 2024. 75 percent of journalists killed in the entire year of 2023 were Palestinians killed by Israel.
As an ardent, unapologetic financial and ideological supporter of the Israeli genocide, Biden wasn’t about to mention Gaza, instead, he opted for a stilted attempt at comedy, delivering jokes about Trump, Fox News, his age vs. Trump’s age, etc. as the champagne toasts flowed and expensive food consumed.
Depending on your political leanings and perspective, comedian and master of ceremonies Colin Jost delivered either the most moving and sincere, or the most repulsive and insincere tribute to Biden’s “decency” to close out the final act of the circus.
A waxen-looking Biden, all wrapped up in evening finery, sat largely unresponsive as Jost related a story about his deceased grandfather, and compared his grandfather’s “best qualities” to Biden’s “best qualities.” Jost related that the last time his 95-year-old grandfather voted, he voted for Biden. Why? Because, Jost said, gently wagging his finger, “you’re a decent man.”
Jost is probably the least well-known entertainer and celebrity figure to jump aboard the Biden PR train, multiple people, from Bruce Springsteen to Howard Stern, have suddenly sprung out from the woodwork to endorse the “decency” of Joe Biden publicly.
Yet, Stern’s over-the-top gushing and insincere groveling at a recent interview, typical of the scripted, softball questions, PR fluffing, and staged reality of the current Biden “campaign” is truly bizarre, especially for an alleged “outsider” like Stern.
Biden declared Stern a “good father” and, presumably comparing Biden to no less than George Washington himself, Stern thanked Biden for being a compassionate, calming influence, and a “good father for the country”.
What ironic contrast as, days later, any sense of “calm” in the country had been tear-gassed and tasered out of existence.
One could almost imagine a hapless, enraged Donald Trump, trapped in the continued machinations of his legal troubles, fuming and ranting at the injustice of this gross mischaracterization of Biden’s actual character. Trump, as the leading representative of the MAGA version of fascism, is, ultimately, no different, ironically, he and Biden come together in their joint, forceful condemnation of the protesters.
The staged reality of a united country, happy and content under compassionate father figure Joe Biden, quickly dissipated as police moved in over the past days to crack down on free speech and non-violent protest. Both Trump and “Daddy” Biden, two sides of the same fascist coin, wasted no time condemning peaceful protests as dangerous bursts of anti-Semitic mob violence.
While hysterical corporate media join politicians to flat-out libel, slander, and lie about the nature and motivation of legitimate protests, the 2024 version of “Yellow Journalism”, the fact that Biden is directly responsible for accelerating and implementing a domestic fascist police army is overlooked. It has always been a deliberate plan.
Biden has been a vocal proponent of police funding for many years now and has undoubtedly been an influence in increasing the flow of federal monies and equipment in the 1033 program in which:
“The federal government arms local police forces in the United States with weapons of war.
A program called “1033,” for the section of the act that created it, allows the Department of Defense to give state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies military hardware. Since its inception in 1996, nearly 10,000 jurisdictions have received more than $7 billion of equipment. This includes combat vehicles, rifles, military helmets, and misleadingly named “non-” or less-lethal weapons, some of which have featured in police raids and police violence against protesters, including recent protests for racial justice.
Substack writer and statistician Stephen Semler, in an article about Biden’s direct influence on 1033 notes:
“The military equipment police have received through the 1033 program is now Biden’s policy. By him not doing anything about it makes it Biden’s problem.
The Defense Logistics Agency released its quarterly update last week, indicating that nearly $34 million in military gear went to police through the first quarter of this year (up from $12 million from last quarter—or up $9 million from Q3 2020 or up $10 million from Q2 2020).
Biden didn’t respond in any way—that’s a tacit endorsement/approval. Nor did he do anything about the $1.4bn+ already out there since 2013 when he took office. He sided with police unions instead. 1033 transfers aren’t like arms export sales. The military gear that flows through 1033 is on a conditional loan, the matériel can be taken back. Biden can order it to be done himself, without Congress. He has not. This chart reflects his policy decision:"
The plan, as can be seen from the chart above, was always to transform the police into a domestic fascist army, the spending accelerated under both the “Red” and “Blue” administrations, and that “investment” is now paying off for the authoritarian power elite: having a “domestic security squad” standing at the ready to shut down any criticism of Israel.
You might ask, would any of this be happening if it were Russia and Putin being protested and not Israel?
Please take a minute and watch the video below, posted an hour ago as I type this.
Fascism in America is here, and it has little or nothing to do with who you vote for.
It’s only my idealistic, personal opinion, but I truly believe this moment in time to be a chance for true spiritual and societal evolution despite the current darker undertones.
The courage of these young people, standing up to an army in a cloud of tear gas, while being simultaneously pummeled by flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets, under threat of even more imminent brutalization and arrest, chanting “ We are not leaving, you don’t scare us” is no less than remarkable.
They are the best hope humanity has to offer right now, and most certainly the conscience of America, they are forcing us to examine the collective shadow self in another, parallel historical cycle.
The students are proving definitively that America has no future if our leaders, and the population as a collective, choose to invest our resources and life energy into global war, genocide, and suppression of free speech.
The question remains: Do we support their direct action in opposing fascism, or do we abandon them and succumb to suppression and tyranny?
There is always a choice.