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Facing the Behemoth
By Br. Bede Vincent "It was Hobbes who made both the Leviathan and the Behemoth popular. His Leviathan is the analysis of a state, that is a political system of coercion in which vestiges of the rule of law and individual rights are still preserved. His Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, however, discussing the English civil war of the seventeenth century, depicts a non-state, a chaos, a situation of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy. Since we believe National Socialism is—or tending to become—a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy, which has "swallowed" the rights and dignity of man, and is out to transfigure the world into a chaos by the supremacy of gigantic land masses, we find it apt to call the National Socialist system
The Behemoth." From the preface to Behemoth by Franz Neumann, first published in 1942. Neumann died in an automobile accident in Switzerland not long after the end of WWII. Veteran journalist Robert Scheer recently responded to the current „crisis" in the US capital markets and US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's emergency legislation by saying: "What you've got here is really the end of the Reagan Revolution. And I hate to bring up the bad "F" word, but, you know, there is a model for this, and Mussolini had it in Italy, and it's called "fascism." It's where your big corporate interests throw in with government, destroy the freedom of the rest of the people, and preserve their power. Everybody forgets, private corporations and banks did quite well, made out quite well in Italy and Germany in those days, you know? And I am really worried about this assault on our democracy." Since the introduction of what Finkelstein has called "the Holocaust industry" there has been a concerted effort to distort the history of the dictatorship in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Much debate has focused on whether and to what extent any critical analysis of the period would undermine what might be called the Nuremberg consensus, the idea that Germany under the NSDAP constituted an evil state whose primary purpose was to conquer the world and destroy world Jewry in the process. As Finkelstein has pointed out this "Holocaust industry" emerged as a self-serving propaganda apparatus to extort funds from Germany and to divert attention away from Israel's violent policies. The other side of this debate, aggravated some years ago by the son of a Harvard professor named Goldhagen, was whether and to what extent the system in Germany under the NSDAP was a peculiar institution willingly supported by the bulk of Germans—perhaps like that ancient peculiar institution supported for more than just one decade by the bulk of whites in the US. However, useful both of these debates may have been in exploring historical record or re-evaluating the status of victims and survivors of the NSDAP regime—not to mention filling volumes of journals, hours of airtime and pages of OP-ED sections—none of this debate has contributed much to explaining the development of the central political system driving the NSDAP, its allies or for that matter innumerable regimes that survived the 1945 debacle that destroyed Germany and made it possible at least for Germany to consider real democracy. Instead the hegemonic theory since the demise of the democratic German exile community has been that imported by a relatively obscure recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship while he was living in Germany. It is the leading theory of a man who then went on to be an influential professor at the University of Chicago before Milton Friedman became infamous. It was the leading theory of a man who—to use contemporary terminology—wrote that Hitler was making a mistake in not pursuing a "diversity" policy by including Jews in his regime. At the beginning of this year a man died in Havana, Cuba, named Philip Agee. This former CIA case officer not only quit his job after 12 years with the "Company" at the end of the 1960s, he took a decision which would result in his being hounded by the US government for the rest of his life. Unlike numerous people who have criticized US covert action or intervention in other countries and unlike most CIA officers who have later written about their role or the function of the CIA, Agee refused to accept the assumption that the Company was merely suffering from defects and abuses. He wrote: "Reforms of the FBI and the CIA, even removal of the President from office, cannot remove the problem. American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force—without a secret police force. The argument is with capitalism and it is capitalism that must be opposed, with its CIA, FBI, and other security agencies understood as logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class's determination to retain power and privilege." Under the present US government there has already been proof of what this law really meant: not protection of identities (since these have been leaked at will by high government officials) but to punish attempts to expose the actual perpetrators of covert action and the US policies they are designed to support. Since 2001 the US government has not only imposed draconian laws upon its own citizens for the ostensible protection of its people, it has used every means to impose these kinds of laws on its "allies" or any that have commerce with it. The so-called War on Drugs and Global War on Terror are euphemisms for the expansion of US power both overt and covert under the guise of "emergencies" which threaten those who rule the US. Yet it is impossible for anyone to oppose the "wars" on drugs or terror without appearing to condone drugs or terror. Over the course of the past fortnight the US population and collaterally the rest of the world have been threatened by a new "emergency". It is not the Reichstag that may be set afire again but the New York Stock Exchange and its associated trading floors. It is not simply some political, ethnic or religious majority that poses a threat but the necessity of the system, the US capitalist system, to continue to destroy whatever prevents or inhibits unrestrained accumulation of wealth by the top 10 percent of the country's elite. This elite is embedded in the financial system, a structure that has served no higher purpose since the days of the Medici or Fugger than to suck the lifeblood out of ordinary people throughout the world. It is no coincidence that the legal opinions defending torture and extraordinary rendition or preventive war come from the same pens that have no doubt written the bill presented by Henry Paulson to create a kind of "Reichsfinanzkommissar". The people who bear the immediate responsibility for the war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against the peace of nations have a history and they have a lineage. If this lineage is examined then there is no need to wonder what they intend or what they will do next. However it is necessary to name the names and name the crimes. It is necessary to go beyond sentimental reminiscence about the trials and tribulations of Franklin Roosevelt or Martin Luther King. Hitler's NSDAP and Mussolini's Partito Nazionale Fascista were not the product of spontaneous generation or an ill-fated laboratory experiment. They arose and were nurtured by those who were determined to use the chaos created by the end of the First World War to establish "a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy" in which capitalism has free rein. That was and is the essence of fascism, the system which the US elite has supported deliberately or by default in nearly every country in the world since 1945. When the leading representatives of US capitalism stand before their obedient media servants and tell the world that the "emergency" needs to be dealt with swiftly and decisively, they are drawing on a long-established tradition for the defense of exploitation and the sole satisfaction of insatiable personal greed. Failure to face that challenge and neutralize those criminals led to Germany's destruction. Failure to face down and neutralize the agents of the Behemoth today will bring untold misery to the US and all those who must deal with it now and in the future. Brother Bede Vincent, a former teacher, educated in the US, Brazil and Europe, is working in a project the working title of which is "An Ecclesiastical History of the United States". He is affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies ( www.maisonneuvepress.com) in College Park, MD and can be reached at bede[at]maisonneuvepress.com.
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