An Essay on America: Freedom to Fascism
A Documentary Film by Aaron Russo
I will never forget the first time I made the mistake of joining a “patriots” discussion group that was, ostensibly, about preserving the democratic process of our imperiled nation. Within five minutes of joining I received what would prove to be the first of about ten billion subsequent posts warning of an imminent invasion of America by UN blue-helmets, who, working at the behest of shadowy powers known as the “New World Order” (referred to interchangeably as “Globalists,” Jews/Zionists, Freemasons, Illuminati, reptilian shape-shifters, and anyone who ever shook a Rockefeller’s hand), would take all our guns, microchip us, and “enslave us under world communism.”
I wondered how so many clearly mentally-defective people could not only operate computer technology so deftly, but had managed to find each other across the transom of cyberspace, agglomerating at this particular Yahoo Groups address. “World Communism!” What kinda crack were these people smoking, and where could I get some? Everywhere around us rapacious capitalists in pursuit of unholy amounts of profit were raping the world, and these cuckoo-clocks were still whining about the Commies? Get with the times, man.
It was not until a few years later, when I happened across an old copy of a 1960 documentary called The Capitalist Conspiracy, by historian C. Edward Griffin, that I began to understand this peculiar thesis. In it, Griffin explains that the threat of “World Communism” existed not as an impending Soviet style totalitarianism, but in a capitalist system controlled by a central bank, something Griffin claims is “a plank taken right out of the platform of the Communist Manifesto.”
The truth of the matter is that, regardless of what Karl Marx may have written, the central banking system and its progeny, the credit system, has enslaved both the American people and their government to the tune of more than $8.5 trillion in national debt ($28,439 for each American household, who holds on average an additional $10,000 in personal credit debt), something not even our great-grandchildren will be able to pay off. Perhaps even more chilling is that in the last two years, our national debt has increased by almost one trillion dollars.
You may be asking by now what all this has to do with either Freedom or Fascism. Well, it’s really quite simple. In a world totally dominated by money, “freedom” is the ability to create and possess tangible personal wealth, which we utilize at our own discretion to do what we will, so long as we do no harm to others. But if all the money we claim to possess is only numbers on a computer screen, and most of what we claim to own is actually owned by a bank that rents it to us at high interest, exactly how “free” are we? Is it freedom if we have to spend our entire lives chained to a job which gives us the privilege of working to exhaustion in order to pay back the banks every month? Are we free when our government taxes our labor so that they can pay back the money they borrowed from the same banks? Should we pay taxes when there is no specific law mandating that you do, only the threat of guns and property seizures if we don’t?
Such is the premise of Aaron Russo’s documentary America: Freedom to Fascism, a frightening examination of the real power that makes the world go around: the Federal Reserve Bank and the central banking/credit system. In a pastiche of some of the core ideological pillars of the Far Right—a group that includes libertarians, constitutionalists, Rockefeller republicans, and yes, even the militias—we are told that the income tax is illegal under the Constitution, which prohibits a direct unapportioned tax on the people or their labor, and that the 16th Amendment providing for the graduated income tax was actually never ratified, and that our government knowingly and willingly deceived the people by claming the amendment had passed. We learn that the Federal Reserve Act, also passed in 1913 under highly suspicious circumstances, is in violation of the Constitution, in that only Congress has the power to mint currency. Then again, only Congress has the ability to declare war, and, well, you know the rest.
Long before our most celebrated abuses of governmental power—Nixon’s COINTELPRO program, the War on Drugs, the Patriot Act, Cheney’s secret energy commission—there was the Creature from Jekyll Island, otherwise known as the Federal Reserve Bank. Conceived in 1910 in secret on a remote island off the Georgia coast by a tiny cadre of bankers and industrialists, and passed during the Congressional recess of Christmas 1913 while most of Congress was home with their families, the Fed is neither “federal” nor does it have any “reserves.” It is a private bank, whose shareholder identities are kept secret, that has a private and exclusive monopoly to print American currency, loan it to the Federal government—with interest, of course—and arbitrarily determine the relative value of the dollar, since it is no longer backed by precious metals or other tangible wealth.
In other words, although we are a supposedly free country, money is whatever they say it is, and more importantly, whatever they say it is not. It is worth whatever they say it is worth, and is available only through them, for which they will take a handsome commission. They control the jobs, the food, the services, the amenities, everything. As David Korten writes in The Great Turning, “By controlling the creation and allocation of money, the ruling class maintains near total control over the lives of ordinary people and the resources of the planet.
And so our journey begins as we view the concept of fascism through a different lens, that of our own consumer culture. In simple language, we begin to understand why there is this deep, abiding, wholly justified (formerly “paranoid”) concern that the Federal government has brazenly overextended its power into imperial hubris, and domestic repression.
Does this perchance sound vaguely familiar to what the Left is saying?
A duck will remain a duck no matter what party it comes from.
Although motivated in part by a desire to avoid taxes altogether, which perhaps shines a light on why their ranks are almost exclusively populated by the white and affluent, the objections of the “tax protest” movement are rooted in Constitutional law and a true love of democracy. If you think nasty things about them and believe in taxes, then at the very least you should be concerned with where your tax money goes, and more importantly, where you are told it went.
Liberals have always been willing to pay taxes because they believe their money goes, among many things, to help the unfortunate and to maintain the national infrastructure. But these same well-meaning Liberals have little-to-no idea that most of their tax money (roughly 80 percent) goes straight to fund the Pentagon and to pay interest on the national debt. So little of your tax dollar actually goes to government expenses that the Federal government is forced to borrow, on average, $3 billion a day from foreign banks in order to keep afloat.
If that doesn’t sufficiently burn your sage, then consider that since 1999 literally trillions have gone missing from the US Treasury (whereisthemoney.org). Gone. Vanished. Bupkiss. If after learning this you aren’t grinding your back teeth while you sleep, tell your doctor to scale back the dosage on your social anxiety pills and have me ask you again in a week.
The less subtle message is: it doesn’t matter what your political inclinations are, even if you think you’re in on the scam, even if you think you’re “rich” or “affluent,” you’re not. The banks and their government goons are screwing you, and dictating your life, whether you see it yet or not, and you own nothing.
This film, for all its flaws, indulgences, hubris, passion, and intellect, is the perfect introduction to these very complicated, highly obfuscated, particularly scary subjects. But there is a path through it, and although some lament taking the red pill, most are at least happy knowing the truth, even if the truth itself leaves a lot to be desired in the happiness category. More importantly it leaves most viewers all the more resolved to do something about it.
In the film, Russo plays the role of a less snarky, more belligerent and better dressed Michael Moore. In a series of pastel silk shirts Russo engages with tax protestors, Constitutional scholars, and a Whos Who of conspiracy buffs including the aforementioned C. Edward Griffin, erstwhile apocalyptico Mike Ruppert and his partner in crime, Former HUD Assistant Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, and attorney Edwin Vieria. He fights with a former Chief of the IRS, who admonishes him in Yiddish, (invariably confirming the deepest held paranoiac fantasies of every rabid anti-Semite from here to Oxnard). He interviews an coquettish expert on implant technology, who claims the government’s plan is to chip us all, and only those with the chip can have currency, purchase goods and services, or move about from place to place. Controlling us will be as simple as turning on and off our “account.” No chip, no money, no food.
But perhaps the most effective sections of the film are the interviews with victims of some of the IRS’ most unconscionable audits and raids, moments of sheer outrage as painfully transparent in their malevolence as a repressive government that believes its own bullshit can get. Everything leaves you wondering, particularly as we contemplate Katrina one year later, what the hell does the government do for us anyway ?
In these days of ”The Decider,” phantasmal Weapons of Mass Destruction that only Sean Hannity seems to have found, Israeli “defense,” “racial parity” in the government’s response to Katrina, “legal torture,” and the ever-more-conveniently appearing threat of “terrorism” from “Islamofascists” (always impeccably timed to offset some newly released, unflattering piece of news about the Administration’s chicanery or incompetence), should it be any wonder when a small, strange, but incredibly passionate group of patriots emerge from under the rock of larger, more fashionable cause celebres, calling to all and sundry that it’s worse than we ever imagined? How much more shit do we have to eat before people wake up and believe it?
There is considerable case law and documentation which refutes all of Russo and Company’s claims, but the way that Russo presents the film, you are left wondering if the laws are legit, or just part of the vast cover-up. On something this big, anything is possible.
Here’s all you need to take away from this. Despite how “affluent” we believe we are as a culture, in reality the dollar is only worth $.04. What keeps its value propped up is its near-exclusive relationship with oil transactions and other nation’s treasury reserves (the dollar having replaced gold as the backing) and some 10,000 nuclear weapons. If you looked deeply at the reasons for our most recent military campaigns, and the economic and diplomatic warfare we are conducting on nations like Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, you’d fast come to understand that these nations, like Iraq before it in 2000, decided to stop using the dollar as their reserve currency, or to buy oil. If our dollar ceases to hold value…you do the math.
All of this is to say that the extended wardrobe of Fascism contains business suits as well as jackboots and swastikas.
Charles Shaw is the Editor in Chief of Conscious Choice.