“For the highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.” Socrates – Plato’s Republic
My first awareness of the term Continuity of Government (CoG) came from reading former terror-czar Richard Clarke’s take on the US government failures on 9/11, Against All Enemies. While describing all the fancy high tech systems in place to ultimately be foiled by either human inefficiency (the official story) or nefarious planning (also the official story), Clarke expanded on the implementation of CoG on that world shaking day.
Continuity of Government, for those unacquainted with the term, is the facilities, systems and their operatives in place to run the USA government should the USA become, well, inoperable. At least in the usual sense of operation. CoG is maintained during disaster from hidey holes deep in the Earth by unelected people we’ve never heard of paid for with money we don’t have.
As Congress and their ilk were whisked to places of relative safety on 9/11, Dick Cheney ran our military response from the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center), a bunker below the White House, while Clarke, from yet another bunker still, coordinated and liaised between the various functionaries who accomplished effectively nothing in precluding the flying cavemen from bringing us to our knees. The double Dick defense – pretty useless as it turned out.
In fact, the first place the notion of CoG came to my attention was in 1973 when I watched Dr. Strangelove for the first time. Discussions of the mine shaft gap and repopulation ratios in the 1963 film still resonate, especially in a nation with tens of thousands of bunkers set to receive perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in catastrophic conditions. Hundreds of thousands in a nation of about 300 million people.
In Virginia, Mount Weather is an entire underground city built to house the government’s crème de la crème should something make the area above ground uninhabitable, most likely that very group. In Pennsylvania, Raven Rock is a hole under a mountain where the Pentagon can retire to conduct their business in safety from the things their business manufactures. Or in the West, the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center offers a place for the military to operate with the impunity of the gopher after they have reduced the nation’s mountains to molehills.
And of course all the thousands, if not millions, of private bunkers, shelters and hidey holes all across the nation built with the express intent of forestalling the inevitable: surviving a nuclear war. Some of them, elaborate underground compounds loaded to the gills with all the necessaries to begin anew subterranean, all the comforts of home in a hole, while others are little more than self-financed mausoleums to save on social reclamation.
Because realistically, that’s what it’s all about.
Consider the USA’s various suggestions to its citizens to deal with the very crisis they create:
A holdover from WWII, in the 50s, fallout shelters became the private means to combat nuclear war and were promoted and sold and outfitted to Americans well into the 60s, when people who couldn’t perhaps afford personal fallout shelters instead suggested not having nuclear war as a preferable alternative. The USA disagreed on principal but remained conventional about the whole war thing while continuing to menace the world with the atomic cudgel.
By the Reagan 80s fallout shelters had fallen out of favor but the government still waved nuclear devastation in our collective faces with the addition of chemical and biological death to round out our genocidal options. That government of ours, always looking out for us. And in that vein, they proffered more safety tips: dig a hole in your back yard at least 6 feet long and deep and 3 feet wide and cover it with a sheet of plywood.
This, the austerity version of the outdated fallout shelter, was actually promoted by the Reagan/Bush administration as an effective means to survive a nuclear holocaust. All one needed was a backyard, a shovel and a sheet of plywood to weather the crisis. The government gets luxury accommodations; we get a hole in the yard.
Then, after the USA did nothing to even threaten the perpetrators on 9/11, running and hiding like the pussies they are, the Bush/Cheney Catastrophorium offered yet another way for us to defend ourselves against the very kind of threats our government manufactures: plastic sheeting and duct tape. This professional safety equipment was to be used to seal our windows and doors in the case of some attack or another by our expanding litany of enemies.
Attentive citizens will note that the similarities in all three methods reveal their intended purpose: pestilence prevention. The 50s was an industrious, post-war period (that we had wars in) and citizens with disposable income and private property actually engaged in useful activities in their free time. With the Cold War in full swing, convincing people to convert cellars or basements or dig fallout shelters wasn’t hard to do.
By the 80s, there was less disposable income or tolerance for the notion of acceptable nuclear war but the Pentagon worked diligently (in concert with the CIA) to maintain global hostilities to justify their ruinous proclivities and we were still ready to die because cooler heads didn’t even bother showing up. So the administration recommended self-internment with plywood lid because it was easier than making a real bomb shelter while equally pointless.
By the Bush/Cheney turn of the screw, they still wanted us to support Home Despot but realized most people couldn’t fit a sheet of plywood in their minivan and again modified their safety tips for an even less motivated populace. Plastic sheeting and duct tape? Hell, one could transport that on a bicycle.
Why, with full knowledge that none of these methods would even begin to protect someone from a nuclear, biological or chemical attack, would the government promote such nonsense? One reason is to keep us proactive in our survival; if we feel we’re actually doing something we’re less inclined to rely on the support of others. Like the government. But the main reason is as it always was: public health.
During any kind of horrific conflagration or public Mass Casualty Event (MCE) there will be survivors and dead. Hospitals and medical facilities will be useless owing to the sheer number of injured compared to the low number of doctors (USA doctor to patient ratio is about 1 to 400). Take a number and try to bleed over there with all those people with compound fractures.
The government, a disaster at economics or social planning, is expert at one thing, the thing they do with the greatest zeal: waging war. Thus, they understand the hard realities on the ground when such activities are engaged in and a prime one is corpses; war zones tend to have a lot of those. It doesn’t take too long for corpses to get horribly nasty, often becoming so during the process of becoming a corpse.
On a battlefield it’s horrific and distressing but contained or at least isolated. In a civilian setting it is catastrophically dangerous owing to the potential for the rapid spread of contamination. Decomposing dead things breed pestilence and disease, placing survivors of a MCE in immediate and long term risk. Tending to hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses in urban, suburban and rural settings is logistically problematic in the best of conditions, none of which are evident in such circumstances. How would a government so crazy that it imagines it could survive a nuclear war even hope to cope with the disposal of perhaps millions of decomposing citizens?
Convince them to bury themselves. Fallout shelters are under the ground. A hole 6’X6’X3’ is a grave. Plastic sheeting and duct tape will at least contain the rot and decomposition within a structure. The government, in their professed concern for us, instead of eliminating the things which would necessitate said concerns, counsels us in useful methods to dispose of ourselves after they have opted to use them. As you die, if you would be so kind as to turn off the lights and pull the dirt in over you….
This, I postulate, is our problem and its solution. We die. Sorry but there it is. We also live so quit whining and at least appreciate that. We shouldn’t have to die so that rich motherfuckers can get their jollies playing chess with our flesh. The reason they can get away with all their little wars and big ones is that they don’t have to fight them and don’t have to die in them. If they had to do either of those things, war would end this afternoon, I assure you.
Planes, jets, drones, missiles and such assure them they’ll never have to fight. Their bunkers convince them they don’t have to die. They are of course too stupid and egomaniacal to see their bunkers as the fine mausoleums they are; that a cage, however nicely appointed, is still a cage. The key is they don’t realize who holds the key. The bunker is the domain of the technician. Above ground power is power, below, power is absolute. Above ground, if the power goes out, people can still breathe. Above ground.
In a bunker, the people at the switch who know how to make it work, and, more importantly, know how to make it stop working, are the real kings. Like doctors and funeral practitioners, they cannot be arbitrarily eliminated, which then necessarily elevates them. Power struggles are certain, especially with nothing to do. Money under the ground is pointless as is God because the fact of habitation in a bunker proves that neither of those grand notions was lofty enough to keep you out of a bunker, while above paradise burns. He who controls food, water, air, controls everything and everyone down there.
Here in paradise as we know it, without locking you in a cage, one cannot control your ability to breathe; we are still pulmonary free-agents. There is much food and water about and the fact of 7 billion of us suggests that we for the most part are finding it, so comestible despots do not hold us totally in their thrall. Here in paradise, we can really only be enslaved to ideas. God, gold, government, commerce, nobility hold us in intellectual restraints; the law is used to manifest those as physical where applicable.
In the bunker, ideological notions pale beside real world concerns. Any interruption in power could lead to death most unpleasant; locked in a tomb that cannot be evacuated because what exists outside is always worse by many degrees. Disease, madness, claustrophobia, megalomania, suicide, murder. All that fells us in the outside world is magnified and intensified in a cage, and that is what we relegate our species to through the promotion of the bunker mentality: caged beasts.
The disturbing irony of the bunker set is they have created hiding places, hideouts, where mass murderers can hole up to avoid consequence for their behaviors, as noted the very behaviors which hasten such habitations. We have paid crazed homicidal maniacs to set the Earth as a huge bomb and provided them places to run and hide when they ignite it and observe their handiwork as the sick children they are, with the gleeful self-aggrandizement of the psychopath.
Government bunkers are military bunkers, so the inhabitants will get to enjoy direct military rule rather than the back-door version currently practiced internationally. That means all the ‘lucky’ apparatchiks and officials who imagine themselves so lofty as to be among the ‘few’ will find themselves subject to orders from low ranking military personnel there in Bunkylvania. The military destroys everything they can’t control. We are best served keeping this in mind.
Of course there are many private bunkers to house and protect the very rich, many who profit from the wars which hasten bunkers and such contrivances. They are staffed by the lowly servant class, just as their masters’ palaces above ground are. In such enclosed environments, where capacity trumps money, slaves become masters – prisoners, jailers.
While initially perceived as salvation they will soon be seen as the prisons they are, each ruled under the tyranny of those able to exert the greatest control. They who challenge the dictates of those who rule will find themselves exiled to certain death outside as the limited resources will not be used to maintain prisoners or dissidents. Apocalyptic absolutism – very appealing.
The story of Gyges of Lydia is instructive: Gyges was a shepherd who discovered a magic ring which gave him the power of invisibility. His newfound capacity allowed him to seduce the queen, murder the king and take over the kingdom of Lydia. The story as recounted was told by Glaucon to Socrates in Plato’s Republic as an illustration of how impunity necessarily leads the just to behave unjustly.
Glaucon argued that two rings divided between a just man and an unjust one would ultimately just leave us with two unjust men. While Gyges story is clearly apocryphal (the antecedent to many popular magic ring tales) Glaucon uses it to illustrate how the ability to avoid repercussions for one’s actions leads even the everyman into deceit and treachery.
Power corrupts the most decent of people and the most decent of people for the most part aren’t really all that decent. Indifference makes their malevolence benign. These warriors, as the fascists who fund them, have shown repeatedly that they know no shame or embarrassment in their dogged pursuit of human oblivion. These are people completely wanting social responsibility though they are responsible for the majority of the social ills which plague us. These are they who represent our future? These are who we forsake everything to save?
The reason we war was stated before: the people who declare them don’t have to fight them or suffer their consequences. They make money on them. It seems that we are at the point that if this doesn’t stop, then we will, the guilty living out their pathetic and deranged lives in their little holes as the planet evolves into a post-human matrix, perhaps dominated by apes or other more intelligent creatures, (at least more intelligent than us).
To end this is simple conceptually, effort when applied and necessary for our survival. If our species destroys this, our paradise, then none of us deserve to remain. Especially those who made it happen. Let’s keep the Pentagon around so they can emerge from their holes in a hundred years and blow it up again? Brilliant. Such thinking is evidence we don’t deserve to be around. We need to take action to prove we do.
The solution is up to us, the citizens who aren’t invited into the bunkers: about 299 million of us. The government ain’t helping on this one, nor are the benevolent wealthy because they ain’t benevolent and everyone is an exception in their own eyes. To save us, the life forms of Earth, there can no longer be exceptions.
We need to isolate each and every bunker in this nation, and all of our brothers and sisters around the world need to find them in their nations. They need to be opened up, cleared of medical supplies, food and drinking water (which will be provided for those in want), then loaded with nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, chemical weapons, high explosives, missiles, nuclear waste and industrial toxins, then sealed shut forever.
In this way the bunkers can be used to protect all of us.
Those distressed by the loss of their ‘out’ can be sealed in them as well, making the planet an even nicer place.
We are humans and need to live above ground in the sunlight. Those who would move us into the Earth for political/economic gaming purposes are rodents, vermin of the dirt trying to bring us to their level. We need to stand on our feet, not crawl around in holes and demand an end to the stupidity that necessitates bunkers.
If the rich and the homicidal cannot hide from the wars they demand, they will be less inclined to demand them. If every executive and officer who touts war is compelled to lead the troops onto the battlefields, they will tout no more. Bunkers are for cowards hiding from responsibility. No more cowards in authority, no more hiding places for the cruel, no more ‘outs’ for the barbarous – seal the bunkers!
© 2013