2006-11-05

Vestigia terrent, or the 2006 US mid-term elections....

5 November 2006.

  • Under the timely title The 2006 U.S. Midterms: Another Stolen Election?, Michael Keefer, professor of English at the University of Guelph, has published on Global Research's valuable website what he himself calls «a very selective list of recent books, articles and documentary films which assess and analyze the evidence of flagrant Republican breaches of the most fundamental principles of democracy, together with the prospects for a repetition and extension of these fraudulent practices in the 2006 and subsequent elections». He divides the items into three categories : «Critical Studies», including «exemplary work by Steven Freeman (the book he co-authored with Joel Bleifuss is, in my opinion, the single most important of these studies), as well as work by other major contributors to an emerging understanding of the theft of the 2004 election», films «including one by the prize-winning director Dorothy Fadiman, which bring together documentary footage and illuminating interviews with election analysts», and, a «short list of items anticipating Republican fraud in the midterm election offers a representative cross-section of current concerns—including evidence of further massive purges of voters’ lists, and evidence from unimpeachable sources that the touch-screen machines manufactured by two of the major suppliers of voting machines, Diebold and Sequoia, have been designed to facilitate electoral fraud». I leave it to readers to judge for themselves whether they find the documentation listed by Professor Keefer (16 items in the first category, 7 in the second, and 12 in the third) convincing. For my Swedish readers, let me point out that my subjective impression is that, unlike the situation (hitherto) obtaining here, voting procedures in the United States seem designed to make voting in elections as cumbersome and difficult as possible, in particular for certain categories of voters. Thus, to take one example of many, US elections take place on a ordinary working day, with predictable effects upon voting rates in neighbourhoods with few polling places, where people can be forced to stand in line for hours to cast their ballets. That such conditions prevail in poorer districts seems more a matter of «Intelligent Design», than the result of random processes. But I have not made a scientific study of this matter, so my views, as noted above, can only be characterised as subjective. Their nature, at any rate, should be abundantly clear to any classically educated person who reads my brief response to Professor Keefer's article, as posted to StumbleUpon :



Who can predict the future ? Surprises can always occur, but our best guide to the future remains our experience of the past. In this particular case, as Quintus Horatius Flaccus put it in translating Aisopos' fable of the lion and the fox into his elegant Latin : «Vestigia terrent»....

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