Hillary/ Trump: Clowns Or Village Idiots?

                                                                  Donald Trump!

Hilary Clinton.

It is obvious to most people in the world, the ones  who are suffering deeply as they watch the American Presidential Election farce grind its boring, erratic way along the political track, that most Americans are, shall we say: Intellectually Challenged.

They take more than a year and spend enormous amounts of money trying to find a President who will lead them towards the greatness that they claim is theirs.

For example, in the recent past they elected George W Bush, a man who kept his nation laughing as he tried repeatedly to fit several words together and convey some of the deranged thoughts which filled his head.

George W Bush had an addled brain and had little idea that what came out of his mouth make little or no sense to most humans.

Next on the scene was Obama, a fast-talking black optimist. He was given a Nobel Peace Prize within minutes of becoming President and no prick of conscience ever made him give it back. No, on Thursdays (or was it Tuesdays)? he still went through the Death By Drone process. All over the world drones were launched and they exploded and people, on Obama’s say-so or on the say-so of informers, were blown into tiny pieces. The flies busied themselves with the spoils that lay under collapsed buildings but didn’t know who to thank.

Obama got bored fairly quickly and soon was busy with other things, other wars. He did what was asked of him and helped to push the line that Americans were exceptional although no one had any idea in what way Americans were exceptional. One thing was obvious: Americans loved war.

And after WW2 was finished, the Yanks had a huge army, and it was spread all over the world in strategic places. The idea of taking over the world began to fill the American mind. After all, if they controlled the world, they would never be short of the necessities of life. They would just take them off the ones who owned them!

Four years went by, and then another,  and the grinning black face with the big ears grew in popularity in some quarters.

It is now 2016 and, in November, more Presidential Elections are to be held soon. The frantic search for someone who can be Commander in Chief of the  greatest empire in the world goes on and on and, in November this year, the election will be held. Whether there will be any sane Americans left is unknown.

The two major combatants at this stage of the game are Hillary Clinton, the wife of President Clinton, and Donald Trump a self-made billionaire, both deeply flawed. A quick look at their images shown above needs no further comment.

Neither of these people should be entrusted with any power and neither should they be trusted with control over any Armed Forces.

Gaza: The Land Of The Lost!

It seems unbelievable I know but in case you didn’t know, Gaza is still under the boot-heel of Israel (also known as Zion).

Yes, like baby excrement on a blanket, once Zionists get established they are hard to dislodge! And like germs or cancer, they tend to multiply and spread and eventually destroy the host.

The Goliath Spider, like Zionists, is without conscience or morals.

Yes, the weight of public opinion or International Law does not worry Zionists. They just get on with their mission which is to get rid of Arabs and other such godless creatures and turn the Middle East into a haven for Jews.

In this criminal endeavor, the Jews have the support of the U.S. and wealthy Jews from around the world. The IDF is armed to the teeth by the States which, on occasion, has been known to preach the virtues of democracy but not it seems for the people of Gaza.

Here are a few Gazan kids who have felt the hard love of the Zionists.

I wonder if the Zionists will ever relent and repent their brutality. There are no signs of their humanity but plenty of evidence of their continuing barbarity!

A Beautiful Poem For A Dying World!

Dover Beach.

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

—Matthew Arnold

The Saker Unloads On The U.S.A.!

Friends, the Saker published this article on ICH today which I have included an excerpt from. Deliciously, it cuts the U.S. into small, bite-sized pieces. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

“Putin’s secret weapon: the truth

The current situation is, of course, totally unacceptable for the Global Hegemon: not only has the US-lead coalition of 62 countries managed to conduct 22,000 strikes with nothing to show for it, but the comparatively smaller Russian coalition has managed to completely displace the Empire and negate all its plans. And the most formidable weapon used by Putin in his proxy war with the USA was not even a military one, but simply speaking the truth.

Both at his UN speech and, this week, at his speech at the Valdai Conference Putin has done what no other world leader before has ever dared doing: he openly call the US regime incompetent, irresponsible, lying, hypocritical and terminally arrogant. That kind of public “dissing” has had a huge impact worldwide because by the time Putin said these words more or less everybody knew that this was absolutely true.

The US does treat all its allies as “vassals” (see Valdai speech) and the US is the prime culprit for all the terrible crises the world now has to face (see UN speech). What Putin did is basically say “the Emperor is naked”. In comparison, Obama’s lame speech was comically pathetic. What we are witnessing now is an amazing turn around. After decades marked by the “might makes right” principle advocated by the USA, suddenly we are in a situation where no amount of military might is of any use to a beleaguered President Obama: what use are 12 aircraft carriers when you personally look like a clown?

After 1991 it appeared that the only superpower left was so powerful and unstoppable that it did not need to bother itself with such minor things like diplomacy or respect for international law. Uncle Sam felt like he was the sole ruler, the Planetary Hegemon. China was just a “big Walmart”, Russia a “gas station” and Europe an obedient poodle (the latter is, alas, quite true). The myth of US invincibility was just that, of course, a myth: since WWII the USA has not won a single real war (Grenada or Panama do not qualify). In fact, the US military fared even much worse in Afghanistan that the under-trained, under-equipped, under-fed and under-financed Soviet 40th Army which, at least, kept all the major cities and main roads under Soviet control and which did some meaningful development of the civilian infrastructure of the country (which the US is still using in 2015). Nevertheless, the myth of US invincibility only really came crashing down when Russia put a stop to it in 2013 by preventing a US assault on Syria by a mix of diplomatic and military means. Uncle Sam was livid, but could do nothing about besides triggering a coup in Kiev and an economic war against Russia, neither of which have succeeded in their goals.

As for Putin, instead of being deterred by all the US efforts, he invited Assad to Moscow.

Assad’s Moscow visit as yet another indicator of US impotence

This week’s visit by Assad was nothing short of extraordinary. Not only did the Russian succeed in getting Assad out of Syria and to Moscow and then back without the bloated US intelligence community noticing anything, but unlike most heads of state, Assad spoke face to face to some of the most powerful men in Russia.”

*  *  *  *  *   *   *   *   *   *

Yeah, America is like King Kong! Lots of strength but no intelligence!

We Are Still Here, Israel!

“Come out and fight, you American pigs!!!”

Friends, I came across this wonderful article on ICH today about the third Intifada.

I present this extract for your consideration. Susan, in a few well chosen words, has shown to the world the abject failure of the racist Jewish State to crush the Palestinians!

Israel: In the Death Throes of a Racist Dream

By Susan Abulhawa

“Our ancient society, though fragmented and brutalised, stands defiant, persistent, passionate and steadfast. Though traumatised and leaderless, we remain, rebellious, brave and resolute.

How breathless you, Israel, must feel. How devastating it must be to fail so miserably at one task, year after year, decade after decade. To have repeatedly intensified tactics of death and cruelty but still not managed to crush us. To cart off small children by the thousands pissing their pants, and still find that thousands have taken their place the next day, hurling rocks at your tanks and guns. To imprison them so young as they cry with fear, scream for their mothers, only to grow up unbroken, defying and fighting you still. To demolish homes and whole towns, only to find that we rebuild and multiply faster than you. To see us dance, study, marry, and have babies through your endless siege, occupation, and slaughter campaigns. To see us live after you have shredded our hearts with grief and loss. To bomb and destroy our schools, prevent children and teachers from reaching their classrooms, and still face our literacy rate that rivals your own. 

How frightened you must feel that we still do not fear you; that in the recesses of our being, we are a triumphant people and instead, it is you who is frightened. How profoundly disappointing it must feel to destroy our villages, dig in Silwan, under Al Aqsa and Al Shakhra decade after decade and still come up without forensic evidence to support your narrative, and simultaneously be faced with the multitude of Palestinians whose native claims are present, obvious, written, well known and undisputed. How frustrated you must feel that those of us you barred from our homes, whom you thought would forget, continue to write, create, protest, and expose you abroad, gathering more and more momentum for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign that is breaking the back of your lies. How defeating it is to spend millions of dollars to harass us abroad in order to silence us, only to find our voices grow louder.”

If all of the Palestinians had the conviction of Susan and her writing skills, the Israelis would have been banished decades ago, sent back to where they came from.

Let us hope that the current intifada gains some momentum and  brings about some wins.

Is This How You Want Your World To Look?

 This extraordinary image came from Opednews.com

It sent shivers down my spine as it suggested strongly to me just how our world could look once the approaching nuclear firestorm has finished with Planet Earth.

Whether any humans will survive is a moot point. And if any do, just how they will cope with the radio-activity and the burns or how long they will live and whether they could reproduce, or would want to… well, who knows?

All I know is that humans are well down the road to extinction, further down than many realize. The world is like an opened gunpowder keg and sparks are flying ever closer driven by the whirlwind that is a toy of the War God.

Russia is flexing its muscles and the U.S., retarded, deranged, and deeply immature (as it has been from its inception), could retaliate thinking that its protective devices will save it from annihilation.

Sorry to be so pessimistic but the War Gods are in full flight and there will be only losers on the darkening plains.

How Much Time Do We Have?

By Daniel Lazare

October 03, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “Consortiumnews“- “Only odd-numbered world wars start in Sarajevo.” That was the joke during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. Though it turned out not to be true, fortunately, a strange echo occurred a few years later when NATO military commander General Wesley Clark threatened to shoot down Russian planes flying paratroopers into Kosovo, prompting a British general to refuse on the grounds that “it’s not worth starting World War III.”

“But war among the great powers may now be in the offing in Syria, where the conflict seems to be exploding on a new and grander scale. Instead of two players, NATO and Russia, it now includes a half dozen or more: the U.S., France and Great Britain, plus Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf states. Where the conflicting claims of Bosnians, Serbs and Croats were difficult enough to sort out in former Yugoslavia, the struggle over Syria is an immense tangle in which a growing list of combatants struggle to impose their disparate points of view.”

“The effect is to encourage more of the same mindless confrontationalism that has already plunged Syria into catastrophe. What will Obama do if Russia continues to bomb rebels supported by the U.S. and Saudis? Will he step up military aid or send in jets to chase Russian fighters off? What if U.S. and Russian planes exchange fire? Will he back away from a showdown or allow himself to be maneuvered into a broader conflict?

No one knows. But with the warmongers in control in Washington, the fighting can only spread.”

I came across this except in an article in ICH. The world is slipping into WW3 so easily, so smoothly, it’s as if it is preordained.

Did anyone notice other than me? You know, with Russia and the U.S operating in the same theater of war, it’s only a matter of time before the sh..t hits the fan or a false flag begins to fly.

The world is spinning out of control. The Psychos Rule!

False Flag 9/11 – America’s Justification For Endless War!

“The Bush/Cheney administration’s 9/11 atrocity set in motion the world war that continues to expand and metastasize to this day. This war—the “war on terrorism”, the war on Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on Libya, the “war on the Islamic State” etc. is the same single war, all rooted in the Big Lie of 9/11.

No corner of the world has escaped the reach of this still-growing horror. No individual is untouched by its flames. Thousands upon thousands have been murdered. Entire societies have been wiped out and displaced.

Today’s world—of endless war for oil, endless false flag terror operations and atrocities, unabated political criminality, economic looting, social upheaval, fascism, surveillance and cyber terror, and global war/intelligence-industrial police state—is the fruit of 9/11.

Fourteen years and countless false flag terror operations later, the US government is on the verge of toppling Syria using Al-Qaeda military-intelligence assets. The US now openly supports and arms Al-Qaeda all over the world.”

This excerpt from an excellent article written by Larry Chin can be viewed on The 4th Media.

http://www.4thmedia.org/

Secretly, Israel Loves Palestinian Children!

This photograph shows an IDF soldier expressing his love for a young Palestinian boy by giving him a warm hug!

Look, I know there is a gun there, a very nasty looking gun, and I can see the boy’s arm is in plaster, and I can see that the boy is looking rather perplexed ( perhaps we should say ‘rather worried’), but, if you forget all the stories you’ve ever read about the frequent massacres of Palestinians carried out by Israel especially those in Gaza, you might be able to see this image in a new light!

Of course, you might have to put aside stories of Israeli snipers shooting Palestinians kids in the head while they play or the taking of young Palestinians in the middle of the night to give them a bit of ‘rough and tumble’ while they are questioned about stone-throwing, etc,.

Or the stories about Palestinian houses being demolished by Armour-clad Israeli bulldozers or the starving of the captive Palestinians and the denial of medical aid to them, etc,.

Just put all of that out of your mind and try to look beyond what the image is telling you. Instead imagine a hope-tinged, happy picture where, universally, love and understanding and generosity thrives.

What, you just can’t do it?

Neither can I!

Humans Are The Pits!

This photograph of an African child who, with his mother and another sibling, drowned while trying to reach the safety of Europe is an indictment of all of humanity.

Our Prime Minster, a man devoid of compassion, prides himself on stopping the flow of refugees to Australia. Of course, as you all know, many refugees died similarly while trying to reach the shores of the Lucky Country. Those that made it, are held prison in various places.

The extreme irony of this situation is that Australia, along with the U.S., is bombing Syria as we speak.

The family of the little drowned boy was trying to escape from the violence that Syria is experiencing thanks to the Coalition of the Killing.

And, even more ironic, our Prime Minister is trying to get approval from the U.S. to increase Australian participation in the bombing campaign.

Tony sheds crocodile tears over the three year old while, simultaneously, he is trying to  escalate  the Australian attacks against Syria which will force more people to flee to somewhere less dangerous hence exposing them to danger!

The world we live in is insane!

The Solution For A Dying World!

The Great Unraveling

By Chris Hedges

August 31, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “Truthdig” – The ideological and physical hold of American imperial power, buttressed by the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism, is unraveling. Most, including many of those at the heart of the American empire, recognize that every promise made by the proponents of neoliberalism is a lie. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, has been funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, creating vast economic inequality. The working poor, whose unions and rights have been taken from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment, making their lives one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $2.1 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes. And the neoliberal order, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, has hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans.

Democracy, especially in the United States, is a farce, vomiting up right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump, who has a chance to become the Republican presidential nominee and perhaps even president, or slick, dishonest corporate stooges such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and, if he follows through on his promise to support the Democratic nominee, even Bernie Sanders. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order. Political elites, Democrat or Republican, serve the demands of corporations and empire. They are facilitators, along with most of the media and most of academia, of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

The attraction of a Trump, like the attraction of Radovan Karadzic or Slobodan Milosevic during the breakdown of Yugoslavia, is that his buffoonery, which is ultimately dangerous, mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade. It lays bare the dissembling, the hypocrisy, the legalized bribery. There is a perverted and, to many, refreshing honesty in this. The Nazis used this tactic to take power during the Weimar Republic. The Nazis, even in the eyes of their opponents, had the courage of their convictions, however unsavory those convictions were. Those who believe something, even something repugnant, are often given grudging respect.

These neoliberal forces are also rapidly destroying the ecosystem. The Earth has not had this level of climate disruption since 250 million years ago when it underwent the Permian-Triassic extinction, which wiped out perhaps 90 percent of all species. This is a percentage we seem determined to replicate. Global warming is unstoppable, with polar ice caps and glaciers rapidly melting and sea levels certain to rise 10 or more feet within the next few decades, flooding major coastal cities. Mega-droughts are leaving huge patches of the Earth, including parts of Africa and Australia, the west coast of the United States and Canada and the southwest United States, parched and plagued by uncontrollable wildfires. We have lost 7.2 million acres to wildfires nationwide this year, and the Forest Service has so far spent $800 million struggling to control conflagrations in California, Washington, Alaska and other states. The very word “drought” is part of the deception, implying this is somehow reversible. It isn’t.

Migrants fleeing violence and hunger in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Eritrea are pouring into Europe. Two hundred thousand of the roughly 300,000 migrants to Europe this year have landed on the shores of Greece. Two thousand five hundred have died so far this year in the sea, on overcrowded and dilapidated boats or in the backs of trucks such as the one discovered last week in Austria that held 71 corpses, including the bodies of children. This is the largest influx of refugees into Europe since World War II, a 40 percent jump since last year. And the flood will grow ever greater. By 2050, many climate scientists predict, between 50 million and 200 million climate refugees will have fled northward to escape areas of the globe made uninhabitable by soaring temperatures, droughts, famines, plagues, coastal flooding and the chaos of failed states.

The physical, environmental, social and political disintegration is reflected in an upsurge of nihilistic violence driven by rage. Crazed gunmen carry out massacres in shopping malls, movie theaters, churches and schools in the United States. Boko Haram and Islamic State, or ISIS, are on killing rampages. Suicide attackers methodically commit deadly mayhem in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Iran, Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, Mauritania, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China, Nigeria, Russia, India and Pakistan. They struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and in 2010 when Andrew Joseph Stack III flew a light plane into a building in Austin, Texas, that housed offices of the Internal Revenue Service. Fanaticism is bred by hopelessness and despair. It is not the product of religion, although religion often becomes the sacral veneer for violence. The more desperate people become, the more this nihilistic violence will spread.

“The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms,” the theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote.

These “morbid symptoms” will expand until we radically reconfigure how we relate to each other and the ecosystem. But there is no guarantee such a reconfiguration is possible, especially if the elites manage to cling to power through their pervasive global security and surveillance apparatus and heavily militarized police forces. If we do not overthrow this neoliberal system, and overthrow it soon, we will unleash a Hobbesian nightmare of escalating state violence and counterviolence. Masses of the poor will be condemned to misery and death. Some will try to violently resist. A tiny elite, living in a modern version of Versailles or the Forbidden City, will have access to amenities denied to everyone else. Hatred will become the primary ideology.

The attraction of Islamic State, which has up to 30,000 foreign fighters, is that it articulates the rage felt by the wretched of the earth and has thrown off the shackles of Western domination. It defies the neoliberal attempt to turn the oppressed into human refuse. You can condemn the group’s medieval vision of a Muslim state and its campaigns of terror against Shiites, Yazidis, Christians, women and homosexuals—which I do—but the anguish that inspires this savagery is genuine; you can condemn the racism of white supremacists who are flocking to Trump—as I do—but what they are responding to is their similar frustration and despair. The neoliberal order, by turning people into superfluous labor and by extension superfluous human beings, orchestrated this anger. The only hope left is to re-integrate the dispossessed into the global economy, to give them a sense of possibility and hope, to give them a future. Short of that, nothing will stem the fanaticism.

Islamic State, much like the Christian right in the U.S., seeks a return to an unachievable purity and utopianism, a heaven on earth. It promises to establish a version of the seventh-century caliphate. Twentieth-century Zionists seeking to form Israel used the same playbook when they called for the re-creation of the mythical Jewish nation of the Bible. ISIS, as the Jewish fighters who founded Israel did, is attempting to build its state (now the size of Texas) though ethnic cleansing, terrorism and the use of foreign fighters. Its utopian cause, as was the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, is attractive to tens of millions of youths, most of them Muslims cast aside by the neoliberal order. Islamic State offers a vision of a broken society made whole. It offers a place and sense of identity—denied by neoliberalism—to those who embrace this vision. It calls for a turning away from the deadening cult of the self that lies at the core of neoliberal ideology. It holds up the sanctity of self-sacrifice. And it offers an avenue for vengeance.

Until we dismantle the neoliberal order and recover the humanistic tradition that rejects the view that human beings and the Earth are commodities to exploit, our form of industrialized and economic barbarity will collide with the barbarity of those who oppose us. The only choice offered by “bourgeois society,” as Friedrich Engels knew, is “socialism or regression into barbarism.” It is time we make this choice.

We in the United States are not morally superior to Islamic State. We are responsible for over a million dead in Iraq and 4 million Iraqis who have been displaced or forced to become refugees. We kill in greater numbers. We kill more indiscriminately. Our drones, warplanes, heavy artillery, naval bombardments, machine guns, missiles and so-called special forces—state-run death squads—have decapitated far more people, including children, than Islamic State has. When Islamic State burned a Jordanian pilot alive in a cage it replicated what the United States does daily to families by incinerating them in their homes in bombing strikes. It replicated what Israeli warplanes do in Gaza. Yes, what Islamic State did was cruder. But morally it was the same.

I once asked the co-founder of the militant group Hamas, Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, why Hamas sanctioned suicide bombings, which left Israeli civilians and children dead, when the Palestinians had the moral high ground as an occupied people. “We will stop killing their children and civilians as soon as they stop killing our children and civilians,” he told me. He noted that the number of Israeli children who had been killed at that time was a couple of dozen, as opposed to hundreds of Palestinian children. Since 2000, 133 Israeli and 2,061 Palestinian children have lost their lives. Suicide bombing is an act of desperation. It is, like Israel’s saturation bombing of Gaza, a war crime. But when seen as a response to unchecked state terror it is understandable. Dr. Rantisi was assassinated in April 2004 by Israel when it fired a Hellfire missile at his car in Gaza from an Apache attack helicopter. His son Mohammed, in the vehicle with him, also died in the attack. The downward spiral, more than a decade after these murders, continues.

Those who oppose us offer a vision of a new world. We offer nothing in return. They offer a counterweight to the neoliberal lie. They speak for its victims, trapped in squalid slums in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and North America. They condemn the grotesque hedonism, the society of spectacle, rejection of the sacred, profligate consumption, personal wealth as the primary basis for respect and authority, blind celebration of the technocrat, sexual commodification—including a culture dominated by pornography—and the drug-induced lethargy that are used by all dying regimes to keep the masses distracted and disempowered. Many jihadis, before they became violent fundamentalists, fell victim to these forces. There are hundreds of millions of people like them who have been betrayed by the neoliberal order. They are a powder keg. And we offer them nothing.

The wretched of the earth increasingly do not believe in the efficacy of nonviolence. They saw how nonviolence failed in Tunisia, which contributes the largest number of jihadis to the fighting in Iraq and Syria, and how it failed in Libya, Egypt and Iraq, a country where the U.S. puppet regime gunned down nonviolent protesters in the streets. The wretched of the earth—including in the United States, where we are seeing a mounting number of assassinations at the hands of police, 23 so far this year—intend to counter state violence with insurrectional violence. They have learned to speak in the language we taught them. Keep shooting unarmed black men and women in the streets of American cities while ignoring the nonviolent protests calling for an end to the state lynching and terror, and guess what will happen?

“Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity,” Frantz Fanon wrote in “The Wretched of the Earth,” “but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.”

Do those in power read history? Or maybe this is what they want. Once the wretched of the earth morph into Islamic State, or adopt counterviolence, the neoliberal order can lift the final fetters that are imposed upon it and start to kill with impunity. Neoliberal ideologues, after all, are also utopian fanatics. And they, too, know only how to speak in the language of force. They are our version of Islamic State.

The binary world the neoliberals created—a world of masters and serfs, a world where the wretched of the earth are demonized and subdued by a loss of freedom, by “austerity” and violence, a world where only the powerful and the wealthy have privileges and rights—will condemn us to a horrifying dystopia. The emerging revolt, inchoate, seemingly disconnected, is rising up from the bowels of the earth. We see its flashes and spurts. We see its ideology of rage and anguish. We see its utopianism and its corpses. The more despair and desperation are manufactured by the neoliberal order, whether in Athens, Baghdad or Ferguson, the more the forces of state repression are used to quell unrest and extract the last drops of blood from collapsing economies, the more violence will become the primary language of resistance.

Those of us who seek to create a world that has hope of viability have little time left. The neoliberal order, despoiling the Earth and enslaving the vulnerable, has to be eradicated. This will happen only when we place ourselves in direct opposition to it, when we are willing to engage in the acts of self-sacrifice and sustained revolt that allow us to obstruct and dismantle every aspect of neoliberal machinery. I believe we can do this through nonviolence. But I am not blind to the inevitable rise of counterviolence, caused by the myopia and greed of the neoliberal mandarins. Peace and harmony may not engulf the Earth if we succeed, but if we do not remove the ruling elites from power, if we do not overthrow the neoliberal order, and if we do not do it soon, we are doomed.

(Chris, I was going to publish excerpts from this article but there was little that could be excised without lessening the article’s impact. The article is probably the most important article I have ever read and it comes at a time when the world is struggling to avoid a nuclear war and deal effectively with Global Warming.

Please forgive me, Chris and Tom. Allow me to add my little voice to yours. If other bloggers join in, we might be able to sway some minds and bring about desperately needed change!)

Some Food For Thought!

A White Man’s Fear in a Frightened America

By Frank Nuessle

An Excerpt

“Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book about his experience of being black in White America has touched a place of deep-seated fear and unacknowledged anguish buried deep inside of me. 

Why would I, a sixty something, tall, blue eyed, well educated, white man who has lived a privileged life in White America, be so afraid? 

I think it’s because Coates is right when he points out that we “American Dreamers” espouse Freedom for All, while at the same time, we build our privileged lifestyle ‘on the backs of our fellow humans.’  In more recent times, technology has freed us ‘to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the earth itself.”  The hypocrisy of America’s actions in the world stand clearly opposed to our vision of our country as “the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, rapists, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization.”

It frightens me that we Dreamers might reap what we have sown.  If so, all of us, the rich and the poor, the innocent and the guilty, will suffer the consequences. How does America wake up to these consequences and escape from our current dream that is so divorced from reality?

Today America has no language, no story, for such a renewal.   The rejuvenation of hope and belief in our democratic system is hampered because we live out of false belief about the nature of our humanness.   Our cultural belief, which has spawned naked capitalism, is that we humans are just animals with more sophisticated brains, so that life is merely a constant struggle for survival and then you die.  These beliefs are fed to us daily by mass media along with the false belief that America is still the shining exemplar of democratic values where honesty and hard work pays off.   This is simply not true.”

Friends, I came across this article and this section of it struck me as particularly pertinent to where we are in world affairs (See Information Clearing House to read the whole thing).

The Americans still live in a world of their own and their actions, always ill-considered and illogical, drive us ever closer to a nuclear war that will probably lead us to extinction.