Sticking to the EU issue, since that's the least discussed at this forum.
Bannon could find the EU threatening on several cranky fronts.
1. despite its current corporatism, the EU has the means to be reformed if voters had the will to demand it, and that's a win for universal concepts of civil rights. I had argued in past years about the hypocrisy of American right-wingers in supporting NATO was that all our European allies were guilty of "Communism" by GOP standards - universal health care being just the tip of the iceberg. Well, that bastard Bannon took me up on that. Wreck the EU and its social safety net, and the US gets to pose as the sole major model of liberal democracy. Sorry, Canada or New Zealand won't inspire too many folks in the rest of the world. All we have to be is less bad than Russia and China.
2. Even if the EU remains corporatist, it is a challenge to US capitalist hegemony. Cheney's neo-cons explicitly said that America must destroy any challenger to its hegemony - they didn't say anything about form of government.
3. Now for the big one: the White Bloc. We can't yet prove this, but at the very least Bannon is a Victorian nostalgic, whose people sound like that monster Cecil Rhodes when talking about the destiny of White/Christian/English-speaking people to impose their civilization on the whole world. Well, let's say he wants his 1914 back. Anglo-American economic hegemony was real. The globe was effectively divided between White empires (except for Japan and China). Those empires were, in truth, beginning to turn on each other like predators who have run out of prey. But in Bannon's diseased mind, they may still shine as Caucasian cousins, sworn never to spill White blood, always ready to help each other in the specific case of a rebellion by dusky natives.
In this way, you reconcile the contradictions between White nationalist/separatist isolationism and Classical liberal imperialism, meaning in modern politics, the Buchanan/Wallace racist populists versus the neocons. You see that contradiction every day when you see racists flip back and forth between loving militiamen who want to collapse government down to county-size fiefdoms and wanting Washington to enslave and annihilate the Moslem world. You can't have both, but both represent an idea of White supremacy, which is still taboo in national discourse. Taboo ideas get parceled out to surrogate ideas covered by codewords, like States' Rights on one hand or "Christian civilization" on the other.
Bannon is laboring to revoke the taboo. He needs, if even only for himself, the old fantasy that there are homelands endowed by God unto the different races, talk once common among nationalist activists trying to secede from earlier empires. But of course, the minute these nationalists got their homeland, they began scheming to steal the lands of others.
The Nazis even re-enacted that hypocrisy in super-speed. Their early '30s rhetoric was the same victimization spiel seen among those nationalities genuinely enslaved by empires. In only a couple of years, they'd moved to the "liberate our enclaves behind enemy lines" phase. By 1939, they were ready to toss all that national homeland for everybody crap and proclaim their right to be the enslavers.
Of course, by then the Brownshirts' anarchistic talk of abandoning the cities and tearing down centralized institutions like the Army was long erased. No need for isolation once the masses regain their confidence they can get away with more.
Thus it is with the far-right crank jabbering on the Internet. He's confused enough about the actual lines of authority in America that he can be an agrarian militiaman one day and a cheerleader for the Pentagon the next. The key is disguising the hated big govt. bureaucracy as something that strikes an emotional chord. That's where fascists thrive. A federation of backward, ruralized, theocratic sovereign states that just happens to spend $700 billion a year on a global military? Sure, why not? A brotherhood of the White races, each respecting the other's right to enslave a certain sector of the Global South without all those old entanglements of international law or climate treaties or human rights? As long as I trust my tribal chieftain to get me my share of the booty, I'm ready to believe that.
So no EU, because the Italians and Croats and Hungarians don't fit in his 19th century schema. They are part of the enslaved South.
This sort of brings up a question. Is the right way to fight a regressive "revolution" to counter it with messages that liberalism as we understand it is American and patriotic, therefore "normal"? Is this going to become a battle of rival normalizations? Are we trying to activate the non-voters who we assume to still have some humanistic values, or are we trying to convert Trump's base who now take their marching orders from a "conservative" who says he's a Leninist who wants to overthrow the existing bourgeois liberal society?
I've had a feeling for a long time that attempts to out-patriot the Right, to claim that originalism actually supports Jeffersonian liberalism, rest on dangerous assumptions about the essential commitment to fairness of the White masses.
Yes, but the velocity of events is important. A terrorist attack allows things to happen so much faster. And it can create the electoral conditions for them to go on for 4 years, or 8.
I recall Bush Junior's administration flailing around in its first 9 months, unable to sell an agenda far more extreme than the genial uniter image he'd sold in the election. He was becoming a national joke. Matt Stone and Trey Parker had a live-action series running called "That Darn Bush."
This cover truly reflects what is in the hearts of Trump's supporters, the nostalgia for their forefathers' barbarism from the forests of Germania to the Tulsa riots. They are only in denial about the sense of glee, poorly smothering it in duty and tradition. They hired Trump, over so many others, to finally be the destroyer of their enemies after all these decades of insinuation and promises.
Funny how all the talk about offshoring and interventionism has fallen silent.
Bannon's Breitbart has already put out false claims that a majority of Silicon Valley tech-firms have Asian-born CEOs - as if that were a bad thing being done against White people. Like the anti-Semites, he will never accept that immigrants succeed at some industries due to their own merits, that it has to be due to some conspiracy or an evil inherent to that industry (Jews in Hollywood, Black rappers and athletes, etc.). When he uses Breivik-like terms such as "Christian civilization", Asians don't count regardless of their faith or birthplace.
Obviously, he's at least extended his concept of the Master Race to include Slavs, so Germans and sufficiently northern Italians should already be okay as immigrants.
We are falling with extraordinary speed down the rabbit hole of White Supremacist theology. Weeks ago I thought Bannon was simply racism + isolationism, meaning the sort whose conviction is that there is a "proper" homeland for all the races to have for themselves but no place else... of course, certain exceptions being made for when superior races colonize inferior lands or rule them through puppets. Now he's making his foray into foreign policy and we have to wonder if there is anyplace on his dream-Earth where a Person of Color has any rights to respect.
It was apparent all through the campaign that Trump had no concept how power is shared between the branches of government. It wasn't just that he wanted to impose the dictatorial style of a capitalist CEO on the Federal government, he already assumed it was that way, that presidents were either not using their power or were using it for the wrong policies, but no one else ever mattered.
The more logical route is to whip up anger about the courts to empower Congressional action, and maybe even Constitutional amendments or a Constitutional convention enabled by GOP control of state legislatures. That would be a enormous project designed as a Final Solution to wipe out the last 200 years of law and civil rights. The excitement this would kindle among the deplorables could save the GOP in midterms, their quid pro quo for all the problems Trump is causing them in real life.
Erdogan also had the competence to run Turkey quite well during the '00s, managing to be the face of an economic boom while its neighbors were ruined by war. As I understand, it all came down to the moment when he started demanding constitutional changes, which required a supermajority that his reasonable policies towards the Kurds made impossible. So to civil war and endless crackdowns. Trump/Bannon may be trying to skip ahead to this part.
Divide and conquer. Leave the Mexicans for next month's crisis. Ramp up pressure until an individual Latino commits an act of violence, then begin the scripted cycle of escalation. Or carry out a false flag attack... another form of alternative fact.
There's been an article circulating widely this week that argues the purpose of the badly-written executive orders was precisely to invite a court action, and then attempt to get Federal officers to ignore it. Supposedly this has already happened to some extent with the earlier court orders, for instance in California US Marshals refused to serve an order restraining US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
I think this new order is so sweeping that any chance that Federal officers defy it directly is low. More likely more games with interpretation, which is normal. So Reichsfuhrer Bannon is likely to lose on this and expend some political capital. Why did he start all this unless he has some way to win? A new propaganda campaign against Federal judges to prepare for new legislation? Stage-setting for a false flag attack that will lead to the arrest of an individual who, conveniently, is exactly one of those affected by the original visa ban?
It is very hard to think one step ahead of such bizarre people once they have power, which is why prudent nations do not let this sort have power in the first place.
The lies matter because they herald the direction the movement's priests intend to direct society. Hitler told everyone his plans way back in 1923. Then he put on an act, switching stories to juggle his old followers with new ones to build an electoral party. But once he was in power, he was compelled to return to his true nature, his death list and the myths he truly believed. He had to fight another war with France, he had to eliminate the Jews, he had to invade Russia. He could not operate outside of his mental universe.
So which of Trump's bewildering flurry of bullshit are his core beliefs? His hatred of Iran, his need to lump all ordinary Moslems together as a single behemoth that cannot co-exist with Christians, his need to cripple China just because it's so big, his view of Mexicans as having no existence but to plot against White America, his dismissal of Blacks as fit only to be criminals and servants, and most of all his contempt for women. He comes back to these things again and again. We can be more sure about those than about his beliefs on economics and the role of government.
Yeah, yeah, tens of millions of you in the South who worship everything that your ancestors did, yet claim that White Supremacy was just a misunderstanding. Where was your hypocrite ancestors' belief in States' Rights when they passed the Fugitive Slave Act?
No one goes to war over the right of their state to abrogate the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments unless they have someone in mind they intend to strip of the right to vote. Which then makes possible all the other things that have been done to Blacks.
Dylann Roof cut through all your bullshit and expressed the heart of the matter, just as Anders Breivik expressed it for the pathetic "alt-right" who are now camped in the White House.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, March 1861:
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails... They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal."
Stephens was right in that all the other fundamental principles he praised in the rest of his speech, every one still part of your right-wing beliefs, rested on the bedrock of human inequality. He was honest. You're not.
There's simply no use for a mass draft in modern warfare.
However, the suppression of domestic dissent is another matter.
We could see the logic for this forming during the campaign, where Trump was seducing gullible antiwar people with attractive crumbs, saying some particular war was stupid. But for his actual supporters, the promise was a Fortress America, a greatly enlarged military that was brought home from overseas. Of what use would these legions be? Stateside bases act as a subsidy for the dead-end towns next to them. Bases are usually in Red States because the land is cheaper there, and maybe because having them targeted by ICBMs was more acceptable there. That has helped bind rural White America to the military, which they've come to see as their special province and proof that they're better Americans than the rest of us.
Recall that when the time came for Beijing to crush Tiananmen Square, it called in Army units from rural areas, who were expected to be loyal.
The story of Pershing's Mexican raid was taught quite differently to Americans like me growing up before anyone heard the terms "Chicano" or "La Raza." We weren't taught about how the US' relationship with the dictator Diaz had put us in a bad light once the revolution began. We weren't taught about the consequences of the US invasion of Veracruz. So it was confusing to see the conflicting narratives of Pershing's incursion as a last romantic fling before the horrors of WW1, versus Pancho Villa as folk hero.
Times changed enough for the Villa narrative to become stronger. But now, no one knows or cares about the events of 1917 at all. So old Donald Trump with his old-time racist myths has a population to work with that's pretty much a blank slate.
I have this horrifying hunch that we have not yet seen the worst White people can do when it comes to having their cake and beating it too.
It is interesting that we are seeing a plague of ethno-nationalist regimes and parties grasping at power, at this moment when we basically have the chance to lick overpopulation. This is because ethno-nationalists are usually nativists. They view women's wombs as the barracks of their future armies; it is their duty to reproduce their tribe to outnumber its enemies. What do the US, France, Germany, England, Israel and Russia have in common? Those falling (White) birthrates. But even Indian Hindus have a falling birthrate, and there again we see ethno-nationalists looking to beat down demographic challenges.
In America the Christian Right have (as usual) been given the duty of calling for something in the name of Christian culture that otherwise would be recognized as racism: the Quiverfull movement, Biblically concocting the demand that (the right kind of) Christian women have more babies to outreproduce the Moslem threat (actually Black/Latino). However, the downfall of this scheme is the ideological unreliability of the children; the Christian Right is having a hard time reproducing itself due to defections.
I've gone on about this before, but what I'm instead suspecting will be instituted is a restoration of debt serfdom biased to target non-Whites. This means re-establishing the Southern caste system, with the actual ownership class in their fortified villas, and the, to put it crudely, redneck class elevated to the middle caste as enforcers by cycling them thru the military & mercenary contractors. Then it won't be a problem that there's not enough of them, but a problem of finding enough people to profitably oppress to make their own standard of living higher than currently regardless of the Medievalization of our nation.
Now this gets us into some interesting territory regarding caste systems. It's possible for a privileged someone of a higher caste to be poorer than someone from a lower caste. We know about that in India, but even in the Jim Crow South some Blacks had some wealth despite the massive disadvantages they were under. Under a rigged system (via all-White juries) debtors with the advanced skills required by the 21st century economy might be tried and sentenced to divergent paths. The White middle class would be allowed to stay in their homes, but their income would be permanently garnished in the manner of peasant rents. The non-Whites would be exiled to these abandoned wasteland communities you mentioned. Maybe like Jews in the Russian Pale. I'm thinking that while robots have won out in factories, in a resource extraction/real estate bubble economy, the vast wilderness lands now being schemed for privatization must be developed, and robots aren't going to be cost-effective in Montana in January. Nope, it's Gulag time, millions of Black & Latino laborers cared for by Indian doctors and Asian teachers, all enthusiastically condemned as debt parasites repaying the "damage" they did to Real Americans.
So when I watch the stumbling attempts at resistance - and at justification - in the age of Trump, I'm trying to gauge how far ordinary Whites and their assault rifles will go in mind-boggling, all-time-villain mass atrocity. How many of them will really resist the bizarre nightmare I just described? Once they are cornered into an us-or-them zero-sum confrontation? And more importantly, how many will fight for it with all they've got because, all along, they've never really had any sense of identity or pride except as the Master Race?
The sickest part of the Trump joke is that he came to power by essentially accusing the Democrats of carrying out the Shock Doctrine - then he went ahead and actually did it himself. The key? The need of the fascist mentality to divide the capitalist elite into patriots and traitors based on ethnic stereotypes, then blame the ills of capitalism entirely on the latter.
I have actually spent the last 34 years (God, has it been that long?) writing stories about a 2nd American civil war along the present factional lines. Of course, I have not found a publisher, because I'm not favorable to the right-wingers like say, "The Turner Diaries" or "Victoria."
Around 1992 I got tired of writing short stories about the aftermath of that war, which seemed a cliched cop-out in science fiction. I decided to do it the hard way. Write a book, "Warheads," about the first incident that makes war inevitable. And then have it be about a bunch of kids fighting in a schoolbus going to the last public school in northern Houston.
Some of the things I wrote about then have already happened. We've had the catastrophic Christian-Right president who led America to failure in the Middle East, we've had the Black president who has provoked a racist backlash but refuses to support armed resistance by his followers.
Other things I wrote about seemed off-course. Given the Southernness of the right-wing movement, the use in my story of skinhead teenage gangs secretly protected by the Christian Right looked too "European".
Until the alt-Right spewed out of the Internet gutter.
Anyway, the last section of the book is called Harper's Ferry, because it's about a catastrophic attempt by private mercenaries to rescue White hostages being held in a Black/Latino neighborhood, because the governments of Texas and the US are no longer on speaking terms.
In the last few years I've finally resumed work on the next book, "Nation of Warheads," where I can work out my ideas on how a revolution of Workers of Color can succeed under the horrible conditions resulting from the end of the 1st book. I'm glad I put it aside for 14 years. The technologies that have arisen in recent years show the path to a revolutionary economy that will be necessary to overthrow the now-openly fascist regime we see forming around us. But the strategy to carry it out is really heinous.
The elephant in the room is the growing awareness that Whites are demographically doomed to become a minority in maybe 30 years. Of course many states will have this happen before that, and state government is the historic favorite tool for racist governance.
The logical purpose of the current campaign of dehumanization is to rig elections permanently in favor of "real" Americans. For a decade or more that has consisted of Republican attempts to make Blacks, in particular, face burdens tailored to their historical voting patterns, and fear that any discrepancy in their voting will lead to their arrest. Judges have struck down some of these measures.
But now the preparation is being made for these judges to be overriden and removed. The far right has long harbored the dream of openly repealing the Lincoln amendments under the cover of States' Rights. Even Jim Crow operated in the refusal of the Federal government to enforce those amendments. Eliminating them opens up a new cosmos of possibilities.
Look out for right-wing talk about amendments or a Constitutional convention. They've gathered control of enough state legislatures to make it a possibility. The objective will at first appear to be the stripping of birthright citizenship from some Latinos. That simply culls enough from the electorate to enable the next phase: the creation of official 2nd-class citizenship in the fashion of Apartheid. This has been the Holy Grail of our far-right movement since 1964. Its poison has been extruded into every possible excuse to restore historic inequalities. It is the body whose hydra heads are the movements for not just White supremacy, but male supremacy, Christian supremacy, and the supremacy of the rich. All of these, though, lead back to the restoration of American patriarchy and its "understood" two-tiered citizenship.
Is it because he enjoys being arbitrary, or is it because his followers feed on the cruelty unleashed by this haste? If it's the latter, then the message is being sent out over the land: you too can participate in sadistic patriotism. To policemen, state legislatures, ordinary bullies.
It was obvious over a year ago that Trump intended to rule by decree. He didn't campaign for fellow Republicans in Congress, he didn't do anything to help the GOP, he created his own parallel cult organization. He showed zero understanding of how Congress, the Supreme Court and the Constitution function. He made endless promises to enact what the Executive may only propose to Congress.
This clearly did not hurt him. What's new is the elevation of Steve Bannon to direct this new form of rule.
Trump is notorious for refusing to pay his bills and then grinding it all out in court as a routine business operation. Or I should say "famous", since despite all the denials among his followers, they could hardly be unaware of this behavior. They want a leader who will cheat everyone they think has cheated them.
If that's all he does, he really does have the mind of a hillbilly. There are much bigger scams that could be run through a fully corporatized White House. Corporations in every country could simply form joint ventures with entities whose ownerships worm their complex ways to The Trump Organization. This in turn opens up Enron-level stock scams, the dilution of value through forming joint ventures being an Enron favorite. A hotel might generate tens of millions a year in revenue. Joint ventures in energy or privatization of state goods get you to billions. Favors in the privatization of Social Security, Medicare and public schools get you to the level that I like to call "Pentagon money".
Peasants have supported ruling classes that objectively hurt them before. The (profitable) secret to this is that people prize not just empirical goods, but emotional rewards. Pecking orders are great at producing emotional rewards for the people who are second from the bottom - at the expense of the people at the bottom. How else could the Whites of the South have tolerated the poor economic performance of their states under Jim Crow while the rest of America forged ahead?
ISIS appears to be far too useful an enemy for all governments to be worth destroying. Everyone sends forces there to bomb ISIS, and they instead bomb someone else's proxies. And imagine how valuable ISIS is in the long-lasting Israeli effort to prove to the world that Moslems and Arabs are inherently animals and that the Palestinians thus can be deprived of the right to exist. Sure, America is the only country where this propaganda campaign worked, but it's the only country where it needed to work. ISIS can be molded into the final justification for the cleansing of the Occupied Territories and the official elimination of Arab citizenship in Israel proper.
If ISIS finally falls to the Kurds and Shia actually living there who understand how awful it is, the Saudis will bankroll a replacement and this all starts over again.
We have certainly reached the point in technology where the automation of the entire retail sector is underway. Retailing overpriced crap is now much more valuable than making it. Thus any burdens placed on imported goods will have to be offset by accelerating the conversion of retail into websites 'n' robots.
And the potential there is vast. The resistance is simply the age of Americans unable to embrace whatever Merch-Matrix that Amazon is planning. That's why Trump has no idea that this is happening. Younger Americans will consider it perfectly natural. Right now, the hot topic in real estate is not building factories or offices, but the biggest warehouses ever seen near the major cities. Those warehouses handle the problem of turning your website orders into one-day delivery. You guessed it, that's what Amazon's drone delivery fumbles were about. It won't stop trying because it's already built the aircraft carriers near your home.
There are actually many positive aspects of this. Electrifying the transport of goods will tend to accompany its automation. People have been using the need to go to "big box" stores to justify full-size SUVs that our forefathers got along perfectly fine without despite having twice as many kids. We could enormously reduce shopping trips. We could even build the supermarket equivalent of those super-warehouses, where you would virtually cruise the aisles from home and robots would pick out the produce you want. If we actually grew the produce hydroponically on-site, stacked among LED lights, many links in the food distribution chain would be removed. But that means lost jobs, reaching deep into the middle class. Of course, there is no plan for dealing with this.
What we should watch out for is a bait & switch that will initiate something far more horrific than a wall. Like this:
1. Trump's new army & vigilantes round up several million "illegals". Most are from Honduras, Guatemala, India, and Pakistan.
2. There is no way to physically dump these people back in their non-bordering countries.
3. So these millions will languish in privately-operated detention camps not designed for any humane standard of long-term residence. The operators will complain that they can't make profits from just what Trump pays them.
4. Magically, the entire right-wing complex will bombard the public with the need to legalize prison slave labor in every facility.
In an instant, you will have created a new official class of stateless persons. You will have created a legal precedent for doing the same to your own minority citizens. You will have not just sweatshop labor in this new class, but doctors and accountants from South Asia. Maybe a gulag-style labor force to do work that robots can't, to tear down the rest of America's remote wildernesses to profit developers.
Of course, you have also deformed labor markets to drive down wages and destroy jobs. But you will also have created jobs. The balance between the former and the latter is Donald Trump's reward to his followers. Those border vigilantes will become handsomely-paid private prison guards. Don't forget the extra police and bounty hunters now needed.
The creation of a new, permanently resident non-citizen proletariat - guarded by otherwise unemployable gun-nut rednecks who are automatically awarded the status of the police and army "heroes", big men in their communities and big voices to influence the less fortunate Whites around them to support this process. Simply being members of the Guards' race will make them all feel better and ignore the worsening objective conditions in their lives.
It all looks like a relatively Final Solution to me, given the short-sightedness of advanced capitalism.
Yet the people who voted for him were shown no evidence that he had learned any of those things, and they still considered him to be preferable to the modern world. What does this tell us about what they hoped to replace it with?
You are correct. The Right has spent the last 4 years on a multi-pronged assault to reestablish the principle that we are not equal before the law.
1. the enshrining of a "religious" right to discriminate in all matters
2. the campaign for profile searches, from airports to stop & frisk
3. Stand Your Ground laws establishing that a White man has a greater right to fear and shoot a Black man than vice versa
4. Just about everything regarding Moslems.
A victory in a single one of these fronts will be parlayed by legions of right-wing legal organizations into precedent for all of the other fronts.
Fascism is a right-wing populist critique of capitalism, which argues that markets aren't unequal ENOUGH, that capitalists of the dominant race have an obligation to discriminate further against all the others, to replace any vaguely objective measure of merit with a caste system that enforces patriarchal tyranny. In this conspiracy theory, the capitalists themselves are divided into Good, meaning the war industrialists, steelmakers, other heads of "manly" smokestack and extractive industries, and Bad, meaning the Jewish industries, basically, banking and entertainment and law. Then all the latter are scapegoated for all the actual sins of capitalism while the former are hailed as patriots.
So now that we know who we are dealing with, the question is, do these racialists demand that the world be eternally walled off, race from race (a position that many anti-war people seem to be embracing and desperately reading into Trump as they fall under his spell), or are they already reviving the special exception from Jehovah to the now-unified White Man to conquer all others as he pleases? The racists of the past could easily slip from one argument to the other based on transient military advantage, as the Nazis did from their autarkic position in the early '30s to their sudden crusade to enslave all the Slavs in 1941.
I believe the answer is, the Israeli leadership is sworn to create, by provocation and by shifting regional alignments, the opportunity to carry out a sudden, devastating ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Territories. It may not be possible in reality, but the seductive dream of it keeps the increasingly bigoted Israeli electorate going from month to month.
To carry out this final solution, Israel would need to nail down all the major actors. Saudi Arabia is clearly open to betraying all Islamic principles now, and its bizarre new neoliberal economic agenda is designed to eliminate its own servant population which includes many Palestinians. Israel must be sure that population will not be allowed to pose a threat. The Israeli-Saudi alliance against Iran seems based on the assumption that it indeed will foment Palestinian uprisings since it surely cannot launch any other useful military action from afar. I doubt the sincerity of this paranoid fantasy, but if it is sincere, then Iran must be crushed before the final cleansing occurs. We shouldn't dismiss the possibility that ordinary Iranians and Syrians themselves are willing to abandon the Palestinians to deal with their own problems.
But now there's just getting to be too many other actors in the Middle East. Russia and China are muscling their way in, though their own fabulous cynicism means anything could happen. It's not a slam dunk that anyone will stand in Israel's way when the Palestinians have so little to bribe anyone with.
Obviously Mr. Wibberley is not your friend, Mr. Jones. Any criticism of Trump is now dissected to brand all dissenters as demagogues. But any horrible things Trump says are excused as being "just talk," even though he's the one who derides any Constitutional restraint on his power.
Just tell us, Mr. Wibberley, which of us Americans are you willing to sacrifice in the name of "peace"?
It is the ideology behind the cuts that normalizes the harm that they cause. The demonstrations are ultimately against the ideology.
We've been living with these bastards in America since Reagan took office, and they have learned nothing and opened their hearts to nothing. Their proposals grow more extreme every year, because they have had a master plan all along for dragging America back to the 19th century. This now includes racially-targeted voter suppression (the foundation of Jim Crow), the claim that gender discrimination does not exist (as Mr. Sessions claimed), and the appointment of a radical theocrat with a long history of pushing Christian supremacy over democracy (Betsy DeVos) to sabotage the public school system.
This is not about cutting or balancing the US budget. Have you not heard? The budget just submitted to the Senate proposes an increased deficit every year for the next eight so as to give giant tax cuts to the rich. This is about Making America Victorian Again, in all the worst ways.
What happens when there are two populist movements at the same time? Like say, Abolitionism and Secessionism in 1860? Each one claims to be the only one to represent the "people", because they fundamentally are at odds to who counts as people.
At every step of the way, Sanders said the solution was more equality. With his unprecedentedly open racism and sexism, Trump was demanding a solution of more inequality - promoting the needs of White over Black (BLM), Christians over Moslems, polluters over environmentalists, the past over the future, and relentlessly, men over women. America First did not mean all Americans, and those excluded were aware of that, but you couldn't be bothered to ask them.
That's like Hitler. It's nothing like Sanders. You have no business judging Trump's remarks if you don't even know that he goaded a crowd into beating up a Black Lives Matter protester in that shrine to beaten protesters, Birmingham, Alabama. And if you do know and have convinced yourself that, as Trump said, "He deserved it," then you are willing to sacrifice over 100,000,000 Americans different than yourselves because you value them less than your foreign policy preferences. The rights they are losing may not be restored for generations, given our past history.
We do not have enough money to buy a new party. That's kind of the point of capitalist democracy.
It's also the point of Trump: he took control of an existing party very cheaply by going straight to its worst elements and promising to promote them ahead of its sane establishment.
It's J. Edgar Hoover giving LBJ the dossier on Nixon's treason at the last minute in '68 all over again. Except in those days, releasing the info at the last minute was too unseemly even for a brawler like Johnson, so Hoover knew Nixon would get away with it.
I wonder how many LBJ-hating suckers in 1969 were sure that Nixon would end the war quickly and make America great again.
Another critical irony played into Hitler's hands. Colonial empires were a way of life back then, along with the racial supremacy that they inevitably indoctrinated. Germany had lost its colonial empire in WW1. Japan was a latecomer prevented from conquering more lands. When US tariffs triggered global trade war in 1930, the empires turned easily into protectionist blocs to ride out the storm - even though among them the US (owning the Philippines & Hawaii and neocolonially ruling much of Latin America) and Great Britain had been the great ideologues of free trade. This debacle surely made Germans and Japanese feel they'd been sold a bill of goods by liberalism and look for their own imperial solutions. What made Hitler unusual was his racism being so exclusionary that he could advocate white-on-white enslavement.
I really hate to think anyone in the world is falling into this trap now.
You're conflating two different disasters. The hyperinflation happened in 1919-23. The Great Depression began in 1929 and its spread to Europe was largely the fault of America's protectionist Congress in 1930. Signs were hopeful in-between, with the Nazis seemingly on the sidelines. However, having both so close together probably finished off the shaky legitimacy of the Weimar state created by elites and factions who were only held together by their fear of Communists.
Yes, compared to the suffering of ordinary people in the Depression, we have it very easy. We are very weak, cowardly, spoiled people. We whine and threaten at the tiniest setback.
However, there are reasons why we are so weak and passive, built into the very nature of our evolution from, to put it bluntly, an artificial tribe of near-barbarians assembled by 17th century London investors from the dregs of European society for the purposes of raping a continent, to what we thought after World War 2 a modern, civilized people would be. In those latter days we lied too much to ourselves about the barbarity hidden within our patriotic myths and our rigged political institutions and economy. I think we also lied about the savagery within our selves. All of that was lurking in the shadows, while our modern day-to-day reality was increasingly about mass consumers participating in market choice without regard for caste, race and gender roles. As long as the bribe of higher earnings kept coming, no one rocked the boat too much. This is no way to form strong character.
It only took a very few things to go wrong with that liberal model - some of it deliberate sabotage - for the tribalist savage to come back out, because he was always looking for an excuse.
If you're going to say that establishment Democrats are evil, then you're putting a great many Blacks, Latinos and White women in that camp. You should be looking back at how history has forgiven the shortcomings of many of the people who fought the Confederacy and the Nazis, all the way up to Lincoln and Roosevelt themselves, because shortcomings are not the same as the paradigm of slavery that those enemies represented. More importantly, without those morally compromised allies, we would have gotten to see those paradigms ascendant and all our fine liberal/progressive standards would never even have existed.
Now if you have a plan to genuinely defeat the enemy while completely bypassing that very large number of people who aren't pure enough for you, then go for it. I am very interested in such an approach myself. But you know what? I recognize that by looking for that, I am giving up on democracy and stepping over the line to coercive revolution. After all, that was good enough for the Founding Fathers like John Adams, who confessed that only 1/3 of the colonists were on his side and another 1/3 neutral.
And millions of other Americans will cheer for any foreign strongman who claims to be anti-American in the fantasy that isolationism will bring Utopia. Right now, can you name any country of real influence anywhere in the world that is not either run by right-wing ethno-nationalists, state capitalist authoritarians, or aging bourgeois democrats in fear of being overthrown by neo-fascist anti-immigrant parties? Can you see anywhere in the world where the concept of human rights is not impotent? Anywhere where the poor are winning against the rich - whether the latter are of the Wall Street mafia or one of its rising rivals?
That is the post-American Century. Enjoy it from your prison cell.
America is becoming elderly, especially White America. In my opinion that means that signs of senility creep into the popular opinion. It's hard to overturn the economic system when you need the support of a lot of old people trending towards the maximum delusion of being self-sufficient while demanding help from others. Trump is all that plus a (alleged) billionaire's sense of superiority.
Worse, I think that the older you get, the more you see the future of the country as being in the hands of hostile aliens. Members of a society, supposedly, sacrifice for the future of their children, but what happens when their children don't honor their ancient prejudices? Shouldn't that encourage a kind of nihilism, a Samson Option of destroying the country rather than preserving it for those young dark punks who keep you in media-cultivated fear?
Not all old people are like that, but how do you push those who are out of the way of your social reform crusade? I see the problem as practically requiring the fragmentation of America into a group of autonomous city-states that use the most advanced technologies and a young multi-ethnic workforce to build the actual future, and a vast, dying wasteland between them where most of the old White people flee because they can't stand the future. Then it's simply a matter - a supremely ruthless one - of dumping your biggest social liabilities on your enemies who don't believe in feeding them while your young workforce builds up surpluses in social insurance, has post-racial children and eventually takes over America. But this sounds like the mass dieoff in Yeltsin's Russia. Also, the old rednecks in the sticks would suddenly have a compelling use for all those assault rifles they've been stocking up - a 1966 Indonesia with advanced weapons.
I don't really see any nation out there with both the will and the power to stop state torture worldwide. We are suddenly living in an era of racist nationalism, and torture is clearly a surrogate for racial persecution, because it is always demanded for opponents seen as aiding an enemy race plotting to supplant "us".
Your first point is exactly why it is important that the Military-Industrial Complex has become White Man's Welfare. Not just the creation of a crisis situation that requires that otherwise-useless rural Whites get paid out of the taxes of those they despise. But the elevation of these armed parasites into "heroes", and their subsequent indoctrination and training for a life as a caste elevated over their peers.
You put them thru the military to give them status (and violence skills), then thru the mercenary firms to pay them off. Or make them police. By the time they retire, they have far more cash than their neighbors, and inevitably become a sort of knighthood/gentry, establishing local political influence for the hierarchy.
I guess the ones too pathetic for that become prison guards. Who they will be guarding is the rest of the story of how this absurd reactionary economy will function while the world moves on without us.
Kevin Phillips' 2005 book, "American Theocracy", issued many dire prophecies based on the history of other declining empires. While all of it is relevant to our situation in 2017, I would like to note his discussion of technological decline near the end of the book. His premise is that empires fall in love with the technologies that once put them on top, and then they are in denial about the need to move on to other technologies. Specifically, that the Dutch were slow to move to coal power, and Britain was slow to move to oil power, because their financial commitment to the previous energy technology had become emotional.
So it is not surprising that there is an irrational love of oil in America that keeps finding objections to the new energy sources that other countries are quickly exploiting. The problem is that we would have to accept that our empire is in decline, and that others are obtaining advantages that will harm us. Trump only defines the former problem as a lack of conventional military power and smokestack industries, as you'd expect of an old man. And he can't define the latter problem because he only sees China as a threat in the form of conventional military power and smokestack industries, not the much greater changes being caused by electronics and eventually genetic engineering.
The problem is, none of the nations forging ahead are human rights-respecting democracies either, except South Korea, which is now in crisis precisely because the citizens refuse to tolerate the kind of cronyism that is now embraced by Trump as normal.
In addition, those Dust Bowl refugees were often met with hostility by their fellow Americans in California. Billboards warning them to keep moving. The implication of mob and vigilante violence against them. So it is today, including America. Denying global warming makes perfect sense if one fears that he and his race/nation will be penalized for their disproportionate role in creating victims by having to accept new taxes or refugees. Those refugees have to be blamed as the terrorists who threaten our way of life, rather than recognized as the victims of our way of life.
And Lyndon Johnson was the only man who could have gotten those bills passed. You Republicans' beloved Barry Goldwater opposed them and won a KKK endorsement.
The New Deal CREATED the White middle class. The Republican monopoly on power in the 1920s continued the laissez-faire boom-bust cycles that were getting worse over the previous half-century. The 1929 crisis was the proof that it didn't work, and the GOP-backed Smoot-Hawley tariff act of 1930 spread that crisis worldwide - which led to the triumph of fascism in Germany and Japan. American laissez-faire ideology caused World War 2. The New Dealers had to fix the economic collapse, the trade mess, and the war. You've skipped over the only true economic golden age ordinary Americans ever experienced, which ended with the capitalist coronation of Reagan in 1980. That was the year average wages in America stopped growing. They had grown for decades before that. They haven't grown since. The Democrats became part of the problem BECAUSE Bill Clinton undermined the New Deal and signed right-wing bills from Gingrich's Congress to survive the only way one can under capitalism - taking donations from the billionaires (or being one).
You've created a history just as false as the Republican narrative that the Democrats are still the party of Jim Crow despite the parties swapping the Southern racist constituency that Jim Crow served.
The problem is, the Republicans are hearkening back to a very successful system of oppression. It's not that they want to make us all wage slaves. It's that their supporters want to make non-Whites into slaves again, and Whites into overseers. Overseers had crappy lives by any absolute standard. But I'm sure they learned to appreciate the sadism that they were given special license to commit against those of lower caste.
So what's to stop people from making a rational decision that it is easier to return to that and live with a guaranteed caste status, than to keep trying to learn new job skills - which every rational observer admits is the fate of technological societies - in order to avoid losing ground in a competitive economy?
And the word "reactionary" hardly exists in American English or discourse because that was defined by European monarchist and feudalist nostalgia and we're in denial that we ever had anything like that here. Americans don't know the meaning of that word. They can figure out a term like "regressive," so we should go with that instead.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense to claim their defense is "You have to take the bad with the good," but then argue that the solution is to "compare systems." Their whole belief system was founded long ago on their being the Master Race/God's Hand on Earth and it's never truly been repudiated. So if they're better than anyone else, then their struggles can't be compared to anyone else's social system - no, their suffering is "special", perhaps a test from Satan Herself. Thus, "You have to take the bad with the good." They can come up with a hundred excuses for why we can't be like Norwegians and have nice things. They even help finance, thru the right-wing movement and Evangelical Protestantism, extremists who go over to countries like Norway and try to ruin what they have and make them like America.
That's the heart of tribal culture. Culture is organized conformity that enforces cohesion among strangers in a large society. If they value the cohesion gained by the guaranteed enforcement of pathologies more than they mind the pathologies, then they can always ramp up to lethal levels their fear of what might go wrong in an altered social order as well as those individuals who talk about alteration.
"Their substitute is to look to the past, the good old days of community, mutual support, a sense of place and continuity."
Nope, I don't see a rational argument against that. People who thought that way usually did not change their minds - the world moved forward as they died off... or the world crashed into barbarism as they triumphed.
If he didn't become a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, what caucus was he supposed to join that was supposed to be more radical in supporting racial equality?
You might also recall that Trump had his issues in the Republican primaries, his bagman Roger Stone threatening delegates by saying they should be "visited" by Trump people, Trump himself accusing Cruz of being the son of a Castro agent, and finally the shenanigans at the first day of the convention when Preibus maneuvered to create the illusion of unanimous votes to keep delegates from giving speeches about their reservations against Trump. If you think Trump is more legitimate than Clinton, then you must hold most Americans in contempt.
There's something deeply broken about the relationship between anti-war Whites and the overwhelming bulk of People of Color, and I would like the fundamental dispute to be exposed so that the latter can pursue their own ideas about what America should be, not your ideas, so that they won't keep being undermined by Hippies For Trump when they're not anti-war enough.
So if Blacks aren't anti-war enough for you, then they deserve to be plunged back into Jim Crow in the sacred cause of Isolationism and anti-imperialism?
Yeah, what's the persecution of African-Americans to you?
When our minorities can't stand his green light for police persecution anymore and fight back, what will you be saying then? That they're neoliberals, that they're the CIA, that they're part of the global socialist conspiracy? John Lewis? Yeah, he's an evil imperialist and, as Trump said about the protestors beaten up by his followers, "Maybe he deserved it."
Were the three superpowers in Orwell's 1984 really at war with each other, or were they permanently allied with each other against all their citizens, always providing each other whatever justification was needed for whatever measure they wanted to pass?
Has Wallstreetica always been at war with Rosneftistan, and always been allies with Beijinginc? Have we been fools for thinking that Russia or China or whoever were going to save us from the Wall Street hegemony when they were simply building their own corporate empires that would have the same relationship with ours that GM, Ford and Chrysler have with each other, cross-owned by a single global elite?
But the irony here is, Putin makes more money NOT pumping oil - in coordination with similar production cuts by other major producers - than by pumping more and more oil in a glutted market. The worst thing that can happen to him is for Russia to cut back production while OPEC members cheat on their pledged cutbacks.
However, if Putin were covering up a looming collapse in Russian reserves, then he'd sure need a replacement, someplace where extraction is too technologically complex for his country to handle. Like it or not, Exxon is the place to go for that.
So what's really going on here? There are several possible combinations of factors.
The problem is, EVERYONE says they're in Syria to fight ISIS, and no one is actually fighting them except those of the native peoples who face extermination at its hands. ISIS is clearly too valuable to too many people to destroy.
Or Trump will join Putin in a new cold war against the West's actual democracies. After all, aren't Germany and France a greater affront to the values of the Republican Party than Russia? All that damn equality and secularism and national health care and gun control and alternative energy and unions. Don't worry, Le Pen and the AfD will liberate White Christians from democratic oppression!
And yet the rugged individualists prostrate themselves before Trump as though he were a barbarian king. And the rural class welcomes him as though he were their old overlords, the plantation owners, arisen from the dead.
It seems that no one believes himself more fanatically to be self-governing than a henchman, who waves around the whip handed him by a master.
Pat Buchanan is a racist and an enemy of democracy. Trump is worse. Neither of them is fit to even stand in deGaulle's shadow.
How do you feel about America as the next Apartheid South Africa? I'm sure you could find good things to say about Pretoria throwing off the capitalist imperialism of the Commonwealth and isolating different races in their "natural" homelands.
We're getting ready here in America to fight the Republicans for the most basic standards of civilization. If you don't value that, then you don't value us. Enjoy your future under the belief system of Anders Breivik. But we won't. People here are already losing their healthcare and they will be the first of many to die under Trump.
There are a lot of Americans who embrace the evil of the hard right - and they have the best guns and the most ferocious inciters of violence.
And there are tens of millions of Americans who supported New Democrats, and the hatred between them and the Left tells me that there will never be a coalition for victory by peaceful means. So what does that leave?
What makes you think Trump doesn't want another 9/11? Then he can seize the powers he needs to Make America Great Again. Because what right-wingers believe is that the problem with America are the very existence and rights of liberals. Anders Breivik, who shared many beliefs with Steve Bannon, was willing to mass-murder socialist teenagers, not even adults, on the excuse that their liberal contamination was allowing in the Moslem conspiracy. But his butchery shows whom he really considered the threat. A similar reasoning is used against American liberals for their softness against immigrants. That can be parlayed, after a terrorist attack, into a general campaign to disenfranchise and exploit the Blue States so that America will truly become a one-party state, not what we've been complaining about, but the full Jim Crow model.
China is not ready to have a nuclear exchange with the US, and I suspect it would rather wait it out and get to repair the planet afterwards. Russia - well, maybe Russia is willing to sacrifice smaller allies to continue a more lucrative alliance with Trump. After all, Russia is basically an armed oil company and anything America does to sabotage efforts against global warming put more money in Putin's pockets. Iran? Iran is just another annoying competitor in the oil market. No one in the Middle East is worth a nuclear exchange for Putin.
Hell includes nukes. And only two likely players here have usable nuclear weapons, Israel and the USA. Will these countries threaten nuclear strikes against countries that support Palestine? And if they get away with such threats, what message does that send to nuclear proliferators who have their own blackmail wishlists?
If you don't have a problem with Trump inciting his rally crowd in Birmingham, Alabama to beat up a Black Lives Matter protester, then the only kind of peace you're interested in is a world divided between racist dictators, each using hatred to keep the masses quiet.
As Bella Abzug once said about the election of Richard Nixon - "We're all niggers now." I'll take civil war instead.
Too bad that anti-war people are rarely concerned with the race war at home.
But as Trotsky said, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Americans of Color will not forget who made excuses for the racist oppressor in the White House in the vain hope of bringing peace to the world through isolationism.
On to dictatorship and civil war in your own front yard.
I think Aristotle described "kakistocracy" as "rule by the worst." So he had this covered.
If we have observed kakistocracy in our lifetime, it was probably in the worst regimes in Africa, Mobutu or Bokassa or Charles Taylor. Yet even these regimes, as far as I can tell, have an ethnic support faction based on a belief by followers that the crimes on top will benefit them too - even if only by destroying the lives of people from rival tribes.
The Destroyer has come. When he's finished, will we hold his followers and apologists responsible?
But look at the size of the backlash to that counterculture: George Wallace leading to Richard Nixon leading to Ronald Reagan five years after the war ended.
I think most Americans knew the war was pointless by '68, but they kept voting for Nixon so he would eradicate, not North Vietnam, but their own kids, for committing the ultimate crime of pointing out that they were suckers and conformists. Every protest after that was met with more public support for mass suppression of dissent - until the moment when Nixon said we were no longer at war and suddenly his crimes were no longer acceptable. He was no longer needed.
What does it say about you that you think mocking disabled people and minorities does not indicate to that unemployed worker that he's probably next on the chopping block?
And Trump is president solely because he is a celebrity TV star, not because of a single act of public service ever performed in his life of refusing to run for any political office that would put him below the authority of anyone else. He's another actor who's an asshole - but one who promises to destroy the people you apparently want destroyed. Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr and many other German artists and intellectuals who fled Hitler could tell you a few things about life and death political matters.
The Russians supplied the e-mails to get the media to create a knee-jerk reaction to any allegation against Clinton - then Comey cashed it in by creating a false impression that he had something new on her a week before the election. Of course it was timed so that the revelation that there was nothing there would not be able to take hold.
This was well coordinated by Trump's people, probably the dirty tricks master Roger Stone.
The key here is, just like with Fox News, the subsequent reveal of the "error" doesn't bother its loyal followers. Because by promoting the hatred they want promoted, this organ "means well." Wink wink.
So if the support base is going to reward a propaganda organ no matter how outrageous its emissions, and a few more naive outsiders will get lured in each time by a false story before it's retracted, what's the cure?
The answer is, this is not a news operation, this is a political movement that acts like any political movement to attract people with a certain bias, but we do not treat it like a political movement. If we treated it like a political movement, the naive outsiders would have their guard up.
So how do we recognize an organization as being news or politics? Our newspapers began as openly partisan organizations in towns small enough that everyone knew who was aligned with whom. And a lot of our biases were due to our personal relationships with those whos. Generally you knew people who were in your own class and ethnicity, and that told you whom to be biased for. Remember, these divisions were among ethnic groups we now consider all White. That meant all of them had the right to create their own newspapers, their own political machines, and their own narratives of victimization.
Republicans will never stop looking for a way to bring back the cornerstone of the only America they're loyal to - the one in which the law recognizes Whites as the only true Americans, and everyone else as provisional, limited Americans, well below second-class. See:
the attacks on TSA so as to leave no popular option but profile searches of "Moslem-looking" people
the obvious bias in application of stop & frisk
the crusade for a special religious right to discriminate in any matter at all
It's because common law is based on precedent. Once they win on one of these, the precedent will be stretched out of all imagination by legions of right-wing attorneys and judicial appointments and state referendums.
So demonstrating that hate crime laws will be applied to non-Whites may be a good thing in opposing that crusade and the cult of White self-victimization. But it may also be a bad thing in that right-wing media will use the seal of official recognition of even a single hate crime against Whites as justification for severe measures against all minorities.
It's all about getting that retaliatory cycle going. Both the revolutionary who thinks his society is too unequal and the reactionary who thinks his society is not unequal enough will want escalating retaliation to force everyone to become part of the war.
Read about the contradictions between the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, and the (betrayed) understanding between Britain and Prince Faisal that the overthrow of the Ottomans would create a single Arab superstate. In effect, Britain sold Syria to both the French and the Arabs, and it sold Palestine to both the Zionists and the Arabs. Now that's game-playing.
So if it wasn't the wall, and if Trump only won a majority of voters making over $55,000 a year, and if they have no problem with the all-oligarch cabinet, or losing Medicare, or losing their health insurance ---
WHAT THE HELL is all this screaming about a victimized White Working Class Man taking back his country from evil neoliberalism?
Here's a darker possibility: Trump and his neo-Nazis know that most of the illegals they could round up will be from countries we don't share a border with, Honduras, India, Pakistan, etc. Which means their home countries don't have to take them back.
Perpetual internment. Huuuuge construction contracts for that. Eventually, forced labor? With those White Working Class border vigilantes hired as the brutal guards?
"racist, misogynist, immigrant-hating, religious bigot, all of which have deep roots in American history and society"
But all of this for the first time is coming up against the demographic inevitability of Whites losing their majority status. And yes, right-wing Whites are very aware of that though the media rarely confronts them about their plans to deal with it. For the first time free and representative elections are a threat to White society nationally, not just in the Reconstruction South, though what resulted there certainly provides tools for their intellectual heirs. One-party government, armed thugs in the street, Jim Crow was built on that. So those are reasonable responses to a homegrown racist. And they hate the media far more than their 1876 forebears, so censorship won't be hard to sell.
But they will have to go further this time because they are grasping at levers of national power to accomplish what Jim Crow could not - a Final Solution. Meaning the Constitution, the very definition of a citizen, the official recognition that we are all equal (or not) before the law. They have to make their leap to fascism while Trump has welcomed them to do so by obliterating the usual conservative "we're nothing like the Nazis" memes based on free markets, limited government, and sincere theocracy. All that's left is gun ownership, but the military power of guns is in who is allowed to organize and train in their use. It will not be hard to create double standards against non-White militias so that White militias will be as dominant as the KKK or the Brownshirts.
It comes down to the grassroots response among Whites to Trump's sadistic policies. No, America is not as political a culture as Germany, where hyper-organized parties that define ways of life were already a thing by Hitler's time. But we do have religions carrying on that activity to an extent, with their own alternate reality and economy and media and especially schools, and the more of them that ally with Trump, the more they can impose control over the next generation as Betsy DeVos sabotages public schools in their favor.
I would call his racist and sexist opinions - when he wasn't even running for office - very political baggage. The problem isn't government, as so many of Clinton's enemies both Left and Right claim. The problem is White American men and the monstrous "past" that they worship.
Hitler never held office before 1933. The world judged the German people guilty for starting the clock on Hitler after voting him in, instead of admitting that he showed ample signs of being a monster beforehand - the monster they craved.
I think the odd thing about America's endless proclamations about equality and justice is that there were always asterisks tacked on. How else could we have lived with "All Men are created Equal" when we clearly didn't mean that?
It's as if, in Europe, feudalism and monarchy made people have to spell out specifically what the basis of rights were, whether different ethnicities were to be transferred from their joint subjugation under monarchs to bureaucratic republics as equals or as greater and lesser tribes with gradations of injustice. Whereas Americans vaguely accepted that at best there was an inner tribe of "real" Americans over a herd of people equivalent to the conquered and abducted individuals who were a part of the economic model of expansionist tribal societies. All our idealism worked within the tribe, and then was strained when people of conscience tried to reach out to those others. I've compared it to the Stanford Prison Experiment, where subjects were coded as guards and prisoners and their humanity was entirely deformed by that boundary. As much as Europeans hate each other, they can see right over their borders into entire countries run by people unlike themselves, yet with many similarities. America was set up to make that experience impossible. Our idea of humanity is personal at the level of the race we hang out with, and abstract beyond that whether it's to all people or only those in distant lands who look like us.
America was more racist under isolationism than internationalism. Stop looking for a solution there.
You don't know the meanness of ordinary Americans. They aren't made evil by our foreign policy elites. Hitler had many friends in isolationist America, but FDR cleverly used his alliance with Japan - which we hated not just because it defeated us at Pearl Harbor, but because it threatened our own belief in racial supremacy thereby - to silence those friends and agglomerate Hitler and Hirohito as a single threat in the public's mind. Which they were, but the ordinary public wasn't thinking deep thoughts about the global rise of fascism, it was just vengeful.
And just to flip that around, after that war the USSR was using our shameful Jim Crow to lure the new developing nations to its side. US liberal Cold Warriors held that over our racists, argued that we had to desegregate at home to win the propaganda war abroad.
This, really, was the unimaginable catch of the disappearance of a Communist threat. Liberals could no longer argue that greater equality was needed as a propaganda weapon. Capitalism and racism could be themselves again.
You're being too charitable to the Right to say they could only have used our War on Islam to commit all the evils we're seeing. Look at the larger battle in American law. It's all about establishing one tiny precedent for treating another group as inferiors under the law. For the right-wing movement, the right to (1) treat Blacks as a special threat under "Stand Your Ground" laws, (2) treat the children of illegals as a basis to end birthright citizenship, (3) establish a special religious "right" to discriminate, (4) profile Moslems in the airports or Blacks in the streets, all are one strategy to get support for that one crack in the idea of legal equality. Once it's made they will move swiftly to spread it to all laws like they did under Jim Crow. They're not responding sincerely to a crisis created by our evil foreign policy, they're looking to provide us Americans all possible excuses to honestly exercise the evil that still lurks in our hearts.
"must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes"
What the Hell does Trump mean by "comes to its senses"? Is he saying that we must break the will of the outside world to build nukes by building more than they can afford to? Does he mean that the world must accept American nuclear domination and the power to demand whatever Trump pleases? Is there a difference between these?
His clarification:
""Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass."
Who's them? Putin?
Or is he expecting himself and Putin to ally to blackmail the rest of the world with their enormous arsenals?
In 1969, Brezhnev made a secret offer to Nixon to launch a joint war on China, using their massive mutual superiority to guarantee the success of a nuclear first strike. I guess bad ideas never die.
I thought there might actually be one area somewhere where Trump was not worse than Reagan, but I'm out of guesses now.
The "White" race is a legal construct that did not exist anywhere in colonial law before the late 1600s. Before that, you were English or Irish or African or whatever.
And as usual, the laws bent to the needs of economics.
I think with all the foundations of the old international order shaking, and right-wing ethnonationalist strongmen rising everywhere, there is about to be a major betrayal in alignments. These strongmen are increasingly the CEOs of corporations in practice. They can be bought.
And when I look around, I see the Palestinians are the ones who have the least money. For example, if Putin puts his business first, he will value his deals with rich countries over those with poor countries. If he and the Saudis - who have announced that they are remaking themselves as a neoliberal corporate state - can miraculously reach a stable oil production quota, both might betray any ties to the Palestinians (Russia as a state wooing the Arab republics, Saudi Arabia as the defender of Islam). Then Israel gets the green light from them (and the US of course) to eradicate the West Bank and Gaza, and the fatcats live happily ever after. Iran is hardly in a position to stand against a betrayal of that scope, and Iranians are tired of fighting other peoples' battles. Israel and Russia might be good partners in corruption and bigotry, sharing many citizens with ties to both lands.
I don't think it would actually be as simple as that, but it's an example of the kind of thinking we're about to see. You think this is shocking, wait'll you see Europe get torn apart and returned to its normal state of warfare.
There are no war crimes anymore. There are no human rights anymore. Name the power that would enforce anything? If not Russia or the USA, the surely not China, India, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Japan, or Iran.
In the blink of an eye, it's as if World War 2 never happened, as if nothing had been learned, as if there are now no constraints on any country's military action except other countries' military actions, with no one being sure who will be on whose side until the shooting starts.
Well, the "socialism" part of 1984 didn't happen. We're just as ready to be ruled by corporations and billionaires as by big government... as long as said tycoons make clear that they will favor our race over those we despise in the "free" market. What will we do first, take away the right to vote from Blacks again, take away the right to vote from the poor again, or simply terminate elections entirely?
It is the logical completion of Osama bin Laden's campaign. He needed secular democracy utterly discredited to prepare for the restoration of the caliphate. His admirers have done everything possible to provoke White Christians in Europe to vote for fascists. Yet accomplishing it in America is a greater victory.
Of course it is a Pyrrhic victory, in that they expect the persecution of Moslem populations all over the West to become the recruiting ground for the next wave of jihadis. I do not know whether they really believe these persecuted minorities can overthrow White governments and become the rulers, or whether they expect those populations to be ethnically cleansed thus removing the contagion of contact with the evil West, or finally they expect the jihadis to pour into whatever Middle Eastern country is vulnerable to their main forces. The last is more likely, and is what actually is happening.
At every step of this process, those extremists are relying on us the citizenry to give in to our own extremists and commit the grossest escalation, because only governments can do those, not disorganized ethnic communities. The choice, and the guilt, is on us.
He wanted to storm the al Aqsa Mosque personally. The brutal Netanyahu regime was scared of him and talked him out of visiting Israel.
That was over a year ago. He hasn't changed on this. In fact, if there's one thing that's consistent about Trump it's his bigotry. He hates whom he hates. The only Blacks, Latinos, women and Moslems he tolerates are the ones who crawl before him as servants. He has room in his heart for about one such token from each category, so I guess he might have room for the King of Saudi Arabia as long as the King completely betrays the Palestinians.
Remember, China is not entirely monolithic. Its new capitalists fight each other for government favors. So you have an old-paradigm China of construction, steel, concrete and coal interests too. And when it comes to foreign aid, there might be a tug-of-war between those entrepreneurs who realize that the Western centralized infrastructure model is dying and inappropriate for much of the developing world. But you have the old guys wanting their shot at covering Africa with power transmission lines and smokestacks and superhighways.
We'll see how this goes. The West lacks the will to overturn its own model.
Well, none of those have nukes. When I see White people with guns and money demanding a restoration of the old order in several major-power states, that's when I get scared. Zimbabwe and a bunch of Moslems don't remind me of the 1930s.
You claw your way to the top, then you use your money to buy legitimacy from the other oligarchs and close the door behind you.
It works as long as there isn't an event that overthrows the system, like a world war. A ruined America and a new hegemon would change things, but then we'd probably all be dead anyway.
My concern is that your statement has wider applicability. At this moment the richer, lighter-skinned peoples seem to be on the march all over the world to crush the civil rights of their fellow citizens and rally their ethno-nationalism to rattle sabers.
Something has happened to flip the switch on people to try to kick other people off the lifeboat. Maybe the multiplying refugee/immigration problems - not just the Middle East and therefore not something you can just blame on America - are rooted in global warming. Thus we see growing ethno-viciousness in India, where I read illegal immigration from slowly-inundated Bangladesh is now an issue. But we also have the problem of the emptying-out of the rich countries by low birthrates and subsequent economic stagnation, like in Japan. Israel has aspects of both these global crises.
By the way, any leftists who think going back to trade blocs is going to restore economic justice should consider which unfortunate countries will be stuck in our bloc. The same ones as last time, the poor bastards in Latin America under US guns. Instead of invading countries to consume their oil, we will go back to invading countries to require them to buy and sell with us. And since there will be far fewer of those countries than under free trade, and they will all be close to the US, our grip will be very tight.
The upside is, with free trade out of the way, getting a major war going will be much easier.
"President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on harnessing Russia’s oil and gas reserves in order to restore the country’s global power..."
I did not know that.
The problem with Trump viewing Putin as a mentor on economics is that, as an oil producer, Putin WANTS others to stop producing oil and gas. The last thing he wants is the US joining the price war with Russia and Saudi Arabia. That will wreck the current fragile agreement between them to stabilize production.
Yet it's even more stupid because Russia and Saudi Arabia will win that price war anyway. Our frackers will again start falling behind on their debts. Of course the majors will jump in and buy up the wreckage, but they then need oil prices forced back up again.
What seems more inevitable is autarky; the collapse of global trade amid tariff wars and a reversion to imperial economic blocs. You know, like the ones that did not prevent World War 2. Thus the US is stuck having to be to self-sufficient in oil. The question is, what happens to the value of the US $ in such a crisis?
As for all the right-wing claims that eliminating regulations will make everything magically cheaper again, I've seen this scam before. Detroit said every safety and environmental regulation for the last 50 years would make all cars too expensive to sell. The real estate complex said that the Americans With Disabilities Act would be the end of the world. The economic gains will be tiny - but they will be exaggerated by the speculative greed of the investor class, and turned into yet another stock bubble that is doomed to burst.
The conservative movement's goal was to make the final enemy those who demand equality inside America, and the final solution that they be scapegoated, silenced, disenfranchised, impoverished, and reduced to servants forever. Republican office-holders resisted open acceptance of this - as opposed to the cover stories of States' Rights and limited government - until November 8. Now we shall see how many of their sponsors are willing to follow this logic to its horrifying end.
Like global warming denial and health insurance denial and police violence, torture is assumed to be loved by conservatives out of ignorance. I propose, instead, that all that is sadism. "The purpose of torture is torture," as Orwell said. It is not an optimized act of information extraction. It is an optimized act of terror against people you do not wish to have any rights or power at all. Why optimized? Not because it will make your victims silent forever, but because your own masters are using it to seduce and addict you into support. They grant you the privilege to unleash the inner beast that is inside of all of us, against those who are not granted that privilege.
To be "conservative" in America today is not genuinely to go back to the past as they claim, but to use that excuse to bring back any doctrine or even revise it to put yourself on top of others, man over woman, White over Black, Christian over others, etc. even if that means putting certain people over yourself more than ever seen in our real past. The rulers beat you, you beat the lower castes, you feel good enough to keep the system going and the lower castes fear you too much to fight back.
The purpose of torture is torture. The purpose of inequality is inequality. Sadism is another currency, another market, which enough of us will accept instead of our fair share of profits and decent living conditions.
This will be the critical factor. The Saud family's basis of legitimacy is Medieval in nature: that being custodians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina makes them special, but also specially responsible for the fate of Moslems in other lands. They logrolled that into a right to personally own all the oil in their country.
The signs of a covert alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel have been growing, centered around their joint scapegoating of Iran and its allies as the font of all evil. Then this year we heard of the privatization of Aramco and forced marketization of Saudi society, a Neocon dream project if there ever was one.
At a deeper level, that break from feudal and Islamic norms may be a last-ditch attempt to replace the dynasty's previous mystical legitimacy with a fully corporatist legitimacy - you obey us because now you need to work in the market to survive and we control the hiring. Thus leapfrogging the West with all its dying talk about democracy and citizenship.
In that case, Palestinians and Jerusalem are not cost-effective and will be jettisoned. We then will see whether the feudal aristocracy beneath the King-turned-CEO will resist this, aided by that Saudi failure to ever develop a popularly legitimate state.
But then, why should I consider Assange and his friends a credible source when they clearly prefer racist Trump ruling America? See, I don't have to trust any of you people who want America to return to isolationism so bad that you're willing to take Jim Crow back in the bargain. I would rather have a war right here than that, and maybe I can form my own echo chamber with others of like mind, with our own facts and justifications for action.
The question is, is the plan to keep the deplorables happy by unleashing them to restore America's normal racist state of terror, as cops, as discriminating employers, and as vigilantes?
Because I strongly suspect that's what the deplorables really wanted all along from Trump. They know the pie isn't growing any more, and even when it was, it was always their ancestors' sadistic pleasure to make their own piece larger by beating it out of Blacks and immigrants. People who spend so much time advocating a return to the past are guilty of its crimes until they prove themselves innocent.
It is certainly interesting to consider the implications of the half-century project of the right-wing movement to restore robber baron corporate rule to America - when increasingly foreign countries act as multinational corporations.
Cheney and the neocons were not fans of that; they wanted an American monopoly of all forms of power. While head of the American Petroleum Institute, Cheney gave a speech blaming the state-owned oil corporations, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, for a likely supply crunch in the early 21st century. As head neocon, Cheney was laying out the corporate justification for war on Iraq and Iran. Note that the neoliberal prince who's taking over policy in Saudi Arabia is now plotting to privatize Aramco. But Russia is using its dual nature as dictatorship and oil corporation to advance its power. And what do corporations do? They buy control of governments, domestic and foreign.
The draft is hardly necessary with current military technology. The Military-Industrial Complex has already become White Man's Welfare. Young, unemployable White men are already conditioned to see the military as their tribal birthright, while Blacks have been skeptical about the military since Vietnam and Latinos since the occupation of Iraq.
Thus it serves the anti-egalitarian agenda of the Right to process these White men into a new kind of knighthood, lauded as heroes, hooked up with the giant corporations who handle our war operations, and then hired up by Halliburton and the mercenary firms to make more money than anyone else lacking a college degree. So they return to their towns as Big Men, gun nuts, Christian warriors, an influence on their poorer neighbors. They might as well be knights coming back from the Crusades with their rewards of farmland, certain to protect the heartland against wayward thinking by the peasants.
You can see the value in this if it ever becomes necessary to send the National Guard in to crush the cities they already hate.
Big generational difference with Potter fans. There's not much sympathy for Trump among people under 30, except maybe those growing up in households that would never allow them a book about witchcraft in the first place.
It's harder to tell with Star Wars because the generation that grew up loving Reagan was also the first generation of Star Wars fans. You'd be amazed at the ability of the strong and rich to imagine themselves as underdogs, like the way our military and its worshipers identified with the Rebel Alliance. Firstly, the term "Star Wars" as nickname for Reagan's anti-missile initiative (maybe we should have called it "Death Star" instead for the first-strike capability it promised). Secondly, the use of the term "Jedi Knights" by the military doctrine radicals who brought you "4th Generation Warfare". It is unfortunate that the realities of filmmaking lets right-wingers see the Rebel Alliance as a bunch of humans and some "friendly Negro" aliens, not the diversity and equality of non-humans therein. Lucas himself wanted the (all White male) Empire as an allegory for the US occupation of Vietnam, but that was already lost in May 1977 to America's collective amnesia.
What is really telling, though, is the number of Star Wars fans who seem to prefer identifying with Vader and his murderous stormtroopers. Oh, it's all in good fun. No effect on real life at all. Really.
No, a part of the electorate wanted "change". If they're too stupid to distinguish between progress and regression as forms of change, then the country is doomed anyway, but I think a large part of the White electorate wants "change back" all the way to the 19th century and Trump was their avowed weapon. A lot of older minority Americans rightly fear this and wanted whichever Democrat seemed the safer bet so they could hold on to what little of America they have. Sanders did not have time to make his case to those Americans, because to put it bluntly, he's from Vermont and he hasn't spent decades engaged in the rituals that White politicians on the national stage normally perform to obtain minority support, just as right-wing politicians engage in opposing rituals to obtain White Christian support.
There is no one electorate. In fact, this country appears to be headed to civil war. Now that will be a change no one will enjoy.
German anti-semitism in modern times was a mostly Catholic phenomenon, oozing in from Austria and Bavaria. Under Prussian Lutheran hegemony, the German Empire became a place where Jews were confident in the future. Read the book "Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany", by Kevin McAleer. He describes how the cult of dueling among upwardly-mobile bourgeois German men, due to their universal membership in the national guard, actually favored Jews over Catholics because of the Pope's opposition to dueling. It is thus not surprising that the Kaiser's army in WW1 had many Jewish officers, including the captain of Hitler's company. Jewish industrialists had helped build up the Kaiser's economy and war machine, and one, Walter Rathenau, became his economic czar during that war. Ironically, this high profile was used to scapegoat Jews after the Kaiser's defeat.
It's important to recognize how quickly a society's hatreds can turn at the dictates of self-interest.
What happens when only one party's supporters care about how rotten its leaders are - while the other hunts for the one who promises to be most racist, cruel, and sadistic?
Like it or not, there has always been a double standard in the Great Power system (the multipolarity that anti-Americans keep praising as the replacement for America's dying hegemony) when it regards the right to interfere with other countries' internal politics. The rule is, you can mess with states in dispute between the Great Powers, but you can't mess with another Great Power.
So anyone crowing that America is getting what it deserves for helping Yeltsin back in the '90s better stop and think what the consequences are of Putin blundering his way into getting Trump. Yes, organizations in the US helped Yeltsin with Clinton's approval. But we didn't help Zhirinovsky, the fascist.
This isn't new. Bush & Cheney declared war on their CIA for not sufficiently smearing Iraq to prepare for their invasion. The outing of Valerie Plame was sabotage of the CIA's anti-proliferation operations.
Attacking the CIA for not telling the lie you want is not going to save democracy.
Putin may not have wanted Trump to win, according to the Newsweek article about his propaganda operation. He wanted democracy discredited and America weakened regardless of the outcome. And he's dong the same in Europe.
"White" has always been a construct; it's always been provisional for anyone who differs in any way from its tribal core. Jews thought they were "German" until suddenly they weren't.
We have evolving internet tools at hand to replace corporations for some important services.
We already don't need giant entertainment/"news" corporations. We can entertain each other for free to an extent online. Artists now can obtain financial freedom to pursue their vision via Patreon.
However, a more daring vision of the future would be the replacement of investor-driven consumerism with consumer-investors who communicate directly with the entrepreneur about what they want to exist. I helped crowdfund the revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000 by ordering the blu-ray season set a year in advance. The more we were willing to commit to, the more episodes they were able to make. After the near-disappearance of high-quality stereo equipment made in the US below $1000, we have had a budding revival that also often involves crowdfunding. This is not heavy industry, but small-volume craftsmanship. Another company that requires close consultation with potential buyers is Local Motors, which proposes to build entire car bodies using 3D printing technology, in tiny factories located in many cities.
What all these things do, along with generating electricity at home, is break up the concentrations of capital that have deformed our social institutions with their absurd influence.
Privatization and state capitalism will no longer be contradictory; the same people will run both while in office, selling off public assets to themselves and their partners, then using their posts to actively manipulate stock prices with their slanders and favors. Companies will be elevated or threatened by government actions of blatant conflict of interest. The general oligarchic class we have grown up with will be supplanted by a tight-knit syndicate of regime loyalists, in the fashion of Russia.
Xenophobia is not just spreading in the White countries. It's not just the response of the "declining" race. It's not even just the modus operandi of charismatic strongmen.
In India, China, and Japan, different aspect of xenophobia are being implemented by boring, faceless bureaucrats.
In India, Modi presents a technocratic face to investors and green-power advocates, but on the streets, the BJP's state parties conjure up mobs to deal with enemies - first the mobs attacked Moslems, now they attack Hindus who dare criticize the other attacks.
In China, triumphal nationalism is the order of the day. A couple of years ago when I was able to watch a lot of the Chinese state-owned English-language channel over the air in Houston (!), what was striking was a documentary praising Chiang Kai-Shek's generals for their fight against the Japanese in WW2. What was going on here? The struggle between Chiang and Mao, the Long March on which the Party founded its legitimacy, is being swept under the rug to emphasize the permanence of China... and the crimes of Japan.
Which is not unreasonable, when Prime Minister Abe tries to use quick-fix economic gimmicks plus resurgent Japanese chauvinism in yet another chapter of the 25-year battle to get Japanese growth rates up again. The only question is, how do Japanese militarists feel about Trump as ally, a man who is a living caricature of all they deride about Western society?
Which is the eventual downfall of all this ethno-hate. Right-wing racists make terrible allies because the exclusionary doctrine they share eventually must make them exclude each other. There can really be only one Master Race. Too many people have applauded the fall of liberal capitalist ideology without considering how humans treated each other beforehand, when there were only racial and religious myths, not human rights. The reason supremacism is on the march in both the declining White world and the advancing Asian world at the same time, might be that the idea of democracy was all we had to hold onto the idea of human rights.
China is a repressive power at home. But now everyone else is devolving to that standard. Democracy is in its worst crisis since World War 2.
As for the bullying, while I want to see China get treated fairly on the offshore island disputes, I can't prove any country's case on any of those. And building artificial islands and then slapping a 200 mile territorial waters limit on them would just be bullshit.
Finally, on the trade cheating, it absolutely is true that everyone cheats on trade when they're building their economy. Taiwan used to be the world's greatest intellectual property pirate. Japan wrote the book that East Asia follows when it comes to unfair trade practices. Most of all, America itself was once a great haven of tariffs and copyright piracy and its industrial revolution began with the theft of the design of the spinning jenny, declared a state secret by the British crown. So the media has been completely derelict in covering this issue.
well, i'd argue the oil monarchies and dictatorships are the worst form of governance for climate change, but until now they weren't the same countries that had the best academics who could actually work out the size of the problem and the technology to solve it. Big Oil was smart to target the US voter for its disinformation programs because those voters could put men into power able to punish US universities and scientists for pursuing the truth.
It used to be that in stories about pollution in China, you'd hear the bit about how ordinary Chinese people heat their homes with nasty little coal stoves burning brown coal.
So before we condemn China for still building so many coal plants, or merely converting to natural gas with its own methane-leak issues, we have to understand the need to get citizens to stop burning coal in their own homes. Moving that pollution to more efficient coal plants away from population centers is still an improvement in human safety.
On the other hand, the Chinese government needed to look for ways to leapfrog past the Western paradigm of natural gas as panacea. Everything happening now is five years too late, because China kept pushing conventional economic development at breakneck speed during the last half of the last decade.
When you've created a gas-powered car industry of 20 million units a year, you've waited too long to force EV development. Now Beijing is wading in late with the usual post-hoc solutions. First it used subsidies, and when too many small-time hustlers got into that, it had to start cracking down and forcing consolidation.
That's because the ultimate benefit to the world comes not from the Chinese CO2 data, but from Beijing's goal of creating new higher value added export industries. Creating a world-class exportable car is now a huge technological feat. If Chinese capital is divided between 70 or more brands, then it will produce no cars able to compete in America at all. Nor will it produce an advanced, inexpensive electric vehicle.
The biggest revolution China could foster is the rejection of the entire centralized-grid model in the poorest corners of the world. However, China is divided. Its electronics companies make the solar panels and low-power devices that could free developing countries of the tyranny of huge loans for dams and power lines and cars and highways by which banks and multinationals enslave them. Yet China is now also the home of giant banks and multinationals. This will be a battle of interest groups within Chinese capitalism, the future versus the past.
Which vision China chooses to export will determine the fate of the world.
the problem with passive resistance is that you have to have an opponent who has some stake in the concept of social self-restraint. that's why Gandhi could beat the British, hypocrites though they were. he wouldn't have fared well against Hitler or Stalin because their rationales for power were absolute.
so was november 8 a referendum by White people on whether it was time to impose power without borgeois restraint? if so, the second siege at Standing Rock next year will be a tragedy.
For the first time I'm beginning to consider that "gatekeeper" is not inherently an evil thing... it's just that they are easily perverted, overthrown, and then we're left in howling madness.
There are plenty more conspiracy theories where that came from. There is an infinite supply, because the theories are merely a means of whipping up one's own cult into blinding itself to the costs of crushing the rights of other long enough to actually do it.
We don't recall most of the conspiracy theories the Nazis used to get from week to week in their crawl to power. Because we know the crawl to power came first, and lies were manufactured to serve it. We now sensibly assume everything the Nazis said was a lie for that reason.
When we apply that standard to Trump, the White supremacists whispering at his ear, and the tens of millions of voters who demand to be told lies to justify their supremacy, a lot of bullshit will drop away and we will see clearly the trajectory of this new fascism. This time, instead of Germanic governmental organization of all terror, we will do it Southern-style, all-volunteer, paid only with bullshit justifications, the internet lynch mob and the occasional stochastic terror by a "lone wolf" to keep the rest of us in line at a bargain-basement price.
If those settlements are declared not illegal, then either America must define a special white-man exception to international law, or the entirety of international law forbidding armed colonization is out the window for all races everywhere. Which, absent the old racist understanding that the "civilized" nations observed rules with each other that didn't apply to the lands of "savages", means international law is dead as a restraint to war.
So let's start anticipating, instead of merely reacting.
The Trump regime will have its hands full, and the process will probably push out at least until spring. This story is now highly visible, and now we know that Trump only belatedly sold off his stake in Energy Transfer Partners after it was learned he got campaign contributions from its chairman.
So when he reverses the decision, protesters will be out there in huge numbers, including the veterans who were already arriving a few days ago. It will be a national confrontation against, not just fossil fuels or the disregard for Native Americans, but the entire Trump package: jobs only for White "real" men plus endless conflicts of interest for the rulers, via the poisoning of everyone else physically and mentally.
The more we annoy Trump, the more he will lose control and try to seize the reins from the governor of North Dakota. National Guardsmen are already there. Trump has contempt for federalism. He sees those troops as his property. Potentially, the Reign of Trump will begin with a little Tienanmen Square in the middle of nowhere. All the cards will be on the table for our next four years.
Yes, it's cynical for me to point out such a tragedy as an opportunity. The Right has overcome us with its cynicism and cold-blooded cultivation of trivial outrage into an entire universe of myths to make its privileged followers believe themselves to be martyrs. At some horrible moment, either we must resolve to fight back just as hard, or surrender our nation to a minority cult until our children or grandchildren can't take it anymore. Resolve is built by advance preparation.
What makes Trump different is that his most ardent followers want a race war to put themselves back on top of every community. It won't take too many abuses by bigoted police to get that familiar cycle of retaliation going in America. At that point, Trump's ignorance of federalism puts him in play wherever white people need to be "protected."
Marcos and Erdogan also won fair elections, at first. Read the articles at this site and you will see the growing concern among the young Egyptians at the methods of the new Moslem Brotherhood government that sent them out into the streets again. The problem was that the Egyptian army positioned itself to be the only alternative regime, because it was not properly stripped of its political and economic power after General Mubarak was overthrown. This danger was recognized well in advance by people at this site.
And you must admit, Lois, that those young people went out into the streets because they had good reason to be concerned, based on the actions of other Islamist parties in power. Exactly the way that young people in this country are alarmed by Christian fundamentalists in control in Washington.
I'm thinking about how long strongmen can rule before their paranoia catches up with them and they really roll out the tyranny. With Trump I assume the worst because my greatest fear is that his followers want him to be the worst right now. But Putin and Erdogan had many twists and turns in their rule before their willingness to throw out all restraint was proven. Marcos was president of the Philippines for 7 years before declaring martial law. Of course, the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt blew their game very quickly. And I would rather Trump did the same, and take my chances with the brawl for power that would follow. It's not like we can ever really trust election results again.
The White supremacy of our far-right movement is disguised, as Apartheid and Jim Crow and even early Nazism were disguised before, by the lie that there is a "proper" place where each race can fully be "itself", and it's just a matter of forcing those people to move over there and leave what just happens to be the most valuable land to Our Kind.
Just as some Zionists were thrilled that Hitler was pressuring Jews to leave Germany when there was no place to go but the colonies in Palestine, there is a cynical logic to right-wing Zionists today to obtaining more Jewish emigration from America by any means necessary. The Jew who stays in America is very likely to vote Democratic and support liberal causes. Make him move to Israel, whether by carrot or by stick, and you've made him into someone who will do whatever must be done to preserve Israel.
These Jewish kids have sensed what is coming, and they refuse to surrender their Americanness.
As the National Enquirer and Alex Jones proved, years of fake news seemingly without a partisan agenda is an excellent way to prepare your audience for the introduction of propaganda.
So you are contending that the entire Libyan rebellion was the work of "terrorists"? No one else? Not one single Libyan was pissed off with the way Gaddafi was running the country? Everyone fighting Gaddafi was al-Qaeda?
Or are you just doing what Washington has always done and you are calling everyone opposed to your personal favorite dictators a terrorist?
We'll get back to you when our minorities rise up against Trump.
The world was multipolar before. Is this 1814 or 1914?
I don't see stable spheres of influence here quite yet. The jihadi movement has no fear of the impossible, that just means more martyrs. So the Russians will not enjoy their naval base in peace. This is a cold war between Russia and Saudi Arabia where both sides are chained to loose cannons. It's good for Hezbollah because it just demands that its people get treated as the plurality of Lebanese, not the conversion of anybody. But ISIS isn't really out of business, because it serves as the useful excuse for everyone else to bomb their actual enemies.
We're not going to enjoy a multipolar world of authoritarian strongmen dreaming of past "greatness". I warned everyone of that. We should pray every night for the next 20 years that the nukes stay in their silos long enough for China to just foreclose on everyone and take over the world. And even that is a horrible outcome for human liberty.
I'm not sure how great the policy damage will be. But the deepest problem, which Mr. Engelhardt and other advocates of peace tend to ignore, is the extent to which this was a coup by peasants demanding the return of the True Czar.
In the old days in Russia, when conditions got worse for the masses, they did not stop to think that Czarism as an institution was a failure, nor did they think that their property system under the boyars needed to be overthrown. Instead, some demagogue would proclaim that the Czar in Moscow had been kidnapped and replaced by an evil impostor. And he would form a mob to march there and storm the Kremlin.
Why? Because these idiots believed that God blessed their land through its Czar. Who today is stupid enough to overthrow democracy because of their belief in conspiracy theories and religious superstition?
Well, they're all around us. They are the problem of 2016, clawing out of the graves of the 19th century like a zombie army. They are magical thinkers, who expect the caste system of the plantation days to co-exist with all the benefits (to them) of modern technology despite their hatred of nearly all the people capable of understanding that technology. They will threaten violence against scientists unless they stop telling them things they don't want to hear about themselves and their society.
They expect that their traditional birthrights - the right to everything from hiring discrimination to beating ni**ers and raping women - will be restored by the True Czar.
And if this one fails to look the other way so modern civil rights and human rights can be dismantled, other True Czars are out there taking notes, awaiting their turns.
This goes on until it stops being a war about one leader or another, and becomes a war between Americans over which of us have the right to even exist as human beings.
But then, didn't postwar Germany have a different media culture than Britain from the get-go? We've heard about these wretched British tabloids all our lives. They were there waiting for Murdoch to take them to the next level. We haven't heard dramatically sleazy about the German media since, well, we hung Julius Streicher.
Sticking to the EU issue, since that's the least discussed at this forum.
Bannon could find the EU threatening on several cranky fronts.
1. despite its current corporatism, the EU has the means to be reformed if voters had the will to demand it, and that's a win for universal concepts of civil rights. I had argued in past years about the hypocrisy of American right-wingers in supporting NATO was that all our European allies were guilty of "Communism" by GOP standards - universal health care being just the tip of the iceberg. Well, that bastard Bannon took me up on that. Wreck the EU and its social safety net, and the US gets to pose as the sole major model of liberal democracy. Sorry, Canada or New Zealand won't inspire too many folks in the rest of the world. All we have to be is less bad than Russia and China.
2. Even if the EU remains corporatist, it is a challenge to US capitalist hegemony. Cheney's neo-cons explicitly said that America must destroy any challenger to its hegemony - they didn't say anything about form of government.
3. Now for the big one: the White Bloc. We can't yet prove this, but at the very least Bannon is a Victorian nostalgic, whose people sound like that monster Cecil Rhodes when talking about the destiny of White/Christian/English-speaking people to impose their civilization on the whole world. Well, let's say he wants his 1914 back. Anglo-American economic hegemony was real. The globe was effectively divided between White empires (except for Japan and China). Those empires were, in truth, beginning to turn on each other like predators who have run out of prey. But in Bannon's diseased mind, they may still shine as Caucasian cousins, sworn never to spill White blood, always ready to help each other in the specific case of a rebellion by dusky natives.
In this way, you reconcile the contradictions between White nationalist/separatist isolationism and Classical liberal imperialism, meaning in modern politics, the Buchanan/Wallace racist populists versus the neocons. You see that contradiction every day when you see racists flip back and forth between loving militiamen who want to collapse government down to county-size fiefdoms and wanting Washington to enslave and annihilate the Moslem world. You can't have both, but both represent an idea of White supremacy, which is still taboo in national discourse. Taboo ideas get parceled out to surrogate ideas covered by codewords, like States' Rights on one hand or "Christian civilization" on the other.
Bannon is laboring to revoke the taboo. He needs, if even only for himself, the old fantasy that there are homelands endowed by God unto the different races, talk once common among nationalist activists trying to secede from earlier empires. But of course, the minute these nationalists got their homeland, they began scheming to steal the lands of others.
The Nazis even re-enacted that hypocrisy in super-speed. Their early '30s rhetoric was the same victimization spiel seen among those nationalities genuinely enslaved by empires. In only a couple of years, they'd moved to the "liberate our enclaves behind enemy lines" phase. By 1939, they were ready to toss all that national homeland for everybody crap and proclaim their right to be the enslavers.
Of course, by then the Brownshirts' anarchistic talk of abandoning the cities and tearing down centralized institutions like the Army was long erased. No need for isolation once the masses regain their confidence they can get away with more.
Thus it is with the far-right crank jabbering on the Internet. He's confused enough about the actual lines of authority in America that he can be an agrarian militiaman one day and a cheerleader for the Pentagon the next. The key is disguising the hated big govt. bureaucracy as something that strikes an emotional chord. That's where fascists thrive. A federation of backward, ruralized, theocratic sovereign states that just happens to spend $700 billion a year on a global military? Sure, why not? A brotherhood of the White races, each respecting the other's right to enslave a certain sector of the Global South without all those old entanglements of international law or climate treaties or human rights? As long as I trust my tribal chieftain to get me my share of the booty, I'm ready to believe that.
So no EU, because the Italians and Croats and Hungarians don't fit in his 19th century schema. They are part of the enslaved South.
This sort of brings up a question. Is the right way to fight a regressive "revolution" to counter it with messages that liberalism as we understand it is American and patriotic, therefore "normal"? Is this going to become a battle of rival normalizations? Are we trying to activate the non-voters who we assume to still have some humanistic values, or are we trying to convert Trump's base who now take their marching orders from a "conservative" who says he's a Leninist who wants to overthrow the existing bourgeois liberal society?
I've had a feeling for a long time that attempts to out-patriot the Right, to claim that originalism actually supports Jeffersonian liberalism, rest on dangerous assumptions about the essential commitment to fairness of the White masses.
Yes, but the velocity of events is important. A terrorist attack allows things to happen so much faster. And it can create the electoral conditions for them to go on for 4 years, or 8.
I recall Bush Junior's administration flailing around in its first 9 months, unable to sell an agenda far more extreme than the genial uniter image he'd sold in the election. He was becoming a national joke. Matt Stone and Trey Parker had a live-action series running called "That Darn Bush."
He needed 9/11 by the time it happened.
This cover truly reflects what is in the hearts of Trump's supporters, the nostalgia for their forefathers' barbarism from the forests of Germania to the Tulsa riots. They are only in denial about the sense of glee, poorly smothering it in duty and tradition. They hired Trump, over so many others, to finally be the destroyer of their enemies after all these decades of insinuation and promises.
Funny how all the talk about offshoring and interventionism has fallen silent.
Bannon's Breitbart has already put out false claims that a majority of Silicon Valley tech-firms have Asian-born CEOs - as if that were a bad thing being done against White people. Like the anti-Semites, he will never accept that immigrants succeed at some industries due to their own merits, that it has to be due to some conspiracy or an evil inherent to that industry (Jews in Hollywood, Black rappers and athletes, etc.). When he uses Breivik-like terms such as "Christian civilization", Asians don't count regardless of their faith or birthplace.
Obviously, he's at least extended his concept of the Master Race to include Slavs, so Germans and sufficiently northern Italians should already be okay as immigrants.
We are falling with extraordinary speed down the rabbit hole of White Supremacist theology. Weeks ago I thought Bannon was simply racism + isolationism, meaning the sort whose conviction is that there is a "proper" homeland for all the races to have for themselves but no place else... of course, certain exceptions being made for when superior races colonize inferior lands or rule them through puppets. Now he's making his foray into foreign policy and we have to wonder if there is anyplace on his dream-Earth where a Person of Color has any rights to respect.
It was apparent all through the campaign that Trump had no concept how power is shared between the branches of government. It wasn't just that he wanted to impose the dictatorial style of a capitalist CEO on the Federal government, he already assumed it was that way, that presidents were either not using their power or were using it for the wrong policies, but no one else ever mattered.
The more logical route is to whip up anger about the courts to empower Congressional action, and maybe even Constitutional amendments or a Constitutional convention enabled by GOP control of state legislatures. That would be a enormous project designed as a Final Solution to wipe out the last 200 years of law and civil rights. The excitement this would kindle among the deplorables could save the GOP in midterms, their quid pro quo for all the problems Trump is causing them in real life.
Erdogan also had the competence to run Turkey quite well during the '00s, managing to be the face of an economic boom while its neighbors were ruined by war. As I understand, it all came down to the moment when he started demanding constitutional changes, which required a supermajority that his reasonable policies towards the Kurds made impossible. So to civil war and endless crackdowns. Trump/Bannon may be trying to skip ahead to this part.
Divide and conquer. Leave the Mexicans for next month's crisis. Ramp up pressure until an individual Latino commits an act of violence, then begin the scripted cycle of escalation. Or carry out a false flag attack... another form of alternative fact.
There's been an article circulating widely this week that argues the purpose of the badly-written executive orders was precisely to invite a court action, and then attempt to get Federal officers to ignore it. Supposedly this has already happened to some extent with the earlier court orders, for instance in California US Marshals refused to serve an order restraining US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
I think this new order is so sweeping that any chance that Federal officers defy it directly is low. More likely more games with interpretation, which is normal. So Reichsfuhrer Bannon is likely to lose on this and expend some political capital. Why did he start all this unless he has some way to win? A new propaganda campaign against Federal judges to prepare for new legislation? Stage-setting for a false flag attack that will lead to the arrest of an individual who, conveniently, is exactly one of those affected by the original visa ban?
It is very hard to think one step ahead of such bizarre people once they have power, which is why prudent nations do not let this sort have power in the first place.
Trump is Sonny, not Vito.
The lies matter because they herald the direction the movement's priests intend to direct society. Hitler told everyone his plans way back in 1923. Then he put on an act, switching stories to juggle his old followers with new ones to build an electoral party. But once he was in power, he was compelled to return to his true nature, his death list and the myths he truly believed. He had to fight another war with France, he had to eliminate the Jews, he had to invade Russia. He could not operate outside of his mental universe.
So which of Trump's bewildering flurry of bullshit are his core beliefs? His hatred of Iran, his need to lump all ordinary Moslems together as a single behemoth that cannot co-exist with Christians, his need to cripple China just because it's so big, his view of Mexicans as having no existence but to plot against White America, his dismissal of Blacks as fit only to be criminals and servants, and most of all his contempt for women. He comes back to these things again and again. We can be more sure about those than about his beliefs on economics and the role of government.
Yeah, yeah, tens of millions of you in the South who worship everything that your ancestors did, yet claim that White Supremacy was just a misunderstanding. Where was your hypocrite ancestors' belief in States' Rights when they passed the Fugitive Slave Act?
No one goes to war over the right of their state to abrogate the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments unless they have someone in mind they intend to strip of the right to vote. Which then makes possible all the other things that have been done to Blacks.
Dylann Roof cut through all your bullshit and expressed the heart of the matter, just as Anders Breivik expressed it for the pathetic "alt-right" who are now camped in the White House.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, March 1861:
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails... They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal."
Stephens was right in that all the other fundamental principles he praised in the rest of his speech, every one still part of your right-wing beliefs, rested on the bedrock of human inequality. He was honest. You're not.
There's simply no use for a mass draft in modern warfare.
However, the suppression of domestic dissent is another matter.
We could see the logic for this forming during the campaign, where Trump was seducing gullible antiwar people with attractive crumbs, saying some particular war was stupid. But for his actual supporters, the promise was a Fortress America, a greatly enlarged military that was brought home from overseas. Of what use would these legions be? Stateside bases act as a subsidy for the dead-end towns next to them. Bases are usually in Red States because the land is cheaper there, and maybe because having them targeted by ICBMs was more acceptable there. That has helped bind rural White America to the military, which they've come to see as their special province and proof that they're better Americans than the rest of us.
Recall that when the time came for Beijing to crush Tiananmen Square, it called in Army units from rural areas, who were expected to be loyal.
The story of Pershing's Mexican raid was taught quite differently to Americans like me growing up before anyone heard the terms "Chicano" or "La Raza." We weren't taught about how the US' relationship with the dictator Diaz had put us in a bad light once the revolution began. We weren't taught about the consequences of the US invasion of Veracruz. So it was confusing to see the conflicting narratives of Pershing's incursion as a last romantic fling before the horrors of WW1, versus Pancho Villa as folk hero.
Times changed enough for the Villa narrative to become stronger. But now, no one knows or cares about the events of 1917 at all. So old Donald Trump with his old-time racist myths has a population to work with that's pretty much a blank slate.
I have this horrifying hunch that we have not yet seen the worst White people can do when it comes to having their cake and beating it too.
It is interesting that we are seeing a plague of ethno-nationalist regimes and parties grasping at power, at this moment when we basically have the chance to lick overpopulation. This is because ethno-nationalists are usually nativists. They view women's wombs as the barracks of their future armies; it is their duty to reproduce their tribe to outnumber its enemies. What do the US, France, Germany, England, Israel and Russia have in common? Those falling (White) birthrates. But even Indian Hindus have a falling birthrate, and there again we see ethno-nationalists looking to beat down demographic challenges.
In America the Christian Right have (as usual) been given the duty of calling for something in the name of Christian culture that otherwise would be recognized as racism: the Quiverfull movement, Biblically concocting the demand that (the right kind of) Christian women have more babies to outreproduce the Moslem threat (actually Black/Latino). However, the downfall of this scheme is the ideological unreliability of the children; the Christian Right is having a hard time reproducing itself due to defections.
I've gone on about this before, but what I'm instead suspecting will be instituted is a restoration of debt serfdom biased to target non-Whites. This means re-establishing the Southern caste system, with the actual ownership class in their fortified villas, and the, to put it crudely, redneck class elevated to the middle caste as enforcers by cycling them thru the military & mercenary contractors. Then it won't be a problem that there's not enough of them, but a problem of finding enough people to profitably oppress to make their own standard of living higher than currently regardless of the Medievalization of our nation.
Now this gets us into some interesting territory regarding caste systems. It's possible for a privileged someone of a higher caste to be poorer than someone from a lower caste. We know about that in India, but even in the Jim Crow South some Blacks had some wealth despite the massive disadvantages they were under. Under a rigged system (via all-White juries) debtors with the advanced skills required by the 21st century economy might be tried and sentenced to divergent paths. The White middle class would be allowed to stay in their homes, but their income would be permanently garnished in the manner of peasant rents. The non-Whites would be exiled to these abandoned wasteland communities you mentioned. Maybe like Jews in the Russian Pale. I'm thinking that while robots have won out in factories, in a resource extraction/real estate bubble economy, the vast wilderness lands now being schemed for privatization must be developed, and robots aren't going to be cost-effective in Montana in January. Nope, it's Gulag time, millions of Black & Latino laborers cared for by Indian doctors and Asian teachers, all enthusiastically condemned as debt parasites repaying the "damage" they did to Real Americans.
So when I watch the stumbling attempts at resistance - and at justification - in the age of Trump, I'm trying to gauge how far ordinary Whites and their assault rifles will go in mind-boggling, all-time-villain mass atrocity. How many of them will really resist the bizarre nightmare I just described? Once they are cornered into an us-or-them zero-sum confrontation? And more importantly, how many will fight for it with all they've got because, all along, they've never really had any sense of identity or pride except as the Master Race?
The sickest part of the Trump joke is that he came to power by essentially accusing the Democrats of carrying out the Shock Doctrine - then he went ahead and actually did it himself. The key? The need of the fascist mentality to divide the capitalist elite into patriots and traitors based on ethnic stereotypes, then blame the ills of capitalism entirely on the latter.
I have actually spent the last 34 years (God, has it been that long?) writing stories about a 2nd American civil war along the present factional lines. Of course, I have not found a publisher, because I'm not favorable to the right-wingers like say, "The Turner Diaries" or "Victoria."
Around 1992 I got tired of writing short stories about the aftermath of that war, which seemed a cliched cop-out in science fiction. I decided to do it the hard way. Write a book, "Warheads," about the first incident that makes war inevitable. And then have it be about a bunch of kids fighting in a schoolbus going to the last public school in northern Houston.
Some of the things I wrote about then have already happened. We've had the catastrophic Christian-Right president who led America to failure in the Middle East, we've had the Black president who has provoked a racist backlash but refuses to support armed resistance by his followers.
Other things I wrote about seemed off-course. Given the Southernness of the right-wing movement, the use in my story of skinhead teenage gangs secretly protected by the Christian Right looked too "European".
Until the alt-Right spewed out of the Internet gutter.
Anyway, the last section of the book is called Harper's Ferry, because it's about a catastrophic attempt by private mercenaries to rescue White hostages being held in a Black/Latino neighborhood, because the governments of Texas and the US are no longer on speaking terms.
In the last few years I've finally resumed work on the next book, "Nation of Warheads," where I can work out my ideas on how a revolution of Workers of Color can succeed under the horrible conditions resulting from the end of the 1st book. I'm glad I put it aside for 14 years. The technologies that have arisen in recent years show the path to a revolutionary economy that will be necessary to overthrow the now-openly fascist regime we see forming around us. But the strategy to carry it out is really heinous.
The elephant in the room is the growing awareness that Whites are demographically doomed to become a minority in maybe 30 years. Of course many states will have this happen before that, and state government is the historic favorite tool for racist governance.
The logical purpose of the current campaign of dehumanization is to rig elections permanently in favor of "real" Americans. For a decade or more that has consisted of Republican attempts to make Blacks, in particular, face burdens tailored to their historical voting patterns, and fear that any discrepancy in their voting will lead to their arrest. Judges have struck down some of these measures.
But now the preparation is being made for these judges to be overriden and removed. The far right has long harbored the dream of openly repealing the Lincoln amendments under the cover of States' Rights. Even Jim Crow operated in the refusal of the Federal government to enforce those amendments. Eliminating them opens up a new cosmos of possibilities.
Look out for right-wing talk about amendments or a Constitutional convention. They've gathered control of enough state legislatures to make it a possibility. The objective will at first appear to be the stripping of birthright citizenship from some Latinos. That simply culls enough from the electorate to enable the next phase: the creation of official 2nd-class citizenship in the fashion of Apartheid. This has been the Holy Grail of our far-right movement since 1964. Its poison has been extruded into every possible excuse to restore historic inequalities. It is the body whose hydra heads are the movements for not just White supremacy, but male supremacy, Christian supremacy, and the supremacy of the rich. All of these, though, lead back to the restoration of American patriarchy and its "understood" two-tiered citizenship.
Update. Mr. Khadir was released as a witness. Mr. Bissonnette is under arrest.
Is it because he enjoys being arbitrary, or is it because his followers feed on the cruelty unleashed by this haste? If it's the latter, then the message is being sent out over the land: you too can participate in sadistic patriotism. To policemen, state legislatures, ordinary bullies.
It was obvious over a year ago that Trump intended to rule by decree. He didn't campaign for fellow Republicans in Congress, he didn't do anything to help the GOP, he created his own parallel cult organization. He showed zero understanding of how Congress, the Supreme Court and the Constitution function. He made endless promises to enact what the Executive may only propose to Congress.
This clearly did not hurt him. What's new is the elevation of Steve Bannon to direct this new form of rule.
Trump is notorious for refusing to pay his bills and then grinding it all out in court as a routine business operation. Or I should say "famous", since despite all the denials among his followers, they could hardly be unaware of this behavior. They want a leader who will cheat everyone they think has cheated them.
If that's all he does, he really does have the mind of a hillbilly. There are much bigger scams that could be run through a fully corporatized White House. Corporations in every country could simply form joint ventures with entities whose ownerships worm their complex ways to The Trump Organization. This in turn opens up Enron-level stock scams, the dilution of value through forming joint ventures being an Enron favorite. A hotel might generate tens of millions a year in revenue. Joint ventures in energy or privatization of state goods get you to billions. Favors in the privatization of Social Security, Medicare and public schools get you to the level that I like to call "Pentagon money".
Peasants have supported ruling classes that objectively hurt them before. The (profitable) secret to this is that people prize not just empirical goods, but emotional rewards. Pecking orders are great at producing emotional rewards for the people who are second from the bottom - at the expense of the people at the bottom. How else could the Whites of the South have tolerated the poor economic performance of their states under Jim Crow while the rest of America forged ahead?
ISIS appears to be far too useful an enemy for all governments to be worth destroying. Everyone sends forces there to bomb ISIS, and they instead bomb someone else's proxies. And imagine how valuable ISIS is in the long-lasting Israeli effort to prove to the world that Moslems and Arabs are inherently animals and that the Palestinians thus can be deprived of the right to exist. Sure, America is the only country where this propaganda campaign worked, but it's the only country where it needed to work. ISIS can be molded into the final justification for the cleansing of the Occupied Territories and the official elimination of Arab citizenship in Israel proper.
If ISIS finally falls to the Kurds and Shia actually living there who understand how awful it is, the Saudis will bankroll a replacement and this all starts over again.
We have certainly reached the point in technology where the automation of the entire retail sector is underway. Retailing overpriced crap is now much more valuable than making it. Thus any burdens placed on imported goods will have to be offset by accelerating the conversion of retail into websites 'n' robots.
And the potential there is vast. The resistance is simply the age of Americans unable to embrace whatever Merch-Matrix that Amazon is planning. That's why Trump has no idea that this is happening. Younger Americans will consider it perfectly natural. Right now, the hot topic in real estate is not building factories or offices, but the biggest warehouses ever seen near the major cities. Those warehouses handle the problem of turning your website orders into one-day delivery. You guessed it, that's what Amazon's drone delivery fumbles were about. It won't stop trying because it's already built the aircraft carriers near your home.
There are actually many positive aspects of this. Electrifying the transport of goods will tend to accompany its automation. People have been using the need to go to "big box" stores to justify full-size SUVs that our forefathers got along perfectly fine without despite having twice as many kids. We could enormously reduce shopping trips. We could even build the supermarket equivalent of those super-warehouses, where you would virtually cruise the aisles from home and robots would pick out the produce you want. If we actually grew the produce hydroponically on-site, stacked among LED lights, many links in the food distribution chain would be removed. But that means lost jobs, reaching deep into the middle class. Of course, there is no plan for dealing with this.
What we should watch out for is a bait & switch that will initiate something far more horrific than a wall. Like this:
1. Trump's new army & vigilantes round up several million "illegals". Most are from Honduras, Guatemala, India, and Pakistan.
2. There is no way to physically dump these people back in their non-bordering countries.
3. So these millions will languish in privately-operated detention camps not designed for any humane standard of long-term residence. The operators will complain that they can't make profits from just what Trump pays them.
4. Magically, the entire right-wing complex will bombard the public with the need to legalize prison slave labor in every facility.
In an instant, you will have created a new official class of stateless persons. You will have created a legal precedent for doing the same to your own minority citizens. You will have not just sweatshop labor in this new class, but doctors and accountants from South Asia. Maybe a gulag-style labor force to do work that robots can't, to tear down the rest of America's remote wildernesses to profit developers.
Of course, you have also deformed labor markets to drive down wages and destroy jobs. But you will also have created jobs. The balance between the former and the latter is Donald Trump's reward to his followers. Those border vigilantes will become handsomely-paid private prison guards. Don't forget the extra police and bounty hunters now needed.
The creation of a new, permanently resident non-citizen proletariat - guarded by otherwise unemployable gun-nut rednecks who are automatically awarded the status of the police and army "heroes", big men in their communities and big voices to influence the less fortunate Whites around them to support this process. Simply being members of the Guards' race will make them all feel better and ignore the worsening objective conditions in their lives.
It all looks like a relatively Final Solution to me, given the short-sightedness of advanced capitalism.
Yet the people who voted for him were shown no evidence that he had learned any of those things, and they still considered him to be preferable to the modern world. What does this tell us about what they hoped to replace it with?
You are correct. The Right has spent the last 4 years on a multi-pronged assault to reestablish the principle that we are not equal before the law.
1. the enshrining of a "religious" right to discriminate in all matters
2. the campaign for profile searches, from airports to stop & frisk
3. Stand Your Ground laws establishing that a White man has a greater right to fear and shoot a Black man than vice versa
4. Just about everything regarding Moslems.
A victory in a single one of these fronts will be parlayed by legions of right-wing legal organizations into precedent for all of the other fronts.
Fascism is a right-wing populist critique of capitalism, which argues that markets aren't unequal ENOUGH, that capitalists of the dominant race have an obligation to discriminate further against all the others, to replace any vaguely objective measure of merit with a caste system that enforces patriarchal tyranny. In this conspiracy theory, the capitalists themselves are divided into Good, meaning the war industrialists, steelmakers, other heads of "manly" smokestack and extractive industries, and Bad, meaning the Jewish industries, basically, banking and entertainment and law. Then all the latter are scapegoated for all the actual sins of capitalism while the former are hailed as patriots.
So now that we know who we are dealing with, the question is, do these racialists demand that the world be eternally walled off, race from race (a position that many anti-war people seem to be embracing and desperately reading into Trump as they fall under his spell), or are they already reviving the special exception from Jehovah to the now-unified White Man to conquer all others as he pleases? The racists of the past could easily slip from one argument to the other based on transient military advantage, as the Nazis did from their autarkic position in the early '30s to their sudden crusade to enslave all the Slavs in 1941.
I believe the answer is, the Israeli leadership is sworn to create, by provocation and by shifting regional alignments, the opportunity to carry out a sudden, devastating ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Territories. It may not be possible in reality, but the seductive dream of it keeps the increasingly bigoted Israeli electorate going from month to month.
To carry out this final solution, Israel would need to nail down all the major actors. Saudi Arabia is clearly open to betraying all Islamic principles now, and its bizarre new neoliberal economic agenda is designed to eliminate its own servant population which includes many Palestinians. Israel must be sure that population will not be allowed to pose a threat. The Israeli-Saudi alliance against Iran seems based on the assumption that it indeed will foment Palestinian uprisings since it surely cannot launch any other useful military action from afar. I doubt the sincerity of this paranoid fantasy, but if it is sincere, then Iran must be crushed before the final cleansing occurs. We shouldn't dismiss the possibility that ordinary Iranians and Syrians themselves are willing to abandon the Palestinians to deal with their own problems.
But now there's just getting to be too many other actors in the Middle East. Russia and China are muscling their way in, though their own fabulous cynicism means anything could happen. It's not a slam dunk that anyone will stand in Israel's way when the Palestinians have so little to bribe anyone with.
I'm glad to see you're researching what Trump actually is, instead of reading into him what you want to see.
Of course, we Americans are the ones who must live under this abuser.
Are you counting the civil war within America that is now underway?
Obviously Mr. Wibberley is not your friend, Mr. Jones. Any criticism of Trump is now dissected to brand all dissenters as demagogues. But any horrible things Trump says are excused as being "just talk," even though he's the one who derides any Constitutional restraint on his power.
Just tell us, Mr. Wibberley, which of us Americans are you willing to sacrifice in the name of "peace"?
It is the ideology behind the cuts that normalizes the harm that they cause. The demonstrations are ultimately against the ideology.
We've been living with these bastards in America since Reagan took office, and they have learned nothing and opened their hearts to nothing. Their proposals grow more extreme every year, because they have had a master plan all along for dragging America back to the 19th century. This now includes racially-targeted voter suppression (the foundation of Jim Crow), the claim that gender discrimination does not exist (as Mr. Sessions claimed), and the appointment of a radical theocrat with a long history of pushing Christian supremacy over democracy (Betsy DeVos) to sabotage the public school system.
This is not about cutting or balancing the US budget. Have you not heard? The budget just submitted to the Senate proposes an increased deficit every year for the next eight so as to give giant tax cuts to the rich. This is about Making America Victorian Again, in all the worst ways.
What happens when there are two populist movements at the same time? Like say, Abolitionism and Secessionism in 1860? Each one claims to be the only one to represent the "people", because they fundamentally are at odds to who counts as people.
At every step of the way, Sanders said the solution was more equality. With his unprecedentedly open racism and sexism, Trump was demanding a solution of more inequality - promoting the needs of White over Black (BLM), Christians over Moslems, polluters over environmentalists, the past over the future, and relentlessly, men over women. America First did not mean all Americans, and those excluded were aware of that, but you couldn't be bothered to ask them.
That's like Hitler. It's nothing like Sanders. You have no business judging Trump's remarks if you don't even know that he goaded a crowd into beating up a Black Lives Matter protester in that shrine to beaten protesters, Birmingham, Alabama. And if you do know and have convinced yourself that, as Trump said, "He deserved it," then you are willing to sacrifice over 100,000,000 Americans different than yourselves because you value them less than your foreign policy preferences. The rights they are losing may not be restored for generations, given our past history.
We do not have enough money to buy a new party. That's kind of the point of capitalist democracy.
It's also the point of Trump: he took control of an existing party very cheaply by going straight to its worst elements and promising to promote them ahead of its sane establishment.
It's J. Edgar Hoover giving LBJ the dossier on Nixon's treason at the last minute in '68 all over again. Except in those days, releasing the info at the last minute was too unseemly even for a brawler like Johnson, so Hoover knew Nixon would get away with it.
I wonder how many LBJ-hating suckers in 1969 were sure that Nixon would end the war quickly and make America great again.
Another critical irony played into Hitler's hands. Colonial empires were a way of life back then, along with the racial supremacy that they inevitably indoctrinated. Germany had lost its colonial empire in WW1. Japan was a latecomer prevented from conquering more lands. When US tariffs triggered global trade war in 1930, the empires turned easily into protectionist blocs to ride out the storm - even though among them the US (owning the Philippines & Hawaii and neocolonially ruling much of Latin America) and Great Britain had been the great ideologues of free trade. This debacle surely made Germans and Japanese feel they'd been sold a bill of goods by liberalism and look for their own imperial solutions. What made Hitler unusual was his racism being so exclusionary that he could advocate white-on-white enslavement.
I really hate to think anyone in the world is falling into this trap now.
You're conflating two different disasters. The hyperinflation happened in 1919-23. The Great Depression began in 1929 and its spread to Europe was largely the fault of America's protectionist Congress in 1930. Signs were hopeful in-between, with the Nazis seemingly on the sidelines. However, having both so close together probably finished off the shaky legitimacy of the Weimar state created by elites and factions who were only held together by their fear of Communists.
It's more complicated.
Yes, compared to the suffering of ordinary people in the Depression, we have it very easy. We are very weak, cowardly, spoiled people. We whine and threaten at the tiniest setback.
However, there are reasons why we are so weak and passive, built into the very nature of our evolution from, to put it bluntly, an artificial tribe of near-barbarians assembled by 17th century London investors from the dregs of European society for the purposes of raping a continent, to what we thought after World War 2 a modern, civilized people would be. In those latter days we lied too much to ourselves about the barbarity hidden within our patriotic myths and our rigged political institutions and economy. I think we also lied about the savagery within our selves. All of that was lurking in the shadows, while our modern day-to-day reality was increasingly about mass consumers participating in market choice without regard for caste, race and gender roles. As long as the bribe of higher earnings kept coming, no one rocked the boat too much. This is no way to form strong character.
It only took a very few things to go wrong with that liberal model - some of it deliberate sabotage - for the tribalist savage to come back out, because he was always looking for an excuse.
If you're going to say that establishment Democrats are evil, then you're putting a great many Blacks, Latinos and White women in that camp. You should be looking back at how history has forgiven the shortcomings of many of the people who fought the Confederacy and the Nazis, all the way up to Lincoln and Roosevelt themselves, because shortcomings are not the same as the paradigm of slavery that those enemies represented. More importantly, without those morally compromised allies, we would have gotten to see those paradigms ascendant and all our fine liberal/progressive standards would never even have existed.
Now if you have a plan to genuinely defeat the enemy while completely bypassing that very large number of people who aren't pure enough for you, then go for it. I am very interested in such an approach myself. But you know what? I recognize that by looking for that, I am giving up on democracy and stepping over the line to coercive revolution. After all, that was good enough for the Founding Fathers like John Adams, who confessed that only 1/3 of the colonists were on his side and another 1/3 neutral.
And millions of other Americans will cheer for any foreign strongman who claims to be anti-American in the fantasy that isolationism will bring Utopia. Right now, can you name any country of real influence anywhere in the world that is not either run by right-wing ethno-nationalists, state capitalist authoritarians, or aging bourgeois democrats in fear of being overthrown by neo-fascist anti-immigrant parties? Can you see anywhere in the world where the concept of human rights is not impotent? Anywhere where the poor are winning against the rich - whether the latter are of the Wall Street mafia or one of its rising rivals?
That is the post-American Century. Enjoy it from your prison cell.
America is becoming elderly, especially White America. In my opinion that means that signs of senility creep into the popular opinion. It's hard to overturn the economic system when you need the support of a lot of old people trending towards the maximum delusion of being self-sufficient while demanding help from others. Trump is all that plus a (alleged) billionaire's sense of superiority.
Worse, I think that the older you get, the more you see the future of the country as being in the hands of hostile aliens. Members of a society, supposedly, sacrifice for the future of their children, but what happens when their children don't honor their ancient prejudices? Shouldn't that encourage a kind of nihilism, a Samson Option of destroying the country rather than preserving it for those young dark punks who keep you in media-cultivated fear?
Not all old people are like that, but how do you push those who are out of the way of your social reform crusade? I see the problem as practically requiring the fragmentation of America into a group of autonomous city-states that use the most advanced technologies and a young multi-ethnic workforce to build the actual future, and a vast, dying wasteland between them where most of the old White people flee because they can't stand the future. Then it's simply a matter - a supremely ruthless one - of dumping your biggest social liabilities on your enemies who don't believe in feeding them while your young workforce builds up surpluses in social insurance, has post-racial children and eventually takes over America. But this sounds like the mass dieoff in Yeltsin's Russia. Also, the old rednecks in the sticks would suddenly have a compelling use for all those assault rifles they've been stocking up - a 1966 Indonesia with advanced weapons.
I don't really see any nation out there with both the will and the power to stop state torture worldwide. We are suddenly living in an era of racist nationalism, and torture is clearly a surrogate for racial persecution, because it is always demanded for opponents seen as aiding an enemy race plotting to supplant "us".
Your first point is exactly why it is important that the Military-Industrial Complex has become White Man's Welfare. Not just the creation of a crisis situation that requires that otherwise-useless rural Whites get paid out of the taxes of those they despise. But the elevation of these armed parasites into "heroes", and their subsequent indoctrination and training for a life as a caste elevated over their peers.
You put them thru the military to give them status (and violence skills), then thru the mercenary firms to pay them off. Or make them police. By the time they retire, they have far more cash than their neighbors, and inevitably become a sort of knighthood/gentry, establishing local political influence for the hierarchy.
I guess the ones too pathetic for that become prison guards. Who they will be guarding is the rest of the story of how this absurd reactionary economy will function while the world moves on without us.
I think the future will be making all bags and wrappers goat-edible.
Kevin Phillips' 2005 book, "American Theocracy", issued many dire prophecies based on the history of other declining empires. While all of it is relevant to our situation in 2017, I would like to note his discussion of technological decline near the end of the book. His premise is that empires fall in love with the technologies that once put them on top, and then they are in denial about the need to move on to other technologies. Specifically, that the Dutch were slow to move to coal power, and Britain was slow to move to oil power, because their financial commitment to the previous energy technology had become emotional.
So it is not surprising that there is an irrational love of oil in America that keeps finding objections to the new energy sources that other countries are quickly exploiting. The problem is that we would have to accept that our empire is in decline, and that others are obtaining advantages that will harm us. Trump only defines the former problem as a lack of conventional military power and smokestack industries, as you'd expect of an old man. And he can't define the latter problem because he only sees China as a threat in the form of conventional military power and smokestack industries, not the much greater changes being caused by electronics and eventually genetic engineering.
The problem is, none of the nations forging ahead are human rights-respecting democracies either, except South Korea, which is now in crisis precisely because the citizens refuse to tolerate the kind of cronyism that is now embraced by Trump as normal.
In addition, those Dust Bowl refugees were often met with hostility by their fellow Americans in California. Billboards warning them to keep moving. The implication of mob and vigilante violence against them. So it is today, including America. Denying global warming makes perfect sense if one fears that he and his race/nation will be penalized for their disproportionate role in creating victims by having to accept new taxes or refugees. Those refugees have to be blamed as the terrorists who threaten our way of life, rather than recognized as the victims of our way of life.
And Lyndon Johnson was the only man who could have gotten those bills passed. You Republicans' beloved Barry Goldwater opposed them and won a KKK endorsement.
The New Deal CREATED the White middle class. The Republican monopoly on power in the 1920s continued the laissez-faire boom-bust cycles that were getting worse over the previous half-century. The 1929 crisis was the proof that it didn't work, and the GOP-backed Smoot-Hawley tariff act of 1930 spread that crisis worldwide - which led to the triumph of fascism in Germany and Japan. American laissez-faire ideology caused World War 2. The New Dealers had to fix the economic collapse, the trade mess, and the war. You've skipped over the only true economic golden age ordinary Americans ever experienced, which ended with the capitalist coronation of Reagan in 1980. That was the year average wages in America stopped growing. They had grown for decades before that. They haven't grown since. The Democrats became part of the problem BECAUSE Bill Clinton undermined the New Deal and signed right-wing bills from Gingrich's Congress to survive the only way one can under capitalism - taking donations from the billionaires (or being one).
You've created a history just as false as the Republican narrative that the Democrats are still the party of Jim Crow despite the parties swapping the Southern racist constituency that Jim Crow served.
The problem is, the Republicans are hearkening back to a very successful system of oppression. It's not that they want to make us all wage slaves. It's that their supporters want to make non-Whites into slaves again, and Whites into overseers. Overseers had crappy lives by any absolute standard. But I'm sure they learned to appreciate the sadism that they were given special license to commit against those of lower caste.
So what's to stop people from making a rational decision that it is easier to return to that and live with a guaranteed caste status, than to keep trying to learn new job skills - which every rational observer admits is the fate of technological societies - in order to avoid losing ground in a competitive economy?
And the word "reactionary" hardly exists in American English or discourse because that was defined by European monarchist and feudalist nostalgia and we're in denial that we ever had anything like that here. Americans don't know the meaning of that word. They can figure out a term like "regressive," so we should go with that instead.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense to claim their defense is "You have to take the bad with the good," but then argue that the solution is to "compare systems." Their whole belief system was founded long ago on their being the Master Race/God's Hand on Earth and it's never truly been repudiated. So if they're better than anyone else, then their struggles can't be compared to anyone else's social system - no, their suffering is "special", perhaps a test from Satan Herself. Thus, "You have to take the bad with the good." They can come up with a hundred excuses for why we can't be like Norwegians and have nice things. They even help finance, thru the right-wing movement and Evangelical Protestantism, extremists who go over to countries like Norway and try to ruin what they have and make them like America.
That's the heart of tribal culture. Culture is organized conformity that enforces cohesion among strangers in a large society. If they value the cohesion gained by the guaranteed enforcement of pathologies more than they mind the pathologies, then they can always ramp up to lethal levels their fear of what might go wrong in an altered social order as well as those individuals who talk about alteration.
"Their substitute is to look to the past, the good old days of community, mutual support, a sense of place and continuity."
Nope, I don't see a rational argument against that. People who thought that way usually did not change their minds - the world moved forward as they died off... or the world crashed into barbarism as they triumphed.
If he didn't become a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, what caucus was he supposed to join that was supposed to be more radical in supporting racial equality?
You might also recall that Trump had his issues in the Republican primaries, his bagman Roger Stone threatening delegates by saying they should be "visited" by Trump people, Trump himself accusing Cruz of being the son of a Castro agent, and finally the shenanigans at the first day of the convention when Preibus maneuvered to create the illusion of unanimous votes to keep delegates from giving speeches about their reservations against Trump. If you think Trump is more legitimate than Clinton, then you must hold most Americans in contempt.
There's something deeply broken about the relationship between anti-war Whites and the overwhelming bulk of People of Color, and I would like the fundamental dispute to be exposed so that the latter can pursue their own ideas about what America should be, not your ideas, so that they won't keep being undermined by Hippies For Trump when they're not anti-war enough.
Haven't you heard the progressive ruling? Lewis can't be a saint because he likes Hillary. Clinton supporters are all war criminals, worse than Trump.
So if Blacks aren't anti-war enough for you, then they deserve to be plunged back into Jim Crow in the sacred cause of Isolationism and anti-imperialism?
Yeah, what's the persecution of African-Americans to you?
When our minorities can't stand his green light for police persecution anymore and fight back, what will you be saying then? That they're neoliberals, that they're the CIA, that they're part of the global socialist conspiracy? John Lewis? Yeah, he's an evil imperialist and, as Trump said about the protestors beaten up by his followers, "Maybe he deserved it."
Were the three superpowers in Orwell's 1984 really at war with each other, or were they permanently allied with each other against all their citizens, always providing each other whatever justification was needed for whatever measure they wanted to pass?
Has Wallstreetica always been at war with Rosneftistan, and always been allies with Beijinginc? Have we been fools for thinking that Russia or China or whoever were going to save us from the Wall Street hegemony when they were simply building their own corporate empires that would have the same relationship with ours that GM, Ford and Chrysler have with each other, cross-owned by a single global elite?
But the irony here is, Putin makes more money NOT pumping oil - in coordination with similar production cuts by other major producers - than by pumping more and more oil in a glutted market. The worst thing that can happen to him is for Russia to cut back production while OPEC members cheat on their pledged cutbacks.
However, if Putin were covering up a looming collapse in Russian reserves, then he'd sure need a replacement, someplace where extraction is too technologically complex for his country to handle. Like it or not, Exxon is the place to go for that.
So what's really going on here? There are several possible combinations of factors.
The problem is, EVERYONE says they're in Syria to fight ISIS, and no one is actually fighting them except those of the native peoples who face extermination at its hands. ISIS is clearly too valuable to too many people to destroy.
Or Trump will join Putin in a new cold war against the West's actual democracies. After all, aren't Germany and France a greater affront to the values of the Republican Party than Russia? All that damn equality and secularism and national health care and gun control and alternative energy and unions. Don't worry, Le Pen and the AfD will liberate White Christians from democratic oppression!
And yet the rugged individualists prostrate themselves before Trump as though he were a barbarian king. And the rural class welcomes him as though he were their old overlords, the plantation owners, arisen from the dead.
It seems that no one believes himself more fanatically to be self-governing than a henchman, who waves around the whip handed him by a master.
Pat Buchanan is a racist and an enemy of democracy. Trump is worse. Neither of them is fit to even stand in deGaulle's shadow.
How do you feel about America as the next Apartheid South Africa? I'm sure you could find good things to say about Pretoria throwing off the capitalist imperialism of the Commonwealth and isolating different races in their "natural" homelands.
We're getting ready here in America to fight the Republicans for the most basic standards of civilization. If you don't value that, then you don't value us. Enjoy your future under the belief system of Anders Breivik. But we won't. People here are already losing their healthcare and they will be the first of many to die under Trump.
There are a lot of Americans who embrace the evil of the hard right - and they have the best guns and the most ferocious inciters of violence.
And there are tens of millions of Americans who supported New Democrats, and the hatred between them and the Left tells me that there will never be a coalition for victory by peaceful means. So what does that leave?
And what if he's a fascist success?
Hitler = 12 years.
Mussonlini = 22 years.
Franco = 37 years.
What makes you think Trump doesn't want another 9/11? Then he can seize the powers he needs to Make America Great Again. Because what right-wingers believe is that the problem with America are the very existence and rights of liberals. Anders Breivik, who shared many beliefs with Steve Bannon, was willing to mass-murder socialist teenagers, not even adults, on the excuse that their liberal contamination was allowing in the Moslem conspiracy. But his butchery shows whom he really considered the threat. A similar reasoning is used against American liberals for their softness against immigrants. That can be parlayed, after a terrorist attack, into a general campaign to disenfranchise and exploit the Blue States so that America will truly become a one-party state, not what we've been complaining about, but the full Jim Crow model.
China is not ready to have a nuclear exchange with the US, and I suspect it would rather wait it out and get to repair the planet afterwards. Russia - well, maybe Russia is willing to sacrifice smaller allies to continue a more lucrative alliance with Trump. After all, Russia is basically an armed oil company and anything America does to sabotage efforts against global warming put more money in Putin's pockets. Iran? Iran is just another annoying competitor in the oil market. No one in the Middle East is worth a nuclear exchange for Putin.
Hell includes nukes. And only two likely players here have usable nuclear weapons, Israel and the USA. Will these countries threaten nuclear strikes against countries that support Palestine? And if they get away with such threats, what message does that send to nuclear proliferators who have their own blackmail wishlists?
You clearly only see what you want to see.
If you don't have a problem with Trump inciting his rally crowd in Birmingham, Alabama to beat up a Black Lives Matter protester, then the only kind of peace you're interested in is a world divided between racist dictators, each using hatred to keep the masses quiet.
As Bella Abzug once said about the election of Richard Nixon - "We're all niggers now." I'll take civil war instead.
Yeah, that Hitler-Stalin pact really helped bring peace to the world.
Too bad that anti-war people are rarely concerned with the race war at home.
But as Trotsky said, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Americans of Color will not forget who made excuses for the racist oppressor in the White House in the vain hope of bringing peace to the world through isolationism.
On to dictatorship and civil war in your own front yard.
I think Aristotle described "kakistocracy" as "rule by the worst." So he had this covered.
If we have observed kakistocracy in our lifetime, it was probably in the worst regimes in Africa, Mobutu or Bokassa or Charles Taylor. Yet even these regimes, as far as I can tell, have an ethnic support faction based on a belief by followers that the crimes on top will benefit them too - even if only by destroying the lives of people from rival tribes.
The Destroyer has come. When he's finished, will we hold his followers and apologists responsible?
But look at the size of the backlash to that counterculture: George Wallace leading to Richard Nixon leading to Ronald Reagan five years after the war ended.
I think most Americans knew the war was pointless by '68, but they kept voting for Nixon so he would eradicate, not North Vietnam, but their own kids, for committing the ultimate crime of pointing out that they were suckers and conformists. Every protest after that was met with more public support for mass suppression of dissent - until the moment when Nixon said we were no longer at war and suddenly his crimes were no longer acceptable. He was no longer needed.
What does it say about you that you think mocking disabled people and minorities does not indicate to that unemployed worker that he's probably next on the chopping block?
And Trump is president solely because he is a celebrity TV star, not because of a single act of public service ever performed in his life of refusing to run for any political office that would put him below the authority of anyone else. He's another actor who's an asshole - but one who promises to destroy the people you apparently want destroyed. Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr and many other German artists and intellectuals who fled Hitler could tell you a few things about life and death political matters.
The Russians supplied the e-mails to get the media to create a knee-jerk reaction to any allegation against Clinton - then Comey cashed it in by creating a false impression that he had something new on her a week before the election. Of course it was timed so that the revelation that there was nothing there would not be able to take hold.
This was well coordinated by Trump's people, probably the dirty tricks master Roger Stone.
The key here is, just like with Fox News, the subsequent reveal of the "error" doesn't bother its loyal followers. Because by promoting the hatred they want promoted, this organ "means well." Wink wink.
So if the support base is going to reward a propaganda organ no matter how outrageous its emissions, and a few more naive outsiders will get lured in each time by a false story before it's retracted, what's the cure?
The answer is, this is not a news operation, this is a political movement that acts like any political movement to attract people with a certain bias, but we do not treat it like a political movement. If we treated it like a political movement, the naive outsiders would have their guard up.
So how do we recognize an organization as being news or politics? Our newspapers began as openly partisan organizations in towns small enough that everyone knew who was aligned with whom. And a lot of our biases were due to our personal relationships with those whos. Generally you knew people who were in your own class and ethnicity, and that told you whom to be biased for. Remember, these divisions were among ethnic groups we now consider all White. That meant all of them had the right to create their own newspapers, their own political machines, and their own narratives of victimization.
So how do these things work differently today?
Republicans will never stop looking for a way to bring back the cornerstone of the only America they're loyal to - the one in which the law recognizes Whites as the only true Americans, and everyone else as provisional, limited Americans, well below second-class. See:
the attacks on TSA so as to leave no popular option but profile searches of "Moslem-looking" people
the obvious bias in application of stop & frisk
the crusade for a special religious right to discriminate in any matter at all
It's because common law is based on precedent. Once they win on one of these, the precedent will be stretched out of all imagination by legions of right-wing attorneys and judicial appointments and state referendums.
So demonstrating that hate crime laws will be applied to non-Whites may be a good thing in opposing that crusade and the cult of White self-victimization. But it may also be a bad thing in that right-wing media will use the seal of official recognition of even a single hate crime against Whites as justification for severe measures against all minorities.
It's all about getting that retaliatory cycle going. Both the revolutionary who thinks his society is too unequal and the reactionary who thinks his society is not unequal enough will want escalating retaliation to force everyone to become part of the war.
Read about the contradictions between the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, and the (betrayed) understanding between Britain and Prince Faisal that the overthrow of the Ottomans would create a single Arab superstate. In effect, Britain sold Syria to both the French and the Arabs, and it sold Palestine to both the Zionists and the Arabs. Now that's game-playing.
So if it wasn't the wall, and if Trump only won a majority of voters making over $55,000 a year, and if they have no problem with the all-oligarch cabinet, or losing Medicare, or losing their health insurance ---
WHAT THE HELL is all this screaming about a victimized White Working Class Man taking back his country from evil neoliberalism?
Here's a darker possibility: Trump and his neo-Nazis know that most of the illegals they could round up will be from countries we don't share a border with, Honduras, India, Pakistan, etc. Which means their home countries don't have to take them back.
Perpetual internment. Huuuuge construction contracts for that. Eventually, forced labor? With those White Working Class border vigilantes hired as the brutal guards?
"racist, misogynist, immigrant-hating, religious bigot, all of which have deep roots in American history and society"
But all of this for the first time is coming up against the demographic inevitability of Whites losing their majority status. And yes, right-wing Whites are very aware of that though the media rarely confronts them about their plans to deal with it. For the first time free and representative elections are a threat to White society nationally, not just in the Reconstruction South, though what resulted there certainly provides tools for their intellectual heirs. One-party government, armed thugs in the street, Jim Crow was built on that. So those are reasonable responses to a homegrown racist. And they hate the media far more than their 1876 forebears, so censorship won't be hard to sell.
But they will have to go further this time because they are grasping at levers of national power to accomplish what Jim Crow could not - a Final Solution. Meaning the Constitution, the very definition of a citizen, the official recognition that we are all equal (or not) before the law. They have to make their leap to fascism while Trump has welcomed them to do so by obliterating the usual conservative "we're nothing like the Nazis" memes based on free markets, limited government, and sincere theocracy. All that's left is gun ownership, but the military power of guns is in who is allowed to organize and train in their use. It will not be hard to create double standards against non-White militias so that White militias will be as dominant as the KKK or the Brownshirts.
It comes down to the grassroots response among Whites to Trump's sadistic policies. No, America is not as political a culture as Germany, where hyper-organized parties that define ways of life were already a thing by Hitler's time. But we do have religions carrying on that activity to an extent, with their own alternate reality and economy and media and especially schools, and the more of them that ally with Trump, the more they can impose control over the next generation as Betsy DeVos sabotages public schools in their favor.
I would call his racist and sexist opinions - when he wasn't even running for office - very political baggage. The problem isn't government, as so many of Clinton's enemies both Left and Right claim. The problem is White American men and the monstrous "past" that they worship.
Hitler never held office before 1933. The world judged the German people guilty for starting the clock on Hitler after voting him in, instead of admitting that he showed ample signs of being a monster beforehand - the monster they craved.
I think the odd thing about America's endless proclamations about equality and justice is that there were always asterisks tacked on. How else could we have lived with "All Men are created Equal" when we clearly didn't mean that?
It's as if, in Europe, feudalism and monarchy made people have to spell out specifically what the basis of rights were, whether different ethnicities were to be transferred from their joint subjugation under monarchs to bureaucratic republics as equals or as greater and lesser tribes with gradations of injustice. Whereas Americans vaguely accepted that at best there was an inner tribe of "real" Americans over a herd of people equivalent to the conquered and abducted individuals who were a part of the economic model of expansionist tribal societies. All our idealism worked within the tribe, and then was strained when people of conscience tried to reach out to those others. I've compared it to the Stanford Prison Experiment, where subjects were coded as guards and prisoners and their humanity was entirely deformed by that boundary. As much as Europeans hate each other, they can see right over their borders into entire countries run by people unlike themselves, yet with many similarities. America was set up to make that experience impossible. Our idea of humanity is personal at the level of the race we hang out with, and abstract beyond that whether it's to all people or only those in distant lands who look like us.
America was more racist under isolationism than internationalism. Stop looking for a solution there.
You don't know the meanness of ordinary Americans. They aren't made evil by our foreign policy elites. Hitler had many friends in isolationist America, but FDR cleverly used his alliance with Japan - which we hated not just because it defeated us at Pearl Harbor, but because it threatened our own belief in racial supremacy thereby - to silence those friends and agglomerate Hitler and Hirohito as a single threat in the public's mind. Which they were, but the ordinary public wasn't thinking deep thoughts about the global rise of fascism, it was just vengeful.
And just to flip that around, after that war the USSR was using our shameful Jim Crow to lure the new developing nations to its side. US liberal Cold Warriors held that over our racists, argued that we had to desegregate at home to win the propaganda war abroad.
This, really, was the unimaginable catch of the disappearance of a Communist threat. Liberals could no longer argue that greater equality was needed as a propaganda weapon. Capitalism and racism could be themselves again.
You're being too charitable to the Right to say they could only have used our War on Islam to commit all the evils we're seeing. Look at the larger battle in American law. It's all about establishing one tiny precedent for treating another group as inferiors under the law. For the right-wing movement, the right to (1) treat Blacks as a special threat under "Stand Your Ground" laws, (2) treat the children of illegals as a basis to end birthright citizenship, (3) establish a special religious "right" to discriminate, (4) profile Moslems in the airports or Blacks in the streets, all are one strategy to get support for that one crack in the idea of legal equality. Once it's made they will move swiftly to spread it to all laws like they did under Jim Crow. They're not responding sincerely to a crisis created by our evil foreign policy, they're looking to provide us Americans all possible excuses to honestly exercise the evil that still lurks in our hearts.
"must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes"
What the Hell does Trump mean by "comes to its senses"? Is he saying that we must break the will of the outside world to build nukes by building more than they can afford to? Does he mean that the world must accept American nuclear domination and the power to demand whatever Trump pleases? Is there a difference between these?
His clarification:
""Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass."
Who's them? Putin?
Or is he expecting himself and Putin to ally to blackmail the rest of the world with their enormous arsenals?
In 1969, Brezhnev made a secret offer to Nixon to launch a joint war on China, using their massive mutual superiority to guarantee the success of a nuclear first strike. I guess bad ideas never die.
I thought there might actually be one area somewhere where Trump was not worse than Reagan, but I'm out of guesses now.
The "White" race is a legal construct that did not exist anywhere in colonial law before the late 1600s. Before that, you were English or Irish or African or whatever.
And as usual, the laws bent to the needs of economics.
Well, if its adherents were being honest, "ethno-" would be attached as a prefix.
I think with all the foundations of the old international order shaking, and right-wing ethnonationalist strongmen rising everywhere, there is about to be a major betrayal in alignments. These strongmen are increasingly the CEOs of corporations in practice. They can be bought.
And when I look around, I see the Palestinians are the ones who have the least money. For example, if Putin puts his business first, he will value his deals with rich countries over those with poor countries. If he and the Saudis - who have announced that they are remaking themselves as a neoliberal corporate state - can miraculously reach a stable oil production quota, both might betray any ties to the Palestinians (Russia as a state wooing the Arab republics, Saudi Arabia as the defender of Islam). Then Israel gets the green light from them (and the US of course) to eradicate the West Bank and Gaza, and the fatcats live happily ever after. Iran is hardly in a position to stand against a betrayal of that scope, and Iranians are tired of fighting other peoples' battles. Israel and Russia might be good partners in corruption and bigotry, sharing many citizens with ties to both lands.
I don't think it would actually be as simple as that, but it's an example of the kind of thinking we're about to see. You think this is shocking, wait'll you see Europe get torn apart and returned to its normal state of warfare.
There are no war crimes anymore. There are no human rights anymore. Name the power that would enforce anything? If not Russia or the USA, the surely not China, India, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Japan, or Iran.
In the blink of an eye, it's as if World War 2 never happened, as if nothing had been learned, as if there are now no constraints on any country's military action except other countries' military actions, with no one being sure who will be on whose side until the shooting starts.
Well, the "socialism" part of 1984 didn't happen. We're just as ready to be ruled by corporations and billionaires as by big government... as long as said tycoons make clear that they will favor our race over those we despise in the "free" market. What will we do first, take away the right to vote from Blacks again, take away the right to vote from the poor again, or simply terminate elections entirely?
Well, now it's Russia's turn to muscle in on that action. Welcome to a multi-polar Hell.
It is the logical completion of Osama bin Laden's campaign. He needed secular democracy utterly discredited to prepare for the restoration of the caliphate. His admirers have done everything possible to provoke White Christians in Europe to vote for fascists. Yet accomplishing it in America is a greater victory.
Of course it is a Pyrrhic victory, in that they expect the persecution of Moslem populations all over the West to become the recruiting ground for the next wave of jihadis. I do not know whether they really believe these persecuted minorities can overthrow White governments and become the rulers, or whether they expect those populations to be ethnically cleansed thus removing the contagion of contact with the evil West, or finally they expect the jihadis to pour into whatever Middle Eastern country is vulnerable to their main forces. The last is more likely, and is what actually is happening.
At every step of this process, those extremists are relying on us the citizenry to give in to our own extremists and commit the grossest escalation, because only governments can do those, not disorganized ethnic communities. The choice, and the guilt, is on us.
You keep wanting to see something in Trump that's not there.
Remember this?
link to juancole.com
He wanted to storm the al Aqsa Mosque personally. The brutal Netanyahu regime was scared of him and talked him out of visiting Israel.
That was over a year ago. He hasn't changed on this. In fact, if there's one thing that's consistent about Trump it's his bigotry. He hates whom he hates. The only Blacks, Latinos, women and Moslems he tolerates are the ones who crawl before him as servants. He has room in his heart for about one such token from each category, so I guess he might have room for the King of Saudi Arabia as long as the King completely betrays the Palestinians.
Remember, China is not entirely monolithic. Its new capitalists fight each other for government favors. So you have an old-paradigm China of construction, steel, concrete and coal interests too. And when it comes to foreign aid, there might be a tug-of-war between those entrepreneurs who realize that the Western centralized infrastructure model is dying and inappropriate for much of the developing world. But you have the old guys wanting their shot at covering Africa with power transmission lines and smokestacks and superhighways.
We'll see how this goes. The West lacks the will to overturn its own model.
For those reasons, retraining for wind turbine work is more logical. West Virginia, Wyoming.
Well, none of those have nukes. When I see White people with guns and money demanding a restoration of the old order in several major-power states, that's when I get scared. Zimbabwe and a bunch of Moslems don't remind me of the 1930s.
You claw your way to the top, then you use your money to buy legitimacy from the other oligarchs and close the door behind you.
It works as long as there isn't an event that overthrows the system, like a world war. A ruined America and a new hegemon would change things, but then we'd probably all be dead anyway.
My concern is that your statement has wider applicability. At this moment the richer, lighter-skinned peoples seem to be on the march all over the world to crush the civil rights of their fellow citizens and rally their ethno-nationalism to rattle sabers.
Something has happened to flip the switch on people to try to kick other people off the lifeboat. Maybe the multiplying refugee/immigration problems - not just the Middle East and therefore not something you can just blame on America - are rooted in global warming. Thus we see growing ethno-viciousness in India, where I read illegal immigration from slowly-inundated Bangladesh is now an issue. But we also have the problem of the emptying-out of the rich countries by low birthrates and subsequent economic stagnation, like in Japan. Israel has aspects of both these global crises.
By the way, any leftists who think going back to trade blocs is going to restore economic justice should consider which unfortunate countries will be stuck in our bloc. The same ones as last time, the poor bastards in Latin America under US guns. Instead of invading countries to consume their oil, we will go back to invading countries to require them to buy and sell with us. And since there will be far fewer of those countries than under free trade, and they will all be close to the US, our grip will be very tight.
The upside is, with free trade out of the way, getting a major war going will be much easier.
"President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on harnessing Russia’s oil and gas reserves in order to restore the country’s global power..."
I did not know that.
The problem with Trump viewing Putin as a mentor on economics is that, as an oil producer, Putin WANTS others to stop producing oil and gas. The last thing he wants is the US joining the price war with Russia and Saudi Arabia. That will wreck the current fragile agreement between them to stabilize production.
Yet it's even more stupid because Russia and Saudi Arabia will win that price war anyway. Our frackers will again start falling behind on their debts. Of course the majors will jump in and buy up the wreckage, but they then need oil prices forced back up again.
What seems more inevitable is autarky; the collapse of global trade amid tariff wars and a reversion to imperial economic blocs. You know, like the ones that did not prevent World War 2. Thus the US is stuck having to be to self-sufficient in oil. The question is, what happens to the value of the US $ in such a crisis?
As for all the right-wing claims that eliminating regulations will make everything magically cheaper again, I've seen this scam before. Detroit said every safety and environmental regulation for the last 50 years would make all cars too expensive to sell. The real estate complex said that the Americans With Disabilities Act would be the end of the world. The economic gains will be tiny - but they will be exaggerated by the speculative greed of the investor class, and turned into yet another stock bubble that is doomed to burst.
The conservative movement's goal was to make the final enemy those who demand equality inside America, and the final solution that they be scapegoated, silenced, disenfranchised, impoverished, and reduced to servants forever. Republican office-holders resisted open acceptance of this - as opposed to the cover stories of States' Rights and limited government - until November 8. Now we shall see how many of their sponsors are willing to follow this logic to its horrifying end.
Ali H answered your question.
Like global warming denial and health insurance denial and police violence, torture is assumed to be loved by conservatives out of ignorance. I propose, instead, that all that is sadism. "The purpose of torture is torture," as Orwell said. It is not an optimized act of information extraction. It is an optimized act of terror against people you do not wish to have any rights or power at all. Why optimized? Not because it will make your victims silent forever, but because your own masters are using it to seduce and addict you into support. They grant you the privilege to unleash the inner beast that is inside of all of us, against those who are not granted that privilege.
To be "conservative" in America today is not genuinely to go back to the past as they claim, but to use that excuse to bring back any doctrine or even revise it to put yourself on top of others, man over woman, White over Black, Christian over others, etc. even if that means putting certain people over yourself more than ever seen in our real past. The rulers beat you, you beat the lower castes, you feel good enough to keep the system going and the lower castes fear you too much to fight back.
The purpose of torture is torture. The purpose of inequality is inequality. Sadism is another currency, another market, which enough of us will accept instead of our fair share of profits and decent living conditions.
This will be the critical factor. The Saud family's basis of legitimacy is Medieval in nature: that being custodians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina makes them special, but also specially responsible for the fate of Moslems in other lands. They logrolled that into a right to personally own all the oil in their country.
The signs of a covert alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel have been growing, centered around their joint scapegoating of Iran and its allies as the font of all evil. Then this year we heard of the privatization of Aramco and forced marketization of Saudi society, a Neocon dream project if there ever was one.
At a deeper level, that break from feudal and Islamic norms may be a last-ditch attempt to replace the dynasty's previous mystical legitimacy with a fully corporatist legitimacy - you obey us because now you need to work in the market to survive and we control the hiring. Thus leapfrogging the West with all its dying talk about democracy and citizenship.
In that case, Palestinians and Jerusalem are not cost-effective and will be jettisoned. We then will see whether the feudal aristocracy beneath the King-turned-CEO will resist this, aided by that Saudi failure to ever develop a popularly legitimate state.
But then, why should I consider Assange and his friends a credible source when they clearly prefer racist Trump ruling America? See, I don't have to trust any of you people who want America to return to isolationism so bad that you're willing to take Jim Crow back in the bargain. I would rather have a war right here than that, and maybe I can form my own echo chamber with others of like mind, with our own facts and justifications for action.
See how this works?
The question is, is the plan to keep the deplorables happy by unleashing them to restore America's normal racist state of terror, as cops, as discriminating employers, and as vigilantes?
Because I strongly suspect that's what the deplorables really wanted all along from Trump. They know the pie isn't growing any more, and even when it was, it was always their ancestors' sadistic pleasure to make their own piece larger by beating it out of Blacks and immigrants. People who spend so much time advocating a return to the past are guilty of its crimes until they prove themselves innocent.
It is certainly interesting to consider the implications of the half-century project of the right-wing movement to restore robber baron corporate rule to America - when increasingly foreign countries act as multinational corporations.
Cheney and the neocons were not fans of that; they wanted an American monopoly of all forms of power. While head of the American Petroleum Institute, Cheney gave a speech blaming the state-owned oil corporations, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, for a likely supply crunch in the early 21st century. As head neocon, Cheney was laying out the corporate justification for war on Iraq and Iran. Note that the neoliberal prince who's taking over policy in Saudi Arabia is now plotting to privatize Aramco. But Russia is using its dual nature as dictatorship and oil corporation to advance its power. And what do corporations do? They buy control of governments, domestic and foreign.
The draft is hardly necessary with current military technology. The Military-Industrial Complex has already become White Man's Welfare. Young, unemployable White men are already conditioned to see the military as their tribal birthright, while Blacks have been skeptical about the military since Vietnam and Latinos since the occupation of Iraq.
Thus it serves the anti-egalitarian agenda of the Right to process these White men into a new kind of knighthood, lauded as heroes, hooked up with the giant corporations who handle our war operations, and then hired up by Halliburton and the mercenary firms to make more money than anyone else lacking a college degree. So they return to their towns as Big Men, gun nuts, Christian warriors, an influence on their poorer neighbors. They might as well be knights coming back from the Crusades with their rewards of farmland, certain to protect the heartland against wayward thinking by the peasants.
You can see the value in this if it ever becomes necessary to send the National Guard in to crush the cities they already hate.
Big generational difference with Potter fans. There's not much sympathy for Trump among people under 30, except maybe those growing up in households that would never allow them a book about witchcraft in the first place.
It's harder to tell with Star Wars because the generation that grew up loving Reagan was also the first generation of Star Wars fans. You'd be amazed at the ability of the strong and rich to imagine themselves as underdogs, like the way our military and its worshipers identified with the Rebel Alliance. Firstly, the term "Star Wars" as nickname for Reagan's anti-missile initiative (maybe we should have called it "Death Star" instead for the first-strike capability it promised). Secondly, the use of the term "Jedi Knights" by the military doctrine radicals who brought you "4th Generation Warfare". It is unfortunate that the realities of filmmaking lets right-wingers see the Rebel Alliance as a bunch of humans and some "friendly Negro" aliens, not the diversity and equality of non-humans therein. Lucas himself wanted the (all White male) Empire as an allegory for the US occupation of Vietnam, but that was already lost in May 1977 to America's collective amnesia.
What is really telling, though, is the number of Star Wars fans who seem to prefer identifying with Vader and his murderous stormtroopers. Oh, it's all in good fun. No effect on real life at all. Really.
No, a part of the electorate wanted "change". If they're too stupid to distinguish between progress and regression as forms of change, then the country is doomed anyway, but I think a large part of the White electorate wants "change back" all the way to the 19th century and Trump was their avowed weapon. A lot of older minority Americans rightly fear this and wanted whichever Democrat seemed the safer bet so they could hold on to what little of America they have. Sanders did not have time to make his case to those Americans, because to put it bluntly, he's from Vermont and he hasn't spent decades engaged in the rituals that White politicians on the national stage normally perform to obtain minority support, just as right-wing politicians engage in opposing rituals to obtain White Christian support.
There is no one electorate. In fact, this country appears to be headed to civil war. Now that will be a change no one will enjoy.
What was there of content in the last-second Comey allegations?
German anti-semitism in modern times was a mostly Catholic phenomenon, oozing in from Austria and Bavaria. Under Prussian Lutheran hegemony, the German Empire became a place where Jews were confident in the future. Read the book "Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany", by Kevin McAleer. He describes how the cult of dueling among upwardly-mobile bourgeois German men, due to their universal membership in the national guard, actually favored Jews over Catholics because of the Pope's opposition to dueling. It is thus not surprising that the Kaiser's army in WW1 had many Jewish officers, including the captain of Hitler's company. Jewish industrialists had helped build up the Kaiser's economy and war machine, and one, Walter Rathenau, became his economic czar during that war. Ironically, this high profile was used to scapegoat Jews after the Kaiser's defeat.
It's important to recognize how quickly a society's hatreds can turn at the dictates of self-interest.
What happens when only one party's supporters care about how rotten its leaders are - while the other hunts for the one who promises to be most racist, cruel, and sadistic?
Who does that leave running the United States?
Like it or not, there has always been a double standard in the Great Power system (the multipolarity that anti-Americans keep praising as the replacement for America's dying hegemony) when it regards the right to interfere with other countries' internal politics. The rule is, you can mess with states in dispute between the Great Powers, but you can't mess with another Great Power.
So anyone crowing that America is getting what it deserves for helping Yeltsin back in the '90s better stop and think what the consequences are of Putin blundering his way into getting Trump. Yes, organizations in the US helped Yeltsin with Clinton's approval. But we didn't help Zhirinovsky, the fascist.
And don't you think Southern Christian voters' anti-semitism was going to be used by Trump against Sanders - especially once he hired Steve Bannon?
This isn't new. Bush & Cheney declared war on their CIA for not sufficiently smearing Iraq to prepare for their invasion. The outing of Valerie Plame was sabotage of the CIA's anti-proliferation operations.
Attacking the CIA for not telling the lie you want is not going to save democracy.
Putin may not have wanted Trump to win, according to the Newsweek article about his propaganda operation. He wanted democracy discredited and America weakened regardless of the outcome. And he's dong the same in Europe.
"White" has always been a construct; it's always been provisional for anyone who differs in any way from its tribal core. Jews thought they were "German" until suddenly they weren't.
We have evolving internet tools at hand to replace corporations for some important services.
We already don't need giant entertainment/"news" corporations. We can entertain each other for free to an extent online. Artists now can obtain financial freedom to pursue their vision via Patreon.
However, a more daring vision of the future would be the replacement of investor-driven consumerism with consumer-investors who communicate directly with the entrepreneur about what they want to exist. I helped crowdfund the revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000 by ordering the blu-ray season set a year in advance. The more we were willing to commit to, the more episodes they were able to make. After the near-disappearance of high-quality stereo equipment made in the US below $1000, we have had a budding revival that also often involves crowdfunding. This is not heavy industry, but small-volume craftsmanship. Another company that requires close consultation with potential buyers is Local Motors, which proposes to build entire car bodies using 3D printing technology, in tiny factories located in many cities.
What all these things do, along with generating electricity at home, is break up the concentrations of capital that have deformed our social institutions with their absurd influence.
Privatization and state capitalism will no longer be contradictory; the same people will run both while in office, selling off public assets to themselves and their partners, then using their posts to actively manipulate stock prices with their slanders and favors. Companies will be elevated or threatened by government actions of blatant conflict of interest. The general oligarchic class we have grown up with will be supplanted by a tight-knit syndicate of regime loyalists, in the fashion of Russia.
Xenophobia is not just spreading in the White countries. It's not just the response of the "declining" race. It's not even just the modus operandi of charismatic strongmen.
In India, China, and Japan, different aspect of xenophobia are being implemented by boring, faceless bureaucrats.
In India, Modi presents a technocratic face to investors and green-power advocates, but on the streets, the BJP's state parties conjure up mobs to deal with enemies - first the mobs attacked Moslems, now they attack Hindus who dare criticize the other attacks.
In China, triumphal nationalism is the order of the day. A couple of years ago when I was able to watch a lot of the Chinese state-owned English-language channel over the air in Houston (!), what was striking was a documentary praising Chiang Kai-Shek's generals for their fight against the Japanese in WW2. What was going on here? The struggle between Chiang and Mao, the Long March on which the Party founded its legitimacy, is being swept under the rug to emphasize the permanence of China... and the crimes of Japan.
Which is not unreasonable, when Prime Minister Abe tries to use quick-fix economic gimmicks plus resurgent Japanese chauvinism in yet another chapter of the 25-year battle to get Japanese growth rates up again. The only question is, how do Japanese militarists feel about Trump as ally, a man who is a living caricature of all they deride about Western society?
Which is the eventual downfall of all this ethno-hate. Right-wing racists make terrible allies because the exclusionary doctrine they share eventually must make them exclude each other. There can really be only one Master Race. Too many people have applauded the fall of liberal capitalist ideology without considering how humans treated each other beforehand, when there were only racial and religious myths, not human rights. The reason supremacism is on the march in both the declining White world and the advancing Asian world at the same time, might be that the idea of democracy was all we had to hold onto the idea of human rights.
China is a repressive power at home. But now everyone else is devolving to that standard. Democracy is in its worst crisis since World War 2.
As for the bullying, while I want to see China get treated fairly on the offshore island disputes, I can't prove any country's case on any of those. And building artificial islands and then slapping a 200 mile territorial waters limit on them would just be bullshit.
Finally, on the trade cheating, it absolutely is true that everyone cheats on trade when they're building their economy. Taiwan used to be the world's greatest intellectual property pirate. Japan wrote the book that East Asia follows when it comes to unfair trade practices. Most of all, America itself was once a great haven of tariffs and copyright piracy and its industrial revolution began with the theft of the design of the spinning jenny, declared a state secret by the British crown. So the media has been completely derelict in covering this issue.
well, i'd argue the oil monarchies and dictatorships are the worst form of governance for climate change, but until now they weren't the same countries that had the best academics who could actually work out the size of the problem and the technology to solve it. Big Oil was smart to target the US voter for its disinformation programs because those voters could put men into power able to punish US universities and scientists for pursuing the truth.
It used to be that in stories about pollution in China, you'd hear the bit about how ordinary Chinese people heat their homes with nasty little coal stoves burning brown coal.
So before we condemn China for still building so many coal plants, or merely converting to natural gas with its own methane-leak issues, we have to understand the need to get citizens to stop burning coal in their own homes. Moving that pollution to more efficient coal plants away from population centers is still an improvement in human safety.
On the other hand, the Chinese government needed to look for ways to leapfrog past the Western paradigm of natural gas as panacea. Everything happening now is five years too late, because China kept pushing conventional economic development at breakneck speed during the last half of the last decade.
When you've created a gas-powered car industry of 20 million units a year, you've waited too long to force EV development. Now Beijing is wading in late with the usual post-hoc solutions. First it used subsidies, and when too many small-time hustlers got into that, it had to start cracking down and forcing consolidation.
That's because the ultimate benefit to the world comes not from the Chinese CO2 data, but from Beijing's goal of creating new higher value added export industries. Creating a world-class exportable car is now a huge technological feat. If Chinese capital is divided between 70 or more brands, then it will produce no cars able to compete in America at all. Nor will it produce an advanced, inexpensive electric vehicle.
The biggest revolution China could foster is the rejection of the entire centralized-grid model in the poorest corners of the world. However, China is divided. Its electronics companies make the solar panels and low-power devices that could free developing countries of the tyranny of huge loans for dams and power lines and cars and highways by which banks and multinationals enslave them. Yet China is now also the home of giant banks and multinationals. This will be a battle of interest groups within Chinese capitalism, the future versus the past.
Which vision China chooses to export will determine the fate of the world.
the problem with passive resistance is that you have to have an opponent who has some stake in the concept of social self-restraint. that's why Gandhi could beat the British, hypocrites though they were. he wouldn't have fared well against Hitler or Stalin because their rationales for power were absolute.
so was november 8 a referendum by White people on whether it was time to impose power without borgeois restraint? if so, the second siege at Standing Rock next year will be a tragedy.
For the first time I'm beginning to consider that "gatekeeper" is not inherently an evil thing... it's just that they are easily perverted, overthrown, and then we're left in howling madness.
Well then, time to transfer this conspiracy theory to Alex Jones, who is just as much a Trump propagandist.
There are plenty more conspiracy theories where that came from. There is an infinite supply, because the theories are merely a means of whipping up one's own cult into blinding itself to the costs of crushing the rights of other long enough to actually do it.
We don't recall most of the conspiracy theories the Nazis used to get from week to week in their crawl to power. Because we know the crawl to power came first, and lies were manufactured to serve it. We now sensibly assume everything the Nazis said was a lie for that reason.
When we apply that standard to Trump, the White supremacists whispering at his ear, and the tens of millions of voters who demand to be told lies to justify their supremacy, a lot of bullshit will drop away and we will see clearly the trajectory of this new fascism. This time, instead of Germanic governmental organization of all terror, we will do it Southern-style, all-volunteer, paid only with bullshit justifications, the internet lynch mob and the occasional stochastic terror by a "lone wolf" to keep the rest of us in line at a bargain-basement price.
If those settlements are declared not illegal, then either America must define a special white-man exception to international law, or the entirety of international law forbidding armed colonization is out the window for all races everywhere. Which, absent the old racist understanding that the "civilized" nations observed rules with each other that didn't apply to the lands of "savages", means international law is dead as a restraint to war.
So let's start anticipating, instead of merely reacting.
The Trump regime will have its hands full, and the process will probably push out at least until spring. This story is now highly visible, and now we know that Trump only belatedly sold off his stake in Energy Transfer Partners after it was learned he got campaign contributions from its chairman.
So when he reverses the decision, protesters will be out there in huge numbers, including the veterans who were already arriving a few days ago. It will be a national confrontation against, not just fossil fuels or the disregard for Native Americans, but the entire Trump package: jobs only for White "real" men plus endless conflicts of interest for the rulers, via the poisoning of everyone else physically and mentally.
The more we annoy Trump, the more he will lose control and try to seize the reins from the governor of North Dakota. National Guardsmen are already there. Trump has contempt for federalism. He sees those troops as his property. Potentially, the Reign of Trump will begin with a little Tienanmen Square in the middle of nowhere. All the cards will be on the table for our next four years.
Yes, it's cynical for me to point out such a tragedy as an opportunity. The Right has overcome us with its cynicism and cold-blooded cultivation of trivial outrage into an entire universe of myths to make its privileged followers believe themselves to be martyrs. At some horrible moment, either we must resolve to fight back just as hard, or surrender our nation to a minority cult until our children or grandchildren can't take it anymore. Resolve is built by advance preparation.
What makes Trump different is that his most ardent followers want a race war to put themselves back on top of every community. It won't take too many abuses by bigoted police to get that familiar cycle of retaliation going in America. At that point, Trump's ignorance of federalism puts him in play wherever white people need to be "protected."
It's not a theory with Trump.
There was a difference between Hindenburg and Hitler. It can get worse, and it can get fundamentally worse.
Marcos and Erdogan also won fair elections, at first. Read the articles at this site and you will see the growing concern among the young Egyptians at the methods of the new Moslem Brotherhood government that sent them out into the streets again. The problem was that the Egyptian army positioned itself to be the only alternative regime, because it was not properly stripped of its political and economic power after General Mubarak was overthrown. This danger was recognized well in advance by people at this site.
And you must admit, Lois, that those young people went out into the streets because they had good reason to be concerned, based on the actions of other Islamist parties in power. Exactly the way that young people in this country are alarmed by Christian fundamentalists in control in Washington.
I'm thinking about how long strongmen can rule before their paranoia catches up with them and they really roll out the tyranny. With Trump I assume the worst because my greatest fear is that his followers want him to be the worst right now. But Putin and Erdogan had many twists and turns in their rule before their willingness to throw out all restraint was proven. Marcos was president of the Philippines for 7 years before declaring martial law. Of course, the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt blew their game very quickly. And I would rather Trump did the same, and take my chances with the brawl for power that would follow. It's not like we can ever really trust election results again.
The White supremacy of our far-right movement is disguised, as Apartheid and Jim Crow and even early Nazism were disguised before, by the lie that there is a "proper" place where each race can fully be "itself", and it's just a matter of forcing those people to move over there and leave what just happens to be the most valuable land to Our Kind.
Just as some Zionists were thrilled that Hitler was pressuring Jews to leave Germany when there was no place to go but the colonies in Palestine, there is a cynical logic to right-wing Zionists today to obtaining more Jewish emigration from America by any means necessary. The Jew who stays in America is very likely to vote Democratic and support liberal causes. Make him move to Israel, whether by carrot or by stick, and you've made him into someone who will do whatever must be done to preserve Israel.
These Jewish kids have sensed what is coming, and they refuse to surrender their Americanness.
As the National Enquirer and Alex Jones proved, years of fake news seemingly without a partisan agenda is an excellent way to prepare your audience for the introduction of propaganda.
So you are contending that the entire Libyan rebellion was the work of "terrorists"? No one else? Not one single Libyan was pissed off with the way Gaddafi was running the country? Everyone fighting Gaddafi was al-Qaeda?
Or are you just doing what Washington has always done and you are calling everyone opposed to your personal favorite dictators a terrorist?
We'll get back to you when our minorities rise up against Trump.
The world was multipolar before. Is this 1814 or 1914?
I don't see stable spheres of influence here quite yet. The jihadi movement has no fear of the impossible, that just means more martyrs. So the Russians will not enjoy their naval base in peace. This is a cold war between Russia and Saudi Arabia where both sides are chained to loose cannons. It's good for Hezbollah because it just demands that its people get treated as the plurality of Lebanese, not the conversion of anybody. But ISIS isn't really out of business, because it serves as the useful excuse for everyone else to bomb their actual enemies.
We're not going to enjoy a multipolar world of authoritarian strongmen dreaming of past "greatness". I warned everyone of that. We should pray every night for the next 20 years that the nukes stay in their silos long enough for China to just foreclose on everyone and take over the world. And even that is a horrible outcome for human liberty.
I'm not sure how great the policy damage will be. But the deepest problem, which Mr. Engelhardt and other advocates of peace tend to ignore, is the extent to which this was a coup by peasants demanding the return of the True Czar.
In the old days in Russia, when conditions got worse for the masses, they did not stop to think that Czarism as an institution was a failure, nor did they think that their property system under the boyars needed to be overthrown. Instead, some demagogue would proclaim that the Czar in Moscow had been kidnapped and replaced by an evil impostor. And he would form a mob to march there and storm the Kremlin.
Why? Because these idiots believed that God blessed their land through its Czar. Who today is stupid enough to overthrow democracy because of their belief in conspiracy theories and religious superstition?
Well, they're all around us. They are the problem of 2016, clawing out of the graves of the 19th century like a zombie army. They are magical thinkers, who expect the caste system of the plantation days to co-exist with all the benefits (to them) of modern technology despite their hatred of nearly all the people capable of understanding that technology. They will threaten violence against scientists unless they stop telling them things they don't want to hear about themselves and their society.
They expect that their traditional birthrights - the right to everything from hiring discrimination to beating ni**ers and raping women - will be restored by the True Czar.
And if this one fails to look the other way so modern civil rights and human rights can be dismantled, other True Czars are out there taking notes, awaiting their turns.
This goes on until it stops being a war about one leader or another, and becomes a war between Americans over which of us have the right to even exist as human beings.
But then, didn't postwar Germany have a different media culture than Britain from the get-go? We've heard about these wretched British tabloids all our lives. They were there waiting for Murdoch to take them to the next level. We haven't heard dramatically sleazy about the German media since, well, we hung Julius Streicher.