WILL CIVIL WAR II (OR THE SECOND USIAN REVOLUTION) BEGIN IN PORTLAND? With the local Republican Party chairman admitting he is organizing a de facto Schutzstaffel for “protecting” racist rallies, it is entirely legitimate for Dispatches to verbalize the question no other USian journalist has dared ask in print. Ergo: is the skyrocketing incidence of attacks on minorities by USiaNazi terrorists another Fort Sumter – the opening volleys of a conflict that will sunder the North American population as violently did the Revolution of 1776 and the Civil War of 1861-1865? (The Sumter analogy is indeed appropriate, for the advent of the Trump Regime is itself a symbolic act of secession, the founding of an already murderous racist confederacy that is ideological rather than geographic and – far more irresistibly than the confederacy of 1861 – spans the entire USian homeland.) That said, I believe the answer to this formerly unthinkable question will be determined by the Trump Regime itself, and given the outspoken anti-minority hatefulness of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, I am not optimistic about the likelihood of national peace. (Indeed it may be this looming prospect of civil war and/or revolution that underlies the Empire's increasingly provocative warmongering against Russia: start a war, the conventional “wisdom” claims, and you unite the country – the very belief that was Tsarist Russia's final undoing.)
PORTLAND'S LEFT ORGANIZES AS USIANAZI VIOLENCE FLARES NATIONWIDE. With Portland's UsiaNazis granted what amounts to a mobilization permit by the Trump Regime, the hitherto less-than-unified local Left pledges defiance. Meanwhile a white racist murdered a young Native American in Washington state; a session of the Texas legislature erupted into the equivalent of a barroom brawl after a Republican representative said he sicced federal secret police on demonstrators; and in what is almost certainly another act of Rightist violence, a Kentucky daily newspaper office was vandalized by gunfire.
SIMILARLY ORGANIZED FASCIST VIOLENCE CONTINUES IN BERKELEY, not-so-gentle reminders of which are here and here.
BUT WHEN WILL THE LEFT REJECT ITS SUICIDAL SELF-BETRAYAL of opposition to the Second Amendment – a classic example of how we have been manipulated by the Ruling Class into cutting our own throats – and instead follow the (oft-suppressed) example of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. With the federal government – and therefore also the federalized local cops – now condemning Leftist activists as terrorists, we are as likely to be denied police protection as were African-Americans and civil rights activists of all races in the Jim Crow South. The lesson taught us by the Deacons? Take firearms safety classes, purchase weapons, obtain marksmanship and self-defense training and practice until you are proficient, not – obviously – for purposes of political action, (for which we should always embrace non-violence), but to protect ourselves, our loved ones and our homes from the Rightist retaliation that too often follows public activism. To paraphrase a National Safety Council slogan from my youth, “the life you save from Rightist goons may be your own.” I need not add that had one or more of the Portland martyrs been armed, the accused murderer might be in his grave rather than bellowing USiaNazi slogans in a courtroom much as he did at a rally a few days before the killings.
REFRESHER: HOW THE EMPIRE SUPPRESSES THE KING ASSASSINATION TRUTH, a 17-year-old ConsortiumNews report that's again relevant due to the murderous racism resurrected and mainstreamed by the Trump Regime.
KUDOS TO THE STAND FOR ITS DAILY SUMMARIES OF RELEVANT EVENTS. It's the Washington State Labor Council's on-line newspaper – which often includes a superb summary of the day's national news – and its URL is here. Recommended links in the 30 May edition include a long-overdue analysis of the increasingly violent ideological schism in the USian Homeland (a deadly threat the Ruling Class is only now publicly acknowledging); an interesting piece that shows how the so-called “alternative press” has joined the camp of a rising Ruling Class politician who will surely be amongst those employed by the One Percent to co-opt and thereby thwart the opposition to Capitalism; a nauseating encounter with an archetypal Capitalist who denounces those of us seeking a living wage as “socialists and fascists”; and mainstream-media reports that bury their leads as deeply as possible, downplaying the fact that now after bribing the Washington state legislature into an $8.5 billion tax exemption, Boeing is laughing all the way to the bank with profits from the fuck-you termination of nearly 10,000 of the jobs it promised the tax-cut would save. To reiterate, The Stand provides the most relevant daily summary of USian mainstream media I have yet found, nor is it afraid to link to alternative media when the story is otherwise suppressed, as in the McDonald's report above.
ANOTHER LINK I RECOMMEND FOR PERMANENT ACCESS is the Black Agenda Report, here. It's an invaluable source of African-American perspectives routinely suppressed by mainstream media, and subscribing to its informative reports is clickably easy.
MEMORIAL DAY REBUTTAL TO DAN RATHER: If you read between the lines, Rather's Memorial Day effort to redefine our resistance to Trump as analogous to World War II is in realityjust another Ruling Class effort to co-opt our opposition to Capitalism into the Democratic (sic) Party, where it can then be neutralized by another of the Democrats' classic “change-we-can-believe-in” betrayals. Rather's appropriation of Memorial Day for his propaganda – which provoked some interesting feedback on its associated comment thread – prompts me to repost my own Memorial Day memorial, the 50-year anniversary of an atrocity that is far more typical of USian reality than what is portrayed by Rather's subtly pro-Capitalist panegyric.
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QUANDARIES, REFLECTIONS AND A BRIEF RANT: By far my biggest difficulty in transforming Outside Agitator's Notebook into Dispatches from Dystopia is scheduling its frequency. With OAN I could post only when I was so moved, which was sometimes only once or twice a month. Now however, with its transformation to DfD, it has become virtually a full-time (albeit unpaid) job, often requiring mandatory (also unpaid) overtime, and I find myself lamenting the resultant near-total lack of personal, do-as-I-will/do-as-I-need time, which includes not only blessed intervals of silently contemplating the colors of the light (whether outdoors or through my north-looking windows), but even such essential tasks as cooking adequate meals, washing my dishes and shredding vast quantities of paper – anything on which my name, address or Medicare Advantage number appears – for recycling. It seems my best alternative is to reduce DfD's posts to twice per week, but I fear that would limit my ability to link to breaking stories, and I have not yet resolved the problem. Obviously DfD is still a work in progress.
Apropos the promised rant, astute readers will note (and perhaps be enraged by) my second link to the history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, above, which is contained in the National Rifle Association's archive. I post this link without apology; once again, Rightist media and even mainstream media cannot always avoid acknowledging and reporting truth and are thus sometimes valuable sources of information, particularly now as the imperial homeland divides into irremediably hostile camps. Moreover, despite the NRA's gag-me-with-a-spoon association with Trumpism and the USian Right in general, it and its far-more-fanatically Rightist competitor Gun Owners of America remain our best sources of information on firearms, firearms safety and the pseudo-Left's ongoing efforts to disarm us and thereby reduce us all to mandatory defenselessness and compulsory victimhood. Since the NRA never demands disclosure of one's political allegiances as a precondition of membership, its rolls remain as open to the Left as to the Right – an opportunity that (particularly given the obviously unceasing escalation of USiaNazi violence) – prompts the suggestion we stifle our gag-reflexes and act upon the NRA's openness as soon as possible.
LB/30 May 2017
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