40,000 BOSTONIANS MUSTER ON THE COMMON to emphatically say no to Nazism. The Boston turnout was part of a nation-wide anti-JesuNazi mobilization (but given the immunity of Nazism to pacifist opposition, how effective will it actually be)?
THE NAZIS' MORAL IMBECILITY WAS ALREADY OBVIOUS. The Trump-Pence Regime was warned three months ago of looming JesuNazi violence. But then Trump's lawyer voluntarily endorsed the president's racism. And – murderously anticipating Charlottesville – the Republicans were already pushing legislation to weaponize vehicles and thereby legalize JesuNazi vehicular assaults against humanitarians.Though some Republicans still vainly try to disassociate themselves from the ongoing carnage. (Thanks to AJM for sending me the last of these four links.)
WHAT IS RACISM AND CAN IT BE CURED? Robert Parry says racism is blindness. But I who spent many boyhood years living amongst racists in the South say it's a cancerous form of religion and ideology hybridized to incurable hatefulness – the very hatefulness that is now metastasizing throughout the nation.
NAZISM – AND WHITE SUPREMACY IN GENERAL, IS ALWAYS VECTORED by the Capitalists' inconceivable [and inconceivably toxic] wealth. The Trump-Pence Duopoly has long been recognized by the Ruling Class as smugly, even snugly in the JesuNazi camp.
HENCE JESUNAZISM IS NOW AS “AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE,” the hideous truth expressed by USian policy whether last week in Charlottesville or three years ago in the Ukraine. In this context, Obama himself is the ultimate white racist – “white” not only as a racial construct but also as an ideological construct.” `How bad is it? Witness both the deliberately genocidal policies of austerity and the maliciously racist brainwashing imposed on First Nations people, each a harbinger of the deadly wretchedness the Capitalists are now imposing on us all. That's why Hillary would have been just as bad – if not worse.
AS ALWAYS, NAZIS BEHAVE AS NAZIS. (DID YOU EXPECT OTHERWISE?) Hence the zero-tolerance prosecution of people brave enough to destroy racist symbols. (Note by contrast the taxpayer-funded police protection granted racism's defenders.) And let us not forget the ever-intensifying JesuNazi attack against women.
NORMALLY I WOULD NOT WASTE SPACE ON HILLARY'S CO-CONSPIRATORS, BUT this story of a top Hillaryite operative – an African-American woman descended from Confederate Slavemaster Robert E. Lee – embodies too many classically USian ironies to pass up. (With thanks to the reader, a person anonymous by choice, who sent me the link.)
APROPOS RACIST IRONY, THE BEST ONE-LINER THUS FAR ON THE NAZI'S USE of Tiki torches is from a longtime friend, Graphic Artist/Cultural Critic Brian Weaver: “White supremacists carrying Tiki torches at the Charlottesville white nationalist Nazi rally, is some kind of high irony that I’m sure they don’t understand.” (No URL publicly available.)
WHERE I LIVE, THE NEWS IS SO CENSORED WE HAVE TO LOOK ELSEWHERE to find out what is happening in our own locale, as in these intensifying grievances amongst Tacoma Teamsters without whose labor the corporate seaport would die. There is also the growing resistance to the apocalyptic potential of a liquid natural gas plant – a too-little/too-late gesture of futility because the facility has already been fully approved. Thus if nothing else the LNG protest exemplifies how bourgeois leadership diverts and thereby squanders radical impulses that could far more fruitfully be directed elsewhere, as in defending mass transit, expanding abortion-clinic defense or mobilizing for tenants rights. (The News Tribune, the local McClatchy feifdom, is pay-walled with the same malicious effectiveness McClatchy employs in busting its unions [scroll down], which means most of us on the True Left are too impoverished to read it on line. News coverage by local broadcast media is worse than inadequate, and our only sure access to TNT is via the public libraries, access to which is itself restricted by local public transport hatefully diminished by white supremacist suburbanites.)
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Thinking and Writing: Begun as a Letter to a Friend
THE NEW YORKER DARES ASK IF WE ARE FACING CIVIL WAR, thereby repeating and further disseminating the question we of the Real Left began asking at least four months ago. Hence the following, from a letter originally written in response to a comment posted by friend and reader: l
In truth, Doro, I think we are indeed facing another civil war. Nazis (and fascists in general) cannot be reformed. As the Soviet Union so clearly understood, they can only be neutralized – whether by life imprisonment in the inescapable isolation of a Siberian labor camp or immediate execution. General Sherman correctly reached a similar conclusion about the Confederates before his invasion of Georgia and South Carolina, hence the now-legendary mercilessness of his march to the sea. The question, as in the civil war of 1861-1865, is whether We the People have the courage and stamina to do what must be done.
Meanwhile the Trump/Pence Regime with its JesuNazi agenda has given anti-minority violence a degree of respectability unknown since Hitler's ascent to power in the early 1930s. The Nazis have long been lurking in our national shadows – we gave tens of thousands of them sanctuary from the Red Army after World War II – and these foreign-born Nazis we invited into our homeland then of course merely added their European Machiavellianism to reinforce the murderous scheming of our own home-grown Ku Klux, Confederate and Christian Identity brands of Nazism.
In the past, our national governments (and some state and local governments as well), had managed to keep the resultant can of human garbage at least partially lidded. But now what in essence has happened is the incipiently Nazi South has risen again – and this time it has won, capturing not just the federal government but a vast array of state and local governments as well. As a consequence, the struggle We the People face today – against a regime that is ever-more-openly tyrannical – more closely approximates the Revolution of 1776 than the first civil war.
But even that analogy falls apart when we consider the weaponry our enemies have acquired by their conquest of the federal government – weaponry that includes the neutron bomb, designed to exterminate the entire population of even the largest city while leaving all its physical structures, banking, manufacturing and transport capabilities intact for immediate resumption of Capitalist profiteering. And do not think for a moment our JesuNazi overlords would hesitate to employ such weapons us. They do not regard us as human; they view us as the subhumans they must necessarily employ in their quests for profits – subhumans they hope someday to entirely replace with robots.
For the first time in our species' history, we face not just the prospect of self-extinction, but the very high probability we will not only make ourselves extinct, but reduce our Earth to a bug planet in the process -- which I must confess sometimes makes me wonder if the seeds of patriarchy sown 6,000 years ago by talking snakes, burning bushes and fiery wheels were not the interstellar, Kochroach equivalents of the smallpox-saturated blankets with which our European ancestors began their genocidal "cleansing" of North America. For it is unquestionably patriarchy – from which Capitalism and its historically inevitable metamorphosis into Nazism are each directly descended – that has brought us to this terrible impasse. And whom will be the ultimate beneficiaries save the cockroaches and whatever advanced intergalactic Kochroach collaborators they might indeed have.
That said, I view the future from a perspective based on the fact I am 77 years old and slowly dying of congestive heart failure. Because I do not see any way We the People can possibly overcome the Ruling Class superiority in technologies of surveillance and apocalyptic weaponry, I am not optimistic. Though I suspect I will survive a few more years, I am grateful I will probably not live long enough to learn just how unspeakably awful life on this planet will become for those of us who are not part of the obscenely privileged white One Percent. Indeed my death-blow will most likely be dealt me not by my disease itself but by the Trump-Pence Regime's intentionally genocidal reductions in Medicare and Medicaid, which are continuing via administrative means even as deliberate Congressional misdirection focuses our attention elsewhere.
Meanwhile Doro I empathize with your yearning to be reborn as a parrot. But in the intensifying darkness that now overshadows us all, I doubt the wings of any psittacine – or even an arctic tern (whose annual pole-to-pole-and back migratory odyssey totals 44,000 miles) – could fly us to sanctuary. The awful truth is there are now no sanctuaries from Capitalism – especially from Capitalism as it expresses its ultimate sadism via Nazism – remaining anywhere on this planet.
Our species has already divided into two global factions, one side led economically (and therefore ideologically) by the steadily more powerful People's Republic of China, the other by the ever-more-tyrannical USian JesuNazi Empire, the veritable Fourth Reich. And there is nowhere in this planet that cannot be obliterated by Capitalism's thermonuclear arsenal. But we cannot always accurately foretell the future. Our greatest ally in this truly terminal struggle against JesuNazism may prove to be Mother Nature herself, which means there is always the possibility some unforeseen evolution of human consciousness or twist of environmental fate will empower us to achieve the victory that now so often seems so impossibly far beyond our reach.
Nevertheless – no matter if our cause seems hopeless – we must continue to fight. To surrender to JesuNazism (or any other brand of fascism) is to deny the beneficence of our species' communistic instincts – instincts of cooperative solidarity that for at least 200,000 years have defined us as human. (Though I will always sneer at the imbecility of bourgeois hope that defines Yes Magazine's editorial policy, its is nevertheless sometimes a source of invaluable information.) Will we then remain true to our species' humanitarian potential? Or will we betray it – and ourselves – by siding with our deadliest enemies? The challenge voiced by the old traditional song of Working Class militancy, “Which Side Are You On,” defines our quandary today as clearly as it did nearly a century ago.
LB/17-21 August 2017
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