Sen. Grassley Blames Russians for Agitating Black Rebelliousness
Anti-abortion fanatic shrieks biblical invective at a Planned Parenthood patient in Tacoma.
(Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2017)
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(Note: the following story has undoubtedly received some [probably misleading] coverage by the Mainstream Media propaganda apparatus, but the linked reports below, mostly from World Socialist Web Site, cleave through the disinformation to give us a much more complete picture of what actually obtains as the Empire mentally goose-steps ever more rapidly toward unabashed JesuNazism. Also: as of today I am again changing Dispatches' publication schedule, this necessitated by changes in the schedules of some of my other obligations. Henceforth new material will be posted every Wednesday evening or very early Thursday morning. My apology for any inconvenience so imposed./LB)
CLAIMING “CIVIL WAR,” the capitalist owners of the imperial USian government and their political puppets in Congress have launched a bipartisan assault on our few remaining First Amendment freedoms.
An earlier WSWS story, relevant for its slightly different focus, is here.
Significantly, this sudden, dramatic escalation of efforts at censorship and suppression of anti-Capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-theocratic activism is jointly led by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic (sic) Sen. Diane Feinstein.
The Trump/Pence Regime itself has already unleashed its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) secret police against African-American activists and has long encouraged supporters to attack its opponents in a variety of other ways. Combined with the decision by pro-regime social-media and Internet monopolists to suppress allegedly subversive websites and journalists, these developments lend credibility both to fears the regime intends to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law to facilitate mass arrests and/or that it is preparing to start World War III.
These fears are intensified by the fact the regime's newest tyrannies were actually begun in 2016 by Democrats who were then the regime's (alleged) opponents but are now its obvious allies.
Remember it was Democratic (sic) Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton who advocated thermonuclear war against Russia and China, while Republican Donald Trump promised he would seek world peace while launching what amounts to a latter-day pogrom against minorities and immigrants, thereby confining the empire's savagery to the homeland.
The de facto pogrom began as soon as the regime took office, with skyrocketing immigration arrests and presidential encouragement of police brutality.
Now the collaboration of the two parties on domestic-oppression measures suggests the proverbial fix – in this instance some sort of secret, tyranny-enhancing agreement between the two Capitalist parties – was probably in place long before the Trump/Pence inauguration last January. Proof we are all, as never before (unless we were combat-zone soldiers), in dire and potentially deadly jeopardy. (See also “God's Own Death Squad,” below.)
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Trump/Pence Warmongers Ban South Korean Peace Activists, canceling their visas as the Empire's massive military build-up continues. Look at a map of the region to see how its geography mandates that a thermonuclear attack on North Korea will, because of radiation and fallout, unavoidably be an attack on Russia and China as well. Hence World War III. Hence the apocalypse we all dread and the JesuNazis all welcome. Hence the reduction of our beloved Earth to a bug planet. Hence kiss your ass good-bye. Hence The End. (Because of the personalities involved, this confrontation is infinitely more terrifying than the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which I was 22 years old, married to my first wife and just back from nearly two years Regular Army service in Korea. In fact our troop transport, the USNS Sultan, was shadowed by a Soviet sub from the time we left Pearl Harbor until we entered San Francisco Bay maybe five days later. It was September and the missile crisis was still secret; when the sub surfaced 600 yards or so off our port side to charge her batteries, which she did two or three times, the Soviet sailors always waved at us and we U.S. soldiers always waved back, though in retrospect I have no doubt the sub's orders were to sink us – nearly 4,000 soldiers – the instant war began.) (These personal details are based entirely on memory as all my journals from that era – all my Korea photographs too – were destroyed in the 1983 fire.)
Nurses' Union Denounces Trump/Pence Abandonment of Puerto Rico, says the regime is knowingly leaving hurricane victims to die. A related story is here.
JesuNazi Death Threats Bar Congresswoman from Congress. Never in my 77-plus years have I heard of anything like this happening in the USian Homeland. In banana republics, yes of course, but never here in the United States. More proof the brazen, regime-encouraged malevolence of our enemies is truly beyond description. (Again see “God's Own Death Squad,” below.)
Contrasting Police Responses as Drivers Use Motor Vehicles as Anti-Personnel Weapons: Muslim man in Manhattan legitimately arrested as terrorist, white man in California coddled by cops. For more on the California incident, go here.
Conflict in Catalonia: two situation reports from Spain, here and here.
Genocide in Burma: the killing of Rohingya people continues despite the Empire's pro forma (i.e., meaningless) protests.
Trump Posed to Appoint Four Theocracy-Minded Judges who will undoubtedly do everything in their (considerable) power to advance the JesuNazi agenda. Another warning as to how truly awful our circumstances are. (See also “God's Own Death Squad,” below.)
If Money Co-Opts, Does Big Money Co-Opt Completely? See here and here. I thought long and hard before I posted these two stories because of their potential divisiveness. Finally I concluded the fact they each publicly raise the all-important co-optation issue gives them must-post newsworthiness. Such is the sometimes-troubling duty of an editor. Nevertheless I apologize to anyone who is offended by my decision.
On Mothering a Black Son in a Realm Where Blacks Are Targets. A testament of a Black woman's maternal courage, its prose written with such compellingly poetic skill it made me cry. May we all have such loving mothers, as I most certainly did not. (Yes, some of my tears were undoubtedly tears of envy.)
The Struggle in the South: a situation report from Middle Tennessee.
Imprisoned Immigrant Teen Finally Wins Her Abortion. This story did get a little Mainstream Media coverage, but Dispatches has followed it closely, so I'm posting it here in case you didn't see or hear the outcome.
Viciously Deceptive “Clinic” Lures Unwary Abortion-Seekers to Relentless Abuse: the magnitude of the JesuNazis' newest lies equals the magnitude of their misogynistic hatred. (See photo above.)
Hurricane Recovery by LGBTQ People in the JesuNazi Theocracy of Texas: how art and solidarity heals, a useful lesson for every one of us regardless of how we define ourselves.
A Realistic Retrospective on the 2016 Election: The advent of the Trump/Pence Regime has most likely sealed our doom – my opinion, not the linked author's – but as he says, had Hillary been elected we'd probably already be nothing more than radioactive dust, so at least we're getting more time in which to taste the exquisiteness of life. (Yeah, even for me, an arthritic cripple for whom pain has become as much a part of consciousness as breathing.)
Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan, Now Studying Lenin, damns the Democrats' blame-Russia warmongering, notes how the party has become a Capitalist tool for betrayal of the 99 Percent.
Soviet Sub Captain Honored for Defying Launch Order, thereby averting World War III. Would an USian officer dare do likewise? I think not. Nor would the Empire's soldiers dare disobey an order to massacre unarmed USian civilians. All available evidence indicates that we USians – contrary to the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 (who shot their officers rather than fire on unarmed demonstrators) – live in a realm peopled mostly by obedient Adolf Eichmanns.
Two Interesting Reports on the Kennedy Assassination Papers, here and here, the latter revealing undeniable but long-suppressed proof the president was targeted by at least two shooters.
On the Relevance of the Soviet Revolution: “Taking state power is a serious enterprise: it requires a workers’ army to defend the country from national and international capitalists.”
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Knowing Our Enemy: More on the USian Empire as God's Own Death Squad
WHY DOES MAINSTREAM MEDIA refuse to acknowledge the Trump/Pence Regime's wildly accelerating conversion of the white-supremacist U.S. empire into a militantly doomsday-minded thermonuclear Christian theocracy?
Why do we the people continue to deny that our imperial overlords truly believe their sadistic god commands them to conquer the entire planet and subjugate its peoples at least as violently as their forebears massacred the First Nations of North America and vaporized the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The answers to both these questions become obvious once the questions themselves are viewed in their proper sociopolitical and historical contexts.
Jeff Sharlet exposed the theocratic agenda of the U.S. Ruling Class nearly a decade ago in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). As many Dispatches readers already know, it is a properly frightening revelation of how a generously-financed Christian conspiracy that began in the 1934 is succeeding – not just with the Republican Party's enthusiastic sponsorship but with the clandestine assistance of the Democratic (sic) Party as well – in imposing Christian theocracy on the United States.
(We should ask: is it coincidence this corporate-funded ChristoFascist effort began in 1934, the same year the Bankers' Plot failed to make the U.S. a partner in what was to become the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis?) (See also here.)
Though Sharlet's pivotal work on the Empire's theocratic core was published nearly a decade ago, subsequent events have since elevated it and two earlier but closely related works to the stature of superbly well-reasoned prophetic analysis. One is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press: 2006). The other – the best of the three for historical documentation – is Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking: 2006).
The Christian fanaticism Sharlet, Hedges and Phillips decry – which began its boiled-frog climb to technologically enabled Trump/Pence omnipotence long before the politicians of both Capitalist parties formalized the thrust toward theocracy by adding the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance – has triumphed not only by obliterating the few remnants of USian liberty but by threatening human survival in a manner unprecedented in our species' 300,000-year history.
What makes the threat so deadly dangerous is the thoroughly documented JesuNazi belief, as expressed by George the Second and later by a Trumpist pastor, that self-inflicted apocalypse – whether by thermonuclear warfare, Capitalist ecocide or both – is the essential precursor to Jesus's return to Earth.
And the danger is far more immediate than many of us dare admit. It is intensified to near infinity by our Mainstream Media's concealment of just how unspeakably jeopardized life itself has become under Capitalism's (always biblical) agenda and how the Trump/Pence Regime has escalated this jeopardy to almost certain fulfillment by declaring its genocidal, ecocidal, ultimately apocalyptic agenda to now be the summum bonum of the Empire's foreign and domestic policy, which our theocratic overlords and their JesuNazi followers believe is divinely ordained.
Nor is there any rational hope the Democratic (sic) Party might birth any significant rethinking of these policies. As Sharlet points out in The Family, “The difference between the two parties, economically, theologically, is one of degrees, not principles.” (p. 384-385)
Hedges, as if he were anticipating Sharlet's work, had already noted the mindset that would propel the Trump/Pence Regime into terminally apocalyptic power: “And the congregation gathering today in this church waits for the final welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast cleansing that will lift them into the heavens, and leave the world they despise, the one they ruined or that was ruined for them, to be racked by plagues and flood and fire until it, and all those they blame for the debacle of their lives, are consumed and destroyed by God.” (American Fascists, p. 183).
While the people Hedges describes in this passage are mostly members of the Working Class, the same intensity of hatefulness, albeit without the goading of financial desperation, defines the white-supremacist executives and professionals who were by far the largest faction of Trump/Pence voters.
Phillips adds a bit of the historical perspective that makes his work especially valuable: “The essential political preconditions (for theocracy) fell into place in the late 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of the Republican party as a powerful vehicle for religiosity and church influence, while state Republican parties, most conspicuously in the South and Southwest...set out in varying degrees the radical political theology of the Christian Reconstruction movement, the tenets of which range from using the Bible as a basis for domestic law to emphasizing religious schools and women's subordination to men.” (American Theocracy, pgs. 232-233)
“The Christian Reconstructionist movement...proclaims ambitions that range from replacing public schools with religious education to imposing biblical law and limiting the franchise to male Christians...Most Americans, having never heard of Christian Reconstructionism, likely assume it has only fringe status. The groups that monitor such activists – Theocracy Watch...the First Amendment Foundation...Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and others – take the movement more seriously...” (ibid., p. 243)
Meanwhile a Center for Inquiry report notes the federal government loses “over $71 billion per year” in religious tax exemptions, much of which underwrites pro-theocracy proselytizing. Susan Jacoby, one of the many sources cited by the report, puts it thusly: the question is why “church authorities adhering to a deeply conservative brand of Christianity . . . get to use taxpayer money to further their parochial agenda.”
The answer to Jacoby's question is also the answer to the question that opened our know-the-enemy discussion. The government that grants the tax exemptions to finance the theocratic onslaught and the Mainstream Media that refuses to report the magnitude of the theocratic threat (or even acknowledge its existence) are owned by the same cabal of One Percenters.
Which further confirms the formerly unthinkable truth collectively revealed by Phillips, Hedges and Sharlet – that the USian Empire was clandestinely a sword-of-the-Lord theocracy when Trump and Pence took control. Their job, no doubt scripted years ago by the sons and grandsons of the original Bankers' Plot conspirators, is to do exactly what they have been doing since Inauguration Day: that is, releasing the theocracy from its proverbial closet and ascertaining we the people of the 99 Percent are either its captives or its corpses.
In other words, whether as individuals or a species we are well and truly FUBAR. As to why so many of us remain in such self-destructively stubborn denial of that fact, I suspect it is mostly a manifestation of the classically USian imbecility of hope – the same self-protective “ideological bubble” of all-will-be-well fantasy that fostered the extended refusal to recognize Obama the Orator was in fact Barack the Betrayer.
Plus if we accept the unmitigated horror of our circumstances – that we are already targets in a holy war – we will each have to modify our thinking accordingly, never again forgetting we are opposed not only by the theocratic state but by the lynch-mob fanaticism of its civilian and paramilitary allies.
Thus like Red Army soldiers in the earliest months of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, our circumstances are bound to radically worsen before there is even the smallest chance of compelling their improvement.
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If You're in or Near London, There's an Amedeo Modigliani Retrospective – dates to be announced – planned by the Tate Modern, which is essentially the British equivalent of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Meanwhile thanks to an organization called Artsy, the mission of which is to make the viewing of great art readily available to all the peoples of the world, here's a collection of Modigliani's work. Here too, from the visual treat cupboard of Artsy's online magazine, is an interesting study of how and why women and men differ in their approaches to shooting selfies. Indulge. Enjoy. Relish. As the LGBTQ community of Houston discovered (see “Hurricane Recovery,” above), art is healing even when one is menaced by the jackboots of the JesuNazis, as indeed – given the Empire's ever-more-apocalyptic global reach – all genuine humans now are.
LB, with contributions from TigerLille/ 24 October-1 November 2017.
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