Ecocidal Genocide and Enslavement of All Surviving Workers: That's the Shock-Doctrine "Final Solution" Ever More Evident in the Neoliberals' Stubborn Refusal to Fight Climate Change
18 March 2019
Imagine a Concentration-Camp Planet Ruled by a Hillary or a Trump. Unthinkable, Yes? But What Other Future Could They Be Planning?
WHEN WE ANALYZE the indications as investigative reporters and intelligence analysts are taught to do, there is only one possible explanation for the denial, dithering and maliciously scripted paralysis by which our overlords sabotage every effort to counter the already-apocalyptic and soon-to-be-terminal climate crisis.1
No matter how I evaluate the evidence, I find it impossible to escape the conclusion our Capitalist masters long ago decided their "Final Solution" to all the world's problems is to allow the looming disasters to exterminate as many of us as possible. And then impose a zero-tolerance global tyranny more savage than anything our species has ever known, condemning the few Working Class survivors and their descendants to inescapable slavery.
Thanks to Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books: 2007), the Neoliberal methodology is obvious. Thanks to Chris Hedges (American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America; Free Press: 2006); to Kevin Phillips (American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century; Viking: 2006); and most of all to Jeff Sharlet (The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power; Harper: 2008); we already know our oppressors' capabilities and intentions.
We therefore also know our masters are methodically weaponizing the murderously self-righteous patriarchal misogyny, the hateful Christian white-supremacy and the sadistic theocratic malevolence of their increasingly fanatical supporters into a new, terrifyingly global Sturmabteilung to serve as guards, torturers and executioners.
A few of us even recognize the Shock-Doctrine dynamics evident in the epidemic of mass murder2 that fuels the now-probably unstoppable Forcible Civilian Disarmament Movement, which is manipulating our fear, horror and ignorance into the frightened helplessness of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood.
Given how the ChristoNazis and their fascist collaborators are already embraced as allies by the cops and by the imperial war machine, it is obvious these new Storm Troopers will remain armed -- legally or otherwise -- even after the last firearm has been confiscated from the last non-fascist U.S. household.
Meanwhile the entire murder-minded rabble is officially encouraged to prey upon us at will.
But -- until now -- only one other journalist, the admirably courageous Sarah Kendzior, has dared publicly suggest the Occam's-Razor-obvious answer of why our rulers are behaving as they do. Clearly they intend to profit both from the apocalyptic disasters and from the Shock-Doctrine opportunities for genocidal reconstruction of human society -- think Puerto Rico and New Orleans -- such events provide.
Our masters have been quietly smuggling their traveling holocaust of horrors home, one private jetload at a time, since 22 November 1963.3 But now the triumph of the genuinely Nazified Donald Trump and his burn-all-witches running-mate Michael Pence has blown the One Percenters' cover and revealed -- over an entirely bogus storm of objections -- the hideous truth of what actually obtains in this "one nation under (their sadistic) God."
We can (and typically do) spare ourselves the guilt and horror evoked by these near-daily atrocities if we reduce them to the emotionless abstractions of statistics -- for example the approximately 45,000 USian children, women and men the Neoliberals exterminate each year by deliberate denial of medical care. Such sanitized information does absolutely nothing to alleviate our overwhelming sense of powerlessness or goad us to action. But its near-universal availability most assuredly helps maintain the Exceptionally Big Lie of U.S. press freedom.
Of course if we are mindful enough to see without flinching -- and far too few of us are -- we can look directly at the hopelessly distraught faces of the growing legions of homeless children and adults and acknowledge that what is already sculpted by wretchedness on their faces is also an accurate vision of our own more-than-probable future. Housed or not, we struggle to survive even as we are criminalized for the poverty inflicted on us by our masters. So impoverished, we are endlessly tormented -- indeed not infrequently slain -- whether by the edicts of their insurance executives and welfare bureaucrats or the hollow-point antipersonnel rounds fired by their uniquely murderous federally militarized local police. Survival itself thus becomes a (potentially fatal) assertion of revolutionary defiance.
It is therefore utterly delusional to suppose the Apocalypse -- here deliberately capitalized as a proper noun -- is not already well underway. Never mind the environmental projections; to see the future intended for all of us in the 99 Percent, just visit the nearest homeless encampment. Meanwhile the One Percenters and their trusted henchmen -- the lawyers, politicians and executives who transmogrify their masters' moral imbecility into real-world atrocities -- are fully cognizant of our intensifying anger. That's why they are building strongholds and raising private armies to defend them.
Welcome to the new post-imperial Dark Age, complete with moated castles.
Knowing history as I do -- including military history and the history of weapons -- I have a reasonably accurate notion of what is taking shape. Forget nations and governments; it will instead be a world of corporate manorialism enforced by the de facto tribalism of ultra-high-tech feudalism. Its population will be forever divided into two classes: the all-powerful and the abjectly powerless -- that is, the masters and the slaves.
Also knowing anthropology and mythology and life on rural agricultural communes, I can accurately imagine the post-apocalyptic socialist alternative: a contentious but nevertheless fully functional amalgum of family and community that despite its emotional dysfunction is bound by a diligent solidarity evident in proven skill, whether at subsistance agriculture or self-defense.
Obviously I would choose the latter were I able.
My own sense of what our probable future might look like -- mental imagery based on scholarship and personal experience including not only the tragedies and disasters I covered as a journalist but also the postwar horrors I witnessed in South Korea c. 1961-1962 -- is something I intend to write about in considerable detail during the weeks ahead.
For now though suffice it to say life in a postapocalyptic world -- that is, assuming there is any human survival at all -- would be nothing like most of us seem to imagine. The eventual collapse of the electrical grid would eliminate nearly all post-19th Century technology including the associated industrial capabilities essential to its restoration. Meanwhile the post-Roman history of Britain vividly demonstrates civilization's fragility. Save for its stone-and-concrete structures -- chiefly aqueducts, roads, bridges and buildings -- it was gone in less than a century. By the time these structures began crumbling, there was no one left alive who was knowledgeable or skilled enough to repair them.
What follows then is list of 115 present-day headlines arbitrarily divided into eight categories of evidence. Each head is hyperlinked to its text. I lifted 96 of these from the approximately 760 news stories and analytical commentaries I received in my electronic in-box between 25 February 2019 and 15 March 2019 inclusive. The remaining 19 -- 13 slightly older analytical and historical essays listed under "However Banal, Evil May Also Prove Bottomless" as background reading and six reassuring entries under the concluding section, "Unrecognized Resistance to Extinction" -- are from the bookmarks of my electronic library.
Were we to envision a genuinely accurate metaphor for our circumstances and begin to focus on these 115 examples as accurate microcosms of our real circumstances, we might soon realize it is rather as if we of the 99 Percent are passengers aboard a ship at sea. But the officers -- the One Percenters and their lawyers, politicians and executives -- have knowingly overbooked it to maximize their profit and have thus overloaded it nearly to the point of sinking. As we sail toward heavy weather the officers have realized the danger they are in and have begun to lighten the load by flinging groups of us overboard in circumstances designed to rebrand murders as unavoidable tragedy -- exactly as is done, for example, to hide the murders of the approximately 45,000 of us who are slain every year by deliberate denial of health care.
(I am compelled to ask: when someone is killed by deliberate perpetuation of a policy known to be deadly, how can it not be murder? Note in this context the deliberate embrace of genocide inherent in the U.S. One Percenters' knowingly deadly edicts to perpetuate healthcare as a privilege of wealth rather than the universal human right it is considered by every other government in the developed world.)
The officers who command our metaphorical ship meanwhile tells us they are doing everything they can to save our lives. They continue repeating this lie even after we discover they are actually opening the scuttlecocks; the truth is we passengers are all doomed. By sinking us the officers not only silence our complaints and pocket our fares but also collect on the insurance, profiting obscenely.
Now -- as passengers who have not yet been flung overboard -- let us look both at the unprecedented real-world malevolence of our overlords, at the growing rebelliousness it is evoking and also at a few of the many oft-unrecognized assertions of our own boundless determination to survive. It's that very combination -- the serial-killer moral imbecility of our rulers versus our own humanitarian mindfulness -- that make this hypothesis so obviously true once we have brought the evidence into sharp focus.
Having contemplated our circumstances for nearly a decade -- see for example "Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke To Hated Public Services?" (my post of 27 April 2010, for which I was immediately and permanently ousted from Facebook) -- I can no longer doubt the rulers of the world have no intention whatsoever of ameliorating climate change; that instead they are deliberately using the apocalypse -- and quite possibly engineering it -- the ever-more-obvious goal of which is to reorganize all human society into the hierarchical structure of the slave plantation or the concentration-camp.4
Thus the following, a portrait of the deepening gloom in which we dwell, the hues of its darkness softened -- because I'm sure you are as tired as I of reading atrocity reports -- into lists of hyperlinked heads and titles from which you may choose at will. You'll see more of these easy-choice lists as I continue to re-format Dispatches after Facebook terminated my access to the Tacoma Communists page, where until last January links to my work were routinely posted.
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(I). Our Mother Earth as an Abused Woman
The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy
In the Deepest Ocean Trenches, Animals Eat Plastic
Iconic Forests Reaching Climate Tipping Points in American West
Nothing resolved as Flint water crisis nears fifth anniversary
Insecticide Linked to Increased Breast Cancer Risk -- 40 Years After Exposure
Moment of Reckoning: US Cities Burn Recyclables After China Bans Imports
‘Like a nightmare’: Amtrak train, trapped by snow for 36 hours, arrives back in Seattle
Flint water crisis claims its youngest Legionnaires’ victim to date
Measles outbreak in Ukraine claims eight lives
Popular Brands Of Beer And Wine Found To Contain Glyphosate Weedkiller
RSN: How Fukushima Nukes Kill Our Climate, Our Planet, Ourselves
Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment
(II). Dithering as Denial
The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency
Dianne Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal
Legislature, Inslee struggle to fix roads that block salmon, help starve orcas
Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe
The 2020 Democrats of the "Anti-Green New Deal Coalition"
Democrats Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns
(III). The Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us
Survival of the Richest, All Are Equal, Except Those Who Aren't
American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth
The New York Times Won't Stop Pushing Crank Economics
Amazon federal taxes: how the company’s corporate tax bill was $0
The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes
Dakota Access Pipeline Company Is Abusing The Judicial System To Silence Dissent
Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All
Trump's 2020 Budget Proposes $1 Trillion Cut to Medicare, Medicaid
FOCUS: Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump by Destroying Each Other?
Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the US, ADL Finds
Pack City Hall to Stop Mayor Durkan’s attacks on Homeless Services
The Most Harrowing Revelation of the Cohen Hearing
Corporate and “Progressive” Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself
Trump Reportedly Wants to Steal From the Troops to Pay for His Wall
Joe Biden Has a History of Racist Comments
Pharma & Insurance Gave $43M To 130 House Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All
Immigrants endure inhuman conditions at ICE prison in New Jersey
Poverty in the UK: 100 “baby banks” spring up to assist parents with basic supplies
Torture Fans and War Criminals Determine US Foreign Policy
Pelosi dismisses efforts to impeach President Trump
Free dental clinic draws hundreds in Nashville, Tennessee
Closure of Brazil Ford plant to destroy up to 27,000 jobs
The Trump presidency: From the Manhattan underworld to the White House
Latest collision on Long Island Rail Road shows fatal consequences of system-wide neglect
Nearly 200 Immigrants in Texas Detention Facilities Have Mumps
Trump May Want to Be President Forever. Take the Threat Seriously.
Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America
No charges for Sacramento police officers who murdered Stephon Clark
The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples
Cuts to hours for Whole Foods workers exposes fraud of Amazon pay increase
Big Capital, the Working Class, and US Imperialism: a Brief Look at Recent History
Nearly 1.4 Million Puerto Ricans Facing Dangerous Food Stamp Cuts as Trump and Congress Fail to Act
Big Pharma, Insurers and Hospitals Team Up to Kill Medicare for All
Trump's Legacy: Conservative Judges Who Will Interpret US Law for Decades
Chelsea Manning Defies Secret Grand Jury, Julian Assange Scoops Michael Cohen
Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism
President’s Budget Targets Key Health Care Programs
The VA Is Privatizing Veterans Health Care While Launching A Campaign To Deny It
Union Busting on Campus: Jackson Lewis and Higher Education Anti-Unionism
College admissions scandal: what it reveals about wealth in America - Vox
NY School Holds Mock Slave Auction Selling Black Students to White Kids
FOCUS: Colony of Hell: 911 Calls From Inside Amazon Warehouses
Joint US-South Korean war games amid rising tensions with North Korea
Federal Aviation Administration accused of colluding with Boeing in wake of 737 crashes
Of Course College Admissions Rigged for the Rich. The Whole Economic System Is
Report Card Shows Majority of Senate Democrats Aiding Trump's Right-Wing Court Takeover
Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job
The criminalization of environmental protest in Trump’s America
(IV). Their God Demands They Rape Our Mother5
The Supreme Court Is Quietly Changing the Status of Religion in American Life
Giving The Bomb To Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove
What You Need to Know About Trump’s Latest Attack on Reproductive Health
United Methodist Church votes to maintain its opposition to same-sex marriage, gay clergy
Southern Baptist Convention Grapples With Sexual Abuse Report
Cuba's Evangelical Alliance Leads Crusade Against Gay Marriage
With Trump, White Protestantism Hits Rock Bottom
United Methodists Fracture: LGBT Plan Rejected - The Atlantic
The Cult of the Good Christian Woman
Anti-Vaxx Mobs: Doctors Face Harassment Campaigns on Facebook
Revealed: AmazonSmile Helps Fund Anti-Vaccine Groups
Abortion Restrictions Sweep Through GOP-Held Legislatures
Saudi Women Activists Stand Trial in Criminal Court
Trump Administration Rolls Out Implementation Plan for Transgender Military Ban
The Kansas Bomb Plot: What Has the Media Missed?
New Zealand mosque shooting: what we know so far about the mass shooting in Christchurch
New Zealand mosque shooting: the shooter’s manifesto shows how white nationalist rhetoric spreads
The shadowy network shaping Trump’s anti-immigration policies
The EPA and Evangelical (Anti)Environmentalism
Trump: The most anti-science president ever?
(V). A Few Vernal Sprouts of Wishful Thinking
Climate Change Could End Washington’s Global Dominion
FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?
How long can we keep dodging nuclear war?
The climate crisis and the insidious idea that things must get worse before they get better
(VI). The Earth Mother's Spring Sunshine Grows Flowers of Defiance
The Black Stake in the Green New Deal | Black Agenda Report
Female Leaders Warn Against Global Rise of Autocratic Strongmen and Attack on Womens Rights
Youth Climate Activists Arrested for Sit-In at Mitch McConnell's Office
Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse
Researchers: Violence, War And Climate Change Are Linked
Vandana Shiva: We Must Fight Back Against the 1 Percent to Stop the Sixth Mass Extinction
It’s the Green New Deal or Else
Extinction Rebellion: “Green” capitalism versus world socialism
The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming
Global Climate Strike in Pictures: Millions of Students Walk Out to Demand Planetary Transformation
A Tribal Camp in South Texas Is Vowing to Resist Trump’s Wall
(VII). However Banal, Evil May Also Prove Bottomless
Donald Trump Is Anti-Environment, But So Was Barack Obama
How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism
Joining the dots: women, environmentalism and neoliberalism
Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism
How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility
A shock to the ecosystem: Neoliberalism and the environment | well sharp
Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals
Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action
The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries
Average U.S. Citizens Have “Little Or No” Influence On Government Policy
In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve
(VIII.) Unrecognized Resistance to Extinction
A much-expanded version6 of the Jung/McLuhan hypothesis all art includes elements of prophecy.
How to Spin Wool (with Pictures)
Enjoying Horseback Archery Adventures of the Year 2017
Ricky Roberts Ferguson Rifle Timed Fire at King's Mountain National Military Park
Finding Freedom in a Frontier Life
Making a Blacksmith Shop with No Power Tools
Western Science Is Finally Catching Up To Traditional Knowledge
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1Key passage of the cited essay: "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term." How near? About a decade.
2The U.S. epidemic of mass murder is the byproduct of a culture that decrees humans worthless save as consumers, declares greed the only human motivator and honors hatefulness as the apex of emotion. Thus -- without any need for possibly embarrassing conspiracies -- do our rulers guarantee themselves a constant flow of tragedies by which to rationalize their imposition of Shock-Doctrine tyranny. See for example "School Shootings and Drone Wars: America's Invisible Ways of Violence,"
3As I suspect all truthful historians will do if our species escapes extinction, I take the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the death-date of the United States as a pretend-democracy. See James W. Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books: 2008), pgs. 375-376. See also: After Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately reversed his predecessor's order to withdraw 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963.
4I built a half-dozen population projections based on the assumption some humans will survive, my reasoning elaborated in Footnote 6, below. One projections was based on reduction of the human population by 95 percent -- approximately the percentage of earthly species taken by the Permian-Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago. Significantly, using the One Percent/99 Percent model, a 95 percent human extinction rate would would result in the same ratio of masters to slaves, 8.75 million to 350 million or 1:40, that is typical of today's U.S. chain gangs. By comparison, the ratio of Nazis to victims in the German concentration camps was 1:18, for which see Bucheim, Broszat, Jacobsen and Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS State (English translation William Collins Sons: 1968); pg. 504. Given the One Percenters' now obvious adoration of Nazi Germany and the white-supremacist South, these are almost certainly the population parameters they are employing as they try to leverage the Apocalypse into their New World Order.
5Patriarchy and its Abrahamic religious offspring, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are the ideological vectors of the misogynistic war on the environment. As defined by Thomas Sancton and cited by Naomi Klein in "Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action," The ultimate source of Neoliberalism (and Capitalism itself) is ...the misuse of the Judeo-Christian concept of "dominion" over nature and the fact that it supplanted the pre-Christian idea that "the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature -- the soil, forest, sea -- was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it."
6Carl Jung (All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness) and Marshall McLuhan (Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it) each defined art as prophecy. A paramount example is the series of paintings entitled The Scream, each of which clearly anticipate the apocalyptic horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries. But the definitions of art employed by Jung and McLuhan are elitist, which caused them to exclude entirely the vast body of evidence that is to be found outside of museums, galleries and theaters. Hence this section's focus on recovery of primitive skills such as fire-making, blacksmithing, spinning and weaving or the use of antique tools and weapons. All such activities -- and there are a great many more than are sampled here -- preserve the means to survive the death of the technologies upon which we are now dependent. Popular music likewise: in "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" -- the photographically illustrated manuscript that was destroyed, probably by government arsonists, just as it was on the brink of major publication -- I presented an enormity of evidence the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s provided the aesthetic momentum of the 1960s Counterculture, especially the revolution against patriarchy implicit in the earliest aspects of Second-Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. Indeed the poet/musician Lisa Thiel has since composed what could be construed as an entire post-apocalyptic liturgy in celebration of the resurrected Goddess. Nor do I think it mere coincidence Robert Graves wrote the first draft of his revolutionary recovery of our species' long suppressed pre-patriarchal mythology, The White Goddess, in 1944 -- literally just as the Atomic Age was dawning. The survival instinct apparent in such examples -- as if (often without conscious intent) we are already preparing for a world without today's technology -- convinces me some humans will survive, no matter what madness our masters inflict on Nature and ourselves.
(With thanks to Tigerlille1 for some of the above links.)
LB/25 February-15 March 2019
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