Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

MY RECENT BOUT with Covid, 21 June to 9 July – this despite vaccination and three boosters – has robbed me of any expectation of longevity beyond the immediate present. My illness – exemplary both of “long Covid” and of “herd immunity” fulfilling its genocidal intent – has radically worsened my (hitherto-stable) congestive heart failure; the doubled and quadrupled medications so necessitated have set me on an inescapable path to kidney failure and agonizingly reactivated my decades-dormant esophageal re-flux problems. Long Covid has also permanently inflamed my osteoarthritis severely enough I am now so painfully crippled, I am often effectively bedridden; and three months after the fact, it is obvious the virus has slain forever my senses of taste and smell. As many of you know, I am 83 years old; while my doctors refuse to estimate how much longer I might live, there is now no question my departure is looming. At the beginning of the pandemic, three oracles, I Ching, runes and tarot, predicted Covid would kill me, and though eventually I came to believe I had misread their messages, now I know I did not. These days when I dream, it is almost always either of conversations with dead people, usually my father, or of activities in which I am companioned by long-dead favorite dogs. Thus when I fall asleep, I am never sure I will awaken. But as dreadful as all this may sound, it is also a liberation, for now I am free to lift my social-fingers to the arsonist(s) who destroyed my life’s work and write without any concern my words will precipitate my disappearance or the more commonplace removal by alleged accident or suicide.

=========

HERE THEN, AS a prelude to all that follows, is a list of eight present-day horrors that views their known-to-be-deadly effects as cleverly disguised expressions of intent:

Covid-19 – a lethal virus most likely engineered for biological warfare. Regardless of the pandemic's origin, the fact it mutates too rapidly to be controlled by immunization makes “herd immunity” a clever euphemism for deliberately inflicted genocide. Statistically, most victims are members of the working class, aka the 99.9 Percent. Pivotal question: who (or what) is served by the resultant extermination of millions of humans?

Climate change – a modern apocalypse inflicted on our species and planet by patriarchal ignorance and now deliberately, continuously worsened, allegedly by political paralysis imposed by capitalist greed and associated bribery, but in terrifying truth by our masters’ definitively ecogenocidal choices. Pivotal questions: why are the owners of this planet destroying its ability to support life as we know it? Who (or what) benefits from Earth’s reduction to lifeless twinship with forever-barren Mars?

Abandonment of infrastructure – a modern crisis that seems to have begun in the USian Empire but has since metastasized throughout the globe. Typically dismissed as the unavoidable consequence of “neoliberal austerity,” it is the cause of soaring fatalities due to train wrecks, structural collapses and other such disasters. Pivotal question: why are the world’s governments –  the executive agencies that serve the de facto owners of these properties (i.e., the ruling class) – abandoning their investments? Hint: why are factories abandoned and left to rot?

Unprecedented escalation of warmongering – the risk of our species’ extinction by chemical, biological and thermonuclear warfare is at an all-time high; indeed, its terrifying magnitude may be taken as the ultimate declaration the global ruling class now considers itself well-enough bunkered to survive whatever ecogenocidal horrors it inflicts on the rest of us. Pivotal questions: why is this happening now? Apart from the smirkingly bunkered aristocracy, who (or what) benefits from such an ecogenocidal event? And how do the aristocrats benefit if there are no (enslaved) humans to serve them?

Replacement of humans with robots and artificial intelligence – the skyrocketing replacement of workers with machines is creating an ever-expanding “surplus” of unemployed workers who have no real possibility of ever again finding living-wage jobs. Pivotal question: why do our masters so despise humans they are literally sentencing millions of us to death by poverty, disease, homelessness and starvation?

De-educating the working class – aka “dumbing down” the citizenry. Astronomer Carl Sagan defines the problem, and Psychiatrist Niall McLaren analyzes its deliberately toxic economics. Pivotal questions: why do our masters rob us of the intellectual tools we need to thrive as humans? What do they gain from such atrocities?

Destruction of social services – aka “austerity,” in truth slow-motion genocide targeting women and the neediest members of the 99.9 Percent. Pivotal questions: who (or what) benefits from this policy? How is genocide on such scale beneficial to our masters?

Prohibition (or destruction) of health care as a human right – another process begun by USian malevolence – in this instance by its relentless insistence health care remain a privilege of wealth – but now, disguised as “austerity,”  metastasizing rapidly throughout Europe and the rest of the world. (The foregoing data is somewhat dated, though the deadly trends obviously continue both in the U.S. and Europe.) Pivotal question: who (or what) benefits from this growing tsunami of sickness and death?

Ultimate question: what do all these atrocities tell us? What singular purpose does the ruling-class-induced atrocity of global warming – that is, ecogenocidal climate change – have in common with the (other) ecogenocidal atrocities of ruling-class-induced austerity? What terrible truth does that purpose suggest?

Note that universal education and health care are investments in our species’ future, and that their methodical reduction – like the abandonment of infrastructure – is a message from our masters they believe we no longer have a future worthy of investment.

What we see in the above – though it is a truth too terrifyingly painful for most of us to acknowledge (one therefore rendered “plausibly deniable” by the boiled-frog pace of our terminal subjugation) – are eight aspects of a total war against our species and against our Mother Earth’s ability to support human life, the latter possibly aimed at reducing her to irremediably barren twinhood with Mars.

*****

I SHOULD PREFACE this next section by stressing I have no prior history as a devotee of the unidentified-flying-object cult. Moreover I remain profoundly antagonistic to the notion all of our species’ ancient achievements were fostered by extraterrestrial visitations, which I regard as an especially devious means of vilifying the matrifocal, probably matriarchal potlach-communism that characterized our collective history until the decidedly curious, unquestionably violent imposition of patriarchy some six-or-seven-thousand years ago. Though I have heard many credible UFO stories, especially during my years in the working press, I always ranked them among the many seemingly inexplicable anomalies of modern life, and never until now felt any compulsion to write about UFOs or even give them much more than momentary thought.

Also there’s the fact that in all the time outdoors (often in the back country and some of it at sea) that characterized the best of my 83 years, I myself witnessed only one genuinely UFO-ish phenomenon, this in 1959, as best I recall in May or June, just past sunset while sitting outside with friends quietly chatting as we routinely awaited the scattered pinpoints of gracefully floating green and amber light that are the opening movements of suburban  Knoxville’s  breathtakingly exquisite seasonal choreography of fireflies. Instead there was suddenly a bright orange fireball maybe a hand-span above the north-northeast horizon; it was astonishingly big, about a quarter the size of the full moon at its smallest mid-heaven zenith; it glided eastward for maybe 10 degrees almost parallel to the surface of the earth, wobbled violently, showered sparks, descended in a shallow curve, briefly ascended, again wobbled and spewed sparks, then plunged out-of-sight behind the silhouetted peaks of the Great Smokies. It left us startled and muttering exclamations. I immediately telephoned a friend, WKGN News Director Tom Combs, and reported what we had seen. He said he’d already received a half-dozen calls about it. He told me the next day it had been witnessed by at least a hundred persons; that because of its erratic flight, some had feared it was a crashing airplane. All a University of Tennessee astronomer would tell Combs – note the wording – is “we can say it was a meteorite,” and like so many other incidents of its kind, it was soon consigned to official oblivion. But it stuck in my mind because even then I had sufficient background in astronomy to know meteorites do not momentarily gain altitude in their descent from outer space.

Now, given the combination of newly acknowledged UFO incidents with the undeniably apocalyptic perpetuation of the eight atrocities I described above, I am compelled to suspect it is probable we’ve already been conquered by interstellar predators – and that the global ruling class, capitalist and communist alike, is merely functioning as the invaders’ own obscenely recompensed SS-Totenkopfverbände, its present task the reduction of our world to a planet-sized Auschwitz.

Indeed, per Occam’s Razor, this is the only hypothesis that explains all of today’s afflictions – most especially the self-imposed pseudo-paralysis by which the global ruling class, capitalist and communist alike, relentlessly attempts to excuse its ever-more-apocalyptic refusal to reduce the causative abuses, much less its refusal to ameliorate their disastrous results. Mind you, I’m not saying extraterrestrial conquest is the final, definitive truth of our species’ increasingly hopeless present-day circumstances. But the unprecedented solidarity of malevolent cunning the global ruling class exhibits in the success of its universal promotion of the originally USian ethos of self-obsessed moral imbecility and in the veritable omnipotence demonstrated by its diabolical skill at co-optation and/or suppression of any and all forms of organized humanitarianism most assuredly suggest an equal capability for beneficence -- the glaring absence of which is therefore both infinitely damning and all the more suggestive of purposeful choice.

There is also the fact the present-day plague of atrocities is entirely the function of patriarchy and is therefore arguably the final revelation of  its unspoken purpose. Note too how the imposition of patriarchy is biblically attributed to talking snakes, divine apparitions, flaming wheels in the sky and loquacious brush-fires underscored by the (thermonuclear?) destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. With its misogynistic war against our Mother Earth, against all femaleness and implicitly therefore against all being, patriarchy is increasingly recognized as a death cult. Dialectic-materialist efforts to define patriarchy as a logical outgrowth of the agricultural revolution not withstanding, it is not unthinkable to suppose it to be a  long-term interstellar expression of the same strategic scheming evident in smallpox-infected blankets.

At the very least, the body of evidence demands the probability of our terminal victimization by extraterrestrial conquerors ought to be given serious consideration and thorough investigation.

Investigated or not, the likelihood we are already the powerless subjects of some conquering alien species becomes obvious when we examine the undeniably anti-human, sometimes undeniably genocidal or ecogenocidal consequences of the afflictions in question. Though it is clear there is no longer any rational hope we might yet save ourselves, at least we would then be able to correctly identify our executioners and thus yet retain some minimal authority over the courses of our individual lives.  

In this context, let us now consider the likelihood the burgeoning official acknowledgment of unknown aerial and oceanic phenomenon is – in much the same way European acknowledgment of Nazi German technological superiority was the prelude to psychological acceptance of defeat, enslavement and extermination – the precursor to admission we are a conquered species. Note how we are being methodically robbed of all our former freedoms – and more importantly of even any expectation of freedom – literally everywhere on the planet. It is thus at least arguable our minds are being conditioned for enslavement. Is it then mere coincidence that, after denying the reality of UFOs and their underwater counterparts for at least 80 years – often ridiculing and even slandering as mentally ill anyone who dared admit encountering UFOs –  the world’s governments are now finally acknowledging such things are real? Or that the propaganda apparatus which serves the global ruling class now deluges us with documentaries that claim humans are routinely kidnapped and used as lab rats by extraterrestrials?

Typical of the aliens-as-conquerors documentaries is “Alien Endgame,” an hour and 25-minute film available on Max that claims a “massive military cover-up” of the fact “our very existence is at risk.” It includes testimony about incidents in which UFOS rendered nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) unlaunchable, notes that UFOs operate with speed and maneuverability far beyond human capabilities, that they can become invisible and are sometimes undetectable by radar. The film also describes naval encounters with unidentified submerged objects that demonstrate the same seemingly inexplicable characteristics. “If the aliens decide to attack,” the film concludes, “we don’t stand a chance.”

Significantly, the aliens’ oberführers – the terrifying medical-experiment sadism associated with their kidnappings prompts me to describe them with the terminology of nazism – are often said to look like bipeds descended from giant preying mantises. This brings to mind a 1974 or 1975 comment by a prominent astrophysicist that only exoskeletal creatures can survive the gravitational forces generated by right-angle turns at mach 10 and other such astounding maneuvers even then attributed to UFOs. I’m sorry I don’t remember the astrophysicist’s name, but I do remember his comment generated a lively, mostly apprehensive discussion midway through the astronomy course I was then taking as an overage undergraduate. Now, knowing how insect biology is a prime inspiration in robotics and artificial intelligence, I find the notion of insectoid conquerors horrifying beyond words. Is our obviously methodical reduction to moral imbecility the beginning of our replacement by dependably emotionless machines? And let us not forget that female mantises, like female spiders, eat their mates, nor that a large enough plague of locusts – or greedy patriarchs – could leave our Earth as barren as present-day Mars. Are we humans being bred to be our masters' Soylent Green? Might irremediably desolate Mars exemplify the ecogenocidal ruin Earth too is now fated to become?

Even so, a few documentaries present the invaders as benign. “Encounters,” a four-episode program on Netflix, describes the extraterrestrials as claiming “the environment is our first priority,” warning us our species is “actually making harm on the world,” that “technology is not going to do humans any good” and urging us to care for nature. It also quotes Japanese sources who describe the aliens as “kind and comforting,” which echo many First Nations accounts of encounters with beneficent “Star People.”

The notion of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrials and their implicit competition for human allegiance is obviously the newest variant of the ancient traditions, common to all cultures, of cosmic warfare between the forces of good and evil. From any such perspective of universal dualism, the pivotal question becomes the one poised by the coal miners’ anthem, “Which Side Are You On?” But the oft-demonstrated omnipotence of the ruling class – specifically its uncanny genius at deception and co-optation (which history shows us is at least as old as patriarchy itself) – makes any such discernment impossible. Note the paradox of Christianity: is it, as the late and oft-persecuted Jesuit Fr. William Bischel believed and practiced, a benevolently revolutionary credo of peace, humanitarian love, social liberation and the harmonious healing of Nature? Or is its equally documented function as the credo of ecogenocidal hatred embraced by capitalists, Trumpists, prosperity-gospel fanatics, Ku Klux Klaners, Nazis, witch-burners and other misogynistic moral imbeciles the true expression of its essence? The same functional schizophrenia – and thus the same (unanswerable) question – seemingly applies to every religious or political movement our species has generated. Nor is it mooted by the growing suspicion many of our most iconic figures – Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Our Lady of Fatima – may have themselves been extraterrestrials. Quoth St. Paul (2 Corinthians 11:14, New International Version): “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” And despite its apparent absurdity, let us not overlook the claim Hitler's Nazis – and now their USian successors – achieved power as the willing puppets of extraterrestrial masters.

=========

MY ARSON-DESTROYED  and thus forever lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” hypothesized via approximately one hundred photographs and some  one-hundred-fifty-thousand words of extensively footnoted text that the 1960s Counterculture was simultaneously the resurrection of the Great Goddess,  our species first and oldest deity, and – as demonstrated by the aesthetic solidarity that underlay the dissonance of its politics – the first wave of a global revolution against patriarchy. Another writer's parallel work, The Return of the Goddess (Edward C. Whitmont, Crossroad Publishing: 1984), offered a kindred but less obviously revolutionary  hypothesis based on Jungian psycho-analytic analysis of dreams. But as proven by the flames that burned "Dancer" like a witch slain in obvious retaliation for her alleged heresies,  my bluntly expressed conclusions – which noted in passing the Goddess-worship origins of Marxism’s red star and hammer-and-sickle symbols – were obviously tabooed as too dangerous for public consumption. "Dancer"  was thus destroyed just as it seemingly approached mainstream publication. Nor is it insignificant its would-have-been editor, the late Cicely Nichols, regarded "Dancer" as potentially one of the "most influential books of the 20th Century";  indeed the arsonist(s) lit the fire at the very moment Cicely and I began the meeting intended to finalize our working agreement.     

“Dancer” defined  the '60s Counterculture in its broadest sense; it sidestepped the obvious self-indulgence of the white petite-bourgeois faddists who later proved their proto-nazi moral imbecility by their votes for Ronald Reagan; it focused specifically on the aesthetic solidarity of feminism, environmentalism and the back-to-the-land movement as demonstrated by its music, visual art, literature and science, including the folk renaissance, the Whole Earth Catalog and – perhaps most importantly – the Gaia Hypothesis, which in essence is the modern scientific restatement of the inconceivably ancient pagan core-belief our Mother Earth – the Great Goddess who was our species' first and longest-lasting deity – is a living being, conscious, self-regulating and thus at least arguably invocable.

What “Dancer” omitted – this in the admittedly selfish interest of preserving my journalistic credibility – was a pair of decidedly curious events that seemed to confirm not just the project's  relevance and validity but its cosmic/karmic necessity. These incidents – there were also a half-dozen lesser events easily dismissable as coincidence – are the childhood experience I describe in the essay “Abutments” (note the element of missing time, which today might be taken as indicative of a UFO encounter), and  the brief but profoundly moving vision I experienced during an absolutely intoxicant-free moment of reflection in 1970: this occurred in the Cascade foothills beneath the August full moon of 1970, almost exactly 18 years after the 1952 incident. As I described in an earlier essay:

I had walked alone and lonely into the Innis Creek water meadow, an unkempt span of lowland maybe thirty yards wide that was now dry but was annually drenched by the creek's vernal floods. It was at least four times that distance beyond the corn fields, buildings and gardens of the Wickersham, Washington agricultural commune where I was then a long-term guest who contentedly paid my way by contributing a full share of physical effort to the requisite daily labor, and now I stood amidst Nature's shadowy harbingers of early Autumn: blown thistles, bright clumps of pearly everlasting, iridescent cobwebs bejeweled with dew. The communards were meeting in their main building but were ensnared in psychodrama intensified by the unresolvable ideological disputes that invariably arise from caste differences, and I had left the session in disillusioned bitterness and disgust. Seeking to restore my inner peace, I sprawled face-upward on the weedy ground and gazed at the zenith-high improbably brilliant moon as if it were some mandala of last resort.

Then to my astonishment there was a decidedly strange kind of jolt, as if – albeit eerily without the physical reality –  I had heard and felt some unseen door burst open, and all in the same breathtaking instant the moon spiraled into a rainbow that expanded to fill the entire sky, contracted to a vortex of flowing bands of color, plunged tornado-like to earth and shaped a magnificently ageless woman pale and translucent as mist yet undeniably real. She was majestically naked but loosely wrapped in the lunar blonde infinity of her own hair; she smiled, reached out her hands as if to embrace me and then like some impossibly magical dancer swirled her endless mane into rainbow hues that swept her aloft, dissolving herself back into rivers of color that expanded once more from horizon to horizon and shrank into the moon again – a millisecond's vision, a mere glimpse so brief and so ephemeral I could scarcely believe I had seen it and yet so vivid it could not be denied.  But now as if nothing at all had occurred there was only the commonplace moon again, the midnight sky and its diamond constellations, the fragrant crush of wild chamomile beneath my head, the vast nocturnal stillness of Pacific Northwest woods so unlike the firefly-bright insect-rowdiness of the fields and forests in which I'd spent the summers of my boyhood and adolescence.  When the night's chill finally urged me to my feet, I remember there were faint tendrils of fog rising from the creek, and for a moment, just once, it seemed I heard the clear cold water chuckle.

There is also the matter of the carefully disguised remnants of pagan liturgy that scholars including Olaf Nygard and Robert Graves argued are preserved in much of traditional folk music, most assuredly including that which was re-popularized by the folk-music renaissance that immediately preceded and obviously helped mother the advent of the Counterculture.

Though it may seem something of an aside, the mechanics of such disguises – Graves calls it “riddling” – are obscure enough to exemplify here. The following is from an explanatory note I recently sent a dear friend:

All true pagans should know how to decode the liturgy of the Goddess that is hidden in so many traditional ballads, disguised to protect singers and celebrants from being burnt at the stake as witches.

Firstly we should remember most of these stories began as seasonal celebrations, the feasts that mark the turns of the year, specifically the Winter Solstice (Yule, Midwinter’s Day); 1 February (Imbolc or the feast of the Goddess as Brigit, originally the first day of spring); the Vernal Equinox (Ostara); 1 May (Beltane, originally the first day of summer); the Summer Solstice (Litha or Midsummer’s Day); 1 August (Lughnassadh or Bron Trograne, originally the first day of autumn); the Autumnal Equinox (Mabon); and Hallowe’en or Samhain (the night the year dies, originally the first day of winter).

Secondly we should remember the two primary seasons, winter and summer, were anciently personified as the domains of male twins, the king/god of summer and the king/god of winter, perpetual rivals for the love of the Goddess, their mother and the “mother of all being,” personification of earth and cosmos. The Summer King died on the Summer Solstice, slain by his winter twin; the ballad John Barleycorn describes his fate. But he was reborn on the Winter Solstice. Eventually this anthropomorphization became a single god – aka “the dying god” and “the once-and-future king” representing the entire year, hence Samhain as “the night the year dies” and Midwinter’s Day as his rebirth. Hence too the Christianization of this ancient story, with Jesus as the year god and Satan as his rival. (Note that in the Celtic Church, violently suppressed by the Roman Papacy, Jesus was the newest incarnation of the dying god, while his mother – “Mary mother of god” – was the newest incarnation of the Goddess.)

The following is a ballad entitled Willy o’ Winsbury as sung by Pentangle’s Jacqui McShee, with my apology for the extremely infuriating fact TypePad does not allow the normal, line-by-line formatting of poetry:

The king had been a prisoner/ And a prisoner long in Spain/ And Willy of the Winsbury/ Has lain long with his daughter at home

From earthly perspective in the northern hemisphere, the sun turns south at Summer Solstice, then turns north again at Winter Solstice. Spain is to the south of Scotland, the source of this ballad. In other words, the sun is again traveling northward. According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition,  “Willie” is not just a foreshortened version of William – the name means strong-willed protector – but is also an archaic euphemism for penis.

"What ails you, what ails you, my daughter Janet?/ Why you look so pale and wan?/  Oh, have you had any sore sickness/ Or yet been sleeping with a man?"

Janet means “gift of god”; it is the time of Ostara; the land is pregnant with spring,

"I have not had any sore sickness/ Nor yet been sleeping with a man/ It is for you, my father dear/ For biding so long in Spain"

"Cast off, cast off your berry-brown gown/ You stand naked upon the stone/ That I may know you by your shape/ If you be a maiden or none"

Such songs as these were originally danced amidst the standing stones that often encircled stone altars. “Berry-brown gown” symbolizes our Mother Earth's bare brown winter soil and its winter cloak of dead brown leaves.

And she cast off her berry-brown gown/ She stood naked upon the stone/ Her apron was low and her haunches were round/ Her face was pale and wan

"Oh, was it with a lord or a duke or a knight/ Or a man of birth and fame? Or was it with one of my serving men/ That's lately come out of Spain?"

"No, it wasn't with a lord or a duke or a knight/ Nor a man of birth and fame/ But it was with Willy of Winsbury/ I could bide no longer alone"

And the king has called on his merry men all/ By thirty and by three/ Says, "Fetch me this Willy of Winsbury/ For hanged he shall be"

Significant math here: 30 by 3 yields a digital root of nine, as in “the nine-fold Muse.” another name of the Goddess. And the Vernal Equinox is three months – approximately 90 days – after the sun turns north at Winter Solstice.

But when he came the king before/ He was clad all in the red silk/ His hair was like the strands of gold/ His skin was as white as the milk

"And it is no wonder," said the king/ "That my daughter's love you did win/ For if I was a woman as I am a man/ My bedfellow you would have been

And will you marry my daughter Janet/ By the truth of your right hand?/ Oh, will you marry my daughter Janet?/ I'll make you the lord of my land"

"Oh yes, I will marry your daughter Janet/ By the truth of my right hand/ Oh yes, I will marry your daughter Janet/ But I'll not be the lord of your land"

In other words, he’ll not be the lord of winter.

And he's mounted her on a milk-white steed/ And himself on a dapple gray/ He has made her the lady of as much land/ As she shall ride in a long summer's day

Thus the "long summer's day" proclaims the solar supremacy of Janet, and the rule of the Goddess as a cosmic deity rather than merely the Earth Mother is again affirmed, albeit in a manner that conceals her ritual invocation from the Christians, thereby protecting the pagans from the unimaginable agony of death at the stake.

Another key fact, one that “Dancer” repeatedly implied but carefully avoided stating outright, is  the hitherto-unacknowledged extent to which the folk-music renaissance was obviously among the primary cultural influences that psychologically mothered both second-wave feminism and the Counterculture in general.

The related conclusion I dared not even suggest is that what might be termed “Goddess-magic” remained powerful even in its most thoroughly disguised forms. Magical or not, the archetypal woman of the traditional ballad – examples here, here and here – is the diametrical opposite of the oppressive archetypes of empty-headed, athletic-hero-dependent prom queens and submissive housewives that USian females of the 1950s and postwar ‘40s were relentlessly conditioned to believe were their gender’s only acceptable norms. And we should never overlook the fact the private-schooled, Ivy-League-graduate aristocrats who serve the ruling class as its intelligence analysts were unquestionably well-educated enough to recognize the spontaneous and often unwitting resurrection of the Goddess by an entire generation as a burgeoning threat to patriarchy – no doubt the underlying reason for Operation CHAOS (caps as in original). If I could see it all with nothing more than journalistic curiosity shaped by a solidly proletarian education bolstered by supplemental reading, there's no doubt an aristocracy carefully spoon-fed a vastly superior quality and depth of learning could do likewise.

Not surprisingly, the girls and women of allegedly extra-terrestrially inspired Nazi Germany were subjected to misogynistic conditioning notably similar to that which was (temporarily) overthrown here in USia by feminists and elsewhere on the planet by Marxians and democratic socialists.

But that brain-warping oppressiveness is now being everywhere restored with such vengeful permanence it is obvious the Goddess-centered anti-patriarchal revolution I joyfully predicted in "Dancer" will never be allowed. Here in USia, it was in fact slain in its infancy by the government and its nazi-minded auxiliaries. And now, a half-century later, every humanitarian effort our species ever attempted anywhere on the planet is methodically targeted for suppression. 

Thus it should surprise no one the Christonazis and their Neoconfederate allies are re-imposing maximized misogyny as a key part of their MAGA scheme. Their overseas allies are doing likewise in their own domains. Prohibiting abortion, banning birth control and formal persecution of alleged violators are just the opening atrocities of USian encouragement in  what amounts to a globally expanding pogrom against women.  

Nor have the Counterculture’s once-promisingly beneficent legacies remained unbesmirched by the aforementioned good/evil dichotomy that sooner or later seems to contaminate all mass movements with venomously contradictory identities which ultimately kill or at least neutralize a movement simply because they are too impossibly confusing for most humans to resolve. Once-presumably species-saving environmentalism has thus evolved an academic sub-cult that claims our only salvation is genocide, specifically the extermination – probably by bio-weaponry – of 90 percent of the human population, a thoroughly documented conviction that nevertheless remains unspeakable outside the hard right, never mind it has summered in USian environmental colleges at least since the early ‘80s. Feminism has meanwhile fallen prey to what might be termed the Valerie Solanas virus, to which I no doubt over-react because – just as Solanas would have murdered Andy Warhol and an associate – so would my birthmother have slain my father and me.

Both women were well educated and academically accomplished; in 1933 or ‘34 – I’ve forgotten which – my birthmother was one of the first three women to graduate from Michigan State with a BA degree in urban planning and landscape architecture. But while Solanas chose a day of no particular cosmic significance for her crimes – it was 3 June 1963 – my birthmother selected the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 for her premeditated effort at post-partum abortion and her spontaneous attempt to murder my father when he intervened to save my life. The best evidence indicates she planned my slaying to pay the Satanic debt she believed she had acquired by bargaining with a demon to ensure the pregnancy by which she ensnared my father in marriage.

Alleged supernatural elements aside, my birthmother’s thwarted but always potentially murderous anti-male hatred clearly mirrors the ideology of the Valerie Solanas faction of feminists – which my birthmother would surely have publicly embraced had she been less fanatical in her vindictively hypocritical struggle to preserve her lifelong lies of psychological normalcy and socioeconomic superiority. A recognizably similar constancy of broad-spectrum hatred fuels the wanna-be mega-holocaust deadliness of the salvation-by-genocide cult of environmentalists and the mass murders that are becoming part of everyday human life. Its apocalyptic intensity, of a magnitude seemingly without peer in our species’ experience, parallels the cannibalistic behavior of over-stressed and underfed lab rats. I believe it is a symptom of the global pandemic of self-obsessed moral imbecility that increasingly infects our entire species, the same affliction that enables the entire global ruling class – literally every .01 Percenter no matter whether capitalist or socialist – to justify waging their war of ecogenocidal extermination against our entire species. I've no doubt its truth is to be found in how imperialism perpetuates the morally imbecilic dynamics of patriarchy: just as some tribal chieftains and their modern-day quisling counterparts guaranteed their own survival by serving as their conquerors’ slavemasters, so might our masters seek to perpetuate their survival by functioning as vassals of extraterrestrial insectoid or reptilian masters, thus volunteering as the commanders, overseers, executioners and guards of slave-plantation/death-camp earth.

When I consider the impending loss of all human achievement atop the nullification of untold millennia of evolutionary advancement, I am left with a grief so bottomless no language can describe it. Nor can any quantity of tears relieve it. The Goddess herself – that is, our Mother Earth – is obviously dying;  the atrocities and disasters that increasingly beset us are undeniably both her proclamations of our irreversibly  looming extinction and – as she twitches and spasms like any other victim of rape and murder – her own increasingly violent agonies of death.  

LB/25 September-13 October 2023

-30-

(Even so, let us preface our reading by contemplating the blessings given us by our Mother Earth, whom survival commands us to defend; thus may Her radiance empower us to forever dispel the patriarchal darkness.)  

Photograph by KD ©2023: from a work-in-progress, an unabashedly worshipful embrace of our environment.

******************

THROUGH NO FAULT  of our own, most of us in the 99.9 Percent are unaware that white supremacists have  been attacking our constitution's 14th Amendment -- which overturned the Dred Scott Decision by granting U.S. citizenship to African Americans and anyone else "born or naturalized" in the USian states or territories -- since its ratification in 1868.  Nor are we to blame for not immediately recognizing the impending reversal of the 14th Amendment implicit in the undoubtedly permanent cancellation of our constitutional right to abortion by the literally limitless Christonazi vindictiveness enabled by the Supreme Court's lifetime appointments .  

We are deliberately imprisoned in  ignorance of such matters by a regimen of national censorship   -- about which more below -- that is so effective it is veritably invisible. Operating primarily in K-12 education, it long predates the malignant, publicly declared war against learning legitimized by the Hitler-disciple Donald Trump and metastasized throughout USia by the fanatically hateful rabble who believe him to have been "anointed by god" to  rule the USian Empire and conquer the world as their new führer.

Meanwhile Trump's "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is working overtime -- this with the ever-more-brazen assistance of its "Democratic" (sic) Party Fifth Column and a bipartisan, persons-of-color cabal of Clarence-Thomas emulators -- to enable the nation's white-supremacist electorate to restore the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision to the viciously exclusionary, implicitly genocidal definition of "we the people" intended by Chief Justice Roger Taney, his six concurring justices and all their pro-slavery supporters in 1857.

Quoth Taney, in what is formally known as Dred Scott v. Sandford: "The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?"

[...]

"The words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizens’ are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the ‘sovereign people,’ and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them…" (emphasis added).

In other words, Taney and his six adherent justices ruled that if it's not expressly stated in the Constitution, it is neither defensible -- or even legislatively obtainable -- as a constitutionally protected right. Which is precisely the so-called "originalism"  the Christonazified court weaponized  to revoke Roe v. Wade and -- often in a less obvious manner -- routinely employs in its relentless restoration of other white-supremacist, misogynistic, theocratic, homophobic, transphobic and aristocratic tyrannies we the gullible people of the 99.9 Percent foolishly imagined had been banished forever.   

It is therefore of utmost importance to note the not-in-the-constition parallels to the 19th Century exclusionary racist bigotry that spawned the Dred Scott decision are being imposed not only openly via the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization cancellation of a half-century of abortion rights,  but less obviously in both the Biden v. Nebraska prohibition of relief for student-loan debtors and in the potential imposition of nationwide racial segregation implicitly permitted by the awkwardly named, intentionally homophobic 303 Creative LLC et al v. Elenis et al decision.  (For revelation of the ruling-class financial hypocrisy revealed by the anti-student ruling and additional analysis of the total repeal of civil-rights legislation permitted by Creative v. Elenis, go here.)     

Here too are six more examples of the ongoing, already ruinously successful Christionazi campaign to nullify the 14th Amendment, again making the Dred Scott ruling the (permanent) de facto determination of who is -- and who is not -- (theoretically) entitled to the rights and privileges of USian citizenship:

• School Board in Missouri Revokes Its Anti-Racism Policy. The significance of this brazenly anti-Black decision is underscored by the Associated Press report: "The Francis Howell district is among Missouri’s largest, with 17,000 students, about 87% of whom are white...The vote...came during an often-contentious meeting...Racial issues remain especially sensitive in the St. Louis region, nine years after a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown during a street confrontation."
• Black Alabama Voters Prep for Another Fight after Christonazis Flout SCOTUS Ruling. See also Black Lawmakers Say Alabama GOP’s Proposed New Congressional Map Insults the Supreme Court.  AP quotes Rep. Prince Chestnut, a Democrat from Selma, as saying. “We’re  fighting the same battles that they were fighting 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, right here today,” Chestnut said. “Once again the (Republican) super majority decided that the voting rights of Black people are nothing that this state is bound to respect." In other words, Roger Taney lives.
• Did Trump Let 500,000 USians Die of Covid to Cut Them from the Voter Rolls? Thom Hartmann thinks so: "The most unreported story of the pandemic, the one that seems destined to be overlooked as histories are being written, is what Trump did when he learned the Covid coronavirus was largely killing Black and Hispanic people and mostly sparing whites. The moment he came to that realization, he completely altered the US response to the pandemic, leading to the unnecessary death of 300,000 to 500,000 Americans. Deaths that he and his advisors apparently believed (correctly) would be, outside of nursing home residents, disproportionately Black and Hispanic people. (Emphasis as in original.)
• An Overview of the Taney-Inspired White Supremacist Campaign to Purge Blacks from the Voter Rolls.  "Greg Palast estimates there were at least 4 million fully legal and appropriately registered voters purged just in 2022, although the history Pew documented from 2016-1018 suggests the number may have been over ten million. And (Republican-controlled) states are, as you read these words, vigorously purging voters from the rolls, predominantly in (Democrat-controlled) cities and among Black populations, which vote more than 80 percent Democratic."
• Jihadist-Dominated Hamtramck City Council Ousts Oust Two LGBTQ-Defenders from Its Human Rights Commission. (No, unfortunately this is not a scare-story. It's an AP report that perilously downplays the fact Muslim fanatics are every bit as hatefully dangerous as their Christonazi counterparts -- and that, in Creative v. Elenis,  the Christonazi cabal that rules SCOTUS for a lifetime allows jihadists the same rights of hateful exclusion it allows Christians, again targeting any minority not specifically protected by the USian constitution.)
• These Christian Nationalists Want to Stone Adulterers to Death. Think it can't happen here in USia? Please reconsider; that sort of self-inflicted delusion is  identical to the suicidal denial by which modern-minded Afghans  hoped for tolerance from the conquering Taliban. But now they know better; see for example,  Taliban Bans Beauty Salons in Afghanistan. In truth there are no limits to the sadism legitimized  by Abrahamic religion, the most vindictive forms of which are theocracies based on fundamentalist interpretations of Jewish, Christian or Muslim theology. Never forget: the selfsame hatred of women and sexual minorities that rules USian Christonazism  and Jihadist Islam also rules the most extreme forms of orthodox Judaism, which is a major (albeit mostly unreported) fear fueling the widespread Israeli opposition to  Netanayu's efforts to impose de facto theocracy.   
  

 (But let us first contemplate the Mother our survival commands us to defend; may Her radiance empower us to forever dispel the patriarchal darkness.)   

Photograph by KD ©2023: from a work-in-progress, an unabashedly worshipful embrace of our Mother Earth.

******************

I CANNOT REMEMBER, in all the decades I've followed such matters, a more relentlessly disturbing -- and not infrequently terrifying -- outpouring of news reports, whether from within the USian imperial homeland and its European colonies or from an oft-provoked Russian Federation that appears increasingly on the brink of precisely the sort of internal chaos that could make a world-ending, human-species-exterminating thermonuclear apocalypse unavoidable.

Meanwhile political conditions here in the Disunited States have deteriorated to such a depth of vindictively inflicted hopelessness that Hitler Wannabe Donald Trump's infamous characterization of non-white nations as "shithole countries" unquestionably now applies at least as accurately to the alleged "land of the free," wherein working-class existence is ever-more-obviously defined by a methodically engineered and maliciously imposed regime of  steadily intensifying socioeconomic and political oppression. Thus our tragically afflicted nation becomes a toxic variant of  the "rough beast, its hour come round at last" foretold by William Butler Yeats in "The Second Coming," revealing itself to be a relentlessly sadistic remake of Caligula’s Rome, Marie Antoinette’s France and Nicholas II’s Russia in which bottomless moral imbecility and irremediable corruption grant an infinitely evil aristocracy the absolute freedom to do whatever it goddamn well pleases to any and all of the rest of us.

Here – each of these reports chosen specifically for the fact it has seemingly managed to escape the ever-more-oppressive USian censorship apparatus – are 13 examples of the atrocities we now accept as the defining aspects of our daily routine, the most recent afflictions in an ever-metastasizing plague of horrors that in a just and mindful world would have long ago provoked revolution:

• Skyrocketing State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism. Biden the Beguiler and a growing cabal of state attorneys general are radically escalating the Trumpite/Christonazi war against Marxians, other genuine socialists, environmentalists, anarchists, feminists and activists of the Black Lives Matter, pro-choice, LGBTQ and Antifa communities. See also my comment-thread remarks, below.

• Nazis dominate US law enforcement, secret-police and intelligence agencies. Yup; eactly as in Weimar Germany before the Original Nazis were given free reign.

• Does the lifetime-appointed cabal of Christonazi fanatics who tyrannize us via the Supreme Court mean white-supremacist Christians can again refuse to serve people of color? Sure looks that way.

• Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s partial student loan forgiveness plan, 43 million borrowers denied debt relief. See also my comment-thread remarks, below.

• US Supreme Court majority abolishes racial preferences in university admission. What better way to re-whiten the USian imperial ruling class?

• The privatization of public education in the US, backed by billionaires including Betsy DeVos, is accelerating. From the ruling-class perspective, the great advantage of private schools is their absolute freedom from constitutional interference, specifically the fact they can teach anything they choose and exclude whomever they wish.

• Justice Department report fails to substantiate the suicide narrative of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody.In other words, nothing in our maximally mobsterized milieu challenges the overwhelming probability he was clipped to keep him from publicly naming his perverted peers.

• Bathyscaphe billionaires get massive global rescue effort; refugees left to drown. Conditioned to self-obsessed vacuousness, our species’ aristocrat-worshiping Moronic Multitude emulates the moral imbeciles they adore.

• Witnesses say Greek navy sank refugee ship.Plausibly undeniable given the Greek government’s already proven history of anti-refugee genocide.

• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis campaigns on “shoot on sight” anti-immigrant policy. When in USia, do with guns as the Greeks do with naval vessels.

• Trump (Finally) Labeled the Nazi He Is.At last, a truth-telling for which I have long argued.

• Details on the Russian coup attempt we won’t find in mainstream media. A vital analysis if we’re to understand the apocalyptic hazard.  

• The French working class battles murderous police and ever-more-relentless state tyranny. France, a presumptive USian Empire puppet. boils over in furious rebellion: includes details we’re denied by imperial censors.

Though the case is admittedly mostly circumstantial, it cannot be said too often that 90 years of evidence proves far beyond judicially required certainty our plight dates from the 1933 Bankers' Plot, the collaborative effort in which the Wall Street aristocrats conspired with Hitler and Mussolini to nazify the nation into what their genetic and/or ideological descendants have made it today, the de facto Fourth Reich, the ultimate model of patriarchy as a theocratically brain-policed slave state, the global arsenal for terminal apocalypse and the ecogenocidally misogynistic reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.

*****

From the Comment Threads of Other Websites:

As cited above, on Skyrocketing State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism.

Thank you, Mr. Gould-Wartofsky and LA Progressive, for this superbly analytical report. Meanwhile those who claim there is anything genuinely "leftist" about the present-day "Democratic" (sic) Party -- which in post-JFK operational truth has repeatedly proven itself to be nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- are either tragically ignorant of genuinely leftist ideologies or are obediently parroting a Trumpite Big Lie.

***

As cited above, on   Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s partial student loan forgiveness plan, 43 million borrowers denied debt relief.

Predictably, Biden the Beguiler's intentionally fraudulent pledge of student-loan debt relief has proven itself yet another classic example of "change we can believe in" -- the most malevolent Big Lie ever fed the terrifyingly gullible USian electorate.

The pivotal, ultimately damning fact in this ongoing charade -- in which the "Democratic" (sic) Party desperately seeks to maintain its ever-more-transparent disguise as something other than the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party's Fifth Column -- is there is no possible way even the most delusional of the Beguiler's advisors could have imagined the Christonazi cabal that now tyrannizes the nation via the Supreme Court would let any student-debt-relief plan stand. 

Precisely as Comrade Grey points out, the Beguiler ensured  the Christonazis had -- and have -- "the best conditions for them to block the program," which they will obviously continue to exploit to maximum ruling class advantage.

At least as important as the financial considerations cited by Sebouh80 is the political fact any truly effective debt relief would be tantamount to manumission from the lifetime wage slavery that effectively prohibits any and all meaningful anti-capitalist resistance by the debtors. It does so by the constant threat of retaliatory job loss underscored by the fact student loans cannot be discharged via bankruptcy.

This method of prohibiting any such activism, which dates to the Johnson and Nixon regimes' efforts to suppress opposition to the Southeast Asian War, is in fact the original, underlying purpose of runaway higher education costs.

***

Wisconsin’s “Democratic” (sic) Governor Signed Largest Private School Voucher Boost in 30 Years

This is merely additional (irrefutable) proof the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party is nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

(Don't forget it was Wisconsin also spawned Sen. Joseph McCarthy, purgemaster of the c. '50s-'60s persecution not only of Communists but -- in truth -- anyone whose politics were to the left of fascism, all intellectuals especially included.)

***

“Twitter Files” Journalist Matt Taibbi Claims IRS and FBI Retaliation

How many times must it be said? The USian "mainstream media" propaganda machine -- social media included -- is the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

And exactly like the Third Reich's Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (RMVP), its present-day descendant in the Nazi-war-criminal abetted de facto Fourth Reich is ultimately under the command-and-control of the respective nation's secret police, in each instance weaponized to serve the infinite evil of the ruling tyrants.

***

Of Course Greta Met with Zelinsky

I wonder if Ms. Thunberg realizes the tragic extent to which she has been co-opted by the USian imperial brain-police apparatus -- or if she does not, how she will respond when she awakens to the bitter truth of our now-eternal powerlessness. (Because I have enormous respect for her passion, I see her as an innocent in the same way we of the old '60s Counterculture were innocents, smug [and therefore utterly vulnerable] in the foolish belief our righteousness protected us from contamination by the Infinite Evil that has threatened the world since the advent of patriarchy and which -- with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- achieved the terminally misogynistic ecogenocidal omnipotence over our Mother Earth and all her children that was always the patriarchs' ultimately apocalyptic purpose.)

***

5 Elements of Fascism and Their Exact Expression in Trump, the White Christian Nationalist Movement He Leads and the “Republican” (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party He Rules

With respect to Mr. Reich -- he is definitely cognizant of the threat implicit in today's "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- I believe he errs in labeling its ecogenocidal toxicity "fascism." Instead -- especially given the admiration today's so-called "Republicans" express for Hitler -- it is clearly an USian variety of nazism (lower-case "n") -- particularly given its notion of Western-European ancestry/non-Jewish whites as the planet's master-race. There is also the fact it has been credibly reported Trump's favorite book is Mein Kampf -- reports surely confirmed by how the strategies and tactics employed not only by Trump but also by his rivals within the party's dominant like-minded faction are obviously so derived. In this context, it seems to me a grave downplaying of the threat to call our adversaries and their lethal intent as anything other than nazis and nazification.

***

Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023): Chronicler of American carnage

I knew McCarthy in East Tennessee at the University of Tennessee c. 1959 and c. 1962-1964 while he was living in the Sevier County back country and writing The Orchard Keeper.

Though nominally he denounced any and all intellectually focused  conversation as mere "holding forth," in what I recall as our one genuinely "serious" chat, he repeatedly and emphatically cited Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as the most important (and most infinitely damning) text  our species would ever publish. When I replied that Carson's disclosures might be for what was then called the conservation movement what Uncle Tom's Cabin had been to abolitionism,  he  said that could never happen because our species was too pridefully ignorant and too sociopathically self-obsessed.

Point being, if we are to understand his extreme negativity -- which most assuredly is not to justify it -- I believe we have to look at Carson's influence (which has since morphed into the ruling-class-environmentalists' academic  demand for exterminating 90 percent of the working class population), and the fact that concurrent with the publication of Silent Spring, the Tennessee Valley Authority, his father's pride and joy (and my own father's favorite, sometimes tears-in-his-eyes example of beneficent socialism), TVA was already under relentlessly savage attack from the Neoconfederate and proto-Christonazi right. Meanwhile the "Democratic" (sic) Party's alleged efforts to defend and preserve TVA -- especially after the coup of 22 November 1963 -- were ever-more-obviously nothing but charades.

Utterly deprived of humanitarian resources by Nazi-war-criminal-abetted capitalist   censorship, terrorism and weaponization of religion, McCarthy's work thus exemplifies the only aesthetic tolerable to the USian ruling class. 

Afterthoughts: (1)-I should have added that McCarthy’s apocalyptic negativity – albeit far more lyrically expressed than the prideful ignorance and methodically shrunken vocabulary of the Moronic Majority nominally permit– is precisely the helplessly subjugated, ever-more-forcibly conditioned hopelessness by which our self-anointed divine-right masters seek to guarantee no one will ever again dare rise up to challenge their ecogenocidal patriarchal omnipotence; (2)-While the bourgeois environmentalists demand for extermination of 90 percent of the global working class has since been trivialized as a right-wing conspiracy theory, it is in fact anything but. See for example the full text of one of Eric Pianka's speeches and the accompanying commentary as cited by Wikipedia, here. There is also the fact a few of the wealthier students at Huxley College, Western Washington State University's  environmental-science school, were already openly advocating such a final solution c. 1982-83, when I was living in Bellingham. (3)-I err in attributing the call for genocidal reduction of the 99.9 Percent exclusively to the influence of Silent Spring; Carson’s work is actually one of two such goads. The other is The Population Bomb, by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, which was published in 1968. A third factor is of course the sneering, Marie-Antoinette-caliber contempt with which the USian aristocracy – the academic elite most assuredly included – regards the 99.9 Percent, particularly our caste-sisters and caste-brothers who lack college degrees and/or work in fields wherein higher education is not required.

LB/30 June-2 July 2023

-30-

Three Utterly Terrifying News Reports

Biden Shows His True (Christonazi) Colors on Abortion: This past winter, the Biden Regime appeased the far right by leveling severe charges against abortion rights defenders. Now, the activists targeted in the federal crackdown are also facing legal attacks from an anti-abortion group and Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. In addition to the federal criminal charges — which carry a sentence of 12 years in prison — Florida’s attorney general sued two of the activists for damages. Heartbeat of Miami, a “crisis pregnancy center,” is also absurdly alleging that all four activists were engaged in a conspiracy. The purported crime, the conspiracy, the federal charges? Spray painting.

COMMENT: once again – this time by disclosing the hatred of women it shares with its pretend opponents– the “Democratic” (sic) Party reveals its post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the “Republican” (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Note too how this story was completely suppressed by the mainstream media propaganda apparatus. Now we know why the Democrats refused to protect abortion rights when they had the congressional power to do so.

*****

Drone Attack on Moscow Aims to Escalate US-NATO War with Russia. On Tuesday, Ukraine launched its second drone strike on Moscow to date and the first targeting civilian homes. Eight fixed-wing drones were launched, of which at least one crashed into an apartment building. Tuesday’s attack on the capital city of Russia is a signal that, following last week’s G7 meeting—at which the US announced it would send F-16 fighters—the imperialist powers have decided to bring the war ever more directly into Russian territory. These attacks are aimed at provoking a retaliatory response by Russia, which could then be used to justify a further escalation by NATO, including the potential entry of NATO troops directly into the conflict.

COMMENT: I fear this thrusts the threat of thermonuclear apocalypse well beyond that posed by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

*****

U.S. Wars Since 2001 Have Killed 4.5 Million People. The Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates that at least 4.5 million people have died as a result of the wars launched by the United States since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

COMMENT: tyrannical empires are ultimately defined by their body counts, and with its genocidal campaigns against First Nations tribes and peoples of color, the USian Empire has already murdered multitudes more than Hitler;s Third Reich.

*****

In Tacoma as Everywhere Else in the Empire: No Escape 

Tacoma Art Museum board opts for more union-busting. WSLC vows continued solidarity with TAM Workers United: ‘We have defeated these tactics before, and we will defeat them again.’ It’s been seven months since the workers at Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) announced that they have formed a wall-to-wall union (TAM Workers United), as part of AFSCME Council 28. They are seeking livable wages, safe working conditions, transparency and accountability from management, and respect on the job. But despite support from all departments and 90 percent of union-eligible staff, the museum’s administrators have refused to recognize the union.

COMMENT: the aristocratic, anti-working-class vindictiveness of USian art patrons – something I know all too well from my years in New York City – should surprise no one. Hence my most heartfelt support for the TAM workers’ efforts to unionize.

*****

An Exceptionally Vital Report on the True Origin of Capitalism 

Origins of debt: Michael Hudson reveals how financial oligarchies in Greece & Rome shaped our world. Economist Hudson discusses the origin of Western debt-based societies and the research in his book, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point (Islet: 2023).

COMMENT: based on this interview, the best explanation I’ve yet found of the origins of capitalism, and therefore a book I intend to buy.

*****

Nine Comment-Thread Posts from Other Websites:
(Some unavoidably repetitive due to the stubborn permanence of the crises that afflict us.)

We Are In for 19 Months of Relentless, Insultingly Transparent Spin

NOTE: Popular Resistance and Patrick Lawrence of Consortium News err gravely (and in Lawrence’s case perhaps deliberately try to deceive us) by equating Biden to the Soviet Union’s Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko; a far more politically accurate comparison of Biden is to the Weimar Republic’s senile president, Paul von Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler as chancellor and thereby enabled all the horrors that followed. I lead with this comment because – given that the USian Empire remains the global hegemon, by far the most ecogenocidally powerful tyrant in our species’ existence – it is pivotal in explaining all that obtains.

History -- the one subject we USians are methodically conditioned to avoid as if it were a no-antidote poison -- proves the "Democratic" (sic) Party's only (post-JFK} functions are preserving the Big Lie of USian democracy while serving the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column. Thus Biden the Beguiler's combination of bottomless corruption, geriatric senility and now-closeted racism make him the capitalist ruling-cabal's perfect choice to ensure the 2024 elections complete the Empire's nazification.

Those who dare examine the (ever-more-irrefutable) historical evidence will discover our final passage to that now-inescapable denouement began in 1934 when the Bankers' Plot perpe-traitors -- many of them fathers and grandfathers of the Empire's present owners -- were granted federal immunity for their treasonous conspiracy to make USian industry and natural resources the enabling elements for world conquest -- today's "full-spectrum dominance" -- by what would become the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Failing that -- and no doubt inspired by the infinitely evil genius of Hitler and Josef Goebbels -- our relentlessly misogynistic white-supremacist rulers seized Madison Avenue's mass-marketing techniques to fuel their retaliatory scheme of slow-motion, multi-generational nazification. In 1938 they began co-opting fundamentalist Christianity, reconditioning it into a reliably nazified auxiliary. By 1944 they were adopting upper-echelon Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at arms. Then, "as the night the day," followed the 1963 coup and all that has come after, including the sparks of white Moronic Majority racism cunningly blown into unquenchable conflagration by the Obama presidency's innumerable "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals and thus exploding into Trumpite Christonazism.

Yes, especially because of its implicit premeditation, this is an utterly terrifying hypothesis. But as Sun Tzu tells us, it is suicide to underestimate our enemy. Yes, most of the evidence is circumstantial. But USian juries routinely impose death sentences on far less. And this is the only  hypothesis that fully explains both the Republican conversion to unabashed nazism and the enabling Democrat paradox of progressive promises repeatedly asserted yet infuriatingly broken -- the ultimate form of the Big Lie weaponized to impose terminal nazification -- terminal not just to our nation, but to our entire species as well.

*****

US Announces Plans to Send F-16 Fighter Jets to Ukraine

Like the “Democratic” (sic) Party itself, Biden the Beguiler always lies to the citizenry.

The hopelessly gullible Moronic Majority reliably behaves as if the lies were truths, then does no more than whimper in craven submission when the falsehoods are overturned by obviously premeditated socioeconomic atrocities or apocalyptic escalations.

Indeed such lying is a pattern that -- with the post-JFK Democrats now functioning solely as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- has become as predictable as sunrise.

That's why -- just as we now know the Beguiler lied with his implicit promises not to escalate the Ukraine War into a greater conflict (and thus most likely into a thermonuclear apocalypse that will exterminate our species and reduce our Mother Earth back to a bug planet), we know he's also lying when he pledges the debt-limit fight won't be weaponized to further savage the working class.

***

Zelensky’s Wartime Visit to Berlin and Germany’s New “Drive to the East”

Apropos the defiant resurrection of German militarism, it is undoubtedly of great semiotic significance the Bundeswehr has already brought back the traditional jackboots -- albeit modified by a cynically labeled "democracy buckle" -- as their parade-uniform footwear. Hence the goose-step will no doubt soon follow. As my long-dead paternal grandmother, a Scot, so often said, "the Germans are a fine people -- as long as you don't allow them military uniforms."

Hence my clenched-fist salute to Comrade Stern, though he omits the historical fact the already nazified USian ruling class made its wholly owned U.S. government a de facto puppet of German foreign policy by its eager adoption of legions of Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms -- the premeditated post-World-War-II atrocity for which not only our entire species but our Mother Earth herself will soon pay Hitler's terminal, better-dead-than-defeated price.

Unless, of course, there is a truly global uprising by the working class…

*****

Inflation Drives US Household Debt to Record $17 Trillion

And our potentially deadly plight -- that is, the plight of the entire USian working class, 99.9 percent of the domestic population -- will become infinitely worse once Biden the Beguiler completes the "Democratic" (sic) Party's cunningly pre-scripted debt-limit betrayal, thereby  enabling the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party to complete the genocidal destruction of the socioeconomic "safety-net" remnants long targeted by the ruling-class.

But it's really nothing new; it's just another (terminal) example of "change we can believe in" -- the most malevolently destructive Big Lie ever pimped to the hopelessly gullible USian Moronic Majority.

*****

Manufactured Crisis over US Debt Ceiling Sets Stage for Bipartisan Assault on Social Security and Medicare 

NOTE: see updates at US Budget Deal Will Accelerate Savage Cuts to Public Education and Biden-McCarthy Austerity Debt Ceiling Bill Moves to Vote in Congress, also background at  White House Debt Limit Talks: a Manufactured, Bipartisan Conspiracy to Make Workers Pay for War

Given that the capitalist nations are now ruled by a cabal that amounts to a de facto nazi international, we dare not dismiss the possibility a carefully scripted USian default is intended as weapon of economic genocide -- that is, to deliberately inflict murderous  hardship of genocidal magnitude on the entire global working class. This would at least partly accomplish the stated ruling class goal of eliminating "surplus workers" even as  the inconceivably obscene wealth of the .01 Percent and their vassals would, precisely as intended, insulate the ruling class from any collateral damage. I dearly hope I am wrong -- that this is not the ruling-class plan --  but history is unequivocal in its proof there is absolutely no limit to the horrors the ruling class will inflict on us in its quest for eternal omnipotence.

***

Biden’s Debt Ceiling Betrayal Is a Democratic Party Tradition

This analysis by Margaret Kimberly exemplifies why Black Agenda Report should be regular reading for every real leftist in the USian Empire. It is, hands-down, the best (domestically written) political reporting on the Internet, its courageous accuracy and fearless truthfulness a powerful antidote to the Big Lie propaganda in which we would otherwise be drowning. Qualitatively, it is equal to the international reporting and analysis provided by the World Socialist Web Site -- thus my heartfelt gratitude to PR for regularly reprinting BAR's material.  

*****

Atlanta: We Do Not Need a School for Assassins

This is excellent, courageous reporting that is not available in USia's so-called "mainstream media," which -- let us not forget -- is actually the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, serving the de facto Fourth Reich of the USian Empire in exactly the same way the Goebbels group served Hitler's Third Reich.

As a near-lifelong professional journalist -- my sometimes award-winning career on newspapers and magazines began in my 16th year (and I remain somewhat active in the field even now at age 83) -- I recognize reportage of that quality and social-documentary photography produced with equal skill and fearlessness have become the defining qualities of the by-lined group's work.

Moreover, such top-notch journalism is desperately needed by the USian 99.9 Percent. That's why I dearly wish the news collective that radically demeans and discredits itself as a "Unicorn Riot" would dump its self-pitying, implicitly powerless,  Sesame-Streetish name and replace it with a label that would prompt a vastly larger number of people to take its vital work seriously.

*****

Myths and Reality: the Power of Nonviolence

Ms. Morrow speaks a truth, but history proves it is only partially true, entirely conditional on the ability of our foes to regard us as fellow humans.

The primary exception -- as relevant in today's USian Empire as it was in yesteryear's Weimar Germany -- is that non-violence is useless against nazis, whether Original N.S.D.A.P. Nazis,  their many Franco/Pinochet variants. or the USian Christonazis who disguise themselves as members of the "Republican" and "Democratic" parties. 

Let us not forget that nazism -- too often euphemized as "fascism" to downplay its horrors -- is the ultimate fulfillment of both the capitalist ethos of omnipotent greed and the patriarchal ethos of misogynistic omnipotence from which capitalism is directly descended.

All nazis are thus serial-killer-minded moral imbeciles who revel in the ecogenocidal embrace of infinite evil. As Neville Chamberlain learned at Munich, as the White Rose Society learned in the Third Reich, as the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement learned in the USian fatherland and as Harry Turtledove pointed out in the short story entitled "The Last Article" (for which google), nonviolence actually encourages the nazis to ever more deadly atrocities.

Thus too, the only historically proven antidote to nazism was the Red Army, the permanent absence of which most likely damns the 99.9 Percent to lifelong slavery, dooms our entire species to greedy self-extinction and condemns our Mother Earth to reduction back to a bug planet.

*****

SCOTUS Case May Slash Regulation of Everything

I am not certain which is more ecogenocidally terminal  to ourselves, our species and our Mother Earth -- the Christonazi  judicial cabal that is dutifully following the Mein Kampf blueprint in reducing the USian Empire to the de facto Fourth Reich (much as Hitler's N.S.D.A.P.- nazified judiciary reduced the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich), or the pseudo-left's cowardly pretense there remains any doubt at all about our morally imbecilic Masters' malevolent intent.  

Each -- Christonazi activism and the pseudo-left's cravenly pacifist fraudulent indecisiveness  --  is a pivotal factor in the terminally apocalyptic destruction of  USian democratic process the Empire's clandestinely nazified  owners have been slowly but methodically  imposing since they were given free reign by the coup of 22 November 1963.

The third factor in our nation's permanent reduction to an electronically policed open-air death camp, our own reduction to inescapable slavery and the ultimate, ultimately misogynistic reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet by the USian reich's wars of global conquest is of course the U.S. Moronic Majority, which is already hopelessly subjugated to unquestioning submissiveness and thus is no more to be blamed than its 1930s German counterpart.

Nevertheless the circumstantial but infinitely damning evidence remains obvious to the dwindling few of us -- mostly the tiny remnant of USia's once-thriving Marxian community -- who yet dare look: first the immunity granted the nazification-minded perpe-traitors of the Bankers' Plot; then the .01 Percent's infiltration,  co-optation and conversion of white fundamentalist Christianity into a fanatically nazified auxiliary; next the recruitment of innumerable Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms;  finally the murder of our president and all that -- "as the night the day" -- relentlessly follows.

What dooms us is the absence of Lev Bronstein and Vladimir Ulyanov, without whom it is ever-more-obvious there can never again be a working-class awakening.

*****

Continued Fiction? Yes, But Not This Time. (Sorry)
I’ve been so overwhelmed by our ever-more-wretched political reality -- not to mention a passel of surprise medical bills -- I haven’t been able to get the next installment past the conceptual phase. But I promise it's taking shape.

LB/31 May 2023

-30-

W. Eugene Smith, the late world-class humanitarian photojournalist, in Seattle c. 1976. A  fanatical Ansel Adams cultist had just shouted both of  us down for attempting to discuss how the nation's then-skyrocketing inflation was locking lower-income people out of the technology required for professional-quality photography.  The critic, an obviously wealthy white male, damned us for  "attempting to politicize art" -- a nasty, morally imbecilic  response that drew applause from everyone else in the room -- astounding Mr. Smith, but again confirming  what I already knew to be Seattle's most definitive trait, an existential-nazi viciousness compounded by the most hateful, often violent xenophobia I have ever encountered.   

*****

A POTENTIAL BOSS once asked me why I outspokenly affirm the intellectual value of mythology, archaeology, history and sociology even as I vehemently damn the study of philosophy as nothing more than an obnoxiously esoteric form of  self-aggrandizing academic mental masturbation.

What I told him was the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had proven Moses, Jesus and Muhammad to be malevolent enablers of ecogenocidal self-destruction. The Bomb, I hypothesized, is the One Percent’s ultimate terror weapon; it is their declaration of permanent war against humanitarianism itself. It reduces the formal study of philosophy back to modern counterparts of its medieval irrelevance, debating the number of angels that might occupy the head of a pin.

Asked to elaborate, I said the only metaphysics the Bomb had not reduced to irrelevance were Zen, Taoism, its First Nations counterparts and the resurrected paganism growing out of the merger of the Gaia Hypothesis with the folk renaissance’s resurrection of pre-patriarchal liturgical fragments and Robert Graves’ scholarly propagation of matriarchy’s earth-centered consciousness.

I later learned my truthful responses cost me my role as a leading, obviously qualified supplicant for a better paying editorial job. But I answered with equal honesty when a fellow comment-thread-respondent on a Scheerpost essay asked what seemed to me a closely related  question: "Where was Marx wrong?"

While I wrote my answer pretty much off the top of my head, my passion for scholarship compelled me to began re-investigating my own conclusion. Several days of research cemented that hypothesis into Occam-Razored certainty the radiation sickness generated by the atomic terror-bombing of Japan must now be reckoned to include our loss -- conceivably forever -- of the rarely acknowledged but nevertheless vital existential optimism that has obviously motivated human achievement long before our species became recognizable as such.

I began writing this concluding installment of the intended three-part series accordingly.

But then all this work was destroyed by an allegedly "impossible" word-processing crash, and my failed attempts at reconstructing it from memory eventually forced the entire effort back to the proverbial drawing board. The result is the radically pared-down, apologetically tardy result you are reading now.

*****

MOST OF US know from experience our species’ survival requires the solidarity of positive mindfulness, which paradoxically includes the seemingly negative recognition of the worst that might happen countered by relentless determination to use our proven abilities to transcend whatever awfulness might otherwise prevail.

Such mindfulness is thus the diametrical opposite of Barack the Betrayer’s intentionally misleading proclamation of the "audacity of hope," an astoundingly brazen Big Lie intended to minimize the evil of subjugation by delusional redefinition of our cowardly acceptance of its atrocities as virtuous steps toward  "change we can believe in," the far more malignant Big Lie that is statistically proven the One Percent’s most effective weapon for reducing voter turnout.

Our resultant realization of the imbecility of hope -- our species’ loss of positive mindfulness -- is one of the foremost symptoms of this hitherto-undiagnosed complication of the radiation sickness the Bomb has inflicted on us all. Its agonies are infinitely worsened by the incurable gangrene of self-inflicted terminal climate change. But the Bomb not only robbed us all of our ancient ability to think our way out of ultimate crises; it filled the resultant void with the negative mindfulness of the death-camp, whether eternally or not remains to be seen.

*****

MARXISM’S IRREFUTABLY PROVEN socioeconomic projections are based on breakthrough scholarship that also brought about some of the earliest academic recognition of the matriarchal proto-communism that sustained our species through its first approximately 194,000 years.

Moreover, the earliest histories of Marxian theory point to the likelihood Karl Marx’s intent -- Frederich Engel’s too -- included some degree of formal restoration of our original nature-centered solidarity, hence the Marxian opposition to organized religion.¹ That’s why I will always be perplexed by Marxism’s choice to ignore archaeology’s proof of the ecogenocidal, end-of-history violence of patriarchy’s endless war against Nature. Patriarchal invasion and conquest destroyed our earthly Eden, maliciously slandered its Gaian goddess as the source of all evil and began its deliberate reversal of human evolution by falsely re-branding our Mother Earth as our species’ mortal enemy. But Marxism chose to redefine these apocalyptic evils as essential stages of human development, unavoidable steps in an evolutionary process that made humanitarian socialism the historically inevitable liberation of the entire 99 Percent and thus eventually of all humanity.

In other words, Marxism’s one terminal error is its irrational belief in the Christian, ultimately patriarchal definition of progress, which the Cassandras of feminism have been desperately warning us for at least a century is the apocalyptic banishment of any and all commitment to humanitarian advancement.

It is in this context we encounter real-world proof of the tyranny-preserving function of doublethink -- a truth hidden by a malicious lie, a contradiction in terms, a pearl concealed by pig dung. It is exemplified by the Christians’ two-part claim our species’ history (A), reveals an observable “moral arc,” which indeed it does, and (B), the all-time Big Lie this arc bends toward "justice" -- which it most assuredly does not, the terror-tabooed truth we painfully learn only if we dare study the approximately 6,000-year historical timeline of ever-more-deadly patriarchal atrocities.

What we also discover is prior to the patriarchal conquest, our species’ technological and socioeconomic progress walked mostly hand-in-hand, one nurturing the other in a symbiosis of humanitarian betterment based ultimately on oneness with nature and kinship within the family of Mother Earth.

Matriarchy was societal motherhood symbolized by its variously named Goddess: its universal quest for better living -- not merely as sustainable food supplies, indoor plumbing and central heating, but the relentless improvement of human health and the infrastructured time both to advance our Stonehenge-based understanding of our relationship to the cosmos and relish the sensual wisdom that grants female and male equal potential of maximum sexual fulfillment. As with motherhood itself, matriarchy’s "moral arc" bent toward more humanely fulfilling futures, its ethos epitomized by First Nations’ memories of beneficent visitors from beyond the sunrise, the global reach of the Minoan trading commonwealth and the game-park wealth of the Iroquoian Confederacy, for which, in lieu of the destroyed links, see the recommended reading again appended to this text.

Patriarchy’s consequences irrefutably prove it matriarchy’s diametrical opposite. The "greatest tyrant" competition at the core of patriarchal history defines it as the self-obsessed, morally imbecilic, serial-killer minded, definitively ecogenocidal quest by individual males for the sadistic, rape-everything omnipotence attributed to their allegedly divine male idols (double entendre intended). Patriarchal violence terminated the matriarchal partnership of humanitarianism and technological advance; it divided these former evolutionary partners into murderously hateful foes; it reduced "progress" to the perpetual refinement and weaponization of the technology and psychology of everlasting war.

The Bomb is patriarchy’s species-terminating orgasm, its mono-orgasmic final solution to the terrifying and hatefully envied multiply-orgasmic female, its mushroom-shaped ejaculations flaming upward from the definitively Abrahamic miasma of terminal climate change as apocalyptic declarations of our Masters' omnipotence.

What history now bends toward -- what the patriarchal timeline has always bent toward throughout its ongoing 6,000 year effort of apocalyptic nazification -- is ever-more-inescapable tyranny on the mandatory global Trail of Terrified Tears to extinction.

Patriarchy’s preservation thus requires constant application of ececogenocidal force.

Which in turn mandates destruction of every trace of our humanitarian achievements, lest they inspire further outbreaks of influential feminist rage, as when a wildcat strike by all five thousand of the women employed by Petrograd’s Lesnoy Textile Works on 8 March 1917 triggered the entire Russian Revolution.

*****

THOSE APOCALYPSE-ENABLERS who yet respond to our Masters’ ever-more-obvious malignancy by claiming such cleverly schemed malice "is just too outrageous to believe" should take note of the fact the obliteration of any and all history favorable to the 99 Percent is precisely what the Nixon/Kissinger/Pinochet triumvirate of terror imposed, albeit with less-than-total success, on pre-Internet Chile:

"The regime’s aim was more than the violent repression of the (Unido Popular) and the left. It wanted to ensure that nothing remained for the next generation to remember or be proud of—none of the cultural, social, and economic achievements made under Allende. Pinochet undertook a policy of systemic eradication of everything that immortalized the thousand days of the UP. The junta did more than carry out crimes against the Chilean people, for it attempted to create a year zero, devoid of a Marxist past. Chilean history became before and after the coup."

Since then, the ongoing reduction of our species’ libraries of printed manuscripts to concentrated collections of electrons -- that is, from intentionally preservative media to storage intentionally vulnerable to flip-of-the-switch destruction -- renders all our species’ wisdom and knowledge readily redactable.

Patriarchy’s desperation to suppress all evidence of humanitarian potential -- even if our Masters are miraculously prevented from launching their thermonuclear Final Solution -- means any of us who benefited from the now-prohibited education that nurtured rational thinking or are old enough to remember vividly the era of national hopefulness borne of the New Deal are now at ever-greater risk for extermination.

Typically we’re murdered not by now-unfashionable death camps but cunningly euphemism-protected mechanisms of slow-motion genocide -- homelessness, denial of welfare and food stamps, abolition of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and methodical destruction of any other remnants of our species’ now-prohibited positive mindfulness.

We are thus imprisoned by inescapable surveillance, our sadistic overseers’ whips the electronic media Big-Lie-pimped as tools of personal liberation but which are now revealed as the invisible concentration-camp fencing its critics, myself among them, always assumed it to be.

*****

LET US THEN briefly review some exceptionally vivid photographic documentation of patriarchy’s apocalyptic consequences: fire and drought; the climate-change devastation inflicted most recently on Pakistan, Puerto Rico and Florida; and above all else the deliberate intensification of all these horrors. Note the ecogenocidal competition forced on all nations by patriarchy, exemplified by how China has overthrown the ecogenocidally top-seeded USian Empire as the planet’s champion polluter; note too the bring-on-doomsday message of ecogenocidal sabotage, as in the greenhouse-gassing of the world with methane.

The obvious symptoms of our plight -- what military intelligence correctly refers to as "enemy indications" -- begin with the fact our global Masters claimed inability to organize collective amelioration of climate change is becoming our species' terminal Big Lie.

It is proven so by their mutual rejection of their historically proven capacity for successfully cooperative international achievements -- a bring-on-the-apocalypse decision the apocalyptic magnitude of which is exemplified by contrasting the ruling-class successes of the international space station with our Masters’ terminally deadly refusal to mobilize against our looming extinction. The terminal failure of USian democracy -- its relentless march toward white male supremacy climaxed by the irreversible Christonazi tyrannies methodically inflicted on us by the cabal of lifetime-appointed führers that now and forever gives the U.S. Supreme Court the permanent omnipotence sought by Hitler -- thus redefines the entire nation as a failed state.

Let us not forget that any such perpetuation of evil -- for example, the approximately 47,000 annual deaths the One Percenters inflict on us by the intentionally genocidal denial of medical care -- redefines that evil as policy rather than anomaly or coincidence.

Quoth Caitlin Johnstone in "Future Generations (If There Are Future Generations)" there is no longer any question our species "built our entire civilization around economic models that could only result in the destruction of our biosphere.”

The apocalyptic failure of the United States to transcend its founders’ ecogenocidal white racism and achieve even the rudiments of social democracy? Marxism’s abject failure at halting the patriarchy-mandated apocalypse? As Audre Lorde so memorably points out, "the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house."

*****

FIVE YEARS OLD when the USian Empire nuked Japan, somehow I instantly recognized the bombing as the terminally apocalyptic event it truly is, its emotional shock far exceeding even that inflicted by my birthmother’s violent attempts to murder my father and me on that year’s Summer Solstice Eve. But it took me another half-decade to intellectually mature enough to verbalize my recognition of the bombing as "the beginning of the end of the world" -- a conviction I knew to be so dangerously subversive, I kept it strictly to myself until the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Even then I dared share it only with my first wife, a Baltimore artist and poet to whom I am forever grateful for introducing me via Plato’s Republic to the hitherto-only imagined satisfaction of reliably thought-provoking, often naked-souled conversation with a woman my own age who was unabashedly my intellectual equal but who later ended our marriage in ideological retaliation for my post-arrest civil rights activism:

Quoth she: "Loren, are you getting involved with communists and stuff?"

Quoth I: "Yeah, probably."

Quoth she: "Then I’m leaving."

Most often though I resisted thinking about the bombing because on the rare occasions my usually impregnable mental resistance failed, it flung me into a uniquely bottomless realm of psychologically unbearable horror. Then I would slam my mental door on it as quickly as a firefly’s flicker, my don’t-go-there emotional-pain-avoidance reflex toughened to near-absolute dependability by surviving my hateful birthmother’s efforts at marticide and post-partum abortion.

(Which probably explains why now even at age 82 I must always look outside myself for words or analogies adequate to describe the pivotal psychological wounding inflicted by the bombings -- the one relentlessly tabooed symptom that would correctly redefine the radiation sickness vectored locally by Hiroshima and Nagasaki as physical symptoms marking the global onset of an incurable psychological pandemic of global despair. Exactly as our Masters intended.)

Indeed in all my years of searching I have found only two books and two films that dare attempt to express its inescapable and infinite hopelessness. The books are John Hershey’s Hiroshima (Alfred Knopf: 1946) and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (William Morrow and Company: 1957); the films are the John-Paxton-scripted Hollywood variant of On The Beach, directed by Stanley Kramer (United Artists: 1959) and Pandora, written and directed by Park Jeong-Woo (CAC Entertainment: 2016). Pandora is the very best anti-nuclear film I have yet seen.

*****

IT NEVER OCCURRED to me to ponder our true Masters’ identity until 1971, when a newly released Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song eerily underscored a question I had begun to ponder as the press-officer on a federal Office of Opportunity "community mobilization" (sic) project in Washington state

I was offered the job because of my volunteer work for a Whatcom County fair-housing group, and I arrived in the state capitol of Olympia eager to continue my activism on a much broader front by using my professional investigative-reporting and documentary photography skills to propagate the project’s five statewide coalitions: Housing, Welfare Rights, Education, Labor and Youth.

But I quickly discovered the education and labor coalitions had been infiltrated, captured. subjugated and weaponized by the John Birch Society, a prime ideological ancestor of today’s Hitler-worshiping Christonazis.

As I remember, the proto-Christonazis took the education coalition merely by following slave-trader and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest’s probably apocryphal advice to "git thar fustest with the mostest" -- a takeover I thought looked suspiciously as if it had been aided by the feds: remember Tricky Dick Nixon was president and was already known to have commissioned the Rand Corporation to prepare a publicly acceptable rationale for suspending the 1972 election.

The labor coalition meanwhile had essentially self-destructed when the Birchite infiltrators -- or more likely their German war-criminal-nazified Central Intelligence Agency leadership -- proved sophisticated enough to leverage already paralytic intra-union and inter-union racial and gender hatreds into now-obvious precursors to the irreparable divisions sustained by today’s identity politics.

Next destroyed was the youth coalition, which collapsed in despair after its hugely successful initiative campaign to lower the drinking age to 18 collected nearly twice the signatures required to get it on the ballot but was terminated by the extreme prejudice of the fanatical proto-Christianazi prohibitionists. Their own efforts perpetually focused on re-imposition of national prohibition, they looted  all the Youth Coalition's signed petitions from a parked automobile left unguarded by the ruinously irresponsible activists who were delivering it to Olympia.

Inflicted only days after I joined the Washington State Conference of Coalitions, this atrocity told me we were under surveillance by powerful enemies far more sophisticated than anyone borne of the state’s typically xenophobic, white-supremacist, anti-Jewish, anti-intellectual Moronic Majority.

It also told me my presumptive role of propagating propagandist was really that of organizing our strategic and tactical defense.

Which in turn left me expressing aloud to my WSCC management colleagues Terry MacDonald and Yvonne Howard my immediate need to know just how high up the ruling class our enemies were -- a question not even obliquely answered until 1974 when Watergate felon John Ehrlichman admitted the state’s prideful ignorance ensures its function as a favorite rat-lab for the perfection of techniques of oppression.

In any case, by the time I was hired to organize our resistance, our enemies had left us only two functional coalitions. One was Welfare Rights, a wondrously defiant biracial solidarity of proudly proletarian women who were then in the process of ejecting a trio of Ivy-League-schooled feminists for preaching man-hating as the only legitimate first step to female liberation. The other survivor was Housing, which had already acquired sufficient support amongst upwardly mobile whites to ram through legislation repealing a state law that had hitherto granted landlords literally limitless power to oppress tenants.

But when we pled for the competent secretarial support we needed to launch a media blitz to protect the welfare mothers from further assaults, state OEO repeatedly denied it.

And when I abetted my investigative skills with booze to manipulate an official into revealing the reasons for the denial, I learned our true purpose was the predecessor of "change we can believe in": creating the illusion of working toward social-democratic reform while ensuring our own efforts were but charades, invariably defeated in the end.

Rejecting OEO’s effort to redefine my more-than-adequate WSCC salary as bribery for submission, I immediately resigned in protest.

As I know from 30 years on newspaper and/or magazine staffs and the remainder of my life as a politically exiled freelancer, this clandestine reversal of stated purpose is absolutely typical. My resignation is not:  too many of my colleagues are de facto wage-slaves who have families to support and in the realm of unspeakable evil this nation was reduced to on 22 November 1963, they have no choice but surrender.

Thus we see how the ultimate purpose of all post-New-Deal USian governance at every level is the use of false promises to pacify the Moronic Majority by fostering just enough imbecility of hope to sustain our Masters’ boiled-frog imposition of ever-more-inescapable tyranny.

*****

LIBERAL APPLICATION OF Occam’s Razor limits to three the logically probable identities of our ecogenocidal assailants:

Firstly there’s the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, the frightening proof of which Jeff Sharlet bravely reveals in The Family (Harper, 2008) in further confirmation of the courageous revelations by Chris Hedges in American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press: 2006).² Less well-know are the Christians’ declarations of misogynistic, ecogenocidal hatred of our Mother Earth declared by fundamentalist-church reader-boards throughout the early ‘70s: Organic Is Satanic and Environmental Means Of The Devil.³

One need only scan their formal theology to recognize the Christonazis’ suicidal intent is salvation by the permanent destruction of the life-bearing capabilities of our planet, which they believe to have been captured by Satan despite the efforts of their alleged savior Jesus and which must thus be reduced to an eternally lifeless orb.

Think of it as the global counterpart of the Empire’s Vietnam policy: "gotta nuke the planet to save it from the Devil."

Such an intent as the clandestine purpose of imperial policy -- a policy unquestionably enforced by the global terror inflicted by USia’s demonstrations of infinite savagery at Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- would surely explain how and why the normally cooperative international leadership dutifully pretends it’s powerless to achieve any effective agreement to even ameliorate terminal climate change.

But assuming for a moment this were the only operative possibility, it would eliminate the obvious (and obviously relentlessly censored) fact the years of nuclear winter inevitably inflicted by thermonuclear apocalypse would unquestionably reverse global warming, World War III might therefore actually preserve planetary life, albeit nothing above the cockroach level.

Thus while there’s no  question this onslaught by Christianity is already well underway, the extent of its ecogenocidal culpability remains obscure.

Secondly then there is the approximately equal probability the post-World-War-II world is increasingly ruled by a clandestine Nazi International, an organization spawned by Germany and the USian Empire c. 1944-45 to disguise nazism as "neoliberalism" and keep its ideologies of identity politics and racial hatred alive for future weaponization of global conquest.

Even were I to reject the evidence presented by Joseph P. Farrell and the late Mae Brussel as useless "conspiracy theory," I find sufficient indications in the past 90 years of USian corporate and governmental history to evaluate the Nazi International hypothesis as probably true.⁴ Indeed it would not surprise me to learn it is headquartered in or directly across the river from Washington D.C.

But one important indication yet apparently remains a perplexing mystery; neither of our two suspects -- nor the likelihood they are opportunistic collaborators in global ecogenocide -- explain the skyrocketing incidence of momentary intrusions by ever-more-obviously hostile UFOs.

Were these vessels of earthly origin, their presence would be recognized as the aerial reconnaissance it unquestionably appears to be.

Witness too in this context our Masters’ handling of the UFO matter, 75 years -- three quarters of a century -- from official denial to official confirmation of evidence that logically allows only two (rational) explanations: either the UFOs are here to monitor our behavior much as psychologists monitor lab rats, or they are mapping the planet and testing our defenses in preparation for full-scale invasion. Given their obvious technological omnipotence, either likelihood reduces patriarchal religion to primitive science fiction and ourselves to future slaves, in either case, humanity besieged by forces so infinitely powerful, resistance is (genuinely and forever) futile.

Extraterrestrial invasion? That’s logical possibility number three, with the only remaining questions the extent to which we have already been conquered and the parallel extent to which our earth-born Masters have already betrayed us, selling out the entire 99 Percent in return for the invaders’ promises to maintain the already self-perpetuating One Percent aristocracy as their overseers on Slave Plantation Earth.

The most hideously repugnant aspect of this hypothesis is the since-suppressed observation by several prominent USian scientists in the mid-1970s that the g-forces generated by the UFOs’ instantaneous directional changes at speeds in excess of 25,000 miles per hour are survivable only by exoskeletal life forms.

In other words, if our conquerors are genetically advanced predatory insects, they are also demonstrably clever enough to terraform themselves a new home by poisoning our Mother Earth with patriarchy for the past 6,000 years. Now -- with our planet’s soaring temperatures making it ever more comfortable as a cosmic roach motel -- perhaps they are preparing to make it their new homeland, much as our ancestors invaded the Americas for the same purpose.

What this also suggests is we may be pawns in a much larger fight than we imagine. The interstellar war suggested by Hindu and Abrahamic texts is indicative the patriarchal conquest of planet Earth -- initiated by the terrorism of allegedly "divine" apparitions (in the Abrahamic religions the ball-of-fire emergence of "Yahweh" atop Mt. Ararat, also talking snakes, fiery wheels in the sky and loquacious brushfires) – may thus have been the beginning of an unspeakably malicious, bottomlessly evil, irresistibly cunning ecogenocidally apocalyptic effort to herd humanity into self-extermination and reduce our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was in the Ordovician, 480 million years ago.

(Yeah, I know all earthly cooperative-insect hives are queendoms; but who’s to say the drones of whatever realm is attacking us didn’t overthrow their queen and put a fire-ant version of Donald Trump’s idol Hitler in place as dictator for life. In any case, the ever-more-obvious fact we are doomed no matter what happens means the cliché "all bets are off" is now our species’ ultimate truth.)

If extraterrestrial invasion is indeed what obtains, it would thoroughly explain our earth-borne Masters’ two-faced betrayal: claiming concern about climate change even as they set aside their ideological conflicts to unite in serving the conquerors by intensifying their ecogenocidal destructiveness.

While all humans are self-preservationists, the deadly difference between the One Percenters and ourselves is the latter have made themselves omnipotent by the weaponization of their technology -- something the purposeful destruction of the Soviet Union guarantees we the 99 percent will never again be allowed the resources and wealth to overcome.

Our Masters realize it was the advent of firearms made an armed proletariat possible, which in turn forced concessions from a viciously sadistic, murderously self-centered, utterly sociopathic ruling class. Now all those concessions are being reversed, complete with forcible disarmament and its intended consequences, the mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that defines slavery and serfdom.

Since history shows imperial conquest always follows the same ecogenocidal pattern –note how the hereditary Celtic aristocracy who survived beyond Roman conquest preserved its authority by serving the conquerors as local overseers; likewise the conquered aristocrats of India, Africa and many First Nations tribes survived by serving the British Empire in much the same way.

Above all else note the global surrender to generic nazism disguised as neoliberalism, especially the Chinese Communist Empire’s emergence to challenge the top-seeded USian Empire as the planetary champion in the ecogenocidal stakes for our species’ most deliberately deadly poisoner.

As I have said before, ideas have consequences. And when ecogenocidal consequences are sustained by policy, they are unequivocally intentional. In fact when we examine the evidence, it becomes undeniable patriarchy is ecogenocide -- deliberate, conscious, bottomlessly evil ecogenocide.⁵

Bombing an asteroid to keep it from hitting Earth? Our Masters are so infinitely evil,⁶ it wouldn’t surprise me the bombing has the opposite result, ensuring the asteroid hits us instead.

Nor would I doubt they believe themselves well-enough bunkered to survive. Indeed they have already told us as much by their escalation of thermonuclear terror to an all-time high.

Welcome to the global Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei...und Todt.

______________________________________
¹See my essay about the "Crypto-Radical Seismology Faction" resurrected from Northwest Passage, 28 July 1970, page 16. While it was primarily a discussion of the failures of urban radicalism, it was also beginning of my realization we cannot unshackle ourselves from capitalism without first overthrowing patriarchy. It is also  the only piece I wrote under the nom de guerre Angus L. Forsthe, my use of a pseudonym a product of the then-commonplace belief we were at the beginning of a socialist revolution.

²As much as I admire Hedges’ writing, with which I am in emphatic agreement probably 95 percent of the time, I deplore his slander of the non-USian residents of the American continents by his continued acceptance of the slavemaster-founded, meticulously nazified USian Empire’s wanton theft and intentional perversion of the continents’ name.

³My photographs of two such reader-boards in rural Washington state were destroyed by the arson fire of 1 September 1983. While many less-theocratic-minded Christians will protest this pejorative application of their theological name, the refusal of the mainstream churches to officially eject the Christonazis as heretics proves the usage to be both accurate and deserved.

⁴The proven indications include 1933-34 Bankers’ Plot; from 1938 onward, the financial aristocracy’s outright bribery and eventual purchase of influential factions within white protestant Christianity to produce the so-called “prosperity gospel”; c. 1933-1945, IBM’s obscenely profitable service to Hitler’s extermination of non-Aryans; beginning in l944, the defiantly anti-Soviet sanctuary the federal government secretly gave tens of thousands of Original Nazi war criminals and their recruitment by government and big business as advisors in fulfilling the banksters’ intended nazification of the nation; the suspicious timing of FDR’s death on 12 April 1945; the murder of JFK and the subsequent eleven years of ideologically "cleansing" slayings apparently ending with the murder of Karen Silkwood; the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS; the advent of USian "identity politics" as the gateway to the permanent, Mein-Kampf fulfilling anti-solidarity functions of gender war and race war; the useful-idiot dovetailing of bring-on-the-apocalypse Christianity with the environmentalists’ demand for exterminating 90 percent of the working class; and let us never forget our Masters’.good-cop/bad-cop routine, the maliciously manipulative strategy that gave birth to "change we can believe in," demonstrably USia’s most effective weapon for discouraging voter -turnout: the bad-cop Republicans terrorize us , the Democrats pacify us with false promises of protection and both parties then collaborate in our betrayal. by ensuring the fulfillment of said promises is either legislatively prohibited or reduced to meaninglessness.. All of which is underscored by the ever-more-brazen re-emergence of localized nazism throughout the planet, its ultimate victory guaranteed by the ever-more-deadly poverty by which our Masters tyrannize the global 99 Percent. Since all of these indications are detailed in the immediately preceding essays, I see no need to elaborate them again here.

⁵There is fourth possibility, albeit one so contrary to patriarchal brain-warping even many of the most enlightened among us will probably reject it out of hand. The Gaia Hypothesis defines our Mother Earth as a living organism, conscious and self-regulating. Our species has warred against her since patriarchy’s onset; with its ecogenocidal war against her now entering its seventh millennia, she has obviously begun to fight back. The only remaining question is whether she intends to exterminate us or teach us to heed the example of our matriarchal ancestors and live harmoniously within her embrace; after all, is there any human function more essential to our species survival than competent motherhood?

⁶While censorship makes conclusive proof of the malignant magnitude  of our Masters' evil increasingly more difficult to find, the following books make it painfully obvious. Their titles are self-explanatory:  Howard Zinn, A Peoples' History of the United States (Harper and Row: 1980); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press: 2014);  Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books: 2015); James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press: 2017); and our oppressors' bible,  Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, the Ford Translation (Elite Minds Inc.: 2009-2010). By far the best over-view of the innumerable achievements of our relentlessly tabooed pre-patriarchal millennia is Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (Harper & Row: 1987, 1991). Gavin Menzies, The Lost Empire of Atlantis (William Morrow: 2011), details his authoritative, extensively researched hypothesis that the Minoans, whose pre-patriarchal civilization thrived for at least a thousand years, were seafarers enough to organize the first global trading commonwealth; bear in mind while reading Menzies that First Nations accounts suggest an anciently widespread "old people's" culture  based on barter and shared knowledge rather than on conquest and slavery. Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe (HarperCollins: 1991), summarizes the archaeological evidence that proves the superior sustainability of Europe’s pre-patriarchal culture, while Robert Graves, The White Goddess: an Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1966/1982), explores in detail the associated aesthetics and metaphysics. Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek – their indigenous names respectively Nippawanock (Cherokee) and Metacomet (Narragansett-Wampanoag) -- do likewise in their dated but nevertheless still relevant Literature of the American Indian (Glencoe Press: 1973).

LB/23 September-7 October 2022

--30--

Organic vegetables grow most productively when they're consciously planted in worshipful recognition of our absolute dependence on our planetary mother's beneficence. This was my 1995 back-country garden amidst its 31 July-1 August celebration of Bron Trogain/Lughnasadh. 
(Photo by Loren Bliss © 1995, 2022)  

*****

ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY -- see especially the works of Robert Graves, Marija Gimbutas, Barbara Mor, Gavin Menzies, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek -- strongly suggest there was indeed an evolutionary arc toward humanitarian cooperation and justice during the approximately 194,000 years before the terminally ecogenocidal imposition of patriarchy began turning our previously female-centered¹ species against our Mother Earth some 6000 years ago.

So do the many First Nations' descriptions of prehistoric visitors to the Americas as benefactors rather than conquerors.

Were this not so -- were there no such cooperative solidarity  --  we'd never have been able to survive four ice ages, not to mention all the volcanic, seismic, bacteriological and zoological horrors that confronted us during our species' approximately 200 to 300 millennia.  

How then did patriarchy -- misogyny maximized to ecogenocide -- manage to conquer us with its suicidally divisive, every-man-against-everyone-else ideology? And why are we unable to free ourselves from its shackles?

*****

IN BITTER TRUTH, our patriarchal Masters are infinitely more evil than we dare imagine; they beset us in every way possible. Abrahamic theocracy proclaims patriarchy essential to counteract the (alleged) inferiority of all non-whites and to suppress the (alleged) sinfulness of all females, our Mother Earth most assuredly included. Hindu and Buddhist patriarchies view all females with equal contempt. Whites are conditioned to despise all people of color; in turn, peoples of color learn to despise all whites. Gender itself is weaponized, pitting males against females and females against males,  tainting even our most basic instincts with fear, distrust and contempt. Such is the ultimate balkanization purposefully inflicted by identity politics, the strategy by which our Masters perpetuate the extremes of cultural divisiveness they know inevitably leads to nazi race war,  thereby ensuring we will never be able to unite and overthrow them.

Meanwhile our Masters claim capitalism's  terminal transformation to neoliberalism -- that is, to the localized variants of nazism -- is unavoidable because  "society" itself is naught but delusion, or so their ever-more-apocalyptic lies pretend. Survival for each of us, they insist, thus demands endless, utterly merciless competition against all others. Exactly as intended, the  disunity so perpetuated combines with inescapable surveillance and ever-more-thorough censorship to guarantee the human solidarity essential for even minimal reform  remains out of our collective reach forever -- that is, until the present world order is no more.

Ecogenocide thus rules our entire planet. Hidden for decades by our Masters' cunningly contrived vocabularies of  deception, its escalating ruin has become too deadly to conceal and too overwhelming to counteract or even minimally ameliorate; thus inescapably doomed to extinction or slavery by our Masters'  apocalyptic mandates  whether  disguised as "neoliberalism" or  "Marxism," the entire global 99 Percent is now reduced to the future as defined by the alternatives of rage, hopelessness and final surrender Kübler-Ross  identified as our species' psychological  norms for medically foreseen  dying and/or grieving.

The prime so-called "neoliberal" perpetrator of our  doom is of course USian imperial capitalism, which Hitler himself hailed as the global role-model for  governance by mass murder;  the prime Marxist example is the People's Republic of China, its so-called "Marxism" nothing more than  the dishonestly labeled imperialism of state capitalism -- profiteering by the state (rather than by some hereditary plutocracy) -- with its institutionally protected moral imbecility every bit as deadly as that inflicted by our own avowedly capitalist Masters.    

Note too how Christonazism, Islamic nazism, Hindu nazism, the “neo” resurrections of  Original German Nazism and all the other forms of nazism whether doctrinal or existential are all cunningly euphemized as mere "fascism." Obviously this deception is intended to suppress the potential of revolutionary awakening implicit in the torture-chamber/death-camp corpse-stench inevitably generated by usage of "Nazi" or "nazi" in any of its grammatical forms.² 

Accurate reading of patriarchal history also strongly suggests our Masters allowed us socialism and social democracy only when they were assured the proponents of each  would carefully suppress any acknowledgement of    patriarchy's ecogenocidal deadliness; study the Marxism-and-Feminism chapter (pages 13-20) of the carefully footnoted Barbara Mor work cited below for a brilliantly summarized rediscovery of the patriarch-suppressed  awareness shared by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels that our lost egalitarian cooperativeness had been the socioeconomically logical product of our prehistoric matriarchal proto-communism; contemplate too the implicit suggestion Marx and Engels might also have been concerned true socioeconomic equality would prove restorable only by matriarchy's renewal, notions  now  carefully excluded from formal Marxian ideology.

Beyond that, social democracy is invariably the ultimate political scam, capitalism allegedly "reformed" -- though only in "change-we-can-believe-in" charades that   could never threaten our Masters' omnipotence, our boiled-frog enfeeblement and subjugation thus always perpetuating (and often reinforcing) capitalism's ability to eventually transform itself permanently into nazism.

Though socialism includes the World Socialist Web Site -- our best, most reliable present-day source of accurate information about what our Masters are actually doing to us -- WSWS nevertheless yet tries to convince us to accept Marxism's one and only historically proven Big Mistake: its claim the horrors of patriarchy and its ideological and socioeconomic descendants are merely transitional discomforts, necessary growth-pains in an allegedly "inevitable" march toward universal equality and justice -- a "march" we now must recognize as wholly imaginary, naught but myth, misunderstanding and finally a Big Lie.

To bad for us  (and all the more power to the forces attacking our species and our planet),  even our most sincere would-be savior continues to discredit itself by deluging us with apocalyptic falsehoods about "progress" and the "moral arc" of history -- the arc that in any accurately labeled archaeo-historical timeline  reveals our species' most inescapably damning truth: that beginning maybe six-thousand years ago it bends relentlessly toward subjugation and extinction.

"Progress" -- whether adjectivally capitalist or Marxist -- is thus by far our species' most destructive self-contradictory noun.  It is also the deliberately ecogenocidal cancellation of any and all hope for human survival.

It may therefore seem to some we are  indeed witnessing the  "end of history" proclaimed in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama -- albeit in a manner that forever denies us even the very few positive Working Class outcomes he and all the other  neoliberal liars claimed to foresee. Not only have our Masters permanently eradicated  the former (extremely limited) New Deal social democracy; the socioeconomic savagery they've gloatingly imposed on us since then is -- exactly as intended -- eliminating empathy itself: note the self-obsessed moral imbecility exemplified by Hillary Clinton's obscene celebration of Omar Gaddafi's execution by anal impalement. Note too how its horror was popularly reduced to reality-television fun rather than the dire warning of run-amok evil it remains to anyone still fully human. With our Masters' reign of perpetual warfare deliberately metastasized from the imperial rat-lab  of the Middle East to methodical imposition on all the peoples of our wounded planet, the resultant atrocities are everywhere suppressing the remnants of humanitarian consciousness with the apocalyptic venom of social-Darwinism. 

Meanwhile let us never forget the ultimate lesson of our present-day plight: that patriarchy achieves its final fulfillment only as  nazism -- which, short of some humanitarian miracle,  means from now on, the very best any of us in the 99 Percent can ever expect are lives of constantly worsening, ultimately deadly poverty, this intended to exterminate all of us deemed "surplus workers" and force the enslavement of any 99-Percenter who somehow manages to survive this new, global, slow-motion holocaust. 

*****

T0 FREE OURSELVES from such shackles, we must first cast off the self-censorship imposed by the K-12 brainwarping that teaches so many of us to despise the study of history; once we do, we discover two of our species' more potent truths: firstly, that the real U.S. history  -- that is, the ecogenocidal history relentlessly tabooed by our Masters -- quickly makes it clear why Adolf Hitler regarded the United States as the prototypical nazi nation; secondly, we discover history as a compellingly dynamic record of human experience rather than the repugnant tedium of meaningless memorization to which it has been deliberately reduced by our USian Masters' education policy.

Then maybe we'll begin to comprehend the inescapable totality of the Orwellian/Machiavellian methodology by which our Masters are subjugating and re-enslaving us. And perhaps some of us will then find the courage to embark on the even-more-daring quest for genuinely sustainable humanitarian solutions -- outcomes that might save our species and our planetary motherland -- which are therefore the very outcomes patriarchy has always denied us.

By far the best over-view of the innumerable achievements of our relentlessly tabooed pre-patriarchal millennia is Barbara Mor’s 501-page, convincingly footnoted  expansion of an illustrated pamphlet by Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (Harper & Row: 1987, 1991). Gavin Menzies, The Lost Empire of Atlantis (William Morrow: 2011), details his authoritative, extensively researched hypothesis that the Minoans, whose pre-patriarchal civilization thrived for at least a thousand years, were seafarers enough to organize the first global trading commonwealth; bear in mind while reading Menzies that First Nations accounts suggest an anciently widespread "old people's" culture that was based on barter and shared knowledge rather than on conquest and slavery. Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe (HarperCollins: 1991), summarizes the archaeological evidence that proves the superior sustainability of Europe’s pre-patriarchal culture, while Robert Graves, The White Goddess: an Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1966/1982), explores in detail the associated aesthetics and metaphysics. Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek – their indigenous names respectively Nippawanock (Cherokee) and Metacomet (Narragansett-Wampanoag) – do likewise in their dated but nevertheless still relevant Literature of the American Indian (Glencoe Press: 1973). Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Beacon Press: 2014) documents in detail the patriarchy’s methodical extermination of those cultures.

The one book listed above that might prove difficult to obtain is Gimbutas' work, unfortunately one of our most important references -- its importance underscored by the relentless patriarchal censorship that has made her groundbreaking discoveries both difficult to find in local bookstores and prohibitively expensive when the search succeeds; this is because an ad hoc patriarchy of jealously hostile male academics have long conspired to keep her work out of print, which is why it is now also effectively censored by collector-pricing: on 11 August of this year, I was unable to find a usable copy of The Civilization of the Goddess priced at less than $62.59 plus tax and shipping. But Bookfinder.com – the source at which I begin all book searches – indicates the other recommended texts remain available at rational prices.

However, if the Christonazi conquest of the United States continues as predicted, all such works will undoubtedly be banned as “heretical,” with mere possession far more feloniously deadly than my illegal possession of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was in theocratic Ku Klux Tennessee c. 1959.

It is a bit of an aside, but I am thus reminded of how in the always-sadistically biblical South, a basic D. R. Bliss Family rule was to never publicly acknowledge our extensive home library. Why? Because in the South of the 1940s and ‘50s -- reading politically illegal books (and my father had  more than one of those) -- could get you beaten, jailed, beaten again and maybe even killed -- same as in today's soon-to-be 41-state neo-Confederacy.³

Meanwhile we see how patriarchy radically re-defines our consciousness and being, reducing each of us to mere commodities intended only for profitable exploitation.  Our world, and by implication the entire universe, is thus shrunken to the womb-less ejaculate of some seemingly divine, viciously sadistic "involuntary celibate," the invading usurper-god who dares claim he created Planet Earth only six thousand years ago  -- not coincidentally just about when the patriarchal threat becomes archaeologically obvious.

So now at Christmas the multitudes  immortalize the divine victimization of a certain working-class Nazarene named Mary in a galaxy-caliber atrocity that redefines rape as "immaculate conception" -- which is of course the true but oft-concealed "conception-is-always-an-act-of-god" reason the Christonazis sadistically refuse rape and incest victims the medical, emotional and material rescue provided by abortion.

*****

SOME OF US, a growing few,  are at last coming to understand the ultimate and truly apocalyptic danger of capitalism is that it will always morph into nazism -- that nazism is its only possible outcome. That's because capitalism's transformation to nazism is in fact inescapable: the inevitable consequence of capitalism's powerfully symbiotic  proto-nazi combination of greed, moral imbecility and technological omnipotence.

Many more of us now also recognize ecogenocidally misogynistic religion, capitalism and nazism as direct descendants of patriarchy and thus properly name patriarchy as the ultimate perpe-traitor of our looming doom.

As indeed we damn well should; already -- this in addition to the USian wars of extermination waged against First Nations peoples -- we  have a 144-year litany of post-Reconstruction atrocities within the separate states. It begins with the U.S. Government's formal re-imposition of national white supremacy in 1877; it gains momentum with white supremacy's confirmation by SCOTUS in 1896; it triumphs, first by giving legions of Nazi war criminals governmental and Big Business sanctuary; next by the ideological reversals inflicted by the 11-year political murder spree that (apparently) began with the un-prosecuted slaying of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and (seems to have) ended with the un-prosecuted martyrdom of Karen Silkwood; lastly by the election of Ronald Reagan -- "Ronnie the Nazi" to those of us who saw beyond his disguises -- the Powell Memo disciple whose clandestine mode of nazification unstoppably began the deliberate USian march toward destruction of the federal union and increasing international recognition of USia as our species’ ultimate -- and ultimately apocalyptic -- “failed state”:  a very real Public Enemy Number One.

Now, as a consequence, we suffer the present-day, de facto imposition of ecogenocidal theocratic tyranny by the Christonazi Supreme Court -- an affliction as destructive to human society as terminal cancer is to the human body.  

Nor is it by accident those 144 years of USian atrocities have unstoppably skyrocketed into permanent ChristoNazi omnipotence.  Humanitarian "progress" is thus proven impossible, never more than deception or delusion, with the only "moral arc" discernable in our species' patriarchal history leading exclusively toward ever-more-maximized tyranny and utterly inescapable re-enslavement -- its perpetrators granted real-world omnipotence by  the caste-prohibited wealth necessary to counter a technology of oppression already so inexplicably far beyond any 99-Percenter's ability to resist, it ensures our Masters rule is  forever: that is, until our entire species is extinct. 

Therefore let us now dare ask our species' most decisive question:

How then -- save by some form of extraterrestrial rescue (though only after they’ve raped our Mother Earth back to bug-planet permanence) --  can our Masters imagine they will escape the apocalyptic destruction they are so wantonly inflicting on all the rest of us?
___________________________

¹I say "female-centered" to discourage the patriarchal attacks intended to suppress the increasingly irrefutable archaeological evidence our species was originally matriarchal or at the very least matrifocal and matrilinial.

²"Nazi" -- cap "N"-- is Weimar Republic slang that has since become a proper noun for Germany's N.S.D.A.P., the  Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; "nazi" -- lower-case "n" -- is what our Masters deceptively label "fascism": localized and relentlessly euphemized nazism as in the  Ukraine, the Russian Federation, today's China plus of course the USian as-yet undeclared neo-Confederacy,  Pinochet's Chile and all USia's other hopelessly oppressed imperial puppets.

³Given the permanent absence of anything akin to the Soviet organized-resistance that terrified our nazi-minded Masters into allowing us the nearly five decades of New Deal social democracy that were forever terminated by the 1980 election, it seems obvious to me that once our Masters  complete the capture and theocratic "cleansing" of their intended 41-state neo-Confederacy, only a strong military alliance with a major foreign power would save the remaining nine anti-nazi coastal states -- all of their populations forcibly self-disarmed --  from conquest by Confederate blitzkrieg, its imperial  legions granted thermonuclear omnipotence by the doomsday arsenals of the former United States. Worse still, I know of no nation that by then would  dare try stop the new C.S.A. from achieving its ultimate intent: expanding Christonazi tyranny first to all North America, then to whatever land on this planet remains habitable.  

*****

(Next: my long-resisted  conclusions as to whom [and what] our real masters  truly are,
with apology for first estimating as a two-or-three-graf hypothesis what  has instead
grown into a separate concluding essay,  an ongoing work in progress.)

-- LB, 12-21 August 2022

-30-

AFTERMATH: a young woman finds an antique colander in the debris and wreckage washed ashore by the unprecedented high tides of an unusually severe winter storm.  (Photo by Loren Bliss ©2022) 

*****

WE ARE SUBJUGATED as we now are primarily because our conditioned ignorance and gullibility allow nearly all of us -- no matter how sophisticated we might imagine ourselves -- to be seduced by three of our species' most deceptively camouflaged intellectual malignancies.

The seductiveness of these symbiotic falsehoods is so overwhelming, not even the clarifying might of dialectic materialism -- Marxism's presumably impenetrable defense against irrationality -- seems able to protect us from their relentlessly induced delusions.

What are they then, these three most ruinous Big Lies, our ecogenocidally terminal triplets?

The most venomously destructive Big Lie is our pathetically superstitious belief in "eternal life," which -- because there's allegedly "a better home a-waitin in the sky" -- relieves us of any moral obligation to improve the conditions of life on earth. Next comes the ignorantly lethal twining of "progress" with the equally ignorant, equally false, equally crippling conviction the "moral arc" of our patriarchal history "bends toward justice."

"Progress" is the Big Lie that sought to shrink Nazi Germany from what it truly is -- patriarchy’s ultimate definition of itself -- to an anti-historical anomaly; the "arc toward justice" is the corroborative Big Lie by which our Masters leverage our brains into accepting "progress" as synonymous with "betterment" in the One Percent's living conditions -- never mind that for the 99 Percent, such "advancements" invariably mean worsening poverty, skyrocketing body-counts and irreversible environmental destruction.

But as any serious student knows, the arc of history itself is absolutely real -- though the reality it bends toward is not the blessing of liberty and justice but the terminal curse of its antithesis: ever-more-inescapably brutal subjugation by our nazi-minded Masters’ ever-more-technologically omnipotent  arsenal of horrors. Doubt me? Study the six-millennia historical timeline: note what Loreena McKennitt so memorably describes as "the months of peace and all the years of war."

*****

WHILE CAPITALIST "PROGRESS" and socialist "progress" are conventionally believed to be diametrical opposites, closer scrutiny reveals each ideology is equally committed to the apocalyptic destruction of our Mother Earth.  Though the socialist version is traditionally said to be synonymous with our species' quest for freedom and justice, that (former)  ideological truth has since been reduced to yet another Big Lie by the fact Communist China now exceeds the United States as this planet’s deadliest polluter. (The U.S. remains our species’ all-time champion at any and all forms of industrialized murder, which thus preserves its top-seeded role as the world champion of deliberate ecogenocide, a ranking not even    Nazi  Germany could challenge.)  Meanwhile the capitalist version of progress -- formerly euphemized as "bigger and better" --   is now revealed as the methodical reduction and subjugation of the 99 Percent: extermination of "surplus" workers and permanent enslavement of the survivors. Thus capitalist and socialist ideologies are now twinned in ecogenocidal destructiveness.

As our Masters learned by their nazification of Germany, the more vicious they are -- the harsher and more difficult they make survival for any of us whose lifeblood is measured by paychecks -- the closer they move the masses to embracing the intrinsically hateful identity-politics tribalism of generic nazism.¹  And with the Soviet Union beaten, destroyed and no doubt gone forever, there is at present  no power left anywhere on this planet -- absolutely none -- capable of organizing a genuinely powerful anti-nazification campaign, which is the only development that might -- though with odds now only slightly better than those of the proverbial snowball in hell -- yet save us from this all-encroaching, all-destroying evil.²   Such is the ecogenocidal reality of patriarchal "progress."  

In synergistic combination with the fake history of a nonexistent  "arc...toward justice,” the antisocial venom inherent in this notion of "progress" is intensified to the Nth power, with every tyrant now testing his³ serial-killer instincts in competition for top ranking on the oppressive-technology-is-god’s-greatest-gift roster of our species' most ecogenocidal Masters. But the concept of "progress" itself -- the curiously persistent belief in some imaginary human dynamic that leads inevitably toward individual and collective betterment -- is proven by the very history it ignores to be among our species’ most self-destructive forms of magical thinking. Never forget our Masters' definition of "progress" includes the IBM-organized Holocaust, and enough  chemical, biological and thermonuclear weaponry to reduce our Mother Earth to a cinder as lifeless as any asteroid. 

Thus -- and it cannot be repeated too often -- the only “moral arc” evident in human history "bends" toward nazism on a global scale, which means we socialists are gravely mistaken in believing history is our ally and guarantor of our eventual triumph.

One of socialism's core principles -- that the historical momentum of "progress" makes socialism inevitable -- is itself proven wrong: not necessarily  a Big Lie (at least not in the beginning), but unquestionably a ruinous misunderstanding. For as the ongoing reversal of every one of our progressive reforms proves beyond dispute, it is the ecogenocidal momentum of patriarchal history -- the irresistible force of our Masters' eternally nazified will (however ideologically disguised) -- that is destroying us. 

Viewed objectively, our history -- save during the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Revolution -- is whatever our Masters impose on us; thus it is inseparable from our Masters’ historically proven policy of imposing ever-more-self-sustaining tyranny: a relentless march toward ever-more-omnipotent aristocracy protected by ever-more-sadistic zero-tolerance dictatorship fostered by ever-more-invincible technology.

*****

TO BEGIN THE process of discovering and thereby surviving the socioeconomic cancers lurking in our notion of "progress," we must first overcome the crippling aversion to the study of history intentionally inflicted on us by our Masters' insistence it be taught, K-12, as  nothing more than wearisome, intentionally repugnant drills in rote memorization of names, places and dates.  

Beyond that, I suggest reading five authors  the ChristoNazis damn as both treasonous and heretical. These are: Howard Zinn, A Peoples' History of the United States (Harper and Row: 1980); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press: 2014);  Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books: 2015); Chris Hedges, American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press: 2006); Jeff Sharlet: The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).

For me, the most influential gift of the above reading was its revelation of the ageless toxicity of the malevolence directed against the 99 Percent, especially the vast global majority of us who are not white.  A near-lifelong student of history and a miserably involuntary, New-York-City-born resident of five former slave states during most of my first 24 years, I am familiar with most of our Masters' innumerable atrocities; but until I read An Indigenous People's History and Black Earth, I had not realized our patriarchal Masters have always been motivated by the same philosophically and methodologically sophisticated hatefulness they exhibit today.  Yesteryear's Masters were just as conscious of the evil they were inflicting on First Nations folk --  and just as sadistically gleeful about their ecogenocidal triumphs -- as today's Masters are as they reduce us all back to serfdom and slavery.      

If we dare to truly comprehend the toxic magnitude of what assails us, I also recommend -- emphatically recommend --  reading what has again emerged as our species' bible of manifest evil, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.⁴  If we are to truly know our enemy, Mein Kampf is the only book I know that reveals the otherwise unimaginable skill empowering the evil that is overwhelming us. Contrary to our most crippling misconceptions, our foes are neither ignorant nor stupid; they are in fact what they have always been: the best-educated, most intellectually malignant, most effectively cunning oppressors in our species' entire history. That's why -- if we are to have any chance of escaping our Masters' corporate slavepens -- learning something of our real history is necessarily part of our education for intellectual self defense. Nor can it be said too often the taboo'd historical facts revealed by the above bibliography prove beyond dispute our species' only "progress" since the advent of patriarchy is technological -- and that if we are not part of the aristocracy, its only "gift" is ever-more-inescapable despotism. Our freedom is diminished each time our Masters' technological prowess increases.  Thus for us, we the people of the 99 Percent,  "progress" merely strengthens the deadly shackles by which our Masters' long ago began re-enslaving us.

In other words, the sole function of "progress" under Capitalism is to sustain and intensify our Masters'  savagery. "Progress" is thus revealed as the intentionally terminal opposite of "sustainability."

This is clearly the mindset from which our Masters developed and promoted electronic media -- the world's first genuinely inescapable shackles of total surveillance falsely peddled as enhancements to human freedom and mindlessly embraced by entire populations of self-obsessed, fanatically acquisitive workers already reduced to pre-nazi moral imbecility by the relentlessly worsened hardships of survival.

But when we discover our forbidden history's excruciatingly painful revelations, we  are at long last able to chart such "progress" with an historically accurate arc. Whether from the five books cited above or from more extended studies of sociology and history, we learn that eras of humanitarian governance are but the tiniest intervals of relief in the long timeline of patriarchal despotism.

And then -- contrary to all the lies we’re told -- we discover the timeline’s arc curves relentlessly toward technologically maximized tyranny.

Which in turn reveals any notion of "progress" to be naught but diabolically clever propaganda, devastatingly effective in its primary function of perpetuating all present-day forms of tyranny. We discover "progress" as our Masters’ all-time whopper of deliberate disinformation and purposeful misdirection. As already noted,  if we believe in "progress," we can always dismiss past atrocities as anomalous aberrations we've somehow (magically) grown beyond rather than acknowledge them as the horrifying declarations of present-day human surrender to ecogenocidal evil they actually are.

Meanwhile -- thanks to our Masters' ongoing destruction of our planetary resource base -- we the people of the 99 Percent, we who are Working Class even if we are too brainwarped to acknowledge our credit-card servitude, every one of us is now forever doomed to struggling for survival in a realm of perpetually declining expectations and therefore eternal hopelessness.

What this means is implicit in the fact history tells us progressive change occurs only in response to rising socioeconomic expectations among the 99 Percent -- that declining Working Class expectations invariably diminish humanitarian considerations and often, as in the Holocaust or the extermination of First Nations peoples, completely suppress them.

Such is the challenge we socialists face. If even a trace of humanitarianism is to survive, if our species and our planet is to avoid destruction in some final paroxysm of terminal moral imbecility, we must transform our ideologies into  effective antidotes against skyrocketing despair: precisely what history tells us is impossible in any time of societal despair -- never mind today's hopelessness truly is bottomless, without precedent in our species'  experience.

Fact is, our Masters today believe their technological omnipotence has freed them of any obligations beyond themselves and their caste: theirs is the sadistic moral imbecility of a Vlad Tepes elevated to infinity by the “gifts” of modern technology: inescapable surveillance and an ever-expanding arsenal of doomsday weapons, with the ever- worsening environment to force our ever-more-violent reduction to social Darwinism, just as our masters have always intended.
___________________________

¹Why nazism rather than fascism? Why do I choose "nazi" rather than "fascist" as my generic term for the run-amok evil that assails us? Note that each term originated from proper nouns. But in the capitalist world, only "fascist" -- with its implicit absence of Auschwitz-type death camps further gentled by the comic-opera undertones of the Mussolini regime -- became the generic. And knowing the galaxy-class psychological warfare skills of our Masters, I cannot doubt this now effectively mandatory usage of "fascist" rather than "nazi"  is deliberate deception to downplay their malignant intent. 

²Many socialists, especially my fellow Marxians, will denounce my use of "evil" as counter-revolutionary religious moralizing. In adamant rebuttal I suggest such critics consult Webster, which even in its unabridged second edition (Dorset and  Baber: 1983) minimizes the religious connections to "evil." I -- an agnostic Gaian pagan -- use it here without apology as the most linguistically apt, definitively correct, emotionally accurate English noun to describe what our Masters are doing to us: the methodically nazified socioeconomic miasma in which most of us are slowly being drowned and through which all  surviving 99 Percenters are to be enslaved.  

³Of course I am aware there are many female capitalists. I am also aware that capitalism -- at its core a greed-fueled, wealth-based, white-male-supremacist  death-cult -- is a subset of patriarchy, which itself is nothing other than maximally weaponized misogyny. Thus (real) feminists damn female capitalists as traitors to their gender; (real) socialists condemn all capitalists as traitors to the entire 99 percent; as traitors to our species; and as traitors to our Mother Earth. Thus when a female labels herself "capitalist," what she is really doing is declaring herself an ecogenocidally predatory male; when a male labels himself "capitalist," he is declaring himself a deadly enemy of the 99 Percent, an enemy of our species and most of all an apocalyptic rapist of our Mother Earth.    

⁴The Ford Translation (Elite Minds Inc.: 2009-2010), is the only version I could find that was not censored by collector pricing. While I have no way to evaluate the publisher's claim their Mein Kampf  is the most accurate English translation to date, the braggadocio of their firm-name leaves me suspicious of who and what they might be. Moreover I know Mein Kampf to be amongst our most tedious reads; I first read it c. 1954-1955 as part of my late father's know-our-enemy education. Then as now, it is the most difficult reading I have yet encountered. To be sure, that's partly because  no translation can improve the semi-literate wretchedness of Hitler's jailhouse German -- but the real reason Mein Kampf is so painful to read is it is a window on pure evil, in any language the terrifying examination of a monstrous Malleus Maleficarum mind that could as easily be a modern hybrid of Augusto Pinochet, Ayn Rand, Ted Bundy and James Fields. )

(Next: Human Societies Were Not Always Competing in a Death Race) 

LB/18-29 July 2022

-30-

Spring is Springing! Praise to the Maiden and all the joy that she brings.  (Photo by Loren Bliss ©2015)

*****

THE UKRAINE WAR has rekindled the nagging underture of terror about which, mostly for the emotional protection of my first wife,  I dutifully maintained silence throughout the entire Cuban Missile Crisis. 

At the time the crisis became public, 16 October 1962, I was six weeks to the day beyond my return from Korea and release from three years of active Regular Army duty, though I had yet to serve a three-year reserve obligation; I thus remained solidly within the grasp of military discipline, which no doubt reinforced my determination not to trouble an already-frightened Carolyn by sharing my trained knowledge, some of which was probably then still classified,  of the horrors thermonuclear war would inflict on us both.  

I speak out now, an honorably discharged civilian since 31 October 1965, because the war-warnings from my subconscious are again unmistakable. The intensity of my fear is measured -- albeit far more intrusively than ever it was in 1962 -- by sequential nightmares. This time around, they make it impossible for me to sleep more than two or three consecutive hours.  In '62 they woke me maybe two or three times a week. 

One of the 4,000-odd soldiers who returned home from Korea  aboard the U.S.N.S. Sultan at the end of that Summer, sailing from Inchon the second week of August and disembarking at Oakland Army Terminal on 4 September, I realized as soon as the crisis was publicly disclosed that our unarmed and therefore defenseless troop-transport had itself been among the Soviet targets. That targeting  began in late August, with Soviet construction of the Cuban launchpads already underway and its apocalyptic threat well known among our Masters but inexplicably kept secret even from the active-duty military. Departing Pearl after refueling,  we aboard the Sultan discovered the next morning we were being tracked by a Soviet submarine. The sub, which followed us all the way to San Francisco Bay,   announced its presence by surfacing daily to recharge its batteries and run for about an hour maybe 800 yards off our port side  before vanishing back into the Pacific depths; it became such a seemingly benign companion, we USian soldiers and the Soviet submariners would invariably wave at one another in apparent camaraderie whenever our two vessels were mutually visible.  

But disclosure of the crisis made it obvious the sub had been there for one purpose: to sink us if the war started -- to kill at least 4,000 trained and duty-seasoned soldiers plus the l00-odd Military Sea Transportation Service sailors who crewed the ship -- as it surely would have happened had President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev not each been sensible enough to keep the proverbial war balloon solidly moored to the ground.

I should note here I do not fear death itself. To me, turned Marxian by the harsh lessons of life under Capitalism and therefore primarily an agnostic, death is merely the termination of what has been an utterly thwarted, therefore  mostly wretched existence, with all my marketable skills nullified by our Masters' relentless malevolence. Their atrocities include at least two major editorial job-offers cancelled by federal intervention plus the 1983 arson and its aftermath; the consequences include the premature termination of my journalism career, the destruction of my life's work and the reduction of my being to everlasting insignificance.  Even so, I will never welcome death, at least under so-called "normal" circumstances; as William Faulkner wrote so memorably in The Wild Palms,¹ concluding what I have always regarded as his best novel, "...between grief and nothing, I will take grief." Now, less than 48 hours before my 82nd birthday, I realize it is the one axiom by which I have lived my entire life. But regardless of the adjectives we might choose to define the nature  of our existence, nothing can alter the scientifically confirmed reality each individual death is nothing more than a microcosm of the eventual extinction that dooms everything including the cosmos itself.

What does terrify me is the agony of a lingering death like that suffered by so many at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which thanks to the Ukraine War has again become the probable fate of most sentient life on this planet. As in '62, it is the bottomlessly frightful likelihood that when The Bomb drops, I will be too far from ground zero to be slain instantly, but too physically disabled by the blast to manage my own exit. Like anyone else similarly half murdered, I'd then be tortured to death by the literally indescribable agonies of flesh melting by away by radiation poisoning, suffering for hours if not days or weeks as a victim of what -- by every description I have ever read -- is  undoubtedly the most terrifying form of mass execution we humans will ever know.   

But before I say more, let's drop all the lies and euphemisms and call this ever-more-probable Armageddon exactly what it is: yet another ecogenocidal horror triggered by a new and entirely unnecessary war of empire-building, the ultimate  expression of our patriarchal  Masters' infinitely murderous greed and sadism -- specifically the USian Empire's continued conquest of the Soviet Empire's former Eastern European possessions and the present-day Russian Empire's ever-more-determined intent to reconquer those realms.

About which a long-ago and personally influential history professor named Robert Russell would no doubt say, "1,546 years after the fact, and the United States and its European puppets are still trying to restore the Western Roman Empire,  even as Russia is trying to restore its own Byzantine imperium. 

To which I dare reply -- much as the Communist Party of the United States and the World Socialist Web Site of the Fourth International dare reply -- a curse on both their houses for threatening literally every higher life-form on this planet with extinction.
___________________________
¹The Wild Palms, one of several influential books I read in 1959,  is now included in a larger work entitled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (Vintage: 1995). Based on the number of times I continue re-reading their works, Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, the latter a distant maternal cousin, are undoubtedly my most favorite writers of fiction, with Shirley Jackson probably running a close second.

*****

KNOWING HOW APPROXIMATELY six millennia of patriarchal tyranny have reduced our entire species to a captive population ruled mostly by deliberately inflicted ignorance and meticulously conditioned hatred, I was well aware the USian Empire-supported Nazis had started a de facto civil war in the Russian-speaking regions of the Donbas, an ancient conflict renewed eight years ago with modern weapons and the smirking sadism that defines today's fanatics. The political crisis engendered by its skyrocketing casualties -- now authoritatively said to exceed 14,000 children, women and men -- ultimately compelled Putin to yield to the  deadly undertow of Russian history. Thus he proclaimed himself the alleged protector of the persecuted Donbas people and now seeks to conquer the disputed territory, obviously more for its vital heavy industry and fossil-fuel wealth than for the protection of its inhabitants.

But I never imagined his mustering of troops in numbers sufficient for invading all Western Europe was anything more than a Russian version of the massive readiness-drills the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has conducted since its birth in 1949.

And even when I came to realize Putin sees himself as another Tsar and intends to take the entire Ukraine militarily, I never imagined he'd let himself be provoked into terror-bombing civilians, much less openly brandishing his weapons of thermonuclear extinction, threatening to start World War III and thereby indicating his willingness to murder every sentient creature on this planet.

Though I voted for Biden, I did so only because I was way more fearful of Trump; I never imagined Biden would respond to Putin's threats like a 19th Century plantation owner challenging a rival slave-owner to duel, not with swords or pistols, but with guided missiles that will forever reduce our Mother Earth to naught but a bug planet.      

Obviously I should have known better; as I said in a (slightly edited) comment  I wrote last month: "Thus -- since there is absolutely no longer any rational hope for 'change' beyond the ever-more-disruptive Big Lies of 'change we can believe in' -- my personal ethics demand I stop writing as if our betterment were somehow miraculously possible. Why stop? Because literally every humanitarian cause to which I and so many others of my age devoted ourselves -- the defense of our Mother Earth; government-funded universal health care; government-funded public education through graduate school; freedom of inquiry and expression; sexual, racial and ethnic equality; restoration of workers' rights; affordable housing -- all these efforts have been permanently defeated, and now their (few) accomplishments are being forever undone."

"Nor -- with the U.S. Supreme Court now thoroughly Nazified by lifetime appointments -- is there any rational hope for betterment."

In other words, I had already realized that to write about politics in a society deliberately being restructured into an Auschwitz without fences is merely to perpetuate our Masters' deceptions -- that is, to intensify the crippling imbecility of hope and strengthen the attendant shackles of mandatory optimism the patriarchs have forged from their millennia of lies.

Thus I should have extended my decision to write no more about USian politics to include the military situation in the Ukraine and remained silent about the apocalyptic events we now know were already taking shape there.

I apologize accordingly, especially to anyone who might have been misled by my errors.

Though I am hardly alone in falling victim to the toxic effluent of disinformation maliciously spewed by all sides.

Primarily, though, there is the fact the USian imperial intelligence apparatus -- the 17 secret police agencies we are allowed to know about (plus however many more such organizations remain clandestine) -- has eternally discredited itself.

After Cointelpro and the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Operation Chaos and Chile and Iraq and Afghanistan -- not to mention the now-reflexive anti-government cynicism generated by the 11-year campaign of political "cleansing" that began with the obviously unsolved murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and (apparently) ended with the officially unsolved murder of Karen Silkwood on  13 November 1974 -- no publicly disclosed USian "intelligence analysis" can ever again be (rationally) taken as anything other than latter-day Nazi war-mongering.

Note for example the ongoing controversy over alleged biological warfare labs in the Ukraine: Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's admission versus an ever-expanding wave of official denials,  with the truth remaining as unknowable as the (real) origin of Covid-19, in all probability forever.

Meanwhile the best I can do now is repeat my appropriately mortified apology for having been so arrogant in my ignorant obliviousness to the fact we live in a time so absolutely ruled by evil that almost nothing is believable in the old sense of knowing it as fact. Indeed we cannot know anything for certain beyond the hideously undeniable fact we the people of the Working Class -- those of us to be locked out of the secret nuke-proof bunkers our Masters' relentless warmongering proclaims to the world they now have completed to their own survival-minded satisfaction.  

We must therefore learn to be agnostic about everything else, especially the fast-dwindling possibility of rescue.

***** 

ONE OF THE darkest reasons the USian Empire is "exceptional" is the unprecedented hatred and contempt that fuels its thoroughly institutionalized savagery toward  anyone who happens to be mentally ill, making today's United States the worst place in the world to suffer any such afflictions. 

As I have repeatedly witnessed literally everywhere I've been in this wantonly murderous empire, a decisive factor in USia's definitively pre-genocidal climate is the patriarchal misogyny, hatred and bigotry at the philosophical core of its prosperity-gospel Christianity, which traditionally views mental illness as divine punishment for sin and therefore as something that can be "prayed away" -- though only if one is sufficiently contrite.

Meanwhile, had Trump with his legions of Nazis and Christian theocrats won more votes than Biden  (or had they succeeded in taking the Capitol on 6 January), history warns us their rabid inclination to genocide undoubtedly would have generated a new USian Holocaust, probably within days of Trump's second inauguration.

*****

FOR THE PAST several years I have studied what claims to be post-apocalyptic fiction, films and novels alike, and I find myself astounded by the  ignorance and stupidity of its three paramount assumptions: that electricity, fossil fuels and modern ammunition will somehow remain available indefinitely. 

The truth, of course, is that once the electricity fails,  modern civilization is dead. Period. Electricity powers everything including our access to fuel and running water. Due to Pacific Northwest winter storms -- and thanks entirely to our Neoliberal Masters' profit-maximizing abandonment of infrastructure maintenance -- during my final years of rural living, 1986-2004,  I survived brief periods without electricity and running water more times than I can count -- once, in '89, for nearly an entire month. Thus  I cannot but suppose the power outage due to a thermonuclear war would be forever. Whatever fossil fuels might remain in storage tanks could never again be accessed without electricity, which means the entire "Road Warrior" scenario is utter nonsense.

Ditto for the many tales that assume seemingly limitless supplies of modern ammunition; a combination of panic buying and governmental policy has already obliterated -- probably forever -- the ammunition supply formerly available to the U.S. civilian population, and the Apocalypse is only in its beginning stages. As a consequence, rationally thinking USians resistant to enslavement, compulsory pacificism and mandatory victimhood  are already arming themselves with muzzle-loaders and even more primitive weaponry including swords, axes, archery equipment and atlatl-powered spears.

Indeed in all the years I have been watching for seemingly accurate portrayals of post-apocalyptic worlds -- my sense of "accuracy" powerfully shaped by history and archaeology -- I have found only three novels worthy of repeat reading. The first is Nevil Shute's superb On the Beach (1957), which I read with horror and sadness in pre-enlistment 1959, and later that same year, not long before I reported for three years of Regular Army duty, watched as a profoundly disturbing film, the concluding frames of which haunt me to this day.  But Bookfinder tells me the text's been out of USian print since 1983, even as its curiously ubiquitous limited availability indicates to me it's probably been clandestinely banned, though it remains readily available in Western Europe, with copyright dates as recent as 2005.  The second such work is A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller Jr., Bantam Books: 1959), which I read as a soldier at Fort Benning in 1960.  Hailed by critics as one of the best such novels ever written, it begins six centuries after global nuclear war has reduced most of the barely surviving human population back to the hunting-and-gathering stage, with the resultant loss of technology a prime factor in its decidedly absorbing plot. After witnessing in 1961 and 1962 the remnants of the indescribable damage inflicted on the people and environment of Korea by non-nuclear modern warfare, also knowing from history and archaeology something of the consequences of imperial collapse, what I had seen in the Land of the Morning Calm  merely reinforced the apparent realism of Miller's portrait of a ruined world 600 years past its thermonuclear apocalypse. The third novel is Into the Forest (Jean Hegland, Bantam Books: 1996), an emotional odyssey that vividly describes how two sisters, each modern USian women, respond to the dawning realization the civilization upon which they are utterly dependent is no more. Again I give it an "A" for its probable realism, all the more believable because of its psychological focus.

All else I've encountered in this category of fiction fails what I have come to think of as "the technology test" -- that is, the absolute fragility of the electricity grid, and how the magnitude of its collapse becomes infinitely more irreversible once it's recognized power-lines without electricity are nothing more than easy sources of ever-more-valuable copper, the resultant thievery already apparent in the longer USian blackouts.                  

*****

THE FOLLOWING IS from my journal dated 13 March, slightly edited tonight. I do not know whether it is a beginning, a middle, an end, or merely proof I should promptly abandon as foolhardy any notion I might have remaining capabilities in its indicated direction:

Women tell me that in the best of worlds, they'd be free to explore that realm of consciousness and being they describe as "of the Goddess" by the unfolding of their own minds and bodies, their  emotional and intellectual growth typically going hand-in-hand with physical growth.

Obviously this is the one human growth process the patriarchs fear most, for amongst its core revelations -- or so I am told -- is a growing sense of the utter "unnaturalness" of patriarchy and all its philosophically anti-nature derivatives. The  patriarchy's response, of course, is to try to abort the self-discovery process at birth, fettering it by a lifelong deluge of religious taboos, its associated shaming and fearmongering based on misogynistic lies. 

Though I am probably the first man to recognize it -- maybe even the first human of whatever gender to put it in words -- all these woman-hating taboos and shibboleths are unquestionably products of violent clitoris-envy: the awe and fear (and ultimately hatred) of the female's capability for multiple orgasms that rationalizes the male-supremacist savagery of  clitoridectomy and lurks beneath every other expression of misogyny.   

For males,  the discovery of any mental space at all akin to what so many women describe  as "of the Goddess" is unquestionably far less organic than it is for females, if indeed such discovery happens at all. As I myself can attest, it is radically hindered by the very weakness that enables the corruption of our gender by the forces of patriarchy. While I have no idea how Robert Graves or Tim Buckley came to embrace the Goddess-concept, for me its discovery grew out of an eerily persistent childhood sense of a "something" that, until I  read Graves in the Spring of 1967, remained "just beyond the edges of my mind." I began feeling this "something" at least a quarter-century before I finally learned how to verbalize it, as I first did in a 1970 essay that eventually became part of the opening chapter of "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" and was therefore destroyed by the 1983 arson; I also spoke of it in at least two of my fire-lost (and probably in any case aesthetically worthless) attempts at writing poetry. 

That sense of a "something" was already there, strong enough even in its earliest nonverbal form to provide an permanent antidote to the sadistic Christianity with which my already violently hateful birthmother tried to warp my four-year-old mind  for Christmas 1944...

*****   

THOUGH IT IS a bit of an aside, as a former editor it occurs to me the only news out of this dreadful Ukraine War that approaches ready believe-ability is the visual stuff -- photos, video footage and the like -- which, we should never forget, can indeed be faked, though the Associated Press'   ongoing struggle to preserve honest journalism means we can probably trust most of the imagery bearing the AP label. 

Most importantly, the extensive visual coverage is showing the world -- in many instances for  the first time -- the true horrors of total war.

The work coming out of the war also shows us today's generation of photojournalists have not only at long last mastered color, but are now using it in a way that is both increasingly painterly and therefore more powerfully emotive. 

LB/22-28 March 2022.

-30-

Posted at 12:56 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Coronavirus , Feminism, Film, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, History, Humanitarianism, Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Neoliberalism as Neonazism, Patriarchy, Photography, Religion, Science, Seniors , Spirituality, Visual art, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | Permalink

Reblog (0)

Photographic illustration by Loren Bliss ©1968, 1974, 2012

(One of those sudden mysterious creative  impulses prompted me during a night of darkroom work  in 1968  to contemplatively sandwich a '67 negative of Hare Krishna dancers with a '67 neg of  anti-Vietnam-War protestors; I impulsively added the moon with my photo-editor's punch in '74 while contemplating whether to print it for a Seattle gallery show, as I then did. It survived the '83 arson only because it was among the mounted prints  with me in my portfolio case. Today, I am astounded by how relevant these images remain.)

*****

(Author's Note: because this is such a long post -- 8606 words -- I respectfully suggest
separate reading and contemplation periods  for each of the eight passages
set off by the five-asterisk dashes [*****] as complete essays.)

*****

IRONICALLY, IT'S THE (Kapitalismus-uber-alles) Business Administration Department at (private) Duke University that has exposed our Masters'  academese-obscured, price-censored, banner-headline-caliber abstract of horrifying (real) news  soon downsized to a crisis-minimizing fourth paragraph predictably buried by the Republican Fifth Column at Politco.com,which -- despite obvious attempts by the authors of each text to discourage perusal by Working-Class¹ readers -- proves beyond question how and why a tiny cult of deliberately chaos-fostering fake-news perpe-traitors are intentionally destroying the already dis-United States.

It also proves our Masters' choice  of ecogenocidal psychopaths -- the potentially suicidal snot-bombers our Masters' vassals most likely sought in focus-groups and then probably recruited and paid to propagate with their Big Lies  the deceitfully named "Neoliberalism" (sic) that euphemistically hides its mutated Nazism as "Neoliberalism" (again sic't)  (each sarcastically quotation-marked sic as an entree to exposing how "Neoliberalism" (sic't once more) is now protected by a cloak of Goebbels-caliber disinformation) to conceal our Masters' thorough Nazification of "Neoliberalism" (sic) --  originally  by the secret  renewal and export of the apocalyptic ideologies of Original German Nazism and by OGN's ChristoNazi, NeoNazi and Neofascist pseudo-mutations, and thus sic't one last time in this essay. 

My point is, "Neoliberalism" is neither new or liberal; it is every bit as much deception -- and therefore yet another proof of Ruling Class malevolence --  as "change we can believe in."

Meanwhile let us never forget Neoliberalism's sources include Ayn Rand's wretchedly written fictional popularizations of the Nazi ethos, all critically damned as literary garbage that would never have been published save for Plutocratic intervention and is now all-too-often-required reading in what are therefore falsely described as "literature" classes. These often-mandatory Ayn Rand studies invariably seduce Moronic-Majority types to embrace a Nazism they are thus often unable to recognize as such.

As I describe in a subsequent essay below,  it is just such ignorance that enabled someone I had presumed to be friend for nearly 40 years to send me a deluge of pro-Nazi links (fake news included), and when I criticized the choices in a return email, the response was first a long silence followed by a denunciation of me in print as an enemy, the only mercy thus shown being the omission of my name, perhaps with the knowledge its publication might combine with the fact I am a known anti-Nazi, a position that today is becoming as dangerous as it was to have been  an advocate of civil rights in the Jim Crow South, which I also was. 

Too bad most of us have forgotten that among the parents and grandparents of today's Nazis were the murderers of 41 Blacks and civil-rights advocates, their courageous but fatal dedication to the quest for freedom now reduced by the moral imbecility of the present to little more than -- what? A struggle for nothing? Given what this nation has become, who can doubt the final triumph of their enemies? Capturing the government so all but maybe  three solidly "Democratic" (sic) far-west states (with enough combined economic power to easily support themselves), and the much smaller (and therefore less economically able) eastern states, our Masters have already made of most of the national interior a potential New Confederacy, the ad hoc militias of which no doubt await our Masters' marching orders with the same insane eagerness that defined the Southron traitors of 1861. 

The diametrical opposite of yesteryear's well-armed abolitionists, too many of us who  oppose these traitors are cravenly disarming themselves -- an apocalyptic expression, I fear, of the cowardice that makes a soldier fling away his rifle and surrender to the enemy in hope of mercy that ends when the victorious soldier then kills the surrenderer, instantaneously by shooting if there's not an ammunition shortage; by much more grotesque and agonizing methods if ammo is in short supply.  In any case it's a battlefield occurrence far more common then a lifelong diet of USian war propaganda will ever allow us to believe. (To my knowledge Hollywood has never made -- nor ever will make -- a genuine anti-war film, especially of the sort produced by the Soviet Union.) But that's an aside, another of our paths for future exploration. The critical point here is extent to which, thanks to the another Fifth Column service provided our Masters by the "Democratic" (sic) Party's anti-gunowner movement, the populations in those states that are mostly likely to be victimized by Nazi aggression are increasingly disarmed. Thus they are literally reduced to the mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that defines slaves. Which is precisely how the Democrats are busily ensuring how once fuse of civil war is lit, any anti-Nazi stronghold is doomed,  making the outcome of any future struggle to preserve the coastal states from Nazi conquest  pathetically obvious.

Thus today the utter futility of the Civil Rights Movement and the ultimate sacrifices made by its 41 martyrs is accepted as proven fact; indeed today's Nazis hail the  murders as examples of  the proper response when any member of the üntermenschen demands recognition of rights the Supreme Court is busily nullifying, obviously intent on terminating every civil protection we the people have ever managed to obtain.   In some instances the Nazis have actually used CRM and its subsequent undoing as proof of the rightness of white supremacy; they claim the Black quest for equality itself proved the Ku Klux Klaim  that while Blacks are biologically human, their brains have never evolved beyond those of the apes by which they were ancestored. That such inferiors would dare rise up, say the Nazis, merely  proves they were fools; the subsequent undoing of their foolishness, now 100 percent successful, is thus manipulated  to further confirm their creed of white supremacy.   

Having been a small but sometimes influential part of CRM -- the latter because I managed to remain a member of the working press during most of my remaining time in Tennessee   -- the Klan made at least four attempts on my life  -- possibly six, if I count two attempted vehicular assaults while traveling the era's two-lane blacktop highways, though these might only have been early explosions of road rage prompted by the obvious superiority of the machines that facilitated my escape, the Porsche whose emergency brake would later save my life, and a friend's Triumph TR-4 I was driving as practice for post-Porsche participation in a mountain-road rally. 

In retrospect, and from an increasingly physically disabled old age, my escapes from martyrdom tend to seem ever-more-miraculous. In reality they were the due to a combination of factors, paramount among them the defensive  prowess of a fine German shepherd, later poisoned in retaliation,  and the killer-discouragement inherent in my own already well-known skill with firearms. While I was and remain a firm believer in political nonviolence, I have also always believed that when you are attacked as a  lone individual, especially at home or while out-and-about as when grocery shopping,  you should defend yourself with whatever force is necessary to remain among the living.

Knowing  CRM  as I do, I am ever-more-convinced it was the last genuinely enlightened mass movement the United States will ever produce. Its internal factionalism -- ideological differences ranging from  gradualism to various intensities of belief in non-violent protest -- was always obvious during strategic and tactical discussions. But, by mutual consent, it was never allowed to overwhelm the intensity of our belief in our collective right -- "Black and White Together" was the era's slogan -- to  fulfill the Constitution's supposed intent by achieving for Blacks and other peoples of color the same degree of freedom allowed us whites. For whatever reason, we have since shed what I now must suppose was merely a veneer of civilization -- the mutual tolerance that actually, for a brief period starting in maybe 1932 and undoubtedly ended forever in Dallas on 22 November 1963, enabled us to function as a unified modern society.

However, given how, thanks to my British/Canadian heritage, I knew from boyhood the so-called "American Revolution" was at its heart a reaction to the British judiciary's 1772 ruling that Blacks are fully human, the fact we as a nation seemed to be moving ever closer to to fulfillment of the goals of the few abolitionists who were among the Founders always felt, to me, like too much of a miracle to prevail. As indeed it proved to be,  overthrown not by invasion, but by the most in-depth, all-encompassing, ultimately omnipotent program of subversion ever undertaken by any known human agency. 

How did it win? It adjudged greed to be the only truly common human denominator,  targeted its subversion accordingly and has been incessantly victorious ever since. Behind this I sense (but surely cannot prove) the same invisible force that reached out to me in 1983 to validate my life's work with arson at the exact moment I was meeting with the well-connected freelance editor who had pledged to bring its most important project to publication That all such hopes have since been slain by our Masters -- that the deaths of the movement's martyrs were now obviously all in vain -- pains me to such an extent it indeed makes my physical survival seem all the more miraculous. Perhaps, as even many avowed secularists are coming to believe, ours' truly is an accursed species. 

Returning to present-day events, let us not allow our daily dosage of horrors real and fake to distract us from how the fake-news onslaught by  ecogenocidal psycopathic liars includes doing whatever our Masters prescribe to further -- generally by concealment --  the terminally devolutionary terraforming of our earthly Motherland. Among the ever-more-obvious long-range purposes  of the ongoing Fake News Onslaught is generating sufficient quantities of what we might term "crisis fog" -- i.e., the sense of bewildered hopelessness produced when self and community are repeatedly trashed by storms and evictions and other disasters  even as the U.S. response to the pandemic makes it clear our Masters have unquestionably weaponized the virus to rid themselves of us "surplus workers."

Add in the ongoing threat of world war; the anxiety produced by looming Nazi victory and radically intensified by the probability the Nazis have already conquered the dis-United States;  growing fears of runaway inflation, and of course Covid, which the permanently Nazified SCOTUS has weaponized into a sure nation-killer, which means the death rate will continue to soar accordingly.  It's no surprise national anxiety is soaring.

As the mainstream media propaganda machine is showing its pro-Nazi bias by not telling us, Biden the Beguiler could quickly end inflation fears by re-creating the Office of Price Administration, the agency that kept Capitalism's top-hatted, silk-suited closet-Nazi predators  from destroying the nation with their greed c. 1941-1947). OPA was created by executive order, which means Biden could do it again, which in turn means his refusal to do so is an excellent indication of the strength of the financial tethers by which our Masters have reduced all oval-office occupants to naught but obedient puppets. A new OPA to ameliorate the ever-more-apocalyptic spasms of our Masters greed?  Not a chance; I think it safe to assume there is not a single professional politician anywhere in the United States  who has not been enslaved by our Masters' bribery  since the Supreme Court knowingly destroyed the nation with its Citizens United decision in 2010 -- about which more in a moment.

For now suffice it to say the court's traitorous redefinition of dollars as words and thus due the same constitutional protection made it legal for the plutocrats to financially enslave every politician in the land. As a result we now live under a de facto dictatorship infinitely more cunning and technologically powerful than any of its human predecessors -- a realm in which SCOTUS is now removing all the remaining obstacles to our Masters' final achievement of their fathers' and grandfathers' traitorous dreams of a Nazi United States, Hitler's ever-more-obviously anointed successor-nation  fulfilling der Führer's of a thoroughly Nazi world. 

One of the many indexes to our Masters' (absolute) power is  the extent to which they're using the court's atrocities to distract us from our species' deadliest most pressing crisis ever. Our Masters have generated a crisis fog -- real and fake news included -- so thick it seems to have  cloaked terminal climate change to invisibility. But in truth we have made it invisible for the same reason the anti-war movement is not even a shadow of its former self: war is another of the threats about which about which we are convinced we can do nothing whatsoever. And it is also surely true no anti-war movement in the post-JFK U.S. has ever done more than spawn a flurry of news reports that subsequent events proved were nothing more than introductions to obituaries, as at Kent State University and Jackson State College; and if we choose to close-focus this matter, let us start with Karen Silkwood, then expand our vision into all the other murders of heroic individuals and celebrities and then of folks who were unfortunate enough to have been somewhere at the wrong time, all these deaths linked by political undertones.

Obviously a long-ago lover spoke an ultimate truth as we watched Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald;  we were eating room-service breakfast  and watching CBS News: "My god, we live in a banana republic," she said, her olive-green eyes flooding with tears. To which, 59 years later, I can only add, "You were right; and now Donald Trump intends to be top banana." Which awakens my investigative-reporter's mind just enough to make  me wonder if maybe his seeming unstop-ability is ultimately just the result of knowing where more bodies are buried. Such is life -- and death -- in a plutocracy ruled by an invisible cabal of zillionaire moral imbeciles.  

Meanwhile -- thanks to the combination of crisis-fog and the daily unfolding of additional horrors both real and faked -- our ultra-misogynistic Masters continue unchecked their ecogenocidal aggression against our Mother Earth, seemingly intent on reducing her back to the bug-ruled planet into which she properly began evolving in the Ordovican, a mere 480 million years ago. This is accomplished by any number of policies, court-edicts, toxins and diseases -- among the vectors  the same tiny let's-inflict-globally-irreversible-chaos cult of (mostly) ChristoNazis and NeoNazis,  the most obviously  hateful of the anti-mask/anti-vax agitators.

Now perhaps it will also dawn on us the irremediably Nazified U.S. Supreme Court obviously shares the nation-destroying intent of the fake-news mongers. The court is, now and therefore probably forever, reduced to yet another of our Masters' most reliable puppets. It is   ruled is by a sextet of ecogenocidal theocrats,  a trio of whom began our Masters' Citizen United's SCOTUS-approved funding of the federal union's destruction. The fact of  the court's lifetime appointments ensure its one remaining function is to legitimize whatever our Masters want done to complete the ChristoNazification of the entire nation.

The presence of solid pockets of continued anti-Nazi, anti-theocratic resistance in some of the coastal states -- see maps here and here --  is a threat our Masters obviously intend to suppress by more typical Nazi methods, for  vivid previews of which go here and here. Warning: both these films have scenes of the mass murders by which the German Nazis proudly defined their rights as world-ruling  übermenschen.  Nevertheless I urge you to view them precisely because they show us what is sure to happen here in the dis-United States once our Masters' SCOTUS vassals have given them enough mechanism of control, the extermination of opponents becomes no more difficult than  ordering a servant to take up a swatter and kill the houseflies that, thanks to terminal climate change, are descending on us in ever increasing numbers. (Note that in the polio era, the housefly was considered the deadliest  disease-vector on the planet.) That servant is in all probability someone who recognizes such servitude as a modern form of enslavement but also recognizes our Masters' omnipotence and thus knows or at least senses our species has been reduced to such an oppressed state,  there is no longer any nation in the world committed to slavery's overthrow; resistance truly is futile. 

Meanwhile  our Masters have  knowingly dosed our obviously disintegrating nation's NeoConfederate rabble with deadly ChristoNazi lies and paranoia, much of  it vectored by the fake-news snot-bombers. The Moronic Majority's impassioned belief in these falsifications has grown so imperative, SCOTUS  is now making law of them. Hence their  relentless edicts of anti-humanitarian subversion include an allegedly "Constitutional" foundation for an utterly terrifying expansion of the anti-vax/anti-mask suicidal snot-bombers' cult's alleged "right" to exterminate the entire global population by what is now undeniably our Masters' biological warfare weapon. 

In other words, SCOTUS has unleashed de facto lynch mobs of murderously unmasked and suicidally un-vaccinated snot-bombers to infect us with  the virus that has already proven itself the doomsday bug for at least 18 million dead women, men and children -- our Nazi-controlled government's most radical escalation yet of the deadly snot-bomber onslaught by which Covid's homicidal vectors have repeatedly attacked us since the pandemic got here in late 2019.

*****

BUT IS THE U.S. truly the world's deadliest failed state? Here are more links to help you decide for yourself:

The proto-Nazi exterminators of the North American First Nations  literally built the United States on a foundation of rotting corpses -- the murdered bodies of at least 95 million native women, children and men -- as far as anybody knows, the deadliest holocaust in the 200,000-plus years of our species' existence. Nor has anything since ever quelled our national blood-lust: by 2007, the Empire's post-World-War-II body-count was already approaching 30 million.

In 2010, SCOTUS issued the Citizens United edict, about which -- inspired in large measure by the MSNBC-broadcast original of the above-linked Keith Olbermann video -- I wrote of the court's decree with properly prophetic harshness, the accuracy of my suppositions since fully confirmed,  in small part by how maybe five years later the newly corporatized Typepad maliciously deleted this post from its 2010 archives.  The same fate also disappeared another of my more controversial 2010 Typepad posts that again would have been forever lost but for its preservation by the Internet. Each piece was censored from my 2010 archive by the same plutocratic takeover that destroyed a mostly Left-leaning blogger-nest that made national news with its journalist-protecting Typepad "Bailout" in 2008 and '09.  For whatever unknown reasons -- most assuredly not design considerations -- its new, avowedly Capitalist owners also reformatted the outlet’s type schedule, thus turning these two measured and visually proofed one-line headlines into a layout-besmirching two lines, with (as you will see via the links) the second line an obtrusively dangling single word – a visually distracting “widow,” as they were pejoratively (and correctly) labeled by yesteryear’s molten-alloy typographers.

In 2013, former State Department official William Blum declared our bogus "democracy" America's Deadliest Export.  In 2017, we learned "how US imperialism continues to kill the people and planet."

On  5 September 2019 -- with the start of the pandemic disaster still at least three months in the future --  Newsweek  ranked the U.S. as "Among Worst Countries in the World to Live In." 

Come April 2020, Covid's skyrocketing body-count was  not only proving to the world the deadly magnitude of our national failure, but doing so amidst a rising fog of above-confirmed suspicion our Masters were weaponizing the virus as part of their (final) solution to what they see as the only (real) threat to 21st Century Capitalism: a growing surplus of laborers -- that is,  way too many Working Class children growing into way too many Working Class  women and men making way too many more Working Class babies. Nor is such Ruling Class cruelty unprecedented;  think not just of the obviously permanent termination of the child tax credit and the ongoing destruction of the socioeconomic safety net in general; reflect also on the fate of  slaves deemed surplus or otherwise unwanted during the trans-Atlantic passage from Africa. Thus, at least to the observant, do our modern Neoliberal (Neonazi) overlords reveal their slave-trader lineage, ideological and often genealogical as well.

Now, in 2022, the fact our Masters deliberately sustain the world's highest Covid-death toll as a matter of policy not only underscores the extent to which the U.S. is a failed state but strongly suggests the failures are beyond reversal and thus will only worsen until the nation disintegrates completely.

*****

SCOTUS ALSO CONFIRMED, unintentionally of course,  the scholarly hypothesis about secular art that so infuriates the theocrats.

Which -- if I may veer aside to acknowledge the one possible bright spot hidden in the court's infectious darkness -- surely does add to the already conclusive body of evidence amassed by Carl Jung and Marshall McLuhan² that proves secular art far more usefully prophetic than its allegedly "sacred" counterparts, witness this Jackson Browne piece from 1974:

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them, only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived...

Yes of course I know the standard proof of secular prophetic art is "The Scream," but I believe the Supreme Court's ChristoNazi majority has now proven Browne's apocalyptic vision to be at least as accurate for the 21st Century as Edvard Munch's insights are known to have been for the 20th Century.  The all-encompassing horror Munch portrayed in his 1893 paintings has long been recognized as our species' most accurate prelude to the 20th century, which -- were human societies still capable of recognizing historical truth -- we would know was shaped entirely by our Masters' body counts. It is thus hardly surprising the now-inescapable, probably bottomless trauma of the apocalypse Browne correctly foresaw is becoming the common though yet mostly unacknowledged denominator of consciousness for every one of us who has thus far managed to escape or at least resist the mental zombification imposed on us by today's ever-more-omnipotent GOP. 

Originally "GOP" was an acronym for "Grand Old Party," the (formerly rational) Republican Party. It gave us a kindred synonym, "Grand Army of the Republic," for the U.S. soldiers who's epic courage and determination seemed for a time to have defeated the Confederate traitors.³ But today's GOP differs from the original to the same degree as humanitarian reason differs from homicidal mania; today's GOP is instead a growing Sturmabteilung of lockstep-obedient perpe-traitors led by a Hitler-worshiping cabal of Greed-Obsessed Plutocrats and their vassalage of Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Eichmann emulators in the global economy, the mainstream media propaganda machine (MMPM) and planetary governance at each of its five levels: international, imperial, federal, state and local. Thus yesterday's (merely) Moronic Majority becomes the Murderously Moronic Majority of today.

The German Nazi hierarchy and their Capitalist collaborators  -- wherever and however the U.S. protected them from rightful Soviet vengeance via Operation Paperclip and many other still-classified rescues during and after World War II -- would surely be proud to see how, 78 years later, their ideological graduates are completing the subjugation of the global population into a de facto Fourth Reich and -- as if they truly believe their rocketry can enable them to escape the consequences -- hastening the reduction of our species' planetary motherland back into the bug planet from which it evolved. The  ecogenocidal magnitude of the geoengineering in question has already convinced a small but expanding minority we are being conquered by predatory extraterrestrials -- that our morally imbecilic human Masters were long ago bribed to submission by guarantees of eternal omnipotence  and are now behaving accordingly, reshaping the global environment to the conquerors' specifications and forcing whatever remains of the Working Class into permanent slavery. Absurd? Let us hope -- but given the never-ending chaos of lies and disinformation by which the Plutocrats and their vassals began poisoning our minds in 1945, who now can distinguish truth with unassailable certainty?   

Which is precisely why I shrug off, often with an uplifted social-finger,  the "conspiracy theorist" slander invariably directed at any of us who dare point out how rapidly accumulating evidence at the very least suggests our world is now ruled by some top-secret but nevertheless all-powerful Nazi International -- perhaps  the final form of the conjectural ODESSA organization. 

Worse, given our definitively ecogenocidal post-World-War-II history,  if such a Nazi International exists -- as the post-WW-II years (and particularly the decades after the murder of JFK) surely suggest -- it is ever-more-obviously sponsored by the U.S. government both domestically and abroad,  and it is therefore also most likely headquartered in the United States, probably -- typical of all such U.S. intelligence operations --  hidden beneath the fake legitimacy of a benignly named bureaucracy, research foundation or other such organization.⁴ 

I suspect I need not point out how these developments thoroughly legitimize a formerly taboo question: was the  preservation and propagation of Nazism the true purpose of Operation Paperclip? Is that why our Masters then infiltrated thousands more Nazis to protected  havens in the United  States?

*****

TERMINAL CLIMATE CHANGE or TCC -- as it should have been labeled from the beginning, but obviously wasn't, apparently because the Goebbels disciples in governance and on Madison Avenue rightfully feared the TCC-concept's confirmation of the looming apocalypse might terrify the increasingly subjugated Moronic Majority into open rebellion -- was instead disguised as "global warming." Thus our Masters' entire response to the looming ecogenocidal disaster was never more than a Disney-like effort to conceal its all-season magnitude and minimize its horrors by  coating the deadly crisis  with the emotional chocolate of an implicitly cuddly euphemism. 

Which -- now the true body count and cultural cost  of terminal climate change has become so overwhelming it's beginning to escape the censors -- should leave us all wondering to what extent our Masters' privately owned, for-profit versions of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda are censoring the pandemic reports. 

Meanwhile, one of the less obvious issues of this increasingly apocalyptic era is the extent to which the content of our informational media, alternative and mainstream alike, is being reshaped by the evidence we -- our species and our planet -- are doomed. Have some of our Masters eased their censorship? It would surely seem so -- though my best guess is they hope to make the news so traumatically depressing, we can no longer bear reading, hearing or viewing it at all. Already it perpetuates (and often intensifies) the anguish generated by our helplessness. Even I -- for whom sociopolitical journalism was my financial lifeblood -- now regard the news as a prime depressant and avoid it more often than I can comfortably admit.

Truth is -- unless one is a Trumpite, or ranks among the plutocrats and plutocratic vassals who have been disguising Neonazi racial and ethnic ecogenocide as Neoliberal economic austerity at least since my late father helped defeat Sen. Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican presidential campaign by cross-referencing Goldwater's ideology to its sources in Mein Kampf -- there is literally no longer any such thing as "good"  news. Indeed,  because of the hybridization of undeniably terminal climate change and the ever-more-probably terminal Covid pandemic by the Court's knowingly murderous and now irrevocable imposition of "herd immunity," it is increasingly likely there will never again be "good" news -- news that's reassuring or confidence-building -- for any of us in the Working Class.

As a direct consequence, an ever-growing number of us hide beneath whatever shields, real or metaphorical, we might find to protect ourselves; as best we can, we tune out the skyrocketing frequency of disasters that redefine the outside world exclusively in terms of its new Gaian deadliness,  proving it more divinely capable of self-defense than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine and now -- as if vexed to terminal fury by six millennia of patriachal  ecogenocide -- increasingly hostile to human survival.

*****

THE MORE ASTUTE amongst us -- at least those reasonably familiar with our species' history since the advent of patriarchy -- are at last beginning to realize the extent to which we've all been conned by the Christian notion the universe displays a "moral arc" toward "justice." This is indeed one of the most destructive Big Lies ever. The historical truth is the diametrical opposite; under patriarchy, any "moral arc" is determined solely by our Masters, who constantly refine their  technology to compel ever-more zero-tolerance compliance. Thus "progress" inevitably leads toward ever more inescapable subjugation. The bloody physical trauma inflicted by the overseer's whips and the lynch mob's grisly extermination parties is replaced by the less obvious but demonstrably more crazy-making psychological trauma mandated by Neoliberal "austerity" and the inescapable 24/7 surveillance by which it's  enforced; while the homeless camp may have replaced the death camp as the most obvious symbol of our Masters' intent, the Nazi ideology that sustains their underlying greed remains as impregnable as ever. No matter what we do, in the end it seems we cannot escape the down-pressing burden of our Masters' ever-more-crushing tyranny, the cause of its terrible permanence pointedly revealed by Audre Lorde: "The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House."

Often  -- as a growing plurality is already doing -- we thus reject the entire concept of democratic process; we view its weakness and permanent failure as conclusively proven by the breathtaking speed with which the Neonazis are conquering the planet. Already they're reversing the humanitarian outcomes of World War II, nullifying the U.S. Civil War and even cancelling the positive results of our domestic Masters' violent exit from the British Empire.   Nor -- given how the defeat of the Soviet Union has robbed us of the only historically proven antidote to Nazism --  can I  rationally blame the dropouts; I nearly became one myself.  Thus -- though no one has yet dared make public an authoritative analysis of the statistical proof -- it is clear there is within the so-called "progressive" community⁵ an accelerating trend toward what amounts to unconditional surrender:  the abandonment of all political activity.

To me, the potential consequence of that likelihood is by far the most terrifying prospect facing us today. The ranks of us who  resist the Plutocracy's campaigns to reduce us all to prideful ignorance and morally imbecilic self-obsession are rapidly dwindling; the why-bother shrinkage of the electorate combines with  Biden the Beguiler's innumerable "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals to almost certainly guarantee Christonazi victory in November and in 2024. For those of us who know enough history to foresee the looming horrors, our (entirely rational) anxiety is often so intense it cannot be accurately described in any known human language, though Edvard Munch surely did a proper job of communicating it as a visual artist. 

Hence  I'll say it once more: it is  ever-more-probable there will never again be any "good"  news for Working Class humans.

*****

DRIVEN BY A surprisingly relentless inclination to keep writing and photographing even in the face of what is obviously irreversible humanitarian defeat, I began contemplating nearly a year ago how I might  radically minimize my reliance for Dispatches content on the endless litanies of disaster, lies and disinformation we're now routinely force-fed 24/7 by media whether Left, Right or center.  Eventually I began weighing various approaches to  transforming Dispatches into a  grammatically disciplined and therefore more accessible anthology of present-day selections from the journal I began keeping in 1956,  my 16th year; Dispatches' new content will henceforth be focused way more on aesthetics, social history and examples of something I think of as "indicative weirdness" than on politics per se.

It will also include factual descriptions of the often-curious, sometimes downright eerie events that inspired some of my most telling photographs, sustained my 24-year effort on "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" and prompted a  quest, inspired by discoveries on the East Coast,  for Pacific Northwest archaeological anomalies; my success unearthed yet more of the sort of evidence catalogued by the New England Antiquities Research Association. If  substantiated, this evidence resoundingly refutes our Masters' misogynistic claims of white patriarchal intellectual supremacy -- no doubt another reason why, as many of you know, my attempted contribution to this material -- my photos, drawings, site maps -- was itself among the potential forever nullified by the 1983 arson.⁶  But with this new Dispatches format, I may try to reclaim from memory a few of those losses.

My new  content will thus include carefully selected passages of what ethics require I clearly label "speculation" -- never mind these are actually the same sort of insight -- its accuracy confirmed by subsequent events -- that underlay "Dancer." Spontaneous, fleeting and frequently unsought, these days it most often arrives amidst the near-daily meditation by which, thanks to more than two years of ongoing quarantine, I am finally naming, examining and (somewhat) ameliorating the ultimately unhealable  trauma of being suddenly reduced to an emotional orphan, as I was, aged only a bit more than five years, by familial reaction to my birthmother's violent attempt at post-partum abortion, eerily on the Summer Solstice eve of 1945.

I have yet to determine which behavior is more representative of the traditional Midsummer-Eve rites: my birthmother's homicidal madness or the love for his son that compelled my father to rescue me and forcibly confine her violence to our living room floor until the police rescued us both by carting her thoroughly shackled self off to jail. But soon after that, my father fearfully concluded my mother's genetic legacy had reduced me to a "goon boy," his favorite pejorative, usually soon followed by the oft-repeated, always-deeply wounding accusation I was "just like my mother." Meanwhile all but one member my birth-mother's family --  my birthmother's older sister, the aunt whose beneficence literally saved me from the worst consequences of Dyslexia -- decided my existence was more threatening to the expansion of their already substantial life-insurance profits than even my privately institutionalized birthmother had been. Thus in 1957 they permanently ended my summertime visits by evicting me after I brandished a firearm to rescue my 79-year-old maternal grandfather from a club-wielding 18-year-old thug I feared would easily kill him. Apparently he -- and all the rest of my birthmother's kin save the aforementioned hero-aunt -- feared the odium of a never-more-than-hypothetical police response far more than they feared the threatened death of their patriarch, who did die maybe six months later, in '57's mid-November as best I recall. I attended his funeral only because there was no way I could escape it; afterward I was defiantly absent from every one of that emotional-orphan-making family's funerals; I couldn't attend my rescuer-aunt's 2004 funeral because my eternally hateful birthmother delayed sending me her obituary by two months, resulting in some metaphysical suspicions I will probably address in a future essay.   

My subsequent adult life was thus inevitably shaped by so many epics of  disastrous romance, I knew by 1970 -- my 30th year -- that reduction to an  emotional orphan had rendered me permanently unfit for parenthood or marriage. Nevertheless, as age draws me ever closer to death, Covid has quite astonishingly granted me a privilege nominally denied all Working Class people merely by its prohibitive price: that of an extended interlude for the introspection and journal-writing without which I'd have never discovered the meditative self-healing potential   U.S. for-profit health "care" typically tries to hide from Working Class discovery. Meanwhile  anything approaching the requisite degree of therapeutic excellence is affordable only by the tiny minority that can afford it -- that is, the obscenely rich.

To repurpose my Zen-like cogitations for the new Dispatches, I had to relearn to trust my intuition enough I now in meditation keep pen and paper handy to record anything of apparent significance I might recognize; the results repeatedly confirm my  suspicion it is only the theocratic stranglehold of Abrahamic religion that keeps   our more adventuresome scientists from following their Soviet counterparts;  liberated as they were from religious taboos, they were reportedly investigating all sorts of psychic-phenomena questions including whether there truly is some aquifer-like cosmic reservoir of collective consciousness  accessible only via maximum mindfulness. In any case,  I'd decided I would publish many of these internal visions as vignettes.

In my choices of what might be relevant I'll be strongly influenced by what I know of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The population of Rome itself, estimated as at least a million (and possibly twice that) at the empire's height, had shrunk to  about 25,000 by the 13th Century.   This is among  our best indications of the depth of Dark-Age reality forced onto the entire Occident; the magnitude of cultural collapse is also measured by the superstitious destruction of libraries and the church-enforced scientific and technological ignorance that led to the  loss of  central heating and the abandonment of aqueducts, running water, indoor plumbing and municipal sewerage  -- so-called "modern conveniences" lost for the next nearly 1500 years. Such is the pattern by which our species waxes and wanes, the individual microcosm of birth and death writ large in the societal macrocosm of rise, failure and collapse, its universal truth repeatedly proven by the failed empires archeology has since unearthed on every continent save Antarctica.

While each of these discoveries tells us we humans could survive apocalyptic conditions in the past, that is clearly no longer true today. The cooperative skill and instinct that facilitated our survival through four ice ages and who knows how many other disasters is precisely the same skill and instinct that gives us socialism -- precisely why our Masters are doing everything the can to condition it out of us. Which is the ultimate  reason both for Neoliberalism and its underlying Nazi content.  At the same time our  Masters' misogynistic hatred and contempt for our planetary Mother -- the  ecogenocidal venom at patriarchy's core -- combines with their chemical, biological, radiological and thermonuclear weaponry to doom us all, even as their now-inescapable surveillance makes effective resistance impossible. Our Masters and their chosen vassals literally possess the  omnipotence previously granted only to divinities. Thus when we finally recognize what Barack the Betrayer⁷ long ago prompted me to denounce as "the imbecility of hope," we are reduced, logically and correctly, to utter hopelessness.

Seems to me we now have but two choices: one is surrender (which my ethics and sense of personal honor  forced me to reject); the other is the profoundly difficult task of ferreting out the faint, often nearly invisible traces from which we might yet evolve new pathways to Working Class liberation.

Among these traces are, or so I believe,  the three extensively footnoted and now event-confirmed hypotheses upon which I  built "Dancer." Firstly, I confirmed the spontaneous resurrection of the goddess-symbol, both as science (the Gaia Hypothesis) and -- via music, visual art and literature -- as alternative spirituality.  Secondly, with an appreciative nod to McLuhan, I hypothesized from these developments and from the rise of the Counterculture itself the probable existence of some  hitherto-unidentified human instinct to collectively organize ourselves for mutual protection and sustenance even when its prophetic compulsions are not consciously recognized; I was particularly impressed by the spontaneous emergence and explosive growth of the Counterculture's environmentalist, feminist and back-to-the-land factions, likewise by  the popular  rediscovery of primitive technologies. Lastly, I identified an   anti-patriarchal aesthetic solidarity implicit throughout the Counterculture's creative output -- the one quality I felt might have transcended the induced ideological hostility by which our Masters  keep us divided into warring factions.  The late Cicely Nichols obviously agreed; she repeatedly said she believed "Dancer" would  be  "among the most influential works of the 20th Century." Apparently so did our Masters; no doubt  that's what got "Dancer"and all the rest of my significant work burned.⁸

***** 

THOUGH BY THE closing days of 2021 I had pretty much finalized my plans for resurrecting Dispatches,  I remained unsure how to introduce the new format. As I sometimes do when I am genuinely perplexed, I consulted the I Ching, the Wilhelm/Baynes translation (Princeton University Press: 1997).  The text is at least 3,000 years old and is -- as far as I know -- the only oracle ever thoroughly investigated by Carl Jung, after which he wrote approvingly of it in his "Forward" to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation.  Jung's endorsement of this mode of seeking clarity has always been sufficient approval  for me to make it my own; hence via coin-toss, I asked the oracle what might obtain "if I turn these stories and fragments" (that once went into my journals) "into Dispatches posts." It responded with the 46th Hexagram, "Pushing Upward," the judgement of which is "supreme success." The two changing lines elaborate:

"Six at the beginning means:
Pushing upward that meets with confidence
Brings great good fortune."

"Six in the fifth place means:
Perseverance brings good fortune.
One pushes upward by steps."

The changed lines create a new hexagram, in this instance the 5th, "Waiting (Nourishment)," its judgement as follows:

"If you are sincere,
You have light and success.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
It furthers one to cross the great water."

The appended "Image" is especially telling:

Clouds rise up to heaved:
The image of waiting.
Thus the superior man eats and drinks,
Is joyous and of good cheer.

So I opted to wait, sensing the possibility of some pivotal discovery or event. That was on 28 December 2021; then on Thursday, 13 January 2022, the Neonazi-conquered U.S. Supreme Court  officially weaponized Covid-19 into our Masters' 21st Century equivalent of Zyklon B, a brazen, viciously ecogenocidal decree that forever rejects promotion of "the general welfare" as part of our national purpose. It does so by granting the Trumpites and other anti-vax contagion-vectors the right to inflict the so-called "herd immunity" that turns the un-vaccinated and never-masked moral imbeciles  into -- it cannot be said too often -- potentially suicidal, obviously murder-minded snot-bombers.  Far worse, it turns all of them into ambulatory Petri-dishes for the breeding of ever-deadlier Covid-19 mutations. It could spawn the ultimate doomsday bug and so exterminate our entire species. At the very least, the court's permanent Neonazi majority has smirkingly  condemned who-knows-how-many-more of us to death and financial ruin -- which should tell us all we need know about our Masters' long-range intentions. It also reveals something of the treacherous intent behind the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy function as the ChristoNazi Fifth Column.

But its most damning message is that any pretense of U.S. humanitarianism is gone forever.

Instead we may soon discover we Working-Class humans are inmates of a nation become a de facto death camp,  a place wherein it is now entirely legal for the defiantly un-vaccinated and anti-masked Neonazis and their Nazi and Neoconfederate collaborators  to exterminate as many more of us as possible by deliberately spreading -- knowingly and therefore with murderous premeditation -- a virus that can literally mutate to slay us all. Nor -- thanks to the Neonazi-conquered courts -- will these bacteriological Ted Bundys ever again face even the most minimal forms of justice.    

All of which marks the impact and consequences of Thursday morning's SCOTUS atrocity as tantamount -- both personally and societally -- to "crossing the great water."

About the latter I will for the present utter no more than two statements, firstly how I fear the court has inflicted a wound on our nation that, just as the Dred Scot decision did,  is already solidifying  our divisions to the point civil war is again inevitable -- this time with all the apocalypse-accelerating  chemical, biological, radiological  and thermonuclear horrors of modern warfare;  secondly how it should be obvious to anyone with what in Appalachia is termed "a lick a sense" the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party has quite deliberately and with Oberkommando der Wehrmacht cunning confined themselves (and us) to a political cage from which escape is impossible.

About the former, the personal, suffice it to say that, as if precursory to the SCOTUS decree, someone we'll call Person X -- someone I had for nearly 40 years foolishly presumed a dear and trusted friend -- denounced me as no longer worthy of companionship. I should have seen it coming; instead I dismissed   X's occasional, invariably brief but always perplexing expressions of admiration for Ayn Rand's Goebbels-clever fictionalizations of Mein Kampf as situational rather than existential. My mistake;  X finally tested -- I suspect intentionally -- my acceptance or rejection of the definitively ecogenocidal, anti-humanitarian, incipiently mass-murderous, morally imbecilic arrogance and elitist self-obsession known to be the psychological epicenter of Nazism, but which also lurks,  often clandestinely, yet always with full Nazi potency, in the darker corners of the mental Draino that, in its pre-Esalen/pre-Charley-Manson forms, was already government-asset-brazen enough to pimp itself as "the human potential movement."  Needless to say, from X's perspective I failed the test, even as from my own viewpoint I amassed a perfect score. And thus was, by this Person X, declared an enemy and irrevocably dismissed. And so, resigned to the traumatic fact my composition speed was radically reduced by the loss of neurotransmitter-nicotine's temporary anti-dyslexia medication when I finally permanently beat its addiction on 23 September 1995, I began this writing.

But as it turned out, the interval suggested by the "Waiting" hexagram was substantially lengthened, first by my de-nicotinized dysklexic difficults at writing, next by the nagging intuition I should continue my observant wait -- an intuition confirmed on 19 January by the Duke/Politico disclosures I discovered quite by surprise -- which discovery immediately compelled a total revision of my originally intended post, including rewriting six of the eight essays I had written in the wake of the SCOTUS Covid horror.  

*****

MAKING ART, IT seems, remains the one activity most essential to my life, even as I approach my 82nd year. Having written, re-written and edited this essay, I feel as if I've stepped into a cloud of quiet joy: a sense of being bless-ed from without, a feeling as perplexing to my Newtonian/Marxian/agnostic self as it is encouraging to that atavistic wellspring at the core of my consciousness, the cauldron  from which I sometimes guzzle the diverse but always thirst-quenching nectars of my Picto-Celtic, Norse, Saxon and Iroquoian genes. I guess I took that sense of blessedness for granted in my 60-odd years as a working professional; I realize now I'd have given up journalism long ago but for the encouragement of this hitherto unrecognized but obviously protective cloak. And amidst the hurly-burly of pandemic and quarantine and the political terrors the Nazis inflict upon us all, in my heart-of-hearts I tried to do just that -- but instead discovered I cannot. Which surely feels -- at least at the moment -- as a welcome blessing of its own.  

I'm ending this beginning by introducing another new Dispatches topic: what might be termed "metaphysical" stuff, including material I had self-protectively excluded from "Dancer,"  among the exclusions some very compelling evidence the ancient liturgies of the goddess retain invocatory power even after thousands of years of concealment and fragmentation. But before anyone supposes I'm about to surrender to Moron Nation gullibility, let me reassure you all I'll temper any associated text both by my solid grounding in basic university-level science including physics, astronomy, geology and archaeology plus by my investigative journalist's tendency to distrust anything, my own personal experience included, that cannot be objectively confirmed. Those interested in a factual account of the incident I now recognize as the beginning of "Dancer" may read it here.

Also I do  not yet know how frequently I will publish; I am leaning toward monthly or bi-weekly, though that is an ongoing decision-making admittedly influenced by the realization geriatric reality may make my production of new material somewhat random.

Another quandary through which I am working -- probably already obvious to critical readers -- is whether the (alleged) distinctions between Nazis, Neonazis, Neoliberals and fascists have any real validity in the face of their ever-more-unified and therefore ever-more-murderous assaults. While I'm leaning toward calling them all Nazis on the basis of their shared ethos  and footnoting the reasons why, the question remains open, and I would appreciate any suggestions or observations you readers might choose to offer, for which  my thanks in advance.   

Meanwhile let us never forget that in times such as these, survival itself is a revolutionary act. May we all remain safe, healthy and determined.
__________________

¹ The definition of "Working Class" used herein is that implicit in Marxism: like the statistically incorrect but nevertheless usefully descriptive "99 percent," it describes those of us who are neither plutocrats nor plutocratic vassals, are thus entirely dependent on wages or commissions and are thus never more than a layoff or firing away from potentially deadly disaster.

² Until I began the memory-confirming research that generated the above links, I knew neither of Walter Benjamin nor of his valuable contribution to the implicitly anti-patriarchal quest to re-legitimize the prophetic functions or art and literature.

³The New York and Michigan cemeteries of my youth were filled with  Grand Army of the Republic markers, most of them still bedecked with flags and repeatedly honored with fresh flowers.

⁴Two books and a Netflix film do a thorough job of documenting the Christonazi infiltration of USian governance at all levels. The books are The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power  (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008) and American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Free Press: 2006). I heartily recommend each text. The Nexflix film, which I have yet to watch, has the same title as   Sharlet's work and is said to be based on his reporting. Will I watch it? Probably. Will I review it? Maybe. 

⁵Here I use "progressive" in its broadest sense, from Marxian to social democracy and thence rightward to the vast array of pseudo-Leftists who serve our Masters' by agitating the culture wars that foster identity politics and thus perpetuate the ultimately suicidal divisiveness that defines today's domestic and global Working Class. As to the U.S. "Democratic" (sic) Party, I believe it forever renounced any right to claim the "progressive" label when it unconditionally surrendered to the Warren Commission, thereby granting total victory to the (already Nazified) perpe-traitors of the 22 November 1963 coup.

⁶"Dancer" was a thoroughly footnoted manuscript of about 150,000 words illustrated by approximately 100 photographs; it and all the rest of  my significant work -- clippings of published work, 31 years of photography, 27 years of journals, a near lifetime of reference files, awards etc. -- was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983.

⁷It came to me last night while revising this piece that Obama's treachery may be the best evidence yet of our Masters' unprecedented cunning: how better, with maximum deniability,  to legitimize the nation's infamous white racism than by electing as its first Black president a class-traitor whose subsequent betrayals hurled enough metaphorical gunpowder to explode the existential Nazism of the  Moronic Majority's whites  into today's now-obviously unstoppable Neonazi onslaught.         

⁸In what  was obviously a "fuck-off-or-die"message from our Masters, the fire was lit at the exact moment I was meeting with Nichols to finalize our working agreement; the ignition time was preserved by a melted electric clock adjacent the fire's point of origin.   

LB/13-22 January 2022, with typographic revisions and minor editing 29 March 2022.

--30-- 

and Why Ryokan's Haiku Typifies Our Only (Real) Source of Salvation:

First some Bad news:

• https://www.mintpressnews.com/average-u-s-citizens-little-influence-government-policy/189520/
  
• https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/20/bidens-american-rescue-plan-and-its-opponents/
• https://www.laprogressive.com/dupes-of-our-hopes/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+NEW&utm_campaign=2a03409578-LAP+News+-+20+April+17+PC_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_61288e16ef-2a03409578-286953617&mc_cid=2a03409578&mc_eid=f9033578e0
• https://popularresistance.org/single-payer-which-way-forward/
• https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/15/why-there-was-no-peoples-rebellion-against-a-fascist-u-s-president-nine-reasons/
• https://www.blackagendareport.com/return-source-democracy-dead

Then some Good news:

• https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/gaia/esp_gaia01.htm
• https://www.encyclopedia.com/earth-and-environment/ecology-and-environmentalism/environmental-studies/gaia-hypothesis
• https://www.gaia.com/article/goddess-gaia

Obviously if we humans are to save ourselves, we must mobilize not as Americans or Russians or Nooksacks or Koreans or Masai, but as Gaians -- as lovingly fierce defenders of our Mother Earth  -- and we must do so no matter our nationality or race or ethnicity or gender or ideology or whether we view Gaia as metaphor or matriarch. 

Thus our most immediate need is clearly some sort of Gaian International, organized to speed our evolution into a globally cooperative, Nature-embracing humanity. As we've been repeatedly warned, perhaps most accessibly by Edvard Munch (1893); William Butler Yeats (1919); Jackson Browne (1974); and now by Greta Thunberg -- we must do so immediately, with unprecedented speed, before the Neoliberal legacy of murderous greed becomes our own inescapable torture-chamber of knowingly self-inflicted extinction.

My own brief summary-analysis of this good news -- that yes, we as a species may still have one (last) chance for healing the demonstrably fatal wound inflicted on us by the patriarchy's forcible, usually violent suppression of biological truth we were all born knowing -- ends, not ironically, with its beginnings: those glimmers of human perception and intent evident in our revolutionary (re-evolutionary) re-acknowledgement of the biblically despised biological reality -- the fact we like the wolves and bears and cockroaches are all children of our Mother Earth --  that unites us inseparably with all of Nature. 

And thus we forever remain -- in this era, challenged to re-learn how to embrace such  kinship, how to nurture it and help it thrive,  as I have done my very best to do throughout my post-news-staff years -- and yes thanks to the north-looking window beyond my desk do even now in quarantine. I likewise mourn the many who delude themselves into believing Christianity's  adult-Santa-fable some false divine will "save" them from the deadly consequences of denying their irrevocable kinship with the rest of Nature.

Or maybe they really are genetically different.

But as a favorite astronomy professor often said, "we humans are literally made of the substance of stars." (I apologize that I do not identify him; it is  because I cannot remember the correct spelling of his name. All my personal copies of academic transcripts were destroyed by the same arsonist[s] who destroyed all my life's significant work, and obtaining the information by telephone or email under pandemic conditions would take days if not weeks.) 

In any case, I feel that before we go on, we should perhaps quickly reflect on just how patriarchy assails us. However it might have been propagated -- more on this in the footnotes -- there is no doubt it wrenched human society out of the egalitarian, cooperative, proto-communist mode that enabled our ancestors to survive 194,000 years, four ice ages included. Then, beginning some 6,000 years ago, patriarchy overthrew that demonstrably superior ethos and eventually brutalized us into the murderously hierarchical, violently acquisitive, ecogenocidally imperialistic mode that begat the Abrahamic death-cults (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), which with Christian leadership eventually cloned themselves into the secular death-cult of Capitalism, which in turn divided into the apocalyptic death-cults we know as fascism, Nazism and Neoliberalism. 

In other words, our would-be exterminators today are the direct ideological descendants of those who sought to exterminate our pagan ancestors.

Given our present-day peril -- and factoring in Jungian discoveries about our ability to recognize and describe risks to our species well before they become obvious¹ (note again the prophetic elements in works by Munch, Yeats and Browne) -- I believe we can define as functionally anti-patriarchal any human expression that can be shown to foster our conceptual reunification with Nature. This most assuredly includes Marxism, which at least in Frederich Engels' view was an effort to restore humanity to a modern equivalent of its relatively harmonious pre-patriarchal cooperativeness; it also includes ecosocialism and ecofeminism, the healing intent of each made obvious by its name.  But our most effectively anti-patriarchal accomplishments are too often the most obscure. These are the scientific resurrections of ancient wisdom via the Gaia Hypothesis and the burgeoning growth of environmental science documented here, all of which are faulting the patriarchal bedrock.  

Anyone who doubts the revolutionary nature of such advances need only reflect on the extent to which  they infuriate the Christianists. Note how their early-'70s assertions of Christian anti-environmentalism -- "Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Means Of The Devil" -- have  since metastasized into open warfare against science itself.  Our counterattack -- more evidence of that prophetic function identified by Carl Jung -- is exemplified  here, here, here, here and perhaps more evocatively here.

Meanwhile, though the folk renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s was methodically suppressed in the United States, it has elsewhere continued its growth into an ever-more-wildly popular brand of multi-generational Neopaganism that powerfully nurtures our quest for reawakened awareness of our biologically indivisible  oneness with Nature.

Greta Thunberg's assertion we must now radically accelerate and condense into less than a decade a  learning process that hitherto took centuries if not millennia should thus be welcomed. I am frankly surprised it took so long for someone to name our species' plight in a voice heard round the world. Ignore her -- or ignore the Earthly foundation upon which she stands -- we'll soon have no more than a hell-bound snowball's chance of survival, much less of toppling six thousand years of patriarchy's (deliberate?)² planet-killing misogyny.  I'll have reverted to nonexistence by then, I'm sure, but I've seen enough -- and read enough history -- to know I wouldn't wish the horrors of a dying planet on my worst enemy. 

And now amidst this gotterdammerung what might we have that's valuable enough to bribe us to undertake the struggle of biological self-salvation?

In response I offer the following, reprinted here as it was given us by Ryokan via Alan Watts in The Way of Zen (Pantheon Books: 1957)³ -- for me the gateway,  62 years ago, to what through quarantine-enabled contemplation and meditation I have come to (gratefully) recognize as a lifelong path toward learning Earth-centered consciousness: 

The thief left it behind:
                  the moon
                  at my window.

-- Ryokan (1758-1831)

___________________
¹Influenced as I am by the Jungian understanding of how art can function as prophecy -- presumably because our subconscious minds perform the function  Marshall McLuhan described as analogous to early warning radar -- I take all such expressions as indicative of the yet-unplumbed magnitude of our survival instincts. Moreover I believe the fact such perception shows no evidence of yielding to the bottomless despair that is increasingly the sole defining ethos of modern life tells us at least some of our species will survive our present self-inflicted apocalypse.

²Patriarchy with its implicitly mandatory ecogenocide is not only ever-more-obviously our species' one ultimately deadly "unnatural" act. It is also -- at least if we dare consider the possibility our Earth is a target of  extraterrestrial invaders -- perhaps the interstellar equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets, its anti-Nature terraforming spawned by "unnatural" inseminators such as talking serpents, fiery wheels in the sky and shrubs inflamed to loquaciousness. If these origin tales are true -- that is, if they are based on indigenous perception of real-time events -- patriarchy's lethally invasive "unnaturalness" is all the more evident in the fact "unnatural" ranks among the patriarchs' favorite pejoratives of projection.

³The best Watts anthology is entitled Three  and includes complete texts of The Way of Zen (1957); Nature, Man, and Woman (1958); and Psychotherapy East and West (1961); it was published by Pantheon Books in 1977. Eerily, it was also one of my half-dozen bound volumes that survived not just the utterly life-changing arson of 1 September 1983, but which -- far more eerily -- were salvaged in readable form after spending a year beneath the sodden ashes of my friend Helen Farias' house. She returned them to me immediately, sole remnants of a boxed-up personal library that had exceeded a thousand volumes, and they have accompanied me ever since;  (Helen died in 1994. Writing this, I realize I can no longer deny the guilt I feel because  I do not doubt her house -- indeed her ancestral home -- was torched solely because she dared harbor within its upstairs rooms, as a favor to me whilst I sought a permanent Manhattan address, my  books, phonograph records, photography dating from my 12th birthday; clip-files, awards and journals dating from my 16th birthday; and most importantly,  the 24 years of  writing, photography and supportive research that had evolved into  "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" -- all that plus the potential of at least two other photographically illustrated books, one an exploration of academically ignored archaeological anomalies in the Pacific Northwest, the other a pictures-and-text portrait of commercial salmon fishers on the Sailish Sea.)  (Yes, that was a spontaneous digression, one necessarily followed by an apologetic excuse: but where else might I get way with such a stylistic outrage save in the footnotes?) Returning now to our discussion of Watts' Three,  unfortunately but predictably, the book is long out of print -- with extant copies effectively censored by prohibitive prices.

LB/20-22 January 2021

-30-