Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

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-

FIRST, MY APOLOGY FOR AN UNAPOLOGETIC CONCLUSION: As regular readers know, I have struggled for some time – years, actually – with my desire to move this blog “beyond” politics, with the explanation for my sarcasm quotes in this passage's concluding paragraph. I was motivated by the psychological nausea inflicted by the fact today’s politics are overwhelmingly those of the relentless capitalism-inflicted apocalypse, utterly hopeless and therefore infinitely depressing, a condition for which I had hoped to evolve textual and photographic antidotes for myself that would also serve those of you who regularly read this blog.

But now at long last I realize there are three reasons I cannot – indeed could never – do as I wanted. Each is existential. One is that a political journalist – no more, no less – is what I am. As a member of the working press, politics was what I thought about and wrote about most often. Two is that in the privacy of my own thoughts, and sometimes in revealing conversations with lovers or closest friends, I admitted I conceived of politics in the broadest possible socioeconomic sense, as for viewing crime as the consequences both of our national ethos of self-obsessed of moral imbecility and of the desperate poverty resulting from the deliberately murderous systemic malfeasance that ultimately defines capitalism as a form of nazism. By my late 20s I had come to recognize capitalism as the direct offspring of patriarchy, which in turn I had come to recognize as our species’ methodically ecogenocidal war against our Mother Earth, thus a suicide pact – and thus too an ultimately unnatural act, the one truly mortal sin that not only dooms us all but seeks to exterminate all other life (and even the possibility of life) as well. Three – of course (and with heartfelt thanks both to my Marxian father and the maternal aunt who was mindful both spiritually and intellectually) – is that I was long ago awakened to the necessity of not just socioeconomic revolution but metaphysical and aesthetic revolution as well. Though as a member of the working press what I most often wrote about was not the disease of patriarchy but immediate examples of its diverse symptoms, I realize now I have somehow been granted the freedom to do both simultaneously -- that is, to put the symptoms in their proper context (which was the ultimate purpose of the photographic and textual revelations of anti-patriarchal rebellion that were the conceptual backbone of the burned and forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer”) -- and that I have been working toward an analogous clarification-of-post-fire-purpose throughout a retirement that at age 83 has already extended, seemingly as if by magick, far longer than ever I expected to live.

While the thinking outlined above began in my childhood, its present form owes a great deal to the Gaia Hypothesis, which restates in scientific terms the core belief of our pre-patriarchal ancestors and cousins, amongst them the First Nations peoples, that our planet is herself a living being, “conscious and self-regulating.” Thus I have come to recognize patriarchy as total war against all being and the present USian plague of mass shootings not only as a microcosm of the Empire’s definitively nazi policy of massive retaliation, but – exactly as in Islamic suicide bombings – a microcosmic fulfillment of patriarchy’s terminal misogyny, its intent to assert its alleged supremacy of male over female by literally destroying anything and everything born of Nature. Indeed, the patriarchal intent of destroying the planet to “save” it is ever-more-evident in our Masters’ refusal to act against self-induced terminal climate change.

Which brings us to my promised explanation of the sarcasm quotes around “beyond”: in this darkest of all human ages, there is literally nothing for us, whether as individuals or as a species, “beyond” the mandate for responding to the apocalyptic threat posed by patriarchy. Since politics is either the mechanism by which we rescue ourselves and ensure our species’ survival or the weapon by which we destroy all that is within reach – the notion of anything “beyond” politics is as absurd as the medieval notion of transforming lead into gold. More to the point, now that mere survival has thus become a form of revolutionary defiance, politics is the pivot upon which we live or die, about which I shall henceforth write without apology for anything save the limitations of my own vision.

**********

FORMAT NOTE: I have used Typepad’s catalogue of formats to redesign Dispatches to accommodate reception by cell-phone users. This will transform previously published headlines into text that sometimes either overflows its original spacing or leaves great voids in it and does likewise with previously published photographs, flaws that are anathema to me as a former (award-winning) news-and-picture editor, though after a long delay I have come to accept the resultant graphic ugliness as an unavoidable surrender to present-day technology essential for increased readership.

**********

THREE COMMENT-THREAD POSTS FROM OTHER WEBSITES:

On the debt-limit crisis (and why I am so utterly terrified of its looming consequences): We should fear a “compromise” that sells out seniors, kids, and the disabled.

I am 83 years old, a mostly retired, sometimes award-winning print journalist whose newspaper career began at age 16 in 1956. Since the economic debacle of 2008-2009, which cost me nearly 70 percent of my annual income and forced me into bankruptcy, my sole source of pay has been Social Security.

The most telling lesson of my career is therefore the certain knowledge all USian politicians -- whether members of the "Democratic" (sic) Party or of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- are slavishly obedient puppets of the plutocracy, wholly owned and controlled by that tiny cabal of obscenely wealthy, fanatically neoliberal aristocrats who rule the United States and its global Empire with the same morally imbecilic omnipotence that hitherto defined only history's most notorious tyrants.

Their core principle -- here stated in the English translation of its original assertion in Hitler's Mein Kampf -- is that anyone too impoverished or disabled to thrive under capitalism is "life unworthy of life." Thus the only real distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans is the extent to which the former are infinitely more skilled at deceiving the Moronic Majority that functions as the national electorate. Thus too neoliberal "austerity," the slow-motion genocide by which our Masters have replaced death camps.

In fact the present crisis is but a repetition of recent history. Barack the Betrayer -- who campaigned successfully on "change we can believe in," the most ruinously brazen lie ever fed the Moronic Majority -- conspired with the Republicans to savage food stamps in 2011, using a carefully choreographed debt-limit fight to disguise the treachery of the "Democratic" (sic) Party, afterward lying to the public he had "saved" food stamps even as he radically cut food stamps for singles and elderly people, slashing my monthly allocation from $130 to $16.

Today's bitterly damning truth is the Democrats refused to raise the debt limit when they had the votes to do so. In other words. they deliberately engineered the present crisis by handing the Christonazis and Neoconfederates the tools to compel whatever socioeconomic savagery our Masters mandate. Despite his lies, Biden the Beguiler is obviously using the same strategy and tactics his predecessor the Betrayer employed.

Thus the political harlots who cater to our Masters' every plutocratic whim cunningly facilitate ever-worsening tyranny even as they dupe the Moronic Majority by preserving the Big Lie -- and that is precisely what it is -- of a troubled but nevertheless still functional democratic republic.

While I have no idea how deliberately murderous the looming socioeconomic savagery will be, experience tells me it will indeed be another step in the .01 Percent's effort to reduce the numbers of the 99.9 Percent, which means it will be as genocidal as our Masters believe they can achieve without sparking actual revolution.

Meanwhile my gratitude to Mr. Eskow for daring tell the truth, and my thanks to LAP for daring publish it.

*****

Ukrainian attack on Kremlin is a criminal provocation

Whether the drone-bombing of the Kremlin is as claimed by the Ukrainians or the Russians, its ultimate message is, again, that the global ruling class believes itself well-enough bunkered to survive not only a chemical, biological and thermonuclear apocalypse but the decade or so of nuclear winter that's bound to follow it.

And given the ongoing ruling-class refusal to take meaningful action against global warming, it is entirely possible our Masters see nuclear winter as the final solution to that problem too.

Meanwhile turncoat Putin's restoration of Russian Orthodoxy is methodically returning the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to Tsarist tyranny, even as the USian Empire -- no doubt following the advice of the legions of Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals it embraced as comrades-at-arms during and after the final year of World War II -- employs a Jewish puppet to re-nazify the Ukraine.

Exactly as Comrade Zaremba says in her comment, "This attack could get us all killed" -- as in the extermination of the entire global working class and the destruction of Earth as a habitable planet.

*****

Forest Defenders Appear For Preliminary Hearings

Actually -- this in supportive response to mwildfire -- Atlanta is infinitely more malevolent (and therefore infinitely more terrifying) than "an outpost of the Third Reich"; it is instead an embryo of the de facto Fourth Reich, the USian Empire, advised into being c. 1944-1968 by the legions of Nazi war criminals gleefully adopted from the defeated Third Reich and secretly resurrected to far greater ecogenocidal murderousness by the United States government and its capitalist owners.

So advised, the Empire's owners and their governmental vassals have since granted themselves irreversible omnipotence by fully weaponizing technology to fulfill their intent of "full-spectrum dominance" -- conquest of the entire world followed by universal zero-tolerance tyranny enforced by inescapable total surveillance. Their ethos is bottomless sadism and smirking moral imbecility. They will co-opt and exploit all human knowledge, either to fulfill Hitler's dream of subjugating all the peoples of the world or to fulfill the global version of Hitler's final stated wish, for which google Hitler's Nero decree and last will. Thus -- proclaiming of our world as they did of a village in Vietnam, "we had to destroy it to save it" -- they will exterminate our species and reduce our Mother Earth back to a bug planet rather than suffer genuine defeat.

That, my comrades, is the true unmitigated horror of our present circumstances, and that is what the "full-spectrum dominance" of the oppression that is ever-more-appallingly evident in Atlanta should be telling us. But -- alas and to our eventual doom -- far too many of us yet have our heads up that dark and smelly place I dast not mention lest this entire comment be censored.

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

SURPRISE, SURPRISE: The New York Times Publishes My Correction:

For those who’ve already spent their non-subscriber limit of 10 stories per month or otherwise cannot get past the NYT paywall:

All the four questions are from multiple-choice eighth-grade history tests. The question I addressed is, “Which of the following changes took place in Southern states immediately after the Civil War?”

The choices are:

(1)-Access to education became more available to African American people.

(2)-Most African Americans quickly switched from agricultural work to employment in manufacturing.

(3)-African American women were given the right to vote.

(4)-State governments were required to have African American people in legislative and executive offices.

Though I recognized options 1 and 4 were each correct, I answered option 4 as the more important – and my answer was marked wrong. According to The Times, the only correct answer was option 1.

Hence my comment and the comment in response:

Given my background in history -- a near-lifelong interest and a major part of my interdisciplinary BA -- I would debate the stated correct answer on the history question about the results of the Civil War. While it is indeed true the end of slavery enabled African-Americans legal access to education, it is also true the presence of federal troops throughout the secessionist states compelled the acceptance of African-Americans elected to local, state and federal government. (And of course it is equally true that by withdrawing federal troops in 1877, the U.S. government tacitly endorsed the re-emergence of the genocidal white supremacy that methodically purged African-Americans from the political system and radically curtailed their access to education.)

Loren Bliss (Tacoma, May 3)

(42 recommended)

In response:

@Loren Bliss my first thought was where were these black children going to school in 1866. My own state of Florida had no constitutional requirement for providing education until 1868 and we didn’t fully integrate until 1970. We did have black representation in congress during reconstruction though.

Alexander (Sunshine State, May 3)

(5 recommended)

As one of my Tacoma comrades said in response, “Good show! No wonder most USians are so ignorant about history. The media continues to peddle fables.”

**********

FICTION, MAYBE AS PROPHECY, working-titled “A Thing So Simple and So Huge,” a first draft of something, of course subject to constant revision:

Source of title:

And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

– Jackson Browne, “Before the Deluge”

***

THE STORY-KEEPER was awakened by a frighteningly improbable clamor of ravens. His name was Matthew Drusillason; he was a black-bearded, brown-skinned, olive-eyed  schoolteacher, a student of theocracy-forbidden subjects, a refugee from  the religious wars that yet raged beyond the Dead Lands. Three years ago he had been the sole survivor of a badly crewed sailing vessel fatally overcrowded with desperately hopeful emigrant escapees, a leaky, rot-weakened coaster storm-sunk amidst the always-treacherous rip-tides  of the  Sailish Sea. The Potlatch People had found him dying on Sanamo Island's Eastward Beach, and when he confessed to them his bewildered astonishment at having been borne  to the shallows by a pod of dolphins, they had nursed him back to health with their native medicines and afterward, relishing his unapologetically truthful stories of the tyrannies that characterized Before, they had adopted him both as a tribal member and as the keeper of the newest episodes of their struggle for survival in the relentlessly deadly wake of the Before's attempted murder of the formerly vengeful but now-gradually recovering  Mother Earth. His adoption was 14 moons ago; since then, guided by Potlatch  teachers, he had learned much of the locale's plants and animals,  and for a moment or two, knowing ravens do not ordinarily transform the late-night skies with cacophonies of rage, he thought he was dreaming.  But now he realized he was fully awake and the avian uproar he first believed imaginary was in fact happening in reality, and it was occurring at such uncanny loudness it seemed each of the thousand or so ravens he knew dwelt in the island's coniferous forest had taken wing in gratingly loquacious protest. Perhaps he had slept through an earthquake. Perhaps a quake was looming. Perhaps the volcano they called KomaKulsh was again erupting or was about to explode as she was said to have done three decades past. Perhaps a giant tsunami had flooded past the Sailish Sea's mountainous barriers and  was coming to drown Sanamo and obliterate all traces of its residents’ already unlikely survival. Ravens, he had learned, are magickal; they are also among the Earth Mother's chosen messengers; they would know of such events long before humans awakened to the dangers. Troubled by an ever-more-compelling sense of incipient disaster, a seasoned veteran of many post-Before horrors and thus haunted by a looming sense of more potentially terminal possibilities than he could envision, Matthew rolled out of his bed, silently cursed the surprising coldness of the early-autumn air, rebuked himself for not having fed an overnight-sized log into the stone fireplace, seized one of the three cherished red wool Before blankets that had warmed his slumber, wrapped his naked flesh against the now-presumed chill of the Fifth Hinge, stepped barefoot onto the  stones of the cabin porch and thence into the yet chillier dew-damp grass as the corvid clamor continued and yes grew louder, more insistent, more alarmed and therefore more alarming. The swooping, soaring birds had risen in such numbers they reduced the overhead starlight to fast flickers and darted ominously eerie black silhouettes across the round yellow face of the Three Sisters Moon seasonably low and already sinking beyond her eighth-lunation zenith in the southern sky. He had never seen its like, not even in the vast regional musterings of carrion birds that cleansed the post-apocalyptic battlefields of their reeking gore and stripped to bare-bone heaps of weathering skulls the mounds of severed heads that marked the territorial borders of the warring states beyond the Dead Lands. 

Fifty yards from the closely adzed and gray-mud-chinked cedar-log walls of Matthew’s cabin and the clustered, nearly identical dwellings of his immediate neighbors, his fellow Sanamo dwellers were hastily gathering in the village Round, children, adolescents and adults alike, most of the adolescents and adults already visibly armed, all gazing skyward in fearful bewilderment, their upturned faces dimly silhouetted against the slowly waning flicker of the Thanksfire they had kindled to greet the rising moon seven sand-glasses earlier. The Three-Sisters Harvest would begin at dawn today; that’s why the celebration had not continued until sunrise. But why these outraged ravens? What was so dreadfully amiss? No doubt gray-haired Wanda Wolfwise, the Potlatch People’s eldest teacher and the leader of this small band of racially indistinct human survivors, would soon arrive to interpret the ravens' message and – or so Matthew and his gathered neighbors dearly hoped – help them all discern their best options. Now knowing his presence both as story-keeper and warrior was essential, he hastened back inside, exchanged blanket for early-autumn buckskins and elk-hide moccasins, belted on pistols and throwing axe, shrugged into his boomer’s bag, grasped the ancient but meticulously cared-for Before rifle he had been given by the elders as an adoption gift, lifted it off its wooden bedside pegs,  donned his woven-reed hat and strode to join his neighbors at the Round. By now nearly everyone of fighting age who dwelt on the island, 203 adults and adolescents, had mustered, bringing their younger children to the safety of the cedar-log parenting hall as the caw, caw, caw continued  to fill the night sky, seeming even louder and more grating than before, its alarm so intrusive Wanda had brought a hastily improvised birch-bark megaphone to make herself heard above the din.

“It’s an invasion by rats,” she shouted. "Legions of rats swimming up from the south. Rats riding clusters of flotsam at least as wide as three adult armspans. The rats aboard the debris pushed toward us by as many more rats swimming. And when these rats exhaust themselves in the water, only a few drown; the rest change places with the riding rats. The South Shore Kayak Patrol spotted them, sent a lantern signal to the Shore Watchers, who sent a rider to me. Then the ravens started up. But the rats are still a glass away, which means thanks to our warriors and the ravens, we’ve just enough time to organize a defense. Everybody and all our dogs to the Southward Beach. Get ready to ignite the fire boats. Goddess knows what sickness these rats carry. Goddess help us keep them off our island.”

The ravens continued their enraged denunciations; the Potlatchers did as Wanda directed. Eleven family groups of five or six boomers and as many as 12 archers jogged along the packed-earth trail out past the seasonably red-leafed vine maples that grew like natural hedges around the village with its familial clusters of log cabins and its broad surrounding span of black-soil communal gardens bountifully pregnant with harvest-ready corn, beans and pumpkins. Moccasined feet padded a soft rhythm not unlike that of the previous evening's ceremonial drums. Then the joggers slowed to a quieter, more erratic pace, hiking with carefully placed feet down the trail's abruptly steep and hazardously rocky slope through an agedly high-branched stand of Douglas Fir to the Southward Beach, the boomers laden with spare ammunition for flintlock rifles already primed and loaded with trade-powder and bear-greased projectiles of scavenged lead home-cast from cherished Before molds and dependably deadly out to 300 yards, the archers laden with bundles of goose-feather-fletched, salvaged-iron-bladed arrows for their recurve bows, which were effective to only half the rifles' range but able to loose as many as 10 arrows to every boomer’s one painstakingly loaded round of powder and conical ball. The tide was in; small waves lapped softly on wetly gleaming moonlit pebbles; above the incessantly ranting riot of ravens the night sky suddenly flared with serpentine bands of bright green light; the Spirit Dance was reaching way further south than usual; another omen; the Dancers' message yet to be determined. Matthew was momentarily entranced, already thinking how he might describe what he was hearing and seeing and feeling, how he might later record the details of the astounding strangeness that had already occurred, how he might document it with his newly learned expertise in the Potlatchers' traditional mnemonic shorthand, blackberry ink on tanned buckskin...

(To [maybe] be continued, Muse inspiring. )

**********

LB/12 May 2023

-30-

Knoxville, August 1969, the last time I would see my father alive. Negative and print damaged in the 1983 arson fire but salvaged from the rubble a year later. (Tri-X at 800 ASA; 35mm Summicron on M4 Leica.) Photo by Loren Bliss © 2023.

*

THOUGH MY CHILDHOOD taught me to cherish solitude for its self-healing opportunities, it was not until the extended isolation imposed by the Covid quarantine had I time enough to sort the trauma of growing up in a savagely dysfunctional family -- wounds that had remained the psychological equivalents of open sores because I never earned enough money to pay the extortionist fees demanded by the few genuinely competent healers.

Nor is my plight in any way unique: history makes it clear the One Percenters who now and forever own all federal, state and local USian governments will never allow healthcare to be acknowledged as a human right; thus for as long as the USian Empire survives, its healthcare will remain what it is today, a privilege of wealth, its adequacy (or lack thereof) determined exclusively by one’s income.

But the extended hours of uninterrupted contemplation granted by the quarantine ironically exempted me from that intentionally genocidal tyranny. It also granted me a truly priceless gift of compassionate understanding, a series of realizations that leaves me no moral choice but to write the following eulogy to my father, a man I have come to sadly realize I spent most of my life profoundly misunderstanding.

Indeed I owe that man, the late Donald Read Bliss (4 July 1910-21 February 1971), both a deeply regretful apology and an equally heartfelt debt of gratitude.

I owe him the apology for misconstruing as rejection the stiff-upper-lip remoteness symptomatic of his own emotional anguish.

And at the very least I owe him thanks times eight:

• for rescuing me from my murder-minded mother’s attempts at post-partum abortion;

• for teaching me the observational skills and patience required for successful fresh-water fishing;

• for exemplifying and teaching the observant mindfulness by which I would discover how to become as one with my surroundings whether urban, rural or oceanic;

• for giving me a .22 target rifle, a Remington 521-T Junior Special, on my ninth Christmas and coaching me to share his expert-class skill with rifles and handguns;

• for protecting me from Southron viciousness by paying for parochial schooling, grades five thru eight, until I -- a typically lustful 14-year-old male -- foolishly opted to attend a public Southron high school merely because I believed the public-school girls would be easier to seduce;¹

• for giving me my first three cameras, a Kodak Brownie Reflex, a Polaroid and an Agfa Press Miniature on my twelfth, thirteenth and sixteenth birthdays respectively, thereby inspiring my near-lifelong commitment to journalism;

• for being the one and only family member courageous enough to back me in the violent aftermath of a scandalous false arrest, about which more below;

• and ultimately for being the most learned, most empowering teacher I have known in all my nearly 83 years.

Technically my father was the first-generation son of wealthy immigrants. Though my paternal ancestors arrived here in 1629 or 1630 and became prosperous farmers in what is now Connecticut, they were expelled as Royalists in 1789. My father’s father, my paternal grandfather, was the late Amos Read Bliss (1860-1922), a prominent Canadian engineer who migrated to the United States with his wife the late Wilena Marion Dewar (1889-1961) in 1900 or so. His patented automotive dynamo was a pivotal invention in the development of the modern automobile, and he subsequently headed the Ford Motor Company design team that invented the electric starter.

My father thus was raised in what to me is unimaginable privilege, its magnitude symbolized by his twelfth, fourteenth and sixteenth birthday presents, respectively a horse, a 20-foot sailboat and an automobile. He received a classic British education in U.S. boarding schools and anticipated continuing his education at Montreal’s exclusive McGill University. His desire, he told me once, was to become a history professor. 

By his own admission, he had no notion of the horrors of working-class existence; he was utterly unprepared for the emotional shock imposed by the Crash of 1929, which soon found him delivering 100-pound sacks of coal -- one bag per shoulder -- to fireplace-heated walk-ups in the working-class tenements of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Later he worked as a mechanic at a Standard Oil facility in Boston, next as a carpenter, then as a project foreman in residential construction on Long Island. Eventually his managerial skills would secure him high-ranking executive positions with American Houses Incorporated, a New-Deal-related pioneer in the development of prefabricated buildings, after which his ever-more-diverse talents and Mensa-caliber intelligence would earn him rapid promotions from the federal War Production Board.

I cannot doubt it was the painful lessons of the early Depression years that prompted his subsequent embrace of Marxism, to the extent the most memorable music of my childhood was the Red Army Chorus on an all-Cyrillic,78-RPM album that included the rousing “Song of the Machine-gun Carts,” a piece since omitted from the official Soviet repertoire but resurrected by You-Tube, the initial footage eerily approximate to what my childhood internal vision pictured each time my father played it on our Victrola. Likewise favored was Paul Robeson’s Songs of Free Men, and I vividly remember my father explaining, in terms readily understandable by my four-year-old self, the meaning of the album-cover’s semi-abstract symbolism. That same year, my introduction to classical music was the 1939 RCA Victor Red Seal recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Our family’s record collection also included the then-popular hit entitled “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’,” the flip-side of which was entitled “Love Is Gonna Be Rationed,” each often part of my early childhood’s background music.

But when the U.S. began its slow-boiled-frog transition to the generic nazism of neoliberalism by its adoption of innumerable German Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-in-arms even before V-E Day, its earliest victims were those purged as prematurely anti-fascist, a condemnation-without-trial that cost my father the equivalent of a federal deputy regional directorship in 1947, ever after condemning him and all of us in his immediate family to marginal near-poverty even as it irremediably shaped my own closely parallel political thinking.

***

MY FATHER WAS among the most relentlessly honest persons I have ever known. Bound by a personal code based on the Shakespearean premise of “to thine own self be true...thou canst not be false to any man” and an almost medieval sense of honor inherited from his parents, his outspokenness often earned him naught but misunderstanding, my own included, an affliction for which I realized during quarantined contemplation I share no small measure of guilt.

In 1950 permanently exiled to the vindictively theocratic white-supremacist South -- and despite his quickly earned status there as a successful mortgage banker -- my father, my stepmother, my four younger half-sisters and I were often socially rejected as “white trash,” firstly because he was already twice divorced; secondly because he was considered a 1950s version of an intruding “Yankee carpetbagger”; thirdly because of my own sensationalized false arrest and night in the old Knox County Jail during an attempted ruling-class purge to rid the University of Tennessee and Knoxville in general of persons involved in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement or at least peripheral to it and thus all deemed “troublemakers” and/or “outside agitators.”

It was this incident and my immediate, defiantly public embrace of civil rights activism that forever bridged the gap of mutual misunderstanding that had separated us since the familial crisis of 1945. Before 1945, we had been as fondly and comfortably close as any father and son might be.

One of my earliest memories is our mutual trip to view the wounded ocean-liner Normandie only hours before she capsized at the French Line pier in Manhattan on 9 February 1942; this was nearly two months before my second birthday, yet I vividly remember the flare of a welding torch within her starboard anchor-port, how she listed away from the dock and how the waterfront smelled there in the late-winter darkness.

Two years later, when we had access to rural areas in Virginia, my father often took me on long walks with him in the woods, carrying me piggy-back when I grew too tired to keep up. It was on one of those walks I fired my first live round, a shot from his .22 Harrington and Richardson target revolver, with him holding the piece as I aligned its sights, squeezed its trigger in accordance with his instructions and hit the tin can he had placed as a target against a red-clay bank maybe 10 yards distant.

Among the few remnants of my childhood that escaped the arson fire of 1983 is the unique valentine he air-mailed me in 1944, an artifact I have cherished and kept close-at-hand for as long as I can remember: “Dear Loren -- Inside is a picture of something that is almost as big and strong as my wish that you would be my Valentine!” Neatly printed and signed “Love Dad,” the “big and strong” is a photograph of a Norfolk and Western streamlined-steam passenger locomotive, to which my four-year-old hand later added crayon-curls of black smoke.

But after that dreadful 1945 Summer Solstice Eve, his fondness seemed to wane, so that by my teenage years, I had concluded he had forever distanced himself, a belief my hateful birthmother maliciously fostered at every opportunity. Meanwhile my father did nothing to alleviate my dismay: throughout my post-1945 boyhood and until about the time I turned 12, his most wounding pejoratives were to call me “goon boy” or to damn me for being “just like (my) mother” any time I displeased him.

I long suspected he feared I had inherited my birthmother’s penchant for sociopathic dishonesty and morally imbecilic, self-obsessed criminality. Also I felt he doubted my courage: he had boxed competitively in boarding school, but despite his boxing lessons, I loathed schoolyard fist-fighting and never became the triumphant brawler he said he was as a teen and young adult, never mind the fact he had given me enough skill to win about half of those encounters, teaching the bullies they would be hurt even if I lost the fight and thereby eventually making myself formidable enough to terminate the sadistic torment that characterized most of my public school years -- yet another reason I realize now I owe him a debt of gratitude.

But it was my defiant, unrelenting response to false arrest that finally bridged our always troubling distance and swept all his doubts away, and we began meeting for intensely personal conversations over after-work dinners, typically once every week at the S&W Cafeteria as long as I remained in Knoxville, at least once a month after I moved to Oak Ridge for a job at the daily newspaper there.

Nor will I ever forget how we outraged the homophobic Southrons with our spontaneously mutual hug at McGhee-Tyson air base when I arrived there for my final visit to Knoxville in 1969, the last time I would see him alive, when an assignment to write and photograph a report on the Southern Counterculture coincidentally corresponded with the wedding of a younger half-sister, Deborah, the firstborn of my father and stepmother.

It was during that visit I discovered we were each reading Robert Graves’ White Goddess. Nor was I surprised; at some point after my arrest -- I don’t remember exactly when, though I suspect it was during one of the aforementioned dinners -- my father had told me of an experience in the Maine woods during his 12th year that immediately reminded me of my own 12th-year encounter with otherness in the northern Michigan woods. He had been following a creek to its source, he said, when he discovered a place “where the springs sprayed water up out of the ground like fountains,” but he could never find it again, though he searched for it long afterward, and the experience itself haunted him all his life.

Years later, researching mythology for what would become the arson-destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” I discovered such fountains were anciently believed to be characteristic of the (extra-dimensional) realms of the goddess, much as summons by the mythical Birds of Rhiannon were described as eerily similar to my own haunting experience in Michigan.

Obviously -- though I regret we never acknowledged it to one another -- he was as fey as I; though “Bliss” is a decidedly English name, genetic testing has shown we are far more Celt than all else combined. Perhaps Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” here sung by the late Judy Collins, applied as much to him as it does to me.

Equally unforgettable in its tacit endorsement of my own Marxism is a long telephone conversation with him when I was back in Manhattan later in ‘69, a discussion of police brutality in which he thought-provokingly cited an Italian communist party statement reminding all Marxians that cops are themselves members of the working class, admittedly misguided but nevertheless yet viable candidates for recruitment.

However much my arrest and subsequent activism healed my relationship with my father, it was also devastatingly painful for my younger sisters, intensifying the Southron jeers of “white-trash” that had plagued them since infancy, gravely deepening the wounds that -- despite my aristocratically-born stepmother’s comforting responses -- my father’s boarding-school-limited parenting skills were never able to help sooth, much less heal. Though my conscience left me no alternative but civil rights activism, I nevertheless must share some measure of guilty responsibility for the fact it caused my sisters considerable grief from the ever-vindictive Southrons.

***

WHILE EVERY DIVORCE is the product of unresolvable conflict, my father’s preference for intelligent, articulate, adventurous lovers in an age when such women were routinely victimized by the misogynistic sadism of patriarchy and traumatized -- sometimes to madness -- invariably complicated his relationships, which often in conversations with me during his latter years he characterized as a quest for a woman “with whom (he) could share (his) naked soul.”

Paradoxically, like most men of his generation, he also believed that, once married, he owed his wife and whatever offspring they produced the same faithful and protective duty a ship’s captain owes his crew. From the perspective of those values -- another painful truth that did not become apparent to me until the therapeutic contemplation granted by the quarantine -- the potential for conflict with an independent-minded woman is undeniable.

Apart from a few mostly laudatory accounts of her fiercely proto-feminist independence, I know little of my father’s first wife, the late Barbara Barker Bliss, mother of my half-siblings the late Donald Jr., Jock and Joanne.

Of my father’s third and final wife, my stepmother, the late Virginia Hodges Bliss, formerly his executive secretary, a woman so skilled that in his absence she routinely supervised the

_______________________________________________________________

With my stepmother at the beach, Florida c. 1946. Photo by my father. ©Loren Bliss 2023.

_______________________________________________________________

war-effort factory of which he was manager, perhaps the most definitive statement I can make about her -- and thus indirectly about my father as well -- is that she was the absolute antithesis of the malicious stepmother we all know from children's tales and folklore. Indeed she was infinitely more motherly, loving and intellectually encouraging to me in the span of our first few months together than my birthmother had been during the first five and a quarter years of my existence, a powerful post-traumatic healing for which I remain more grateful than words can express. And her supportive fondness did not falter until she was tragically undone decades later by Huntington's Chorea, an unspeakably dreadful disease that turned her latter years into a nightmarish existence I would not wish on any living being. 

In stark contrast to my genuinely protective stepmother, my birthmother was always a fearsome creature. The late Marion Woodruff Fuller Bliss, she was artistically talented, brilliant, and in 1933 among Michigan State’s first three female graduates in urban planning and landscape architecture. But even in my infancy she had become, to me, what I now recognize as the living embodiment of abuse.

Her hatred became undeniable -- even to my toddler self -- after a Brooklyn butcher-shop incident midway in my second year.

Though I was a late talker -- I did not begin to speak until nearly the end of my first year -- but when at last I began to talk, it was almost always in complete, grammatically correct sentences, or so I’ve been told. If I did not know the proper name for something, I labeled it in accordance with its function; hence the exhaust pipe of my father’s black 1940 Ford became the “smoker”; likewise the beaks of the chickens New Yorkers raised in their rooftop Victory Gardens became their “peckers.”

In that era, shopping for meat and vegetables in the City was divided, as in Europe, between butcher shops and greengrocers. My birthmother, with me toddling along, had taken our monthly quota of ration stamps and gone to the butcher to purchase a chicken. My mother pointed to a beheaded, footless, plucked but otherwise intact chicken displayed in the shop’s refrigerated, glass-and-white-enamel counter-top; the butcher held the bird aloft for her approval, and my always-inquisitive self quietly asked “mother, where’s its pecker?”

She ignored me. Assuming she had not heard me over the background noise of conversations, elevated trains and street traffic, I repeated my question at slightly more volume.

Again she ignored me; other customers within hearing grinned and chuckled.

The third time -- still believing she had not heard me above the din -- I shouted: “MOTHER, WHERE’S IT’S PECKER.”

Now all the shop’s customers roared with laughter. Abandoning the chicken, my mother yanked me painfully by my right arm, fled the store, smacked me several times around my head and shoulders and promised much harsher punishment when my father returned from his Manhattan office that evening.

But when she told him the story and demanded he spank me, he not only refused to do so, but laughed harder and longer than I had ever before known him to laugh. Even decades later he could not tell that story without laughing.

As I would learn as a young adult, he also ridiculed her for being morbidly terrified of the judgment of strangers -- a characteristic that, as we shall see, she no doubt inherited from her parents.

A deliberate wounding she subsequently inflicted on both of us exemplifies the magnitude of her vengeful hatred. Temporarily abandoning me in my crib in our Queens apartment, she stormed into an American Houses executive meeting in the upper chambers of Manhattan’s General Electric Building, scattering official papers, hurling a drinking-water-filled pitcher against a wall, ruining with its splatter many pen-and-ink documents as she shrieked knowingly false accusations my father was having an affair with his then-secretary, the wife of an Army colonel not yet dispatched overseas.

(In truth his extra-long, sometimes-16-hour workdays were mandated by the war effort, as the entire firm was working overtime on emergency construction of military barracks throughout the nation.)

By then my father was the corporation’s acting vice-president for operations, and one of the purposes of the disrupted meeting had been officially confirming his appointment as such; hence my mother’s explosive tantrum was maliciously timed to inflict maximum ruin, as indeed it did: it convinced my father’s bosses his choice of wives proved him unfit for top-level executive positions, got him demoted to manager of a building-fabrication plant in Jacksonville, Florida, and got us all exiled to the former Confederacy, literally within a matter of days.

Not long after that I had my first encounter with the murderous hatred the Southrons are -- to this day (and as re-legitimized by Donald Trump) -- taught from childhood to harbor against anyone from the North. We lived in the exclusive and therefore gated St. Johns-River-waterfront Catherine’s Court apartment complex; playing in the sandbox of its locked playground, I was assaulted by a trio of older Southron children who decided I “talked funny” and took my obvious Northeastern accent as an excuse to murder me by burying my head in the sand; I was three; they were six and seven.

Though I fought back with all my strength, they were much bigger and stronger; they quickly overcame me, held me upside-down, dug the requisite-sized hole in the sand and buried my head in it. I survived only because Mary Alice Shotwell, a five-year-old northern-born apartment-complex neighbor with whom I’d become friends, defended me by attacking my assailants with a child-sized garden hoe and sent them fleeing homeward, bleeding and crying for their mothers. As I recall, her father was a U.S. Navy officer; in any case, he was one of my father’s close colleagues in the war effort.

Sometime in the spring of 1944, my father was transferred out of Jacksonville to run an even smaller American Houses plant in Roanoke, Virginia – which I realize now was another demotion, additional corporate retribution for the violent tantrum my birthmother had thrown in the Manhattan board room.

I still remember a part of the drive northward; sitting in the back seat of our black 1940 Ford, watching out the windows as the land gradually changed from Floridian flatness to rolling Appalachian foothills, I asked if we were going to a place with mountains. My father answered that indeed we were and complimented me on my observational skill and reasoning ability – even as my birthmother belittled me for daring ask such a question.

That autumn -- obviously my father was still trying to save their marriage -- we went on vacation with our new dog, a trained English Setter named Cocoa, to my maternal grandparents’ cottage on the South Branch of the Au Sable River in Northern (Lower) Michigan for a week of late-season small-game hunting with my maternal relatives.

At age four, I was of course required to remain indoors with the women, but I remember vividly the partridge and rabbits piled nightly on the front porch floor before they were gutted, skinned or plucked and cooked, and the deliciousness of the wild meat on which we feasted set my taste-buds on a woodland path I would follow until old-age disability ended that aspect of my journey.

I also remember crying bitterly at our departure for Roanoke -- grief I assume now was prompted by my realization the temporary charade of dispensation from my birthmother’s malice that had accompanied our vacation was itself ending, as indeed it was -- permanently.

***

NOT LONG AFTERWARD, my birthmother literally hurled me across our Roanoke kitchen, slammed me into the far wall, repeatedly slapped me with both hands and, when my father intervened, shrieked I had accused her of using a “feces” brush to baste a fish she was cooking in the oven; watching her preparations, I had merely asked her if she was going to baste the fish, using the “fishy brush” -- my term -- she had previously stated was only for that purpose.

Early in 1945, attending a private kindergarten in which I now realize my father had enrolled me as a workday protection against my birthmother’s escalating violence, I brought home a block-printing project that required slicing a raw potato in half, drawing designs on the open ends, cutting out enough material to raise the designs in bas-relief, dipping it in finger paint and transferring the design to a sheet of paper. Visually skilled beyond my years, in my mind’s eye I saw silhouettes of dogs, though for some reason I no longer remember, I chose blue as the color of the finger paint.

My birthmother provided me everything I needed including water-color paper, a large raw potato cut in halves, a pencil to draw the silhouettes on the potato-ends, a small paring knife to turn the silhouettes into printing surfaces and ample work-space covered with newspapers on our breakfast nook’s polished oak floor.

I sat down on the papers, picked up a potato-half and began drawing a childish canine figure on its bare end.

Nearly 78 years after the fact, it still hurts me to remember what happened next: my mother suddenly damned me as a hopelessly clumsy oaf who had wasted a rationed potato, snatched the potato out of my hand, flung it somewhere I don’t remember, dragged me off the newspapers, slapped me several times, kicked the newspapers into a wad, spilled the blue finger paint onto the now-unprotected floor and -- when my father returned from his day’s work -- blamed me for the resultant mess.

The kindergarten meanwhile had decided to celebrate 1945’s May Day in a Roanoke park with a children’s performance of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night’s Dream; I was chosen to be Puck, and the teachers asked my mother to make me an appropriate costume. She did, sewing from chocolate-brown cotton cloth a scalloped-bottom knee-length dress, tights and tasseled cap I immediately hated because it made me look like a girl. My father agreed with me, but my mother insisted I wear it.

I think it might have been during one of their arguments about my costume she hammered her fist onto our mahogany coffee table with such force the blow shattered its quarter-inch-thick glass top.

Ultimately she prevailed; I vaguely remember my father comforting me, assuring me I would only have to wear the despised costume for a couple of hours, and that by so doing I would minimize my mother’s ever-more-frequent outbursts of terrifyingly hateful rage.

Nevertheless, by this time, her animosity had become so obvious, my father was taking me to work with him whenever he could, often leaving me in the comfortingly protective care of my future stepmother.

Just after New Year’s Day of 1945, my birthmother tried to poison us both with spoiled vegetables she herself would not eat, severely sickening each of us for a half-dozen days, our bedridden respites periodically interrupted by vomiting and diarrhea.

Then, on the eerily frigid Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 -- at 32º Fahrenheit the coldest 21-22 June night ever recorded in Roanoke, Virginia -- she wrapped herself in her fur coat, pocketed a paring knife and sought to carry my half-naked, summer-pajama-clad self from our residence in the last house at the end of the paved portion of  Rosiland Avenue to the top of Mill Mountain, there “to meet god.’’ (The house still stands, looking nearly exactly as it did then, albeit renumbered 2927 after Rosiland Avenue's pavement was extended much further to accommodate additional dwellings.)

But my father arrived home unexpectedly early due to a canceled meeting, and when he intervened, my birthmother assaulted us both, her frenzy so violent it took all my father’s military-trained skill to disarm her and all his strength to restrain her. My mind’s eye still sees them wrestling on the living room floor, she gnawing his green necktie and trying to strangle him with it as he fought to protect me by holding her down.

The struggle, through which I huddled in the far corner of our living-room sofa, seemed to last forever; in the end it required six burly cops to strap her to a litter for transport to jail. She was imprisoned for a week, jailed until her mother, my maternal grandmother, came by train to fetch her home to Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Memorably, my grandmother greeted me not with affection but with the painfully chilly you-are-now-nothing-but-an-unwelcome-reminder-of-a-bad-time rejection that would ever-after define my relationship with all of my maternal kin save my birthmother’s older sister, my Aunt Alecia.

***

I YET HARBOR mixed emotions about the fact my father felt it was his gentlemanly obligation not to have my birthmother charged with attempted murder.

Nor have I words adequate to describe the relief I felt when my father and stepmother each promised I would never have to see her again -- a promise that, through no fault of their own, would be broken in only two years.

At home in Michigan with her parents, my birthmother continued violently expressing her hatefulness, first against her father, later against a niece whom my birthmother twice hurled down flights of stars for daring to defy her irrational demands. That niece was my Aunt Alecia’s daughter Pamela -- Alecia was herself a divorcee -- and in 1948, as my courageously protective aunt, she would become another of my genuine saviors.²

Meanwhile, my maternal grandparents -- paralyzed by their craven fear the scandal of an institutionalized daughter would hurt their more-than-adequate income -- refused to act against my increasingly violent mother until my aunt threatened public disclosure via the police and the criminal court. Thus my birthmother was secretly institutionalized for a year in a posh private asylum.

But her cowardly parents remained so frightened by the prospect of socioeconomic odium, they defied the stern advice of her psychiatrists, who wanted her confined for life as a dangerous psychotic. Her father employed his influence and considerable wealth to secure her release, conceal her history of malevolent behavior, suppress the record of her arrest in Roanoke, thereby facilitate a divorce-court decree granting her summer custody of me and -- horror of horrors -- enable her to resume the career as a Registered Nurse her parents had bought for her after she failed to achieve employment in her chosen field.

I will always wonder how many persons she might have murdered, especially given how many times she was fired during her subsequent years as an RN.

Citing my divorce-court-mandated interrogation by a Virginia state social-worker as proof -- a still-memorable encounter with a woman whose infinite coldness was utterly terrifying to my already traumatized five-year-old-self -- my birthmother sought to convince me my father had tried to abandon me in an orphanage: a claim I am sad to admit I believed for many years was true.

Her last act of vengeance toward us both was to deny me the funds to attend my father’s funeral -- this after she had again broken an oft-repeated but never fulfilled promise to help me pay my college expenses. Two days before my father’s death, I had left myself temporarily penniless by paying out-of-pocket all my spring quarter 1971 tuition and fees at Western Washington State College. Hence, citing her broken promise, I begged her for the money to attend the funeral.

Her response? “If god wants you to go, he’ll provide.”

She was particularly hateful to any woman with whom I was close. In 1961 she physically attacked my first wife, slapping Carolyn's face and yanking her waist-length hair until I forcefully intervened to stop her unprovoked assault.   In 1975 -- this after she surreptitiously obtained the names of several of my friends and colleagues and viciously harassed them by phone to compel my then-fiance Ann and me to cancel our long-planned vacation trip to New York City and instead detour to Grand Rapids -- she attempted to poison us both with spoiled chicken retrieved from garbage.

In the '61 and '75 incidents we were protected from her sadistic malevolence only by the intervention of my influential older half-brother Jock. The ‘75 incident also ended my final quest for matrimony; having met my birthmonster, the woman I’d contentedly lived with for nearly two years and planned to marry understandably decided she wanted nothing more to do with me or my family.

My birthmother’s final institutionalization occurred in the mid-1980s -- this after she was repeatedly caught hiding naked in the clothes dryers of the Grand Rapids senior-housing complex where she had rented her last apartment. Reportedly, she claimed her nakedness was necessary to enable her to conceal herself from “the Devil’s soul-catchers,” whom she believed were hunting her because she had failed to fulfill her end of a satanic pact.

So informed, I could not but wonder if herein lay the explanation for her attempt to murder me in 1945. While I most assuredly do not believe in the Devil, I am painfully aware of the global presence of absolute evil, which seems ever more the dominant force in today’s apocalypse-threatened world.

Thus I cannot escape the likelihood my birthmother believed her pregnancy was facilitated by satanic favor; that she intended its payment to be my own sacrificial death atop Roanoke’s Mill Mountain; that she believed her family’s wealth and influence would immunize her to punishment just as it had protected her from prosecution for innumerable lesser crimes (mostly theft, forgery and shoplifting); and that here was the most likely explanation both for the berserker-caliber frenzy with which she assaulted my father when he intervened – a rage so violently enormous it required, as I said, six Roanoke cops to subdue her for the trip to jail – and for her later abject terror of the supposed “soul-catchers.”

Nevertheless -- and despite the fact I am decidedly agnostic about all such matters -- the eerily unprecedented temperature-drop of that night seems to add to the associated events an eldritch element I cannot deny.

Be that as it may, when my birthmother died on 8 June 1995, I felt as if a great burden had been lifted from my life, indeed as if I had at long last been liberated from some hitherto-inescapable curse.

Not long afterward it came to me the ultimate definition of our relationship lay in the fact my birthmother never once told me she loved me. Instead she spoke of maternal love only in the third person, “your mother loves you,” as if she were speaking of some entirely different person, someone far removed from either of our lives.

The best evidence indicates my birthmother was a maliciously sadistic sociopath who -- beneath a carefully maintained veneer of upper-bourgeois heterosexual sociability -- hated all men, deliberately got pregnant to ensnare my father in a marriage she hoped would provide her with a cover to pursue her subsequently revealed lesbianism, and probably despised me from the moment she discovered she had borne a male infant.

I now of course know the violent denouement of that marriage -- for which as a child despised by his birthmother I characteristically blamed myself for entirely too many years -- was inevitable.

***

THOUGH MY BIRTHMOTHER had learned to weaponize the irrational expressions of her madness -- switching them on only when she felt the need to employ them as psychological truncheons to enforce her will, otherwise keeping them switched off and carefully maintaining a deliberately deceptive facade  of intelligent-woman normalcy -- even at age 83 I remain amazed by the extent to which she maliciously conned both my father and his mother, the feisty, independent-minded grandmother my siblings and I knew as Nana. She likewise conned my second wife Adrienne, whom she never met in person and with whom geography insured she communicated only by telephone and mail.

I am also astounded by the forgiveness my father displayed toward my birthmother’s ever-intensifying violence and hatefulness. When I finally dared ask him why -- this in 1969 during the last face-to-face conversation we would ever have -- he replied that honor and matrimonial vows demanded no less.

That is the sort of man he was: someone a trusted friend, the late Conrad Payne, memorably described to my 23-year-old self -- then fresh-out-of-jail and still profoundly skeptical of my father’s regard for me -- as “probably the best friend (I’ll) ever have.” Conrad and his pregnant wife Mary had been among those arrested, and in the aftermath had themselves become acquainted with my father. And I now know Conrad was absolutely correct in his judgment: my father was indeed the best friend -- that is, the most understanding and accepting friend -- I ever had. 

Flawed? Of course he was -- as are all of us raised under the ecogenocidal moral imbecility of patriarchy and its incipiently nazi capitalist derivatives. Sometimes hurtful toward those to whom he should have been most protective? Unquestionably.

But the truth is I loved him nevertheless, and I no longer question his love for me: else why would he have bid me farewell by a fleeting appearance at the foot of my bed as he lay dying three thousand miles away -- his spectral presence actually seen more clearly by the woman of Irish descent who was my lover at the time, and as well by my dog, who howled at his passing. Thus, until I am no more, and no doubt longer if there be afterlife, I shall sorely miss the steadily deepening bonds of friendship and mutual understanding that characterized our post-1963 relationship.

_____________________________________

¹Given the wretched educational quality, white-supremacist bias and often-violent bullying that characterized that era’s Southron public schools, my decision to abandon the vastly superior quality of parochial education is one I will always deeply regret.

²I attended first and second grade at Jacksonville’s Norwood Elementary School, where reading was taught by the word-recognition method, and where I was socially promoted despite my seeming inability either to read or do basic arithmetic. But my Aunt Alecia -- by then a working artist with a growing reputation throughout the Middle West -- recognized my problem as dyslexia and in 1948 traded a piece of sculpture to a friend to buy me six weeks of summertime tutoring in phonics. The result was literally life-changing; by mid-third grade, I routinely tested as reading at a 12th-grade level. In other words, Alecia’s beneficence enabled my life as a journalist and lifelong scholar, for which I had the good sense to make a point of thanking her profusely many times in the late 1980s. Alecia DuRand (1908-1993) after her second marriage, she was the first woman in the U.S. to head a collegiate fine-arts department, and there is a two-year art scholarship in her name at the school that so employed her, Grand Rapids Community College.

LB/7 November 2022-25 March 2023

-30-

But First, an Essential Explanation...

MY APOLOGY FOR again breaking my no-more-politics promise. As I stated on 7 November 2022, my long-term intent is to repurpose this blog into an anthology of age-appropriate autobiographical reflection and -- should the project taking shape in my mind convince me of its worthiness for print -- an effort at writing fiction, the latter a medium I abandoned after Roberta Tyson, then a Viking Press editor, damned me in my mid-20s as a presumptuous fool with no writing talent whatsoever.    

The reasoning behind my attempt to divorce Dispatches from Dystopia from politics is an apocalyptic truth that should be obvious to anyone who's paying attention to the world beyond their cellphones and the various other facilitators of fanatical self-obsession by which our Masters keep us self-destructively shackled to the Ayn Rand variants of nazism -- even as their secret-police vassals monitor our ever-more-nazified malleability literally moment-by-moment. 

And what specifically is that apocalyptic truth? It is simply that  investigative reporting -- and thus all other forms of political writing -- have become irrelevant.

Why? Because the USian Empire has bred a new, utterly sociopathic subspecies of human, apocalyptically incapable of empathy and thus purposefully devoid of any and all of the cooperative instincts that sustained H. sapiens sapiens for at least 200,000 years.

From this new subspecies, hybridized and conditioned as it is to maximum heartlessness and sadism, our Masters have constructed an ecogenocidal  Moronic Majority, a population so subjugated it will obey without qualms any order it is given, whether explicitly or implicitly, mass murder most assuredly included. Thus it not only willingly inflicts the innumerable atrocities mandated by the death-cult known as capitalism, but greets them with the malignant glee exemplified by the swelling Christonazi applause that now inevitably follows the ever-more-frequent murders of Jewish people and any other humans our Masters target as members of unwanted racial or sexual minorities.

In this context, political writing is actually less energizing than the proverbial pearls-before-swine. It is reduced to naught but delusion, insanely repeated expression of the now entirely erroneous belief it might yet somehow make things a bit better for those of us on the ever-expanding rosters of targeted victims. It is especially useless in realms such as yesteryear's Third Reich or today's USian Empire, each defined by moral imbecility as their only allowable national ethos. Therefore -- and I know this all too well -- the following dialogue will improve nothing, and in that sense it is merely a squandering of effort and electrons.

Nevertheless it is also -- though only for those of us who embrace journalism not merely as a job but as a way of life -- ethically mandatory. 

From that one increasingly rare perspective, the suppression of an entire dialogue by Popular Resistance early in the evening of 20 December 2022 is indeed blog-worthy, for it illustrates better than any such obstacle I have yet encountered how the pseudo-left collaborates with our Masters to perpetuate their unprecedented, ever-intensifying tyrannies.

*********          

Where Our Dialogue Was Going Before the Censors Shut Us Down

THE POST-CENSORSHIP remnants of that dialogue are to be found on the comment thread of "Chris Hedges: How the War Machine Took Over the Democratic Party," a thought-provoking interview with the gerrymander-ousted former congressman Dennis Kucinich.

My suppressed response was to a poster who hides behind the pseudonym “Calgacus.”  For those unfamiliar with Roman history, the real Calgacus was the apparently Pictish chieftain of a semi-mythical confederacy of Celto-Pictish tribes who fought the Roman invaders c. 85 or 86 C.E. at a now-unknown locale in northern Scotland the Roman historian Tacitus labeled Mons Grapius; google "Calgacus" (without quotation marks) for additional details. 

Because the anonymous poster's final response to me was also suppressed, I have invited him to re-post it here as a commentary.

For contextual clarity, I am also re-posting the vital parts of the prelude of our dialogue, text that remained uncensored as of 14:10 PST 21 December 2022. This material -- both the still-available text and the subsequently suppressed parts -- is in italic, thus to easily distinguish it from my post-censorship comments. Words and phrases italicized in the original are indicated by underlining.

    I wrote: Actually, if one dares look at the historical record, the true "turning point" was 22 November 1963, the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, which future historians -- if indeed there is any human future -- will undoubtedly recognize both as the date the charade of U.S. democracy was ended forever and the date the "Democratic" (sic) Party was forever reduced to naught but the Fifth Column of our nazi-minded Masters.

    "Calgacus" wrote: Kucinich & I were referring to the change in the Congressional Democratic party and the party in general. There isn't any doubt on this - that's when they started taking corporate cash, instead of looking to unions for support.

I have to disagree about 1963 as a real turning point. Things just didn't change much after that. Johnson continued Kennedy's policies, for good and ill. Both were postwar cold-war liberals. Johnson managed to get a lot of things done that Kennedy might not have been able to. The problem was Vietnam, of course. I don't think the theories that Kennedy was going to pull out are accepted and well-founded. It all seems like romantic wishful thinking to me. The only thing for it is that JFK was actually a combat veteran - which tends to make people more serious about war.

Unquestionably, the actual important global general turning point started in the 70s and the capitalist empire using the oil crises to strike back, and culminated in Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterrand welfare for the rich, austerity for the working class...

    I wrote: You're flat wrong, Calgacus, about the real turning point: only hours after President Kennedy was murdered, Lyndon Baines Johnson reversed JFK's planned withdrawal from Vietnam and set the nation on its now-eternal, follow the Original-Nazi-agenda juggernaut of perpetual war for global conquest.

As RSN Proved by Imposing Censorship to Protect Hillary, Most So-Called "Alternative Media" Ultimately Serve Our Masters, a Truth Affirmed by Suppression of the Following Two Comment-Thread Posts 

Posted 29 October 2022 on the comment thread of  "An Unbelievable Story of Rape," which ProPublica billed as one of its five most popular reports ever, these remarks survived the site's ever-vigilant censors for maybe 10 seconds:

THE MISSING ELEMENT in this otherwise superb job of reporting is the infinitely vicious class prejudice by which all lower-income people of any race or ethnicity are victimized in the inescapably Ayn-Randified, Prosperity-Gospel-tyrannized, existentially nazified, lynch-mob-sadistic United States.

Indeed one of the defining USian characteristics is the methodically institutionalized hatred that specifically targets anyone caught up in the slow-motion genocide deliberately inflicted by the USian "welfare" (sic) system, foster "care" (sic) included.

Given how euphemistically expressing this caste-hatred is the mandated (albeit never-publicly acknowledged) purpose of every USian welfare bureaucrat -- anyone from clerk to supervisor so employed -- its savagery of potential deadliness is precisely what obtains; that’s because denying aid to a maximum number of supplicants is the primary but clandestine purpose of all USian social-service bureaucracies.

Become so dependent -- whether as a child or an adult -- and you are a pariah for however much longer you manage to survive. Only the nation's mentally ill -- chronically shelterless included -- are more despised.

Nevertheless I do not recall ever reading a report in which the caste-mandated immunity of someone's post-rape psychological rapists was so  wrenchingly obvious. For "psychological rapists" is exactly what they are, and the class-hatred at the  core of the USian ethos -- the 21st Century's most murderous social-Darwinism -- is precisely why they and their ilk will go forever unpunished for their crimes against humanity.

And as we know from history, apologies by such criminals mean nothing. In a just society, Peggy -- whose caste hatred nearly drove Marie to suicide (though apparently nobody cares what it might have done to whatever other foster children Peggy's hatefulness probably victimized) -- would be in a re-education camp for a time at least equal to the almost-four-years of potentially  suicidal ruined-life misery she helped inflict on Marie.  Peggy would also be forcibly sterilized so she could never have children of her own, would never again be allowed near any other children, would never be allowed pets, and would be permanently barred from any occupation that granted her even minimal authority over others;  Shannon, the collaborator who gleefully endorsed Peggy's hatred,  would serve the same sentence as Peggy and afterward be condemned to a life as permanently restricted as that of her criminal accomplice.

As for the two misogynist swine who tortured Marie into a false confession, I recognize that while class-hatred can often be superficially suppressed and in rare instances conditioned away, I also know such male contempt for females parallels that of all serial rapists and is therefore incurable. Thus I can think of no suitable punishment beyond life imprisonment, no pardon, no parole.

And as for the rapist himself, justice demands he is painfully penetrated by his karma each and every time he enters a prison shower.

Disclosure: I react as I do because I know this horror-story from three perspectives. The first is professional; a member of the working press for 30 years and a journalistic freelancer ever since, I have encountered variations of this atrocity at least a dozen times, though only twice were editors courageous enough to allow me to pursue its hideous truths to publication, and I therefore most whole-heartedly congratulate ProPublica for daring report what is undoubtedly an USian commonplace: the entirely rational fear of such consequences the primary reason most U.S. rapes go unreported. The second is personal; as a despised child -- an emotional orphan since my birthmother's two failed attempts at post-partum abortion during my fifth year -- I know all too well Marie's "flip-the-switch" response; given the relentlessly self-righteous lynch-mob sadism of USian society, that turning-off of one’s emotions is the only rational response allowed those of us perceptive enough to understand we will never be granted genuinely healing redress and thus have no other (sane) alternative. Third is my undying gratitude to Marxism for enabling my recognition of the caste-hatred that motivates all such re-victimization; given the circumstances of my childhood, its lessons about USian society many times reinforced by the discoveries of a sometimes award-winning career in journalism and photography, I embrace Marxism because it is the only ideology that dares openly confront the psychological ruin deliberately inflicted by our Masters as they wage class warfare against us all; it is therefore the only ideology my conscience and consciousness allow me. And Marie’s case (again) confirms the professional and personal lessons that shape and sustain my Marxian identity.

It is thus as a proud Marxian I honor Marie with the clenched-fist salute for having the bravery and intelligence to recognize in a lynch-mob-minded society such as this, survival is in fact an ultimate form of revolutionary defiance. I likewise salute Detectives Stacy Galbraith and Edna Hendershot for courageously defying the bigotry and hatred that -- as the obviously unstoppable Trumpite ascendancy now proves -- everlastingly defines the United States. In a just world, each of these three women would be honored as heroes of the people.

Afterthought: in an indicative echo of Barack the Betrayer's most destructive Big Lie, "change we can believe in,"  ProPublica claims "our journalism spurs real world change" -- though obviously only within the ever-narrowing limits set by our Masters.

*****

On 3 November 2022 I thrice attempted to post the following on the comment thread of the Popular Resistance piece aptly entitled "What the 2022 Midterm Election Charade Offers Us," but after I tried to correct formatting clashes, my first two tries were banished as spam, with the Pop Res moderators falsely claiming the source of the censorship was my ISP, Century Link, which I am sorry to say I found entirely believable because of the haughty indifference CL demonstrated toward its email customers after we were shut out by an update. My third try, in which I did not attempt to correct the formatting, initially seemed ok. But when I returned maybe a half-hour later, it too had been suppressed. Here is what it would have said:

WHILE IT IS true USian elections have become meaningless in terms of improving the (ever-worsening) conditions of 99 Percent existence, it is also true that victory by the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party will radically hasten our Masters' long-schemed conversion of the so-called United States into the Hitler-anointed successor of the Third Reich.

Hitler anointed? Indeed: like it or not, that was the underlying intent of the Bankers' Plot. And when the plotters were given immunity in 1934, that intent was sanctioned by the ancestors of those Masters by whom we are tyrannized today -- that is, those who now own all USian governance at every level, federal, state and local.

As I have said so many times on so many comment threads, learn the history. First the Bankers' Plot; next, beginning in 1938, the bribery of Christianity -- many so-called "mainstream" religions included -- to propagate the existential nazism implicit in the Prosperity Gospel; then, starting in late 1944, our Masters' adoption of innumerable high-ranking German N.S.D.A.P (Original Nazi) war criminals as advisors and fellow collaborators.

Finally -- as logically as night follows day -- comes the true and eternal end of USia's charade democracy, 22 November 1963, the assassination squad probably commanded by SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, leader of the "impossible" rescue of Mussolini, subsequent CIA asset and probable "umbrella man" in Dallas.

And now behold the "Democratic" (sic) Party -- forever compromised by (what else?) -- its role in the cover-up, permanently reduced to the Christonazi/Confederate Fifth Column.

The evidence was always there, at least for those of us courageous enough to see it. My late father was cross-referencing Goldwater's 1964 presidential-campaign speeches to their obvious sources in Hitler's Mein Kampf; fortunately for my father, he did not live to see Ronnie the Nazi (as we real leftists called him) voted into office by the Moronic Majority in 1980. He was also spared the equally alarming candidacy in 2016 of a Goldwater jugend-girl who because of her aristocratic  education surely knew the true source of her favorite candidate's ideology.

But thanks in no small measure to my father’s tutelage, I most assuredly paid close attention to such indications. Born in 1940 (and a member of the working press until 1986, my swan song a report¹ revealing how New York City's gentrification was intentionally destroying the bohemia that fostered Manhattan's  role as the western world's cultural capital) -- I lived through USia's transformation into the proto-nazi empire it is today, protesting as best I could every inch of the way.

Last week, despite understanding fully the imbecility (most assuredly not "audacity") of hope and the voter-turnout-discouraging  purpose of Barack the Betrayer's "change we can believe in," I voted straight "Democratic" -- not because of some clinically deluded, Moron-Nation notion it would make things better for us, we the credit-card-enslaved proletarians and peasants of the 99 Percent, but because I hope to postpone for as long as possible the opening of extermination camps for those of us deemed "surplus workers" -- Jews, peoples of color, real leftists, real (i.e., non-Steinemite) feminists, environmentalists, LGBTQ people, all lower-income elderly and disabled people – all of us condemned to death as "surplus," our USian Masters’ euphemism for the Third Reich term that translates as "life unworthy of life."

That is the USia – I refuse to libel the continent by applying its name to the de facto Fourth Reich – in which we have the infinite misfortune to dwell today.

And with the defeat of the Soviet Union, there is no force on this (now-doomed) planet capable of organizing us to repel the nazi onslaught. Especially since Washington D.C. is indeed what the more perceptive elements of the world socialist movement have been labeling it for decades, the successor to Berlin as this planet's Nazi International. 

Wanna know our future -- that is if our Masters' policy of Better Croaked Than Broke doesn't kill the planet first? Google the White Rose Movement.

___________________________
¹"New York Creativity: an Uncertain Future?"; Art Direction, August 1986, pgs. 28-29. (Much edited by the publisher to reduce its original punch, including removal of a paragraph noting how the Urban Pioneer program -- don’t now remember whether this came from LBJ, Carter or Reagan -- had provided low-interest, long-term funding specifically for big-city “urban renewal,” i.e., gentrification.)

*****

THANKS TO MARXISM, I saw all this coming. "Everywhere There's Rain My Love, Everywhere There's Fear"; "A Not-So-Fond Farewell to Reader Supported News" and "Is Trump's War Against Women and Minorities Mandated by 'the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of U.S. Power'" are three accurately prophetic analyses from 2017.

*****

Next: A Long-Overdue Eulogy for My Father, and (maybe) some passages from a work of post-apocalyptic fiction-in-progress.

LB/7 November 2022

-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)

A failed May Day demonstration became my public obituary for Occupy Tacoma; I was among its mourners because -- disclosure -- I had been among its earliest and most hopeful activists. But the deliberately induced  self-obsession and  moral imbecility that destroyed Occupy from within is now destroying the United States as intended, for which see below. (Photo by Loren Bliss ©2012)

*****

Biden's Broken Promises and Ecogenocidal Policies
Make It Ever More Obvious Our Masters -- Whomever or
Whatever They May Be -- Intend to Exterminate Us, Whether by
Disease, Terminal Climate Change or Thermonuclear War

GIVEN THE DEADLY and unprecedented  combination of inescapable horrors by which we are oppressed  -- the mass murder deliberately inflicted  on us  as  "herd immunity";  the unchecked (and thus obviously intentional) intensification of climate change; and now the most terrifying eruption of U.S. war mongering in my nearly 82-year lifetime -- I cannot possibly disagree with the 55.7 percent of the world's 16-to-25-year-olds already convinced our species is doomed. 

But neither they, nor I,  nor any other fellow human without access to the clandestine bunkers of the USian Empire's 17 secret police agencies,  is likely to ever learn who -- or what -- is so methodically destroying our world, and -- just as importantly -- whether our attackers' goal is our enslavement or the extermination of our species.  In all probability, the  only way we will ever learn those truths is if they are inadvertently revealed by the self-destruction of present-day human society or accidentally discovered by some post-apocalyptic explorer -- that is, if any of our species manages to survive what is being done to us.  

Nor can I continue my disagreement with those who assert the present, inescapable captivity of the Working Class¹ -- that is, our de facto enslavement (whether under Nazism disguised as "Neoliberalism" or under Chinese state capitalism disguised as Marxism) -- reduces any present-day discussion of "politics" to naught but mental masturbation.

Which might as well be spelled "master-bation," since in hopelessly moron-ated, pridefully anti-intellectual Moron Nation,  there is neither the leadership nor the knowledge to ever again rescue us from the deceptions that sustain our enslavement and bring us ever closer to ecogenocidal doom. For which, by the way,  we damn well need to stop blaming the Working Class;  contrary to the anti-Working-Class slanders perpetrated by Hillary the Horrible and the brain-warping deceptions disseminated daily by the mainstream media propaganda machine, Moron Nation is mostly the incurably Ayn Randified white bourgeoisie.

Now I too have come to recognize not just the terrible truth prophesied by Jackson Browne, but the ultimate horror first truthfully prophesied by science fiction: that today's technology has given our Masters such omnipotence, "resistance is futile."  It is also -- again witness the collapse of Occupy -- absolutely pointless under present circumstances, conditions intentionally rendered permanent by the USian Empire's destruction of the Soviet Union and the resultant loss of its proven expertise (witness China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.),  in training revolutionaries and organizing revolutions.

This then is in all probability  the final chapter of my farewell to any political writing beyond occasional comment-thread posts on other websites.

***     

SINCE MY FIFTH year, when  our Masters gleefully nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki a mere three months after my birthmother's spectacularly violent attempt at post-partum abortion had fragmented my family and reduced me to an emotional orphan, I have been ever-more-certain some form of doom -- unquestionably the permanent destruction of modern civilization (and most likely the extinction of all humankind) -- is our species' inescapable fate.

Somehow too I recognized the irreparable destruction inflicted by my birthmother's would-have-been homicidal frenzies against me and my father were but a microcosm of the macrocosm of global destruction patriarchy was already inflicting on the world. I also sensed the patriarchy's predatory misogyny was as much the cause of my birthmother's madness as it was the source of our species' suicidal embrace of  thermonuclear and biochemical weaponry -- though I would be in my late teens before I had the knowledge, insight and vocabulary to begin putting it all together, initially via my journals, finally in the arson-suppressed "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer."

And now, with genuine gratitude for the hours of uninterrupted contemplation and meditation granted me by the pandemic, I have come to realize the great life-bonus handed me by that dreadful background of familial dysfunction: it seems we "incurably broken" victims may be the only folks left in the entire USian Empire with enough clarity of vision to recognize what is being done to us. 

In any case it is clear our Masters have already achieved their penultimate goal: real-time duplication of the ecogenocidal omnipotence by which their sadistically patriarchal gods have always sought to subjugate and eventually destroy our Mother Earth. And now it seems they are imposing their Ultimate Solution: ever-more undeniably, the reduction of our planetary Motherland back to a jungle hothouse ruled by giant bugs.     

At the very least, we now know the Republican (Nazi) Fifth Column within the "Democratic" (sic) Party enabled Biden the Beguiler to disguise his Inner Hillary just long enough to deceive us into voting him into place to resume the unreconstructed Goldwater-Girl's hate-prompted mongering of a purposefully genocidal war against Russia and its allies -- a war the only possible result of which will be human extinction.

Hillary's run-amok warmongering against  Russia is precisely why I voted for Jill Stein in 2016: I recognized in Hillary the same Let's-Conquer-the-World-and-Enslave-All-Its-Surviving-Inhabitants psychopathy that prompted Hitler to start World War II. As I would assert when accused of  "squandering" my ballot, the only (real) choice our Masters allowed us in 2016 was between Trump's domestic holocaust and Hillary's thermonuclear apocalypse, and I could not in good conscience vote for either.

In 2020 I voted for Biden because his lies about New-Deal restorations convinced me his Evil might (truly) be "lesser"; instead my vote and its outcome, the election of a Hillary-caliber advocate of planetary destruction,  has become an unforgivable lesson. It is another profoundly depressing example of what -- in rebuttal to  Barack the Betrayer's malevolently fraudulent "audacity of hope" -- I long ago relabeled "the imbecility of hope."

Now of course I'm certain the  horrors promised by Trump and his Nazis were obviously scripted to help our Masters' preferred death-puppet, Biden, beguile us all with his innumerable deceptions.  It's the political variant of the good-cop/bad-cop routine, and it is exactly how our system -- one Ruling Class party concealed by two deceptive names -- is intended to function.

Meanwhile Biden serves the same clandestine purpose as Obama: their colossal "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals destroy the remnants of our faith in democratic process, ensuring permanent Nazi victory as early as 2022.

For however long I manage to remain alive, it will weigh painfully on my conscience I was (again) seduced by yet another variant of "change we can believe in" and thus was deceived into voting for a president at least as determined as Hillary herself to provoke the  thermonuclear war that makes "Better Dead Than Red"  -- actually "Better Death Than Democracy" -- our planetary Motherland's final epitaph. 

Which is precisely why I'm posting the two  LA Progressive links below, each with full texts of my own comment-thread responses, all of it underscored by the thoroughly documented truth we of the Working Class have been permanently disempowered in the ever-more-brazenly Nazified United States, and are being rapidly enslaved everywhere else on this doomed planet as well. 

Obviously none of this can be abated without revolution, which -- just as obviously -- our Masters' now absolute, divine-sadist-caliber technological omnipotence and inescapable mass surveillance has rendered impossible. And so it will remain until technological and socioeonomic collapse, however caused,  reaches such de-electrified magnitude even our Masters themselves have no potential sanctuaries apart from the encampments of their victims -- where one hopes they will at last receive justice.

(Dare anyone ask if this -- the historical fact our Masters' omnipotence is entirely dependent on the now-inescapable techno-shackles of the cell phones and computers by which they've seduced us into self-enslavement  --  is perhaps the subconscious reason the otherwise delusion-based Abrahamic religions are spawning so many  bring-on-the-apocalypse cults?)   

Subjugated by an incurably conditioned combination of prideful ignorance and induced sociopathic self-obsession, the USian Moronic Majority has already proven itself permanently enslaved: the evidence is in the rise and fall of Occupy. As proper analyses  of Occupy's abject failures demonstrate conclusively (examples  here, here and here), the relentlessly anti-intellectual, incurably Ayn Randified egos of too many of its unyielding majority of white/bourgeois activists would have eventually killed the movement from within even without the external forces of our Masters' infiltrators, truncheons and pepper gas. Nor is it an accident such pridefully ignorant, maliciously self-obsessed egotism has become the prime USian ethos. Terrifyingly savvy in Josef-Goebbels-caliber propaganda and behavior modification, our Masters long ago mandated the requisite cradle-to-grave conditioning. Why? Because an ever-expanding Moronic Majority within the dominant white bourgeois fosters and sustains the identity politics that nurture Nazism even as it makes Working Class self-liberation impossible, thus perpetuating  our Masters' omnipotence.

And while we are again being schooled in the fact there is ultimately no defense against our Masters' tyrannies, backed as they are by thermonuclear and biological weapons, let us never forget their ultimate rebellion-suppressant -- the neutron bomb -- which our Masters designed specifically to exterminate all mammalian life in a given target while preserving most of the target's physical infrastructure and material wealth for looting.

(Yes the U.S. government claims they got rid of all their Neutron Bombs; but who can believe our Masters -- who are now suppressing the real Covid death toll -- would ever discard such a classically Neoliberal weapon so useful for speedy extermination of Working Class resistance? Nor dare we doubt the eternal threat our Masters sent to all humanity via Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- "we'll nuke whomever we choose" --  is equally applicable today.) 

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, when the truth is, literally every humanitarian advancement 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 have been permanently obstructed or reversed.   Nor -- with the U.S. Supreme Court now thoroughly Nazified by lifetime appointments -- is there any rational hope for betterment.

Hence, as an older person who emphatically agrees with the skyrocketing pessimism that has already captured 55.7 percent of the planet's youth, I may yet be in a minority, but I am by no means alone.

It is a pessimism reinforced daily by the now-irrefutably proven fact our Masters' sole reaction to terminal climate change is deception, a great smokescreen of lies to hide the fact their ultimate intent -- confirmed by their relentless refusal to act -- is to continue maximizing its deadliness.

But is the virus, in spite of its still-multiplying mutations,  not yet deadly enough to satisfy our Masters? Is the death rate amongst homeless people still too low to meet our Masters' quotas?  Is that why Biden is doing more than any U.S. president ever to provoke thermonuclear apocalypse?

Yet no one,  at least no one with enough prominence to be widely heard,  has yet dared demand to know just who -- or what -- these Masters truly are. Why are they destroying our planetary Motherland's ability to accommodate higher lifeforms?  Could it be the truth is deemed to be so terrifying for us -- We the People of the Working Class -- its mere disclosure would provoke the revolution our Masters so obviously fear? 

Here then are the aforementioned two LA Progressive comments:

On "Is the U.S. Provoking War with Russia?":

On "Why Is Congress Killing the Child Tax Credit?":

The Child Tax Credit was canceled by our Masters’ ecogenocidal majority — that is, by the Republican (i.e., Nazi) Party and its “Democratic” (sic) Fifth Column — for the same reason their White House puppets have weaponized Covid into the 21st Century’s Zyklon B: to help expand and perpetuate the planet’s highest death toll even as Biden the Beguiler attempts to agitate thermonuclear doomsday by goading Russia and China into World War III.

In thinking about what is being done to us, remember that our Masters (whomever or whatever they may be), are so well-fortressed, they believe they and their chosen vassals will – like the Nazi death-camp commanders and SS psychopaths who are their obvious if secret role models – survive whatever horrors they inflict.

What then is the basis of these newest, ultimately apocalyptic manifestations of USian imperial murderousness? Google “Eric Pianka population control,” without the quotation marks of course.

While Pianka’s demand for a 90-percent reduction of the human population remains circumstantial evidence, its relevance becomes ever more undeniable as our Masters’ genocidal intent becomes ever more overwhelmingly obvious.

Too bad the USian Moronic Majority – which clearly includes far more of the killer nation’s pseudo-Left than its terminally triumphant Nazi Right – suicidally surrendered this issue to the Nazis.

Which, once again, enables the pseudo-Left to suppress the horrific truth: that genocidal population reduction is already – if only to the dwindling minority of us who retain the ability to think logically – the (obvious) long-range purpose of Neoliberalism.

Indeed I hardly think it far-fetched to rank what should clearly be labeled the “Pianka Memo” as (at least) equal to the “Powell Memo” in our Nazi-educated Masters’ present-day revisions of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and their imposition of policies so derived.

***

ONE OF THE  more thoroughly obscured facts of life under patriarchy, and especially beneath the (thus far) metaphorical jackboots of its U.S./Nazi offshoots, is the extent to which we're methodically denied any useful knowledge of our own national history.

The problem -- already apparent in the 1950s and solidified into a permanently unsolvable barrier today -- stems from our Masters'  long ago recognition that, just as the study of history is epicentral to Marxism and socialism in general, it is anathema to Capitalism.²

Obviously in our Nazi-trained Masters' post-World-War-II quest to avoid the appearance of official public-school censorship, they decided on a policy that -- both in terms of its effectiveness and the magnitude of its deception -- testifies to the unprecedented,  absolutely bottomless malevolence of their Josef-Goebbels-caliber cunning. 

They censored our school books, of course; among the suppressed truths were all examples of positive consequences evolving from relations between the U.S. and Russia:  how the Russian Empire saved the federal union from conquest by British, French and Confederate armies during the (first?) USian Civil War;  how the Soviet Revolution helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement; how it terrified our Masters into granting women the right to vote and granting rights to organized labor our Masters have since abolished; and -- especially in the context of the Nazis' attempted coup against President Roosevelt and his New Deal -- let us never forget how Soviet- influenced alternative media saved us from our Masters' original scheme to make the United States a Satellite of Nazi Germany.     

But they also insisted their propaganda-version of history be taught only by the proudly anti-intellectual legions of super-patriotic, testosterone-frenzied thugs  who coach high-school male varsity sports. Thus was mandated the near-universal K-12 public school policy of having history, sociology and economics  be  "taught" (sic) mostly by "teachers" (sic) who were semi-literate jocks,  men whose only degrees were in "phys ed," which was tied with something called "home-ec ed" as the easiest collegiate majors. The home-ec department, of course, was the jocks' favorite source of female companions. 

Thus too was the study of history -- a fascinating human drama scripted by the interplay of cause and effect -- reduced to the intentionally repugnant rote-memorization of dates, places and names. Obviously, our Nazi-tutored Masters knew the best way to keep us from learning our true history was to teach it in such a way to make it a despised subject. Worse, every one of the so-called social-studies "teachers" (again sic) I encountered in the three public high schools schools I attended c.1954-1958 knew far less (real) history than I had already learned from my father's home library by the time I was 11 or 12. 

As a result, just as we are robbed of the truth there could never have been a New Deal without the Soviet Revolution, so are we denied the truth the destruction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  has robbed us us, most likely permanently, of the organized protection of the one ideology that -- despite its flaws --  was nevertheless our species' only rational hope for ever evolving a genuinely humanitarian future.

Who then can doubt that is why the USSR was always our Masters' prime target? And, in this context, who can doubt the possibility it might rise again -- however faint it may be -- is the bottom-line reason our Masters are openly provoking World War III? 

Note how Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union despite the entirely rational objections from Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW in the foregoing link),  which was then -- indisputably and by far -- the world's most militarily competent general staff. 

Again the question: who -- or what -- convinced Hitler to overrule the generals who had already given him an unprecedented string of conquests? And who -- or what -- convinced the USian plutocrats to (secretly) adopt the Nazi cause as their own?

Not surprisingly, our Masters' continuing refusal to answer any such questions furthers their foreign and domestic campaigns to sustain and intensify their policies of anti-solidarity chaos. But it also evokes the skyrocketing belief -- already 50 percent in Britain -- in such horrors as these. 

Which, if true,  means we are scarcely better defended than the doomed inhabitants of what may have been Sodom and Gomorrah -- that even our faintest hopes are as imbecilic as the fake "hope" (sic) so successfully pimped by Obama.

As is already true -- thanks to the lifetime-reigns of the U.S. Supreme Court tyrants and the resultant fact their again-confirmed Nazification will outlive nearly all of us (and by then will be either apocalyptically moot or remain at least as Nazified as it is today)  -- for any hopes yet foolishly retained by any members of the USian Working Class. 

But I do see one (faintly) visible global hope -- the only such hope I can find -- that actually has some basis in rational possibility. Because we know the Chinese think in terms of centuries (rather than the days and months that seem to be the outer limits of USian thinking), I submit it is at least possible their apparent co-optation by the final Nazi forms of Capitalism may instead be a colossal deception straight out of  Sun Tzu, specifically the dictum that if an enemy's greatest strength can somehow be transformed into his greatest weakness, victory is assured.

What then?

Perhaps, building upon the metaphysics implicit in the Gaia Hypothesis and the visions of equality and socioeconomic justice given us by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, our descendants can successfully resurrect our quest for Working Class liberation. 
__________________

¹I use the term "Working Class" in the Marxian sense, that is, to include all of us for whom job loss is inevitable ruin because our survival is entirely dependent on our own earnings -- and not on ancestral wealth or other undeserved riches. . 

²Were I teaching a survey course in U.S. history, these five texts would be required reading: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States, Beacon Press: 2014;  Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Harper & Row: 1980; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, International Publishers: 1943; Jeff Sharlet, The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Harper: 2008; Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War, Oxford University Press: 2020.

LB/2-12 February 2022

--30--