I heard about it from my daughter, Sarah, in Chicago.
“Dad, did you hear about Highland Park?” That was an ominous beginning. She continued: “There was a shooting during the 4th of July Parade. A bunch of people were killed.”
My heart sank. I lived in Highland Park for almost 15 years, from 2001-2015. Sarah too. I had been there just a few weeks ago to visit my dear neighbors Hannah and Joe, and to meet up with Sarah.
“You ok, sweetie?”
“Yeah, but it’s really bad.”
“Let me hang up and find out more.”
I looked at the NYTimes and Guardian and texted Hannah – she and her husband were out of town and ok. I told my wife Harriet, who was out pulling weeds in the garden. I was tearful; she consoled me. Though I hadn’t lived there in a while, Highland Park was a big part of my life. It was where I bought a house with my former wife in late 2001; where I ran hundreds of miles in the beautiful forest reserves; where I taught my dog Echo how to catch a frisbee; where I wrote three books; where I recovered from injuries after a bad car crash; where Sarah went through a very challenging (for all of us) adolescence; where I started a new life after my divorce; and where Harriet and I were married by a rabbi, with Echo as our witness, in 2014.
I never made many friends there, but I didn’t care about that. I had friends enough in Chicago and L.A. And then there was the gift of Hannah – a brilliant and funny art historian (U. of Illinois, Chicago), and her kind businessman husband, Joe Reinstein. Joe and I didn’t have that much in common except for being Jewish, enjoying gardening and liking to make jokes. He sounds a little bit like Jack Benny. Many of you, dear readers, won’t have a clue as to who that is, so please look him up on YouTube.
Highland Park, a city of 30,000, is about one-third Jewish. When my former wife (Catholic) and I moved up to there in 2001, some of our Northwestern University colleagues were surprised that we relocated to such a bourgeois suburb. To quiet the teasing, I told them that we moved there so I could “be among my people.” That shut everybody up. Then as now, identity politics ends discussion. In truth, though I am a cultural Jew, I haven’t stepped inside a synagogue since my bar mitzvah in 1969, not including other people’s bar mitzvahs and weddings.
Now, after the shooting, Highland Park was going to become one more of those names on a list that includes Parkland, Sandy Hook, Buffalo, and Uvalde. The grim consolation is that the list is now so long – and growing longer every day — that Highland Park will soon be displaced in memory by another mass casualty event. In a few years, it will be a footnote. But not for the people whose family members were killed or wounded; not for the town’s other residents who will remember that infamous day, and not for a north Florida transplant who remembers the place with fondness.
Outline of a critique of fascist violence
In time, we’ll find out much more about the confessed killer, Bobby Crimo. But my friend Sue Coe nailed the profile in an email she sent me before he was identified: “He will be a 20-something white male, who hunts, goes online in his bedroom, and over excites himself. His mother/grandmother/caretaker, who he hates, does his laundry, and cooks his food. He won’t have many friends; past fellow students will say he was a loner. Maybe there’s a manifesto, posted online, ripped off from some other moron.” She forgot to mention that he will be a Trump supporter, rare for someone his age, and rarer still in Democratic Highland Park or nearby Highwood where the killer lived with his father and uncle. Sue is clever but not clairvoyant – she described what has recently become the typical profile of the mass shooter.
Crimo may have a diagnosable psychotic illness such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or delusional disorder. Alternatively, he might suffer from a less totalizing, but still debilitating mental illness such as borderline personality disorder or depression. He apparently attempted suicide in 2019. In online raps (or rants), he claimed to be compelled to kill. But whether there is a plausible diagnosis or not, the question will be the same: Why did this 21 y.o. kid decide to buy an assault weapon and kill or injure dozens of people he didn’t even know? Answers won’t be found in the DSM but in the convergence of fascism and Republican Party politics.
Fascism is a well-understood political formation, but easier to recognize in hindsight than foresight. It cannot be defined, as some have tried to do, by a delimited set of attributes, for example: 1) militarism and a culture of violence, 2) the leadership (Fuhrer) principle, 3) antagonism to democracy, 4) deferral to the authority of elites, 5) racism, 6) strict control of both gender expression and sexual reproduction, 7) denigration of science, 8) the ubiquity of lies and conspiracy theories, and 9) the bringing of government and civil society to heel in order to enforce one-party rule. The problem with this list or any other, is that it establishes an ideal type that exists nowhere except the mind of the investigator.
Then what use are the words fascist and fascism today? They serve as a warning, enabling us to recognize especially toxic political speech and behavior, and prepare ourselves for the behemoth lying in wait. Does the rampant racism, violence, corruption, and electoral fraud of the last president and current Republican Party mark a fascist turning point in the United States? Does Republican debasement of the Supreme Court – marked by its denial of women’s autonomy, endorsement of gun culture, refusal to accept EPA authority to prevent a climate catastrophe, and endorsement of a theocratic state — indicate the rise of fascism?
To be sure, U.S. capitalist democracy was deranged from the start by slavery and genocide. When those practices were ended or curbed, it was still marked by racial oppression, gross inequality, and environmental degradation. Despite that, U.S. politics has been self-correcting to a surprising degree, staving off fascism when it seemed imminent. The first Ku Klux Klan (1865-1900) was stymied by Progressive Era legislation and policing, and the second (1915-1940) by the Great Northern Migration (which depleted the Black population of the South) and by the democratic solidarity that arose after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S. Fascism in other words, has frequently been incipient, but countervailing tendencies were always stronger. However, that pattern – a glide to the right matched by a lurch back to the center — may be changing.
During the last three decades or so, neo-liberal capitalism has sustained a highly productive collaboration with Christian nationalism and other versions of far-right, populist extremism. They are strange bedfellows. The goal of the first is to ensure the highest possible profits for the longest possible time, regardless of the human or environmental consequences. The climate crisis has made this stance existential. Continued economic growth and increasing profits – the lifeblood of large business enterprises — is simply incompatible with environmental responsibility. For that reason, fossil capital, along with its confederates in the weapons, aerospace, steel, and home building industries, is waging a war against the coming era of environmental regulation and economic planning that must inevitably curb growth. That’s what the recent Supreme Court decision, West Virginia vs EPA, was all about. It was a big win for capital against the environmental movement and American labor. Working people, especially the non-white sector, are the first victims of climate change. In addition, the Court’s ruling will be used to attack workplace health and safety laws.
The goal of the second group, the far-right Christian nationalists, anti-abortionists, militias, and self-proclaimed fascists, is to establish a new nation of white Christian, Aryan, or “legacy” Americans who will reclaim the power they believe was taken from them by the Jews, Blacks, feminists, and queers who sought to “replace” them. Their cultism (QAnon, Stop the Steal, anti-Vax, etc), gun-rights militancy and religious enthusiasm has little in common with the secularism and public reserve of the corporate heads, lawyers, bankers, lobbyists, and advertising executives who comprise the neoliberal faction of U.S. conservatism, but they share one fundamental principle: that the only salient economic and political unit is the individual and the family. The neoliberal faction adds a proviso — codified by the Supreme Court in Citizens United — that corporations have many of the same rights as people.
For neoliberal capital, this means that state or federal programs to regulate production, improve social welfare, and protect the environment are both non-sensical and counterproductive; they are based on the mistaken premise that societies exist and have collective interests that need to be safeguarded. For the far right — Christian nationalist, militia, anti-abortion, and the rest — exclusive focus on individuals and families means that any concatenation of social groupings that opposes their apocalyptic vision must be cast aside if not eliminated. Social movements of feminists, queers, Blacks, or any others, are anathema.
This mixture of neo-liberal and far right-populist extremism is highly volatile. It is also the basis of MAGA and Republican Party identity. When that world view is offered up by the former president and his congressional and mass-media followers and apologists, the consequences can be catastrophic: Witness the January 6 coup attempt, and the earlier, far right killings in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Poway, Buffalo, Uvalde…and now Highland Park.
MAGA triggers and the alien within
When I lived in Highland Park, I never locked my door. I know that’s a cliché about small-town life, but it was true. That doesn’t mean the practice is wise. Our house was broken into once, but instead of walking through the unlocked front door, the would-be thieves broke through a locked, glass side door. They didn’t manage to steal anything and hastily exited the front door, likely chased by Echo – notably nippy with strangers — who would not have passed up the chance to licitly bite a burglar. The police came five minutes after we called them and had great sport playing detective – dusting for fingerprints, checking for signs of forced entry, looking for shoe prints in the wet soil outside. They never caught the guys.
The idea that the Highland Park Police would ever have to deal with a murder, much less a mass murder was unimaginable to me. From 2000 to 2020, there hadn’t been a single killing in town. But everyone was aware of the threat guns posed, especially after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December 2012. In June 2013, Highland Park’s City Council and Mayor Nancy Rotering introduced a measure banning assault weapons and large capacity magazines. I spoke in favor of the it at the June meeting dedicated to the subject, as did many others. However, there were a few who spoke up in opposition, repeating the standard NRA line that people, not guns kill people. One older woman waved a coffee mug and said it could be used as a lethal weapon – a wag near her dared her to try. Another speaker invoked the second amendment with the reverential awe usually reserved for the second commandment – people sniggered. The ban passed easily. It was unsuccessfully challenged in multiple courts, and ultimately survived a Supreme Court review – I doubt it would today.
I now wonder if the confessed killer’s father, Robert Crimo II attended that City Council meeting. He’s a gun lover and Trump supporter who helped his son obtain the rifle used in the shooting. He also ran for mayor of Highland Park in 2019 against the incumbent Mayor Rotering, losing by a margin of 2-1. In April that year, police visited the Crimo home after a report that Robert III (Bobby) had attempted suicide. No action was taken after his parents gave assurances that mental health professionals would be contacted. In September, the police again came to the Crimo household after receiving a call that Bobby had threatened to kill his family. They searched his room and found in his closet 16 knives, a dagger, and a sword. His father later that day claimed they were his, and the weapons were returned. The Highland Park Police promptly reported to the Illinois State Police that Bobby was a “clear and present danger” to himself and others. Despite that, in December 2019, the 19-year-old – who eight months earlier attempted suicide — applied for and was issued a Firearm Owner’s Identification Card (FOID). Because he was underage, the application was co-signed by his father.
The FOID application should have been denied because under state law, no gun permit can be issued to someone “whose mental condition is of such a nature that it poses a clear and present danger to the applicant, or any other person or the community.” In addition, a FOID must be denied to anyone who “has been a patient at a mental health facility in the last five years.” If Bobby’s parents had in fact contacted mental health professionals after the boy’s attempted suicide, they would have had to take him to “a mental health facility,” most likely Northshore Hospital’s Behavioral Health Center in Highland Park, just half a mile from where they lived. Apparently, both the Illinois State Police and the physician or psychologist who treated Bobby, failed to send notification to the Illinois Department of Health Services FOID reporting system.
A few days after being granted his FOID, and then again between June 2020 and September 2021, Crimo bought at least five guns, including two rifles, one of which was the semi-automatic Smith & Wesson M&P15 used in the killings. That’s similar to the guns used by the young, far-right killers in Buffalo and Uvalde. In late September 2020, Bobby attended a Trump rally in Northbook, Illinois. On January 2, 2021, four days before the capital insurrection, Crimo joined other Trump supporters to greet the soon-to-be- ex-president at an unidentified airport. On June 27, 2021, he posted a video of himself draped and dancing in a Trump flag. Sometime later, he had the number “47” tattooed on his face and painted on the side of his car. If Trump is re-elected in 2014, he will be the 47th president, though if the numbers are transposed — 7/4 – they represent the date of the Highland Park shootings.
We know less about Crimo’s actions in the weeks before the shooting, though more information may soon emerge. We know that in some of his most recent YouTube and other postings, he revealed his identification with soldiers, spies, assassins (Lee Harvey Oswald) and warriors — especially with the German SS. After the massacre in Highland Park, he drove up to another, famously Democratic Party stronghold, Madison, Wisconsin, with the intention of shooting up their July 5 parade too. Fortunately, he abandoned that plan when he got there and returned, more or less to the scene of the crime, where he was captured. Was the ongoing Trump saga – the former president’s unrelenting “stop the steal” rhetoric, claims of persecution, exhortations to “take our country back,” endorsement of the NRA, and invitations to violence – a trigger for Crimo? But if they were, why did Crimo attack innocent people at a patriotic parade? There is no obvious answer.
In Male Fantasies (1987), Klaus Theweleit described the transformation of de-commissioned German soldiers after World War I into mercenary militias called Freikorps. Those bands were responsible for political assassinations and the brutal repression of protesting German workers, communists, feminists, and social democrats. By the late ‘20s, they became the stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung) that enabled Hitler’s rise to power. Some became prominent Nazis, like Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and death camps.
Many of the men studied by Theweleit were subjected to stern discipline as children – part of a normally pathological Prussian upbringing — and then further brutalized as soldiers in wartime trenches. Consequently, they developed a sense that they had been hollowed out, or that they had been overcome by an “alien within.” This foreign being was hungry and dangerous, and could find relief only in violence, especially against a crowd. While the solider was stern, bounded, firm and resolute, the crowd was vivid, thriving, shapeless, feminine, social, communal, and sexual – everything he was not, and it had to be destroyed.
Theweleit’s two volume book is widely cited – too widely – in studies of male sexual violence and the psychology of Nazism. There is no easy way to map a wide-ranging study of the literature the psychopathology of World War I veterans onto the mind and behavior of young, mass shooters today. But the preoccupations of the Highland Park killer – assassinations, school shootings, the SS, spies, guns, knives, and militias – suggests comparison with the young fascists in Male Fantasies who emerged in inter-war Europe, scarred and deadly dangerous, who hated crowds, and were ready to follow the orders of a charismatic leader.
Fascism, unlike Covid, can’t be diagnosed with a nose swab; but its symptoms are unmistakable and sometimes fatal. It’s fair to say it killed seven people in Highland Park and injured 30 others. It was also deadly in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Uvalde. Urgent action is needed to stop the proliferation of assault weapons and guns with large magazines. But this essay is not about the need for gun control, or “gun safety”, essential as that is. It’s about the violence that again struck a U.S. community last week, and the need to resist the Republican far-right – both its corporate and Christian nationalist wings. Until their assault upon our health, safety, bodily autonomy, religious (or irreligious) freedom, and environmental future is stopped, the killing will continue.
Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames and Hudson, 1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015) and many other books. He is also co-founder of the environmental justice non-profit, Anthropocene Alliance. He and the artist Sue Coe and now preparing for publication part two of their series for Rotland Press, American Fascism Now.
by Ramin Mazaheri posted with permission and bothparts cross-posted with PressTV
As a numerical minority – of course Shia are the Muslim group most interested in Muslim unity: It means survival. It has meant this since the very death of Prophet Mohammad, and both “Muslim unity” and “the survival of Shi’ism” have been inseparable ever since.
The logic of that concept – that “Muslim unity” is the best protector of the largest minority in the Muslim world – should be self-evident. Minorities need peace to thrive – they are outnumbered in conflicts/votes.
It is only divisive imperialists, and their puppets in some Muslim countries, who reject this logical idea and propagate the opposite – that, instead, Shia are trying to divide the Muslim community; that the minority Shia are bent on war with Sunnis. Of course, that is a war which is already prohibited by Islam – faith can never be forced on someone – so such persons (and I refer to isolated extremists who hold no democratic political power anywhere in the Muslim world) are always rejected as being un-Muslim.
No thinking Muslim needs a conference to restate this millennia-old conversation and settled law. Iran’s annual International Islamic Unity Conference, which just concluded its 35th meeting, is light years beyond these phony non-issues.
What the Conference does is to provide a forum to create an Islamic-geopolitical path to resolve insecurity in the Muslim world. Such insecurity is allowed to occur, in our modern area of imperialism, because there is disunity on fundamental topics of political modernity among Muslims.
Islamic Unity Week was initiated in 1987 and is held on the week of the birthday of Prophet Mohammad. The conference is not held to proselytize in favor of Shi’ism (again, proselytizing in Islam is forbidden, which is why there are no Muslim missionaries) but to strengthen unity among Muslims in a practical sense.
Yes, the event is held under the auspices of the World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought, which paves the way for Islamic scholars to get to know and understand one another. Creating theological empathy and respectful intellectual understanding among Islam’s many sects is indeed an integral part of the conference. But the presence of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the heads of Iran’s Foreign Minister and Minister of Culture, major Iranian political leaders, political scientists, communication specialists, and others attest to the very practical, very real-world results which the conference is expected to produce.
A fundamental tenet of the conference is that Muslims cannot be united as long as foreign powers take away the sovereignty of Muslims in their own countries. Thus, the practical basis of the conference is anti-imperialism, a struggle so bloody and necessary that correct unity of any type must be utilized.
We should always remember that unity among any broad masses has always been called “divisive” by the powers of imperialism – whether such powers were feudal kings who rejected even meager parliaments, or the stockholders of the East India Tea Company, or the “200 families” of France whom Leon Blum had to negotiate with, in 1936, for an 8-hour day because “Who else was there for me to negotiate with?”, or today’s 1% and the media they own all of – because the united power of any masses against the elite will effect a modern revolution in any society.
Political unity should be easier than religious unity, but the Muslim world has more of the latter than the former
When there is Muslim unity on a merely national level the result takes the form of an “Islamic republic”. It must be a republic because monarchy – the preservation of privileges which are based on blood, elitism, and favoritism, and thus the necessary rejection of economic and political equity – is always cruel and unusual punishment of the nation’s masses and their resources.
That idea did not come along in the history of the Eastern hemisphere until the advent of the 19th century, and places like Europe fought the Napoleonic Wars, smothered the democratic wave of 1848, spread the false glory of their monarchs around the globe in violent and arrogant colonialism and embarked on the horror known as World War One simply because monarchs (in alliance with their aristocracy, both old and nouveau riche) wanted to preserve their privileges. It is truly as simple as that, and to say otherwise is a lie.
Monarchy – i.e. autocracy, authoritarianism, inequality before the law, unearned privilege, and arrogance – still has enormous support and backers among most of Western Europe, and these countries have propped up their royal brethren in the Muslim world.
It is incorrect to expect global unity on a religious plane, but are we expected to still wait for unity regarding the truly horrific demands of kings and queens?
“Republican imperialism” – of which France and the United States are shining examples – is not a true republic but one which merely mouths the words of equality before the law, yet whose policies preserve the nouveau riche and keep imperialism firmly in place. In such places, patriotism is the most exalted virtue, and because it places the nation higher than even God it degrades positive patriotism into fanatical jingoism.
Following World War One the idea that a nation of people has superior characteristics, deserve special privileges, and are destined to rule over others was then changed into “fascism”. The differences between monarchy and fascism are slight as there was no fundamental overturning of property relations as in, for example, the Iranian Islamic Revolution – the banking system, medium and heavy industry, and foreign trade remained in the hands of a tiny cabal instead of the people’s hands for the people’s benefit.
Because Western nations are either former or current colonizers and/or strongholds of monarchism (either overt or latent), they suffer themselves from a vicious sectarianism. Their callous, entrenched, self-serving elite tries to foist that same sectarianism onto the Muslim World. The policy of “divide and conquer” is not something they fail to use domestically as well, of course.
This is properly called “sectarianism” outside of the West but inside the West it is given a more innocuous-sounding name – “identity politics”. Both are the politics of battles for elite privileges, of “us versus them”, of anti-unity, of an individualism which strives to know no legal bounds.
“Identity politics” is anti-republican because it is sectarian. One hears this constantly in France – they do have a revolution-from-the-masses history to draw from, after all. In the US, identity politics is cynically viewed as a necessary evil in a world with only heartless societies.
The elite who profit seek divisiveness both in California and Nebraska, just as they want divisiveness in Lebanon and Iraq, just as they now want divisiveness within Afghanistan with a flaming urgency.
It is Afghanistan that this year’s conference was focused upon, as it’s currently ground zero in the struggle for unity in the Muslim world regarding the global war against a sense of arrogant privilege which some persons call “reactionary”, which other persons call “fascism” and which other persons call “evil”.
In Part One the geopolitical foundations of Islamic Unity Week have now been described, which allows us to see the accuracy of the title of Part 2, “Iran’s Islamic Unity Week: A place free from fascist/reactionary/anti-Muslim influences”. In 2021 the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan makes just such a haven incredibly necessary for Islamic Unity as well as global harmony.
Iran’s Islamic Unity Week: A place free from fascist/reactionary/anti-Muslim influences ( Part 2)
The intellectual unity of the Muslim World has long been established. They are similar to the Buddhists in this – they similarly have had very few epochs of “fitna” (civil war) – and dissimilar from their Christian Abrahamic brothers, who seemingly have embraced the idea that Christian unity is neither achievable nor even desirable but fundamentally antagonistic and overly-intrusive.
Indeed, it is not surprising that the Western media did not cover Iran’s 35th annual International Islamic Unity Conference, which just concluded, as it does not appear to see divisions among Christianity as a subject worth covering either?
Part One discussed the geopolitical foundations of the Conference: The struggle for unity in the Muslim world regarding the global war against a sense of arrogant privilege which some persons call “reactionary”, which other persons call “fascism” and which other persons call “evil”. Certainly, “imperialism” can be used interchangeably with all three.
The anti-imperialist victory of the Taliban over the United States-led Western coalition may wind up not being anti-imperialist at all – this was the underlying concern of this year’s conference.
The Taliban themselves were indeed this year’s target audience: it should be easily understandable that the primary aim was to show the Taliban that they are being monitored, and that there are demands by 52 Muslim countries that Shia and other groups be protected in the name of both Afghan unity and Muslim unity.
The expulsion of the Western coalition may prove to be a failure in the anti-imperialism fight if Daesh and other terrorists – who foment Muslim disunity via attacks on Shia – are not totally rejected and subdued by the new Taliban leadership. Without an inclusive government and zero tolerance for “sectarianism/identity politics”, then certainly Daesh will continue to terrorize and thus provide grounds for yet another western invasion. That would mean more decades of disunity in Afghanistan, in a victory for imperialism.
However, a Taliban which is inclusive and which expels Islamic fundamentalists would be a victory for both anti-imperialism as well as Muslim unity. It should be easy to see why for Muslims the two are the same in 2021 It should be easy to see why to the colonialist project of Israel and the individualist-worshipping Western 1% Muslim unity is as threatening to their profit lines as anti-imperialism is; as any broad unity of the masses is.
The Taliban say they have changed from decades of fighting – the conference is a reminder that 52 Muslim nations are studying them closely for proofs.
Daesh and other groups – which are known to be funded by Western imperialist nations even though they find democratic approval in no Muslim region – keep getting Western guns and money precisely because they allow the West to station Western troops in Muslim countries. It is a fundamental tenet of the International Islamic Unity Conference that Muslim nations must provide for their own security, as Iran does. The West repeatedly insists that only they are capable of providing security in the Muslim world, but the double-dealing and murderous hypocrisy of Western history in the modern Muslim world is well-known to all.
Indeed, the Muslim world is so thwarted and denied chances of self-empowerment that they are now relying on the Taliban – originally a terrorist group supported by the United States to topple a democratic government – to break the cycle of Western-backed terrorism within Muslim countries.
It seems like a very weak leg upon which to rest the Conference’s politically-modern version of Muslim unity, no?
But there is no worldwide revolution coming to save the Muslim world: The nation of Afghanistan has proven exceptional in its ability to overcome foreign invasion, and now they must prove that their exceptional ability was based on the modern political ideas of grassroots demands for sovereignty, social equity, and religious harmony.
In a real way, Iran’s Conference is an open invitation, and a plea, and a humble request for communication in order to show the Muslim world that there is another version of what is acceptable in Islam other than what is offered by the house of Saud and the obscenely-monied (which is also to say “obscenely privileged”) Persian Gulf countries. The differences are not cultural values – because Islam is the essence of all these cultures – but the most fundamentally modern political values, i.e. the rejection of feudalism, monarchy, unequal privilege, Muslim disunity, and the violence always required to uphold any of these outdated concepts.
The Conference shows that the petrodollar’s true printers and the Arab League do not have a monopoly on the political direction of the Muslim world, and – in my opinion – their actions and comprador complicity in recent decades show that they do not deserve one.
Iranians believe that due to their Islamic and modern revolution they are not some sort of shining example for the Muslim world but simply a guaranteed safe space – a place that can host open dialogue and which excludes undoubtedly reactionary/fascistic/evil intentions.
Such dialogues must be held in the name of Muslim unity, which should be about as controversial as motherhood but which are controversial because Muslim unity would upend two centuries of Western dominance, colonization and forced regression/stagnation. In 2021 the Muslim world looks to Afghanistan as a place of newfound military sovereignty – grassroots, republican and Muslim unity must immediately follow.
In this extended discussion Julianne Romanello and myself together with Jason Bosch delve into the ideological and spiritual thoughts that have turned our world into an open air prison. We looked into the work of Leo Strauss, Athens & Jerusalem, Noahide fundamentals, the origin of Zionism and many other crucial topics most intellectuals insist to avoid…
Free speech has long been a cornerstone of Western society. However, within the past few years the situation has completely changed. Recently, one of the Western`s oldest public figures – the legendary leader of the Western Civil Liberties Union Ira Glasser, who for many years fought against racism, violation of the rights of workers and employees, and government corruption, spoke about a discussion that took place at one of the leading Western universities following a lecture he had delivered there. Young people, from student to professor, argued that freedom of speech is incompatible with social justice because it cannot fully guarantee the rights of LGBT people, migrants and non-white minorities. Glasser, who had fought for the equal rights in Western society for many years, was frightened to see Western democracy dying right before his eyes.
In a modern society freedom of speech cannot be absolute. Defamation, personal, racial, gender and other insults are inadmissible. There are courts that are supposed to protect the rights of those offended, but no one can deprive a person of the right to express his or her opinion on such issues as illegal migration, the destruction of the education system, the tax system or when heterosexuals serve in the army alongside representatives of sexual minorities. Or maybe already can? In the midst of the pandemic, freedom of speech has become lopsided – the “cancellation culture” has led to calls for violence against members of the successful middle class, who in turn are no longer able to raise their voice in defense of their rights. What is even more outrageous is that this was done to please the old political elites … mostly white and very wealthy.
However, while previously high-profile cases such as Watergate, the Bill Clinton sex scandal and others got in the media spotlight leading to the conviction and often impeachment of politicians, in the course of the past five years the situation has changed. Facts are no longer needed. Investigative journalism has been replaced by fakes and unfounded statements. Certain political forces clearly benefit from this new reality. Democrats support BLM, LGBT people and migrants. Therefore, any accusation against them is a lie, a manifestation of racism and intolerance. Any evidence presented was fabricated in Moscow and Beijing and handed over to Trump. All media outlets that do not support Democrats are lying.
As a result, Joe Biden’s supporters got a powerful trump card – almost complete impunity. Supporting corporations such as Amazon can exploit their employees any way they like, but any complaints about their inhuman work schedule is a provocation by the Trumpists, because Amazon is a company where gender equality is respected and they have diversity directors. The situation at the largest startups in Silicon Valley, the main sponsors of the Democratic Party, is the same.
Accordingly, any accusations against the party of the current President cannot be considered objectively – after all, these are all lies told by the enemies of minorities. Consider, for example, the 2016 scandal with $84 million, which, thanks to Hillary Clinton, replenished the Democrats’ election coffers, in violation of the law on maximum party funding. Trump has long tried to initiate an official investigation of all this, but without success. The same with the scandal surrounding Biden Jr., for whom his father secured a cushy job on the board of Ukraine’s Burisma Company with a monthly salary of a hefty $50,000. When the Ukrainian opposition tried to initiate an investigation into this, Joe Biden simply replaced the country’s disloyal Prosecutor General. Moreover, he brags about it in his public speeches. And brag he certainly can, because changing the prosecutor in a semi-colony is a truly democratic way to go. Attempts by Trump supporters to prove that the Bidens’ activities were illegal have failed despite all the evidence corroborating the charge. The “Democrats” simply said it was a fake.
The same about the Clintons, whose lobbying structures worked hard defending the Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus accused of corruption. Hillary Clinton personally threatened the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. The news about this appeared in the media, but there were no investigations either. Biden, just like the Clintons and other leading Democrats are all hereditary politicians representing the top tier of American society. Most of the Democratic party leaders came to power from Ivy League universities, not from street protests or black neighborhoods. However, it was they who initiated and spearheaded the LGBT and BLM protests, launched the “cancellation culture” and are now enjoying the fruits of their labors. Getting into their closed club is no easy matter. It is easier to leave it, as did Bernie Sanders, a popular politician but a bit too independent for the taste of the Democratic Party bosses. As a result, he was forced to pull out of the presidential race.
At first glance it may seem that Western’s Big Business has nothing to gain from protests and new cultural codes, which theoretically make it possible to declare a boycott of any company. However, while stores in many cities were being burglarized and calls were being made to abolish the “white privileges,” Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Postmates and other corporations spent more than $200 million to push new and tighter labor legislation through the courts, thus dealing another blow to the middle class, which now pays for everything. By the way, this whole process was set in motion by Tony West, the son-in-law of the new Vice-President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color in this post, who comes out as a champion of minority rights.
So, let the protests and all the noise being made about the “oppressed minorities” not fool you. This only makes the “Democratic Party” inviolable, so welcome to the beautiful new West – a one-party system with “right” freedom of speech. If you want more evidence and examples to arrive to the same conclusions as did the author of this article, spend a few minutes watching a good video that is going viral every day:
Batko Milacic is an independent analyst who lives in Podgorica (capital of Montenegro), he is 30 years old. He graduated history at University of Montenegro and his graduate thesis was: “Foreign Policy of Russia from 1905 to 1917”. He has been doing analytics for years, writing in English and Serbian about the situation in the Balkans and Europe. He participated in several seminars for young journalists, organized in the Balkans.
Thirty years ago, the United States dominated the world politically, economically, and scientifically. But today?
Watch this in-depth discussion with distinguished guests: Alastair Crooke – Former British Diplomat, the Founder, and Director of the Conflicts Form Pepe Escobar – Brazilian Political Analyst and Author Max Blumenthal – American Journalist and Author from Grayzone Chaired by Dr. Mohammad Marandi – Professor at University of Tehran
The opening salvo against red state America is the article of impeachment against President Trump introduced on January 11 by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrat Representatives David Cicilline, Ted Lieu, and Jamie Raskin. So much for Biden’s promise to “unify the country.”
What is the intent of this article of impeachment? It cannot possibly be to remove Trump from office. Trump will have left office before the Senate could vote on impeachment. There is no such thing as impeaching a person who is not in office. Clearly impeachment has nothing to do with getting Trump out of office.
How does it unify the country to follow up an election believed by half of the US voting population to have been stolen with impeaching the president who is regarded as the victim of a stolen election? Adding insult to injury will only further enrage 75 million or more Trump voters, and many honest Democrats, who regard the election as stolen. If the Establishment and its Democrat, Republican, and media allies truly believe the election not to have been stolen, why wasn’t the evidence permitted to be examined so that the controversy could be settled instead of ignored? Ignoring the evidence deepens the suspicion as does labeling those who challenged the election “enemies of democracy.” Democrats are now trying to censure Republican members of the House and Senate who supported having the evidence presented to Congress. Why censure someone who wants evidence to be examined?
What many Americans and people abroad do not comprehend is that in the 2020 election Trump officially got 74,222,958 votes. This is the official number, which is understated by the 10 million vote suppression used against him. In “losing,” Trump’s 74,222,958 official votes are more votes than any elected president has ever received with the exception of Biden whose vote count was raised by 10 million fraudulent ballots. How is the country unified by demonizing half of it? Are the Democrats’ threats and reprisals against Trump and his supporters unifying?
I watched the presentations by independent experts to three state legislatures of the detailed evidence showing evidence that the election was stolen in the swing states. Some of the experts explaining the election’s theft were people of color as were many of those who signed affidavits under penalty of perjury of the electoral fraud that they witnessed. This information has never been presened by the media to the public, nor has any media, election officials, Department of Justice, or Congress examined the evidence. It is overwhelming evidence ignored.
Whether of not you believe that Biden—the most uninspiring presidential candidate in American history—got 81 million votes (the largest in American history), why do Pelosi and the Democrats want to make themselves even more hated and distrusted by half of the country by impeaching the president whose reelection they stole?
This is rubbing salt in the wound. Half of the country already regards Biden as an illegitimate president and regards the Democrats as power-mad totalitarians hostile to democracy. What does Pelosi achieve by furthering this image of Democrats? She is damning her party and herself. Why?
The answer is to generate fear in Republicans and Trump supporters.
The Democrats are using open unabashed retribution to scare Republicans and Trump supporters into compliance. Everywhere you look Republican members of Congress both House and Senate, Trump’s present and former cabinet members, and present and former members of the White House staff are denouncing Trump and putting distance between Trump and themselves. The latest is Fiona Hill, formerly of Trump’s National Security Council. She denounces Trump for having “put us on the brink of civil war.” Note that for Republican Fiona Hill, it is not a stolen election that puts “us on the brink of civil war,” but the protest against the election theft. This is the position of the Republican Party. In other words, the Republicans have surrendered. They are useless to the people.
As a large number of videos made available online by people who attended the rally show, the Capitol police allowed protestors into the Capitol. The Trump supporters were not smart enough not to take the bait. Once inside, the Democrats had their “insurrection” and “storming of the Capitol.”
It achieved its purpose. It stopped presentation of the evidence showing Congress a stolen election. Scared by the presstitutes one voice proclamation of an attempted coup, the Republicans wilted and ran for their political lives knowing that they would be blamed for “aiding and abetting Trump’s insurrection.”
The Democrats intend to keep them running, and that is what the impeachment is about.
Trump supporters are in for it as well. The FBI, which has been hand-in-hand with Democrats throughout the Russiagate and impeachment hoaxes, is now hunting down those who attended the Trump rally. Those for whom the FBI cannot invent grounds for arrest have their names turned over to the presstitutes who agitate for their firing from their jobs. Already policemen, corporate employees and executives, including a chief financial officer, have been fired for attending the Trump rally, and recording artists dropped because they attended the rally. Dumbshit indoctrinated school children have impoverished their own families by ratting out their parents for attending the rally and causing them to be fired.
Children squealing on their parents to the media is the worst part of the Democrats’ assault on America, because it shows that the liberal propaganda that passes for education in the schools has destroyed solidarity and loyalty in the family. Without the family, there is no society. Essentially, without family there is no country.
In so many ways Americans are now people without a country.
As the blatently public theft of a presidential election shows, democracy is a dead value among elites and institutions in the United States. The word will continue to be used as cover for oligarchic rule in the interest of the few. All who find the courage to challenge rule by the few will be demonized as “enemies of democracy.” We are already seeing it. President Trump and his “deplorables” are already declared “enemies of democracy.”
Whether or not Americans believe Trump and his supporters are enemies of democracy, many will be caused by fear to go along with it. Otherwise, they will be the next to be outed, fired, and prosecuted.
I am not optimistic. One reason for my lack of optimism is the age of disinformation in which we live. Disinformation is used by the Establishment to conform the public to its agendas. Disinformation is used to reconstruct white society. Disinformation is even used by Trump supporters in efforts to keep alive hope that the stolen election will be overturned or that Trump will win reelection in four years.
Another reason I am not optimistic is that I read comment sections of websites that host courageous and insightful commentators in hope of encountering intelligence and a rising awareness that could result in effective resistance. But what do I find? Inability to comprehend what they have read. Narcissists hiding behind fake names. Nit-picking in place of weighing a well-stated presentation. And the ever-present trolls demeaning the authors with ad hominum accusations that are spread into social media.
I am also not optimistic when I see that Trump, who has experienced the evil power of the Establishment, has not come to the realization that the last blow he can strike against the Establishment is the pardon of Assange and Snowden, two who are persecuted for telling the truth. Perhaps the reason is that many of Trump’s patriotic supporters have fallen for the Establishment’s line that Assange and Snowden are Russian agents who acted against America.
In the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and all of Western Europe, telling the truth is being criminalized. The result will be the destruction of the truth-teller. This is true as well within the universities. Identity politics and Establishment agendas rule. If you cross them, you are out.
Objective truth has been redefined as a “white construct” that serves “systemic racism” and misogynists. White people, especially heterosexual white males, have been assigned the role that Karl Marx gave capitalists. They are hateful, exploitative creatures that must be destroyed by demonization and indoctrination. The process has been going on for some time in the schools and in work place “sensitivity training” sessions.
This is the ideology of the Democrat Party. Imposed ideologies wear down facts.
As the Native American tells the elderly woman in the Clint Eastwood film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, “Hell is coming to breakfast.” White people can expect hell. To see this, all you have to do is to look at Biden’s Department of Justice appointments.
Americans are only now beginning to realize that the expensive educations they have paid for their children have resulted in their children being stolen from them. A friend told me recently that his son and son’s girlfriend had left their brutally lockdowned Democrat state to come to him in a Republican state where life still went on not too far from normal. Having heard their conversations with him and among themselves, he has concluded that they regret that they were born white.
To his dismay, he understands that their regret at having white skin is not because of employment and promotion quotas that limit their success as white people, or the demeaning racial training sessions they have to endue as “systemic white racists.” Their regret is due to their successful indoctrination that, as white racists, they are responsible for the lack of success of black Americans. Perplexed, he asked me, “how can we resist the tyranny that is being imposed on us when the younger generation believes we are quilty and cannot be trusted with our freedoms.
Yes, good question. How?
Note that the outpouring of support for Trump in the Washington Rally, which Democrats easily turned into a liability for Trump, consists largely of older adults. Where were the young people? They stayed home and ratted out their parents.
America’s young were not born into a free society. They have never experienced a free society. They are not socialized into a free society. They have no idea what one is beyond access to the Internet.
It was two decades ago that the Bush regime orchestrated the PATRIOT Act. It was two decades ago that the Republican President of the United States threw habeas corpus out the window and claimed executive authority to detain American citizens indefinitely without presenting evidence before a court. No bar association, no university law faculty, no court, no Congress, and certainly no presstitute media demanded Bush’s impeachment for unilaterally exercising unconstitutional executive authority.
During the subsequent Obama regime, America’s First Black President, who got less votes than Trump did in 2020, executed American citizens without due process of law. No one demanded Obama’s impeachment for his unconstitutional and illegal murder of American citizens.
If cancelling the Bill of Rights isn’t insurrection, what is?
In contrast, President Trump who challenged the media monopoly for its censorship, who challenged the military/security complex for its orchestration of Russia as an enemy, who challenged various “trade agreements” for sending Americans’ middle class jobs abroad—in other words, a rare president who represented the American people—this President was destroyed by the Establishment and its media and intellectual whores.
The corrupt and evil Establishment, acting through the Democrat Party with the backing of the monopoly over all communications and the monetary and power interests of the military/security complex and Wall Street, and strengthened by the Identity Politics hatreds, which extend into the universities, public schools, bar associations, corporations, and judiciary, and the indoctrination seminars that white males are forced to undergo, has achieved more power than Stalin and Hitler could imagine.
Today the United States is not only a threat to its citizens but also a threat to the world. The American Establishment’s belief in its hegemony makes the United States the greatest threat that the world has ever experienced.
The forces in control of the United States deny the existence of objective truth. As the Establishment defines truth, truth is what serves the agendas of the ruling elite.
There is no other truth.
Among other terrors, this means that an accused person can mount no defense. As the trial of the surviving brother of the alleged Boston Marathon Bombing demonstrated, the proof of his innocence according to the FBI’s own evidence was not allowed to be introduced into the trial, only the fabricated “evidence” of his guilt. When this happened, it was clear that the United States government regarded the rule of law as dispensable whenever it interferred with its agenda.
As journalist Ekaterina Blinova instantly recognized, the effect of the stolen election is to create one-party rule in the United States. Of course, the Democrats won’t rule. Rule will be by the interest groups for whom the Democrats will front. As the Republcans abandoned the American people and joined in the denunciation of the “insurrectionist Trump,” there are few voters left who will vote Republican. By its cowardice, the Republican Party has destroyed itself.
What can be done. I am open to answers. If you think about it, you wonder if Americans have the intelligence and awareness to survive. Consider Parler, a social media alternative that does not censor. Why did Parler think it could be independent when it was dependent on Apple, Amazon, and Google? It must be a new high water mark of American insouciance that Parler executives thought the ruling Establishment would allow them free speech. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/09/tech/parler-suspended-apple-app-store/index.html
America is in collapse on all fronts—morally, economically, socially, politically, and militarily. Every American institution is corrupted. America’s collapse will be a large collapse, and it will affect the entire world.
The Establishment used the Democrats for their purpose, because Trump was in office under the Republican banner. Trump, of course, is a populist, but there is no party that represents the people, so Trump ran as a Republican.
The leftwing, or the fraud that passes for one, thinks it is now in the money. This is a naive expectation. The Establishment is in charge, and there will be no leftist agendas unless they serve the Establishment. If Antifa and BLM cut up, their funding will be cut off, and the presstitutes will be sicced on them.
Biden and Kamala are mere figureheads put in office by a stolen election. Any agenda they think that they have is irrelevant. Here is the Establishment’s agenda:
First: Prevent any political organization of the “Trump Deplorables.” Any who attempt to form a real opposition party will be made an example of. In America it is child’s play to frame up anyone. We saw the show in Russiagate, and Trump will now be exhausted with endless frameups as the Establishment pursues him into oblivion. If the President of the United States can be so easily framed up, an unknown political organizer in the red states can be disposed of at will.
Second: Increase the demonization of white people and the destruction of their confidence. White Americans are still a majority and, therefore, a potential political force. Their demonization is already institutionalized in the educational system, in the New York Times’ propagandistic “1619 Project,” and in the “racial sensitivity” training that all white employes of US corporations, governments, and US military have to take. Trump ordered a halt to the anti-white indoctrination sessions in the Federal government and US military, but the new regime will quickly reinstate the required indoctrinated as a sop to deluded blacks, feminists, and leftwingers.
Third: The Second Amendment will be overturned or bypassed. Trump supporters will be disarmed in order to more easily terrorize them and prevent them from protecting their property and persons if the Establishment believes it is efficacious to unleash armed anti-white militias on them in order to bring them into line. White self-defense will be more or less criminalized.
Fourth: The Establishment will increase its fomenting of racial and gender conflict in order to keep Americans too divided to resist its increasingly odious control measures, whether they be the use of Covid to suppress freedom of movement and association, charges of being a foreign agent in order to suppress free speech as in the Assange case, or round up and internment of Trump Americans trying to organize a political party that represents the people instead of the Establishment.
Fifth: Citizenship for the millions of illegal aliens and open borders in order to reduce the white population to an isolated minority.
These measures will suffice for the Establishment to complete the transformation of the United States from a democracy accountable to the people to an oligarchy of entrenched vested interests.
By the time insouciant white people wake up to their fate, violent revolution will be impossible. Modern weapons in the hands of the state are devastating. Mass spying and control techniques that exist today go beyond those in dystopian novels such as Orwell’s 1984. Free speech is a thing of the past. Free speech no longer even exists in universities. As I write Twitter, Facebook and the presstitutes are suppressing the free speech of the President of the United States, and the President of the United States is powerless to do anything about it. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/533027-twitter-locks-trumps-account-for-at-least-12-hours?rnd=1609978506
The Establishment’s control over the media means that no charge against President Trump is too extreme to cause a protest. The enormous support shown for Trump in Washington on January 6 with estimates of participants ranging from 200,000 to 2,000,000 was easy for the Establishment to turn into a liability by infiltrating the rally.
It was naive for President Trump and his supporters not to realize that infiltration was guaranteed as it was necessary for the Establishment to turn massive support into a massive liability. This would achieve two purposes. One purpose was to terminate the challenge to the electors in the Senate, and it succeeded. Here, for example, is Republican Senator Mike Braun from Indiana dropping his intent to object to the electors from the swing states where the election was stolen: “I think … that today change things drastically. Yeah, whatever point you made before that should suffice. Get this ugly day behind us,” he said. Even Rand Paul was intimidated: “I just don’t think there’s going to be another objection. I think it’s over at that point.” https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533033-gop-senators-hopeful-theyve-quashed-additional-election-challenges?rnd=1609980353 Here is Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler whose reelection to the Senate was stolen from her acquiescing in Trump’s and her own stolen elections: “When I arrived in Washington this morning, I fully intended to object to the certification of the electoral votes. However, the events that have transpired today have forced me to reconsider and I cannot now, in good conscience, object,” Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.). https://thehill.com/homenews/house/533052-congress-affirms-biden-win-after-rioters-terrorize-capitol
The other purpose served was to insure that Trump would not go out as a president whose reelection was stolen but as an insurrectionist. And it has succeeded.
Internationally Trump was denounced by NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg for not respecting democracy. “The outcome of this democratic election must be respected,” declared Stoltenberg. Stolen or not it is democracy to be rid of Trump. https://www.rt.com/usa/511743-uk-france-nato-condemn-capitol/
British prime minister Boris Johnson declared that the US is the world symbol of Democracy and that it is vital there is a peaceful and ordered transfer of power, as if there was an actual insurrection taking place and an election not stolen.
The French President Macron declared: “What happened today in Washington, DC today is not American, definitely.” In other words, it is unamerican to protest a stolen election that the Establishment refuses to address. [I watched presentations by independent experts to the Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan legislatures that proved beyond all doubt the presidential election was stolen. Half of the professional presenters were people of color.]
Republican senators themselves, former members of Trump’s cabinet, and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff jumped on Trump with both feet. The no longer Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that Trump’s “unhinged thugs” “tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed. This failed insurrection underscores how crucial the task before us is” to restore Establishment control. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533039-mcconnell-after-rioters-storm-capitol-they-tried-to-disrupt-our-democracy
Republican Senator Richard Burr from North Carolina said: “The President bears responsibility for today’s events by promoting the unfounded conspiracy theories that have led to this point.”
Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis told the presstitutes that “Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”
General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Trump administration said Republicans “who have continued to undermine a peaceful transition in accordance with our Constitution have set the conditions for today’s violence.”
The presstitutes had a field day with misleading and lying headlines. One of the worst offenders was The Hill, formerly a source of real news on what was going on in Congress, but today a highly partisan Trump-hating source of Establishment propaganda.
With the American Establishment’s foreign puppets, Republicans, Trump’s own cabinet members, military leaders, and the presstitutes speaking with one voice setting up President Trump as an insurrectionist threat to democracy, the Democrats’ wild charges seemed credible.
Democrat Senator Schumer from New York, the new Senate Majority Leader, Democrat House Speaker Pelosi, and a large number of Democrat members of Congress, together with the New York Times, have called for Trump’s impeachment or his removal from office by invoking the 25th Amendment. Here is the new Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) making the case:
“What happened at the U.S. Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against the United States, incited by the president. This president should not hold office one day longer,” Schumer said in a statement.
Here is Adam Smith, Democrat from Washington state and chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, calling for Trump’s removal from office: “President Trump incited & encouraged this riot. He & his enablers are responsible for the despicable attack at the Capitol. VP Pence and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump, otherwise Senate Republicans must work with the House to impeach & remove him. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/533136-house-armed-services-chair-calls-for-removing-trump-from-office
For the New York Times, it doesn’t not suffice to remove Trump from office. He must be prosecuted as well.
To understand the extraordinary hatred of President Trump by the Establishment, listen to his inaugural address. He described the Establishment accurately as a force arraigned against the American people, a force that he intended to dismantle and restore America to the American people. This was a revolutionary challenge, a reckless one as Trump is a populist, not a revolutionary leading a determined movement. Moreover, Trump was so uninformed about Washington that he never succeeded in appointing anyone to his government, other than General Flynn (an immediate casualty of the Estatlishment) who agreed with his agenda of normalizing relations with Russia, bringing the troops home from the Middle East, ending NATO, and bringing the jobs home that American corporations had exported to China. Here was Trump unarmed taking on the American Establishment. This was an act of suicide as it has turned out to be.
People who think in terms of party politics have no likelihood of understanding the situation. The struggle is not Democrats vs. Republicans. or red states vs. blue states. It is the Establishment against the people. If you have any doubt about this, note that the US National Association of Manufacturers, always a throughly Republican organization, agrees with Schumer and Pelosi that Trump must be removed from office. Here is the organization’s statement: “Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy.” https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/532988-democratic-lawmakers-call-for-pence-to-invoke-25th-amendment-remove The National Association of Manufacturers want Trump out because they are the ones responsible for China’s rise, the US trade deficit and the destruction of half of the US middle class. All the goods and services imported from offshored production count as imports. It is the offshored production that is responsible for America’s trade deficit, not China.
The presstitutes throughout the Western world have intentionally misrepresented the January 6 rally in Washington in support of Trump. The rally had to be misrepresented, because no one in politics today anywhere in the Western World can demonstrate such massive support other than Donald Trump. No one turned out for Biden or Kamala during the presidential campaign. Their events, soon cancelled, had no attendees. Yet, they won the election? What saps people are. Who turns out for Merkel, Macron, Boris Johnson. No one even knows who the leaders are in the rest of the Western World.
Trump could not be permitted to leave office with such a massive showing of support—a terrible embarrassment to the corrupt scum who “speak for the people.” So the support had to be discredited by turning it into an insurrection ordered by Trump against Democracy, a holy word that is observed nowhere in the Western World.
Here is a description of agitators who suddenly appeared and provoked the entrance into the Capitol by a few Trump supporters who, unlike the rioters in Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta and elsewhere, did not behave as rioters and did no damage. The report is from a person present not as a Trump supporter but as a person to film the event. The report was sent to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller. I have left the person’s name off so that he doesn’t get investigated by the FBI:
“I was in Washington, D.C. today filming the Trump rally and related events. I also ran across your post concerning the Capitol demonstration tonight. Perhaps this short account will help you assess what others are saying in a small way.
“I was also at the Capitol before the crowd appeared setting-up my camera on a stone wall around the perimeter of the back of the capitol (the rear facing Constitution Avenue). Then I waited for President Trump’s speech to end and for supporters to walk-up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol. I was located at the precise location where supporters first rushed up the slope towards the back of the Capitol after casting aside a section of the first Capitol perimeter barrier. Supporters gathered roughly at the center of the back of the capitol, but a circle began to grow around the perimeter as the crowd grew larger. I had no sense that the growing crowd intended to rush the Capitol.
“After a large crowd emerged at the perimeter a man in perhaps his late 30’s or early 40’s showed-up, pacing quickly to his left then to his right before the crowd, and essentially began hurling insults at the crowd challenging their political wisdom. He excoriated the crowd for thinking that their attendance would be taken seriously by members of congress. (Hard to say that he was wrong about that, whoever he was). I cannot recall his precise words, but for a very short period he engaged in a shouting exchange with supporters, and suddenly supporters pushed aside the first barrier and rushed towards the back of the Capitol. Others on the northern edge of the perimeter followed suit. But the first rush was right at the center of the back of the Capitol. I followed the rush to the bottom of the Capitol back steps, and began filming again from atop an inner perimeter stone wall.
“The police, so it appeared, were a little surprised by the rush, and this gave supporters an opportunity to race up the steps. One or two men even made it as far as the steps leading up to the scaffolds on the south side of the Capitol before police arrested them. By this time, five or ten men had climbed to the top of the tall steel tower structure facing the Capitol. Then the police erected and lined-up behind a new barrier perimeter at the foot of the Capitol steps. Police at the top of the Capitol steps aimed rifles down on the crowd (perhaps rubber bullet rifles, I could not tell). The crowd began arguing with police and pressing hard against the new barrier. The police sprayed men pressing directly against the barrier with tear gas from time to time causing them to retreat. “Meanwhile, the men at the top of the tower began rallying the crowd to challenge the new barrier (over bull horns) by filling any gaps between the barrier and the stone wall that I was using as a filming vantage point. Another man worked the crowd with a bull horn immediately in front of me and also encouraged supporters to climb over the inner perimeter stone wall (my filming vantage point) and create a wall of pressure on the new barrier at the bottom of the Capitol back steps.
“After about 30 minutes to an hour I dropped to the bottom of the stone wall to reload my camera when suddenly the barrier gave way and police attempted to fortify it by blasting tear gas into the area between the stone wall and the barrier. I was hit by the gas myself and struggled back over the stone wall in order to breathe. The gas threw many crowd members into a panic. And I was nearly trampled as I struggled to lift my camera and heavy gear bag over the wall after two women began pulling desperately on the back of my coat to pull themselves up and over the moderately high wall in retreat.
“After the second perimeter barrier gave way, the men with the bull horns began working the crowd very hard to fill-up with Trump supporters the steps of the Capitol and the scaffolding on both sides of it. At this point one of the calls, which the men with bull horns repeated from time to time in order to encourage people to climb the Capitol steps was “this is not a rally; it’s the real thing.” Another frequent call was “its now or never.” After about a two hour effort peppered with bull horn calls of this nature the entire back of the Capitol was filled with Trump supporters and the entire face of the Capitol was covered with brilliant small and very large Trump banners, American flags, and various other types of flags and banners.
“Sometime after the rush on the back of the Capitol, people were apparently able to enter the Capitol itself through the front. But I was not witness to anything at the front or inside the Capitol.
“One clearly bona fide Trump supporter who had apparently entered the Capitol himself was telling others emotionally and angrily (including press representatives of some sort, even a foreign newsman) that he witnessed someone inside the Capitol encouraging violence whom he strongly suspected was not a legitimate Trump supporter (apparently on the basis that the man showed no signs at all of Trump support on his apparel). I did not pay that close attention to his claims (for example the precise claim of the violence encouraged) because, naturally, I had not yet read your post and it had not occurred to me that professional outsiders might play a role in instigating particular violent acts in order to discredit the event.
“I overheard one Trump supporter (who followed the rush on the Capitol himself) say aloud, “I brought many others to this rally, but we did not sign on for this” as he watched matters escalate.
“Still, from my seat, I would say that large numbers of very legitimate Trump supporters felt that it was their patriotic duty to occupy the Capitol in light of their unshakable beliefs that (1) the 2020 election was a fraud, (2) that the vast majority of the members of congress are corrupt and compromised, and (3) that the country is in the throes of what they consider a “communist” takeover (although many use the expression “communism” as a synonym for “totalitarianism”). They are also convinced that the virus narrative is a fraud and an essential part of an effort to undermine the Constitution –in particular the Bill of Rights. They have a very real fear that the country and the very conception of any culture of liberty is on the verge of an irreparable collapse. For most (if not a very large majority) rushing the Capitol was a desperate eleventh hour act of partiotism –even of the order of the revolution that created our nation. Some Trump supporters sang the Star Spangled Banner and other patriotic songs as others climbed the Capitol steps. They also demonstrated a measure of respect for the Capitol itself. I saw no attempt by anyone to deface the Capitol simply for the sake of defacing it.
“The incontrovertibly compromised press has called this event a riot. But from what I saw and heard this would indeed be a gross and intentionally misleading oversimplification at best. At least from the standpoint of supporters, if their Capitol event was a riot, then so was the Boston Tea Party. It also seems to me that some professional help (very aware of deep sentiments) might have come from somewhere to make sure that the party happened.”
When I was on the Stanford University faculty, I remember rich and pampered Stanford students occupying the university president’s office in a protest either against the Vietnam war or the name of the Stanford Football Team (Stanford Indians) and destroying the papers in the president’s files of his life’s work. Despite the liberalism of the university president, the presstitutes regarded the protest justified and well intentioned.
The rioters and looters who rampaged through many of America’s major cities suffered no media condemnation, only support and encouragement. This is because, unlike Trump, Antifa and Black Lives Matter are financed by and controlled by the Establishment and thus represent no threat.There is no FBI investigation or intended prosecution of any of the rioters who destroyed billions of dollars of property in America’s cities.
But the Trump supporters provoked into entering the Capitol are in for it says the Establishment figure Trump, in yet another of his mistakes, put in charge of the FBI.
It is difficult to defend Trump when he consistently puts in charge of his security agencies and Department of Justice members of the Establishment who hate his guts.
The FBI did nothing about the real rioters that did billions of dollars of damage to private businesses, but FBI Director Christopher Wray vowed Thursday to “hold accountable those who participated in yesterday’s siege of the Capitol after a pro-Trump mob overtook the building, forcing evacuations.” As these may have been FBI instigators, Wray might be talking about his own employees. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/533165-fbi-director-we-will-hold-accountable-those-who-participated-in
Here is Trump’s FBI appointee describing the people who elected the man who appointed him:
“The violence and destruction of property at the U.S. Capitol building yesterday showed a blatant and appalling disregard for our institutions of government and the orderly administration of the democratic process,” Wray said in a statement.
“As we’ve said consistently, we do not tolerate violent agitators and extremists who use the guise of First Amendment-protected activity to incite violence and wreak havoc,” he continued. “Such behavior betrays the values of our democracy. Make no mistake: With our partners, we will hold accountable those who participated in yesterday’s siege of the Capitol.”
Wray announced that the bureau “has deployed our full investigative resources” and is working with law enforcement partners “to aggressively pursue those involved in criminal activity” on Wednesday.
“Our agents and analysts have been hard at work through the night gathering evidence, sharing intelligence, and working with federal prosecutors to bring charges,” he said.
He requested the public send in any information about Wednesday’s events to the FBI, noting “We are determined to find those responsible and ensure justice is served.”
Notice that Wray, the Establishment’s servant, not the servant of the rule of law, aligns the First Amendment with “violent agitators and extremists” and thus discredits the First Amendment as a tool of insurrection.
Everyone who was not at the US Capitol building on January 6, which is the entire world except the Trump supporters, has been brainwashed, by a corrupt, despicable collection of media whores serving an Establishment of Oligarchs, that Donald Trump intended an insurrection, but it was defeated. By Whom?
It was Trump who called out the National Guard and who told his supporters to leave the Capitol and to go home.
What kind of people can present this as an insurrection that requires Trump’s removal from office and prosecution? The answer is totally evil people who have not only the United States but the entire Western World in their clutches.
The Western World is dead. It is now Mordor.
Trump appointees realize that, unless they add to his orchestrated embarrassment and setup for demonization and prosecution by themselves resigning, they are targeted for reprisals. Seeing permanent unemployment facing him, US Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger has resigned in response to Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis on Capitol Hill. “Other people named as likely to abandon the sinking Trump ship are National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and Deputy Chief of Staff Chris Liddell.” https://www.rt.com/usa/511769-white-house-officials-resign/
Everyone everywhere is participating in Trump’s destruction. The English language Russian press loves embarrassing America. The fun and games leaves the world in ignorance of the extraordinary consequences of what the stolen election and demonization of Trump and his supporters means. The end of the Western World is a big event, and it will affect everyone.
The referendum on Britain’s vote to Remain or Leave the EU – Brexit – has raised deeper issues than simply whether or not the UK retains its European membership. The real issue is that of the whole Transatlantic bloc from Seattle to Warsaw, its, culture, institutions, politics, and economics has also been undergoing deep structural changes – not necessarily for the good.
The victory of the Leave majority in the first UK Brexit referendum in 2018 and a rerun, which should never have been allowed, of the Remain campaign in the general election of 2019 – both in the face of a massive establishment propaganda blitzkrieg was quite remarkable. The centrist coalition of the centre-right Conservative business class and the still deeply Blairite and third-wayist faction of the overwhelming majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, the Trades Union Congress (TUC and most of its affiliated unions) and tens of thousands of rank-and-file woke militants, threw everything but the kitchen sink into their campaign but lost. But even then, the issues had not been settled – that is for the self-appointed, London based, middle-class, parvenues who imagined themselves as carrying the torch for civilization. After what was a definitive verdict – which in both instances was a ‘NO’ to the continued membership of Britain in the EU – there was a vicious counter-attack. It started from the premise that EU membership is an absolute good, the absolute truth, and that any opposition is racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynist … and so on and so forth. The fuddy-duddy notion of national sovereignty was of course considered completely de rigueur. Therefore, there is not, nor can there be any legitimate critique of the EU. Argument closed: no engagement or discourse on the subject, just hysterical ranting, and mass cancellation. Sound familiar?
In fact the EU before, during, and after the referendum was hardly the Shangri La imagined by the ‘Remainer’ constituency. At that time, their political and cultural love object was the EU of Manuel Barroso, ex-Maoist, ex-President of the European Commission, now working for Goldman Sachs, Merkel’s pet Russophobe, Donald Tusk, and not forgetting Jean-Claude Juncker, at that time President of the European Commission, who was incidentally involved in a tax avoidance scandal in Luxembourg where he was one-time Prime Minister, and then a litany of other self-serving political mediocrities on the make. The EU is also an economic dead zone (particularly in the peripheral areas of Eastern and Southern Europe) with unemployment rates higher than the UK and growth rates lower.
A veritable economic and political Shangri-la? Yeah, right. Like Lord Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen* the Remainers are putting the telescope to their blind eye: I see no economic and political dead-zone! Maybe they should have gone to Specsavers!
These sentiments are not just conservative, they are downright reactionary and anti-democratic. And the ex-centre-left has played an insidious part in this development. The glaring contrast between the people’s vote for leaving and the vote of the PLP and TUC institutions which supposedly represent them, for remaining, prompted even left observers to conclude that the people, like sheep, had gone astray and handed racist xenophobes a shameful victory. This was the liberal centre-left’s great Brechtian moment when ‘the people should be dissolved and a new one elected.’ The famous German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, was of course making a sardonic comment on the actions of the East German Communist regime in 1953 when it suppressed the workers uprising. It bears a striking similarity to the response by our own neo-totalitarians in 2016. Additionally, the procrastination of the establishment Remainers, which was slowing down the whole exit project, can be thought of as the establishment’s Augustinian moment. St. Augustine ‘’God give me chastity and celibacy, but not yet.’’ the Remainer-speak version being God give me Article 50 but not yet.
In sociological terms the upper-echelons of the liberal class who think that they have the divine right to set the political agenda, represent a sub-hierarchy below the real policy makers and shakers. The 20% beneath the 1%. They tend to be ensconced in the media, academia, professions such as law and medicine, middle-management, financial planners, economists, computer programmers, aerospace designers, and the entertainment business. Quite a number, particularly in business, government, both local and central, advertising, telemarketing, public relations, could be considered to be ‘bullshit jobs’ (in the late) David Graeber’s insightful observation. As a whole this particular social and occupational stratum, look up rather than look down, they serve power not the people. They are Orwell’s Outer party in his 1984 novel, sandwiched between the Inner party and the Proles. Knowing which side their bread is buttered on they identify with and support the Power Elite.
An avant garde leading from the rear, yes. Trahison des Clercs, most certainly but more politically and culturally homogeneous today than as was once the case.
This shell of a once fighting left (now unrecognisable from their previous political and ideological moorings) now embraces the culture of identity but excludes the entity of class. As a result poverty has become the P-word, and the poor the pariahs of neoliberal dystopic utopia. When we talk about class in a Marxist, materialist sense, we are talking about a relation of power, specifically about who does and who doesn’t have power to shape society. Identity politics makes this conflict of interests in society invisible. Neoliberal economics, however, is quite simply class war. It has advanced in part because identity politics depoliticized the public. Is it mere coincidence that the melange of post-Marxism, identity politics, and neoliberal economics saw the light in the same post-sixties decades? Together, they form the heart of the reaction, which is the take-back by the economic elite in the last four decades of every gain the fighting left loosed from the fist of capital before and since World War II. The rapacity of contemporary capitalism is enabled by the weakness, dishonesty, and cowardice of the flaccid and collaborationist left.
On the American side of the pond the same (albeit worse) diseased and morbid social tendencies began to emerge from a decaying body-politic circa 2001 and maybe even before, but the 9/11 was the pinnacle, which was of course no accident. For one of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being.” said Obama, who expanded America’s favourite military pastime, bombing, and death squads (“special operations”) as no other president has done since the Cold War.
The American political and social-theorist, Christopher Lasch, now unfortunately no longer with us, succinctly identified the political/cultural shifts in the American polity in the late twentieth-century. (1) America has undergone a profound structural, cultural, and political transmutation: it is not the masses or working class, so much as an emerging sub-elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch. The new cognitive sub-elite is made up of what Robert Reich called “symbolic analysts’. This middle-class occupational stratum – in the British rather than the American sense – traffics in information and manipulates words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or even local communities. In fact, members of the new sub-elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. “They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies … and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them,” Lasch writes. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life and have moved offshore.
These tendencies, however, have been observable even before Lasch’s observations. Way back in the middle to late 1950s, the great American theorist C Wright Mills, produced powerful polemics concerning the structure and direction in which the Republic was headed. These tendencies were recognised as early as the 1950s. (2)
He argued:
‘’We cannot assume today that men (sic) must in the last resort be governed by their own consent. Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and manipulate the consent of men … and many people are neither radical nor reactionary, they are simply inactionary. If we accept the Greeks definition of an idiot as an altogether private man then we must conclude that many citizens of mass societies are indeed idiots … History making may well go by default, men may well abdicate its continual making and so merely float along as corks in a bottle of an Ocean drift. The implication of this, however, is that history will indeed be made – but by narrow elite circles without effective responsibility to those who must try to survive the consequences of their decisions and of their defaults.’ (3)
A more recent American social critic, Morris Berman, has also been cognisant of the cultural decline and disintegration of America; indeed it would have been difficult to miss. His caustic analysis on the current state of American Culture – The Twilight of American Culture (4) – makes particularly compelling reading for the English-speaking world. Mr. Berman argues provocatively and incisively that the direction of American civilization is locked into a path which will lead nowhere except into its own demise. The American empire has now borne witness to the passage of its most fruitful and triumphant years and its approaching the future – if it hasn’t already got there – and a period of social and political chaos from which there doesn’t appear to be an exit, or at least a controlled exit. So the controlled exit is about the best route on offer, though only 50/50 at best.
‘’For when a population becomes distracted by trivia, and when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of ‘baby-talk’, when in short, a people become an audience and their public business becomes a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture death is a near (extremely near) possibility.’’(5)
CONCLUSIONS:
The fault-lines, stresses and cleavages in the Transatlantic bloc are becoming increasingly clear both within nations and between nations. In Europe the exit of Britain from the EU and Europe, and the possible defections of Hungary, Poland and Italy. In the United States the strain on the Republic with an increasing and assertive emergence of the South and possible mid-west as well as the drift of coastal America away from flyover America. It could be said that these are simply speculative guesses, but these future possibilities are a little more than simply straws in the wind. For better or worse, big changes are on the way.
Interesting times.
NOTES
(1) Christopher Lasch – The Revolt of the Elites – published posthumously in 1994. The title of the book was taken from the name of a book “the Revolt of the Masses” by the elite theorist Jose Ortega Y Gasset in 1930.
(2) The Power Elite, 1959 and The Sociological Imagination 1956.
(3) C Wright Mills – The Sociological Imagination – Ibid – pps. 51, 195
* The naval Battle of Copenhagen (1801) occurred during the War of the Second Coalition when a British naval fleet commanded by Admiral Sir Hyde Parker defeated a Danishfleet anchored just off Copenhagen. Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson led the main attack. During the battle, he famously is reputed to have disobeyed his senior officer, Sir Hyde Parker’s, order to withdraw by holding the telescope to his blind eye to look at the signals from Parker. The signals had given Nelson permission to withdraw at his discretion. Nelson then turned to his flag captain, Thomas Foley, and said ‘You know, Foley, I have only one eye. I have a right to be blind sometimes.’ He raised the telescope to his blind eye saying, ‘I really do not see the signal.’ Copenhagen is often considered to be Nelson’s hardest-fought victory.
(4) Morris Berman – The Twilight of American Culture – published in 2000.
As the Democratic party tumbles into the morass of racial and identity politics, Joe Biden will find it almost impossible to unify his own party, let alone America.
Donald Trump faced an unfairly hostile press and was burdened with innumerable deficits of his own making, but in comparison with Joe Biden he held one clear advantage at the outset of his term: he had beaten fair and square his ideological rivals in his own party. The GOP establishment retained considerable power in the House and Senate—and Trump couldn’t govern without them. But Trump had beaten—no, whipped—Bush and Rubio and Cruz, and they knew it. He could draw large crowds and they couldn’t. His authority over the GOP may have been resented; the “resistance” to him from the Deep State and affluent suburbanites was formidable and eventually brought him down, but no one could deny that his ascension was based on one hard currency of politics, namely, mass voter enthusiasm.
Biden, a likeable enough centrist senator, can boast of no such thing. He prevailed, as Christopher Caldwell cogently reminds us, after an embarrassingly poor start to his campaign, (fourth and fifth-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire), salvaged by a critical endorsement from a South Carolina congressman who probably influences more votes than any politician in America, immediately followed by a panicked rush of the party establishment to close ranks against the socialist Bernie Sanders. Though American presidential campaigns last far too long, this critical period seemed to pass in a nanosecond. Congressman James Clyburn’s church ladies (and Biden’s unobjectionable tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president) put him over the top in South Carolina. Next, Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar immediately dropped out (the latter two having beaten Biden, sometimes decisively, in states where voters actually see a great deal of the candidates). Elizabeth Warren stayed in to battle Bernie for the party’s Left vote. Biden swept Super Tuesday just as the coronavirus was shutting down the country. It was almost certainly the most underwhelming route to a nomination in recent American political history.
The party which nominated Biden is more divided than the one Trump dominated in 2016; the difference is the battle between the factions hasn’t been joined yet. Socialists would make common cause with deep state and corporate world neoliberals in believing, (or pretending to believe—it can be hard to distinguish) that Donald Trump constituted some sort of unique threat to American democracy. But with Trump gone, they share nothing. One can imagine a gifted politician (a Bill Clinton in his prime) able to soothe the divisions and partially placate the losers; it’s unlikely Biden could manage that at any point in his career.
The splits are as stark as those which separated Mayor Richard Daley and other party “regulars” from the McGovernites who beat them in 1972, but also more complicated. There is a liberal—or socialist-curious—Left that is genuinely concerned about the economic inequality which has been growing in the United States for forty years—Elizabeth Warren, and, in a more dogmatic and further left way, Sanders spoke for them. There is the identity politics faction, which shares their radicalism, ignores economic inequities unless they concern blacks or Hispanics, and is interested in a full-scale cultural war against whiteness, which means against much of American culture and history. Both groups endorsed Sanders but it is not clear how much they share with one another. They share virtually nothing with Michael Bloomberg or other Wall Street titans who contributed heavily to the Biden campaign.
One consequence is that in the early rounds of the Biden transition, every choice has been racially fraught. For the past five days, hundreds of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors have laid siege to the home of Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, protesting against the possibility he would be given a cabinet post in the Biden administration. They opposed Garcetti, a Biden campaign co-chair and probably California’s most well-known Latino elected official, for rejecting BLM demands to defund the Los Angeles police department. California governor Gavin Newsom’s choice of a candidate to fill out the Senate term of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is debated entirely on the basis of identity politics, with blacks and Latinos and LGBTQ groups each proclaiming that one of their “community” deserves the seat; one hears no arguments made on the basis of the character, intellect, or political talents of their favored candidates. Democratic intra-party politics increasingly resembles a zero-sum game of identity competitions, carried out under the feel-good banners of inclusion and diversity.
And yet if the identity politics movement since the first protests following the death of George Floyd seems more radical, pervasive, and frightening, it was not obvious that its beliefs had penetrated into the consciousness of those who were neither college students, young people not yet tied to work and family, or professional liberal activists. In the most bellwether ideological election held since the great awakening, Californians returned to the ballot box once more to pass judgement on race-based affirmative action, which had been made illegal by 53 to 47 percent referendum vote in 1996. In this summer of racial reckoning, liberals in the legislature had pushed for a revote, believing that the state’s changed racial composition, (fewer whites, more Latinos, more Asians) would allow a reversal of that result and give formal sanction for preferential treatment on the basis of race to be used to increase diversity and overcome legacies of past discrimination.
Race-based affirmative action, along with the conundrums of law enforcement, have been the only consequences of the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s to remain under any serious political or cultural contestation. But since a Vietnam veteran named Allan Bakke famously sued for admission to a California medical school while clearly establishing that his grades and test scores were higher than minority applicants admitted in his stead, it has been a fraught issue, decided ambiguously by the Supreme Court. In California, voters had opted for state neutrality regarding race; now, in the summer of racial justice, progressives assumed they would reverse course.
The voters’ answer disappointed the state’s entire Democratic establishment (which unanimously supported the rollback) and the corporate donors who gave the rollback side a 20-1 spending advantage. Nonetheless, California’s diverse and strongly Democratic electorate still wanted race neutrality, voting for it by a larger margin (56-44) than they had in 1997. Latinos voters split down the middle, Asians and whites voted against the reinstitution of racial preferences.
Meanwhile, in Democratic strongholds of northern Virginia and New York City, Asian parents were leading campaigns to keep exam-based elite public schools alive: against them were arrayed progressive politicians and bureaucrats and Black Lives Matter activists who sought to eliminate tests which measure math and verbal competence and replace them with measures that would reduce the number of gifted students in elite schools—in the name, naturally, of inclusion and diversity.
These local battles take place largely under the national radar as Biden struggles to name a cabinet that will be “the most inclusive in history”—while at the same time assuring that key foreign policy posts are given to the kind of neoliberal Iraq war supporters he is most familiar and comfortable with. Indeed, the battle of leaks and emails over whether the next secretary of defense will be a woman or a black is debated almost entirely without reference to the Pentagon’s mission and how to best carry it out. Then there is the probable nomination of Neera Tanden, who has spent the past several years denouncing Republicans on Twitter, to run the Office of Management and Budget, a nomination that hardly constitutes an olive branch to Republicans.
There is no way to see how Biden or his party squares these circles, which would confound a more vigorous politician with a more robust electoral mandate. As the Soviet Union was fading, Georgi Arbatov, an intellectual close to the Politburo, famously remarked that Moscow was going to cause great problems for the United States by “depriving it of an enemy.” He may have been right. Trump has fulfilled the same function for the Democratic coalition; now that Dr. Evil is gone, the knives will come out. This is why the safest political prediction is that those who voted for a “return to normalcy” under Biden are in for a rude disappointment indeed.
A warrior’s soul sleeps in his fist. Wakes in his fist. Till his dying breath, will exist in his fist.
No gun and no mortal danger can unfold this fist. A warrior will live and die with his fist clenched.
This is not for love of violence nor for the thrills of war. Not because of a demented passion for death either. This is because a warrior knows that even in times of peace, evil and evil-doers lurk in the shadow of peace.
Warriorship is vocational. It is non-mercenary. Non-materialistic. Non-negotiable. True warriorhood is purely defensive. It is fixated solely on the protection of a higher justice and defense of self and the meek. It is never predatory. A warrior is steeped in a culture of righteous dignity and martyrdom. Humble dignity. And a sacred martyrdom. A true warrior is not an ordinary soldier, nor a celebrated figure from either media or mythology. A true warrior is real. And rare. A true warrior is the only class of human capable of kissing death right in the eyeball. There is no fear of the infinite black void in the heart of a true warrior.
Throughout history, cultures under duress and attack by covetous enemies have produced their own brand of warrior. Native American Indians gave us the ‘Braves’. Japan gave us the ‘Samurai’. France gave us Joan of Arc. Africa gave us ‘Warrior Queen Amina’. And modern Lebanon has given us, Hezbollah.
Hezbollah: currently the world’s most successful warrior-resistor group fighting against the most malevolent of all modern abominations, otherwise known as the Axis of Evil (US, Israel, and their Western and Arab-Wahabi allies). Hezbollah is also currently the most reviled of all warriors. This is because unable to defeat Hezbollah on the battlefield, and after already spending some $11 billion on many failed coups and smear campaigns this past decade, the Axis of Evil is now reduced to merely attacking Hezbollah with malicious lies and false accusations. To demonize Hezbollah, to sully their immaculate reputation in a vast and global media campaign is about the only weapon left in the hands of the Axis of Evil. This defamation offensive may work on some uninformed people, but indeed it will not weaken Hezbollah’s phenomenal abilities on the battlefield. This agitating agitprop will not change any facts on the ground. It will be but more of your tax dollars wasted on a chimera.
Hezbollah is noble, yet not royal. Its warriors and leaders are essentially from working-class, farming communities who grouped themselves to repel a vicious, colonial and genocidal invader, otherwise known as Israel. Some thirty years after the birth of their resistance group, Hezbollah remain exceptionally humble and profoundly rooted in their modest beginnings. Even though Hezbollah has lost warriors in combat, the number of its martyrs has been relatively low, and it has yet to lose a single battle or war in its 30+ years of existence. And despite its stellar successes on the battlefield, Hezbollah remains unostentatious and merciful in victory. Most notable and impressive of all, Hezbollah’s leadership does not practice chicanery, skullduggery or monkeyshines. They simply do not lie. Not once has its leadership deceived or duped its fighters, its allies or supporters. Consistently true to their word, even Israeli Jewish citizens, according to Israeli polls, believe what Hezbollah’s leadership says above their own leaders in Tel Aviv. This is because time and time again, what Hezbollah says simply and truly ‘is’, and what it promises, it always delivers. And, indeed, it has outsmarted its bulkier enemy at every turn of the road and delivered.
All their battles have been for defensive reasons. ALL of them. They are exceptionally well-disciplined and focused on the task of righteous liberation from cruel and oppressive forces. Their training system produces no traitors and no Mammonites easily seduced by the lure of wealth, physical pleasures, or political status. They are therefore beyond blackmail. Beyond distraction from their cause. Steeped in a culture of martyrdom that’s inspired by the prophet Mohammad’s grandson Hussein and his agonizing martyrdom, a passion-cause and agony that’s parallel to the martyrdom culture of the Christian prophet Jesus, Hezbollah’s warriors are beyond the corruption of soul.
Their training is two-pronged. They are trained in agile guerilla combat, while simultaneously taught a righteous philosophy that in essence is religio-spiritual. A philosophy inspired by their fundamental belief in a just and compassionate god, a god who rewards the faithful and true. This is precisely what distinguishes them from other armies: their absolute philosophical and physical commitment to a righteous god. Although deeply religious and strictly committed to Islam, they are remarkably tolerant of other sects, other faiths and cultures, as exampled by their recent willing martyrdom in defense of Syrian Sunnis, Druze and Alawites, as well as their heroic defense of Christian villages and their ancient Churches in the Levant. Hezbollah warriors have sacrificed their own lives to liberate the very progeny of the original Christians of the world who still reside in the Levant; liberate them from Western and Israeli-backed ISISian terrorists and invaders. Worth mentioning here too, according to a Lebanese General I spoke to, is that Hezbollah are also the protectors of the last remaining Jewish synagogue and its community in Lebanon, numbered at approximately 400 Lebanese adherents. Perhaps here it’s also germane to add that during their wars against Israel, Hezbollah’s leadership have even earnestly embraced and supported the resistance efforts of godless Lebanese communist groups fighting against the invading Jewish army. They have broken bread with and befriended the godless and the godfull alike in the name of fighting and deterring a genocidal and kleptomaniac enemy. Hezbollah remains bonded and intimately close to other Lebanese resistance groups, even in times of peace. Their friendships are always genuine, devoid of exploitative and fickle realpolitik. They are interested and concerned with uniting their countryfolk, not dividing or dominating them. They support a peaceful and equitable co-existence between the 18 legally recognized religions and sects of the Lebanon, whose population count is currently at 6.825 million. It is of historic record that they have even given immunity to Lebanese traitors who colluded with Israel during its 18 year occupation of Lebanon.
Hezbollah follows strict moral rules of war that do not allow for the wanton killing of the enemy: repulsion of enemy and not massacre of enemy is their first and foremost tactic – and if this proves insufficient, then annihilating their enemy becomes a permissible and sanctified necessity. Their Islamic rules of war insist on the humanitarian treatment of POW’s and Hezbollah always obliges. They are trained to be impeccably well-mannered towards their captives: trained not just in strategic guerilla warfare, but also educated in the lofty principles of charity and mercy toward the captured and repentant. They do not abuse victory by claiming sole power: they believe in power-sharing with their compatriots, even with those who never stepped foot on the battlefield.
Hezbollah is supreme, yet evidently not supremacist.
They never break their laws of war for fear of their god. They would rather literally die than break these laws that displease their god. They follow their religio-philosophical and military protocol with absolute precision; and they practice devoted respect and trust in the righteousness of their commanders and cause. Extrajudicial executions are forbidden, and so is the unjustified assault on their enemy. They do not shoot at unarmed women, children or men either. They do not target the handicapped sitting in their wheelchairs like the Israeli army and other Jewish security apparatuses regularly do. They do not invade, they liberate. Hezbollah is a reactive and defensive resistor and not an army of usurpers and psychopaths hellbent on mass murder and the looting of what is not rightfully theirs.
Their resistance culture is humanist. Through and through.
They strive for a just and peaceful world, no matter the cost to their own lives. Indeed, they live for martyrdom; they yearn for martyrdom in the cause of a just and peaceful world. They rank martyrdom as the absolute highest achievement in life.
“We don’t fear death as our death is martyrdom. Martyrdom means eternally living close to our god. Living close to god is the ultimate point in the ascension of mankind: cannot be achieved except through martyrdom” – a Hezbollah warrior.
There is a trinity of principles contained in Hezbollah’s martyrdom philosophy. They are willing to die for three principled notions: for god, for family, and for nation. They live and die for nothing else but for god, family and nation. I can’t stress enough how important their triadic life-philosophy is for them. As faith-filled warriors, they do not ever separate from this soulful philosophy, or ever discard it while at war or even during peace time – not even momentarily, not even for a nano second. Their martyrdom philosophy is their very oxygen. Their very spine. They are consistent in their profound commitment to their divine, triangular philosophy. This is the mother of absolutes for them. This supplies them with infinite, fearless courage. This inspires their attachment and love of righteous, disciplined behavior and focused intent. This provides them with infinite determination; with boundless physical and mental legerity. During warfare training, and on the battlefield and off, they remain intimately connected to this inspirational triangle of motives. In their universe, the muscle, the moral and the divine are eternally wedded. This is the very reason behind their unbroken record of victories and their continuing and increased strength and popularity across the world.
Hezbollah reveres their god above all else – their supernal god sits atop their spiritual pyramid, directly linked below to the two sacred earthly duties of protecting family and nation. Hezbollah warriors value this triadic configuration above even their own lives. They connect their earthly duties towards family and nation directly to the service of their celestial god. Their god requires their unflinching faith and their protection of ‘tribe and land’, and Hezbollah warriors, they are willingly servants who selflessly submit to the absolute reverence of god and protection of family and nation. This noble aegis pleases their god: Hezbollah warriors live for nothing but to please their god, therefore they will never break or dissolve the divine contract they’ve undertaken with their god. Their enemy should be aware and beware: they will actively neutralize any and all threats to this divine equation – even at the cost of their own lives. This is their only mission on earth: reverence of god, defense and protection of family and land. This is Hezbollah’s manifesto in a nutshell. Nothing less than that. Nothing beyond that.
Their resistance model and system has gained much traction and spread outside of their Levantean locale: from the punishing dunes of Yemen and all the way to South America, from the Fertile Crescent and right across the continent of Asia, Hezbollah’s resistance model has spread and continues to be received with open arms, much to the chagrin of their pernicious, defeated enemies.
Hezbollah’s other unique quality is that of sober patience. They are exceptionally adept at the art of patience: their carpet-weaving Iranian friends have taught them this necessary life-skill and they’ve artfully applied this mental discipline to all their war and battle strategies. Believing their faith in their god is permanent and unbreakable, yet everything worldly is changeable, they therefore patiently play the long game against their enemy with utter confidence and evident success.
Yet, despite all the above factual and admirable qualities, their enemies and their enemies’ global media megaphones label Hezbollah as ‘narco-terrorist’ and ‘Islamic terrorist’. Accusing the Hezbollah of trafficking drugs is no different in absurdity than accusing Mother Teresa of global heroin-trading. Everyone who knows Hezbollah’s MO knows that their warriors and their leadership live a clean and sober life. They do not even drop f-bombs or cuss dirty words at their enemy. They are as clean-tongued and clean-living, as humble and ‘gracious as the morn’. Knowing the lifestyle and philosophy that Hezbollah strictly adheres to on the battlefield and off, it is simply inconceivable that Hezbollah would displease their god by running local and international drug rings that ruin people’s lives, break up families and weaken nations. This preposterous accusation belongs to the long list of perfidious lies manufactured by their enemies, who themselves, in fact, participate in international drug trading and trafficking, with the CIA running the lucrative global opium trade of Afghanistan, and the Mossad running the global Ecstasy drug trade in Europe and America.
Unable thus to find a military Achilles’s heel and character fault in their MO, Hezbollah’s enemies have produced a long litany of alleged crimes without ever providing even a single shred of evidence of wrongdoing. Hezbollah’s enemies have added Hezbollah’s good name to their infamously politicized ‘terrorist list’ without even once providing proof and irrefutable substantiation of terrorist activity. Let us here together therefore look at this list of accusations below – and please you will be mindful that if Hezbollah terrorism against the US were in fact true, that there exists actual evidence of Hezbollah terrorism against the United States, Lebanon, especially the south of Lebanon where Hezbollah is based, would have already received a decisive and fatal American ‘Shock and Awe’ treatment.
There is absolutely no proof whatsoever that Hezbollah’s leadership has ever ordered or committed the following: the 1983 truck bombing on the US embassy in Beirut; as well as the bombing of US and French barracks in the same year. The bombing of a restaurant near the US Air force base in Torrejon, Spain; the car bombing of the US embassy annex in Beirut; and the hijacking of a Kuwait Airlines plane – all in the year 1984. The hijacking of TWA flight #847 in 1985. The abduction and execution of three Lebanese Jews in 1986, under the pseudonym of the ‘Organization of the Oppressed on Earth’. The murder of three Saudi diplomats in 1988. The assassination of a Saudi secretary in Bangkok in 1989. The assassination of two more Saudi diplomats and a telex operator at the Saudi embassy in Bangkok in 1990; as well as the kidnapping and murder of a Saudi businessman in Bangkok in the same year. The murder of Ehud Sadan, a security chief at the Israeli embassy in Ankara; as well as the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires back in 1992. The failed attempted murder of a Turkish-Jewish community leader in Istanbul in 1993. The failed attempt at car-bombing the Israeli embassy in Thailand; and the suicide bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association building in Buenos Aires – all in year 1984. The truck bombing at the US portion of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996. The assassination of former Lebanese PM, Rafic Hariri, in 2005. The attack on a bus in Bulgaria that was full of Israeli vacationers back in 2012. And many, many more ‘failed this and attempted that’ terrorism activities falsely pinned on Hezbollah by no less than its enemy Israel and its agents in the US and Europe, and by its gruesome Wahabi-Arabian foes.
A handful of the above false and politicized accusations are on a continuous rotation in the Jewish and Western media, yet not even a semblance of proof is ever provided to the reading public. Relying on Islamophobic media trends, these accusations of terrorism are published and republished over and over again, in the hope that hearsay will eventually prevail as fact in the minds of reasonable people. In other words, the above allegations are nothing but propagandistic slings and arrows aimed at demonizing an undefeated and righteous resistance group. Interestingly, despite these aggressive propaganda operations against the Hezbollah, neither its fighting skills or vigor have been damped, nor have these misinformation assaults halted the spread of its popularity around the the world. Even the military academies of its enemies, in silent admiration now include the study of Hezbollah’s supreme tactics and warfare strategies in their curriculum, thus confirming the high caliber of their fighting skills and war philosophy. One cannot separate Hezbollah’s war strategies from the foundation of their humanist philosophy. Both are always employed in tandem. Hezbollah always leave an exit passage for their enemy to retreat through during an ambush.
Hezbollah receives enthusiastic moral support from Muslim as well as non-Muslim nations. From Eastern and from some Western nations. Hezbollah is respected, loved and revered in the four corners of the world – including appreciation by some citizens in enemy nations who are mentally unmolested by their State propaganda. This is not just because humans by nature love an undefeated war hero. This is because the humble Hezbollah has successfully established itself as an army of the people, by the people, for the people. And here lies the essence of its true popularity. A Lebanese force of good that’s comprised ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ is no different than the beloved American constitutional motto of a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. What Hezbollah has achieved for its nation and for its compatriots as a resistance group, American politicians are yet to actually demonstrate and realize for the benefit of the American people.
Why is that?
This is because the Lebanese have clearly defined their enemy as Israel, whereas the American collective has yet to identify its insidious internal enemy as ‘Jewish power’. Jewish power that has risen through unsavory and un-American tribal cronyism, nepotism, blackmail and coercion. Jewish supremacy that has been blatantly dominant of American life internally and American foreign policy internationally for the past 60+ years (since the Kennedy assassination, in fact). Jewish power that has essentially been corrosive and disfiguring of American traditional life domestically, and ruinous upon its purse and reputation internationally. But, if the Lebanese can so successfully circumvent and repeatedly defeat abusive Jewish power, then so can Americans who live under the boot of an overtly anti-democratic Jewish occupation. The recent shredding of our beloved First Amendment is but the latest victim of Jewish tyranny, and an undeniable expression of their hate of our democracy.
But, for Americans to liberate themselves, they first need to overcome all the gauntlets and weapons of mass distraction, all the social-engineering and numerous other dumbing-down projects that American elite Jews and their lobby have insidiously imposed on American citizen and politician alike. For Americans to be truly free and independent, and they are a captive people at present, they need to first bypass all the Jewish-engineered and sponsored divisions inside of America. Divisions like Identitarian politics, race-baiting and race disharmony, Jewish-owned Hollywood’s demonization of traditional American values, Neoliberalism, globalism, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, Mainstream media, most of Altmedia – and the long list goes on. They also need to discard and rebel against imposed mental pollutants like the mandatory teaching of the fake Anne Frank book in their schools; and most certainly, they also need to reject the funding of all those hideous Holocaust museums that operate to enable ongoing Jewish crimes against Americans by portraying the Jews as the ‘eternal victims with special needs’. All these holocaust museums are no more than propaganda factories paid for by your own tax dollars, not by Israeli Shekels or by private Jewish donations. It is the height of absurdity that Americans should be paying for their own brainwash and mental enslavement. Americans need to, ABOVE ALL, reclaim their First Amendment right that’s been hijacked and recently ripped to shreds by Jewish power. Americans need to regain their freedom of speech and be able to call a spade, a spade, and a Jew, a Jew.
There is no understating how many Jewish chains are already wrapped around the American mind and body. That’s your individual mind and body I speak of.
Begs the question here: where is your dignity and self-respect, dear American? Where is your honor and warriorhood? Where are the fruits of your labor that you’ve invested in your family and country year after year? It is not in your own hands, and it is not being spent on your community either. The Jewish lobby has made sure that your freedom and your tax dollars go first and foremost and directly towards serving the state of Israel. The Jewish lobby has killed your democracy, created social devastation right across the nation and fleeced your hard-earned tax dollars to benefit the klepto and oppressive state of Israel. The Jewish lobby has been treating you no different than a nation of slaves it socially engineers and owns. Presently, America is not in a state of justice and grace. Americans of all colors and stripes are not a free people. America is no longer ‘the beautiful’. America is under occupation by tribal Jewish power. And the Lebanese? The Lebanese, despite their mountain of current internal crisis, are in fact living a well-earned liberated life. The bruised Lebanese are in fact a freer people than the Americans are. A life of freedom from occupation gifted to them by the consistently vigilant and sacrificial Hezbollah. Hezbollah the patriot. Hezbollah, the beautiful.
When will citizens of the West and of America realize that Hezbollah is by far more on their side than the tax-fleecing, warmongering Zion? After all, Hezbollah exists to liberate, not to rob the Mints of Europe and America, not to warmonger for wars of choice that cost mega dollars and Euros and rivers of blood. And most certainly, Hezbollah does not in any measure oppress the Western people’s rights to freedom of speech – a right that the Israel lobbies of Europe and America are fixated on denying the people.
Where is your own Hezbollah, dear American? Where is your resistance to your occupier? Where is your resisting mind? Your resisting vote? Your resisting words? Your resisting art? Your resisting gun?
As an American expat witnessing the damage and dire divisions inflicted on our society by Jewish elites, I advise you not turn your guns against one another. This is absolutely a ruinous folly. This is what your insidious occupier is betting on. Your division emboldens and empowers them. To fleece more out of you for the sake of Israel, the enemy in your midst needs you further divided and weaker. Do not submit, but do circumvent. Circumvention through unity. You do not have to love one another to death, but you do have to unite and resist against your enemy within if a life of freedom, peace and prosperity is what you think you deserve. Unite despite your differences. Unite despite your rage. This is your key to liberation.
‘By deception thou shalt do war’. This is the Israeli motto.
‘Live free or die’. This is an American motto. It is also a Hezbollah motto.(Republished from Plato’s Guns by permission of author or representative)
John Shuck writes: Gilad Atzmon returns to discuss what he sees as a civil war brewing in the United States over dividing lines that are based on identitarian politics. In this educational and informative interview, he elaborates on a recent post of his, It’s Not About Trump or Biden, and he discusses the history of identitarian politics and why the U.S. is so polarized today. He is the author of The Wandering Who: The Study of Jewish Identity Politics and Being In Time: A Post-Political Manifesto. In May 2018 he was on my program that commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Nakba “The Catastrophe” and Palestinian resistance.
It is about a ‘Great Reset’ vs. longing for greatness
It is about Jerusalem vs. Athens
It is really about the ‘last days of the Weimar Republic’ all over again.
Throughout its history, capitalism has been using different tactics to suppress opposition.
At one stage it was the fantasy of an inevitable revolution. It is indeed the threat of that rebellious spirit which contributed to the evolvement of the welfare state, yet the promised revolution never materialized.
It doesn’t take a genius to gather that in historical perspective, those senses of freedom, productivity and hope which became Western emblems during the post-World War II era, had very little to do with our humanist desires and whims. Our ‘freedom’ was manufactured to titillate the poor human fellows behind the Iron Wall. The Cold War which threatened to wipe out civilization was just the means towards capitalist growth. Accordingly, it would be right to argue that we owe our post-war sense of ‘freedom’ to the USSR and Stalin. The more oppressive communism was, the more liberal the West pretended to be. Once the Soviet bloc evaporated, there was no need to sustain our ‘freedom.’ There was no one to ‘titillate’ with Coca Cola and McDonalds. A new Battle Zone was required to divert the masses’ attention from their true eternal oppressors.
Once again it was the so-called ‘Left’ that provided the goods. Instead of the old Left mantra that called to unite us into a proletarian angry fist regardless of our race, skin color, gender or ethnicity, the ‘New Left’ introduced a completely new hymn. Against the most basic Left universal ethos, the New Left taught us to think and speak ‘as a’: ‘as women,’ ‘as a gay,’ ‘as trans,’ ‘as a Jew,’ ‘as a Latino,’ ‘as a Black.’ We practically learned to fight each other instead of uniting into one people. Instead of eliminating differences, we built new ghetto walls emphasizing and celebrating every possible dividing line (White/Black, male/female, heterosexual/LGBTQ etc.). Instead of identifying Wall Street, MSM propaganda and the technology giants as our fierce global enemy, these actually became the catalysts and cash suppliers in a war we, the people, foolishly declared upon ourselves.
In this new ‘Left’ Identitarian amalgam, every ‘as a’ voice is welcome except the White one. Is it because anyone really believes that ‘White people’ are categorically or collectively bad? I doubt it. It is simply because the so-called ‘White’ was picked to play the ‘role’ of the Soviet bloc. The ‘White’ has become the new imaginary ‘evil.’
As things stand no one in America can unite the nation: neither Biden nor the DNC can introduce a harmonious solution as the above are actually extensions of the problem. Biden and the DNC are inherently tied to Wall Street, Soros, the MSM and technology giants that formulated and sustain this tragic battle. Trump and the GOP of course, cannot do much either, because in the eyes of his many opponents Trump himself is the core of this entire disaster. He is clearly ‘too white’ on top of being a ‘man’ and if this is not enough, he is also an abrasive narcissist.
What we see in America is practically the Weimar Republic all over again.
The public is losing its trust in the democratic process and democratic institutions. Poverty and public unrest is spiking. The national press and media are becoming more and more detached from larger segments of the population. Amidst all of this, Wall Street is booming. The two sides of this divide cannot tolerate each other. They are removed demographically, spiritually, culturally and intellectually. Democracy is becoming a nostalgic notion in the USA and this shouldn’t take us by a big surprise as democracy and freedom are not and never have been prime capitalist goals or values. Democracy and liberty were the means, not the goal. They were there to serve mammonism.* But not anymore; back in November 2016 Wall Street gathered that democracy is in the way. The City of London came to the same conclusion after the Brexit referendum.
If America wants to save itself, it may have to grasp its conditions first. It better transcend itself beyond the fake battle between Trump and Biden or between the Democrats and the GOP. America should figure out who is pushing it into the abyss of civil war. America should figure out who works so hard and successfully, so far, to split it and every other Western country in the middle.
If Orwell’s 1984 carries any prophetic merit, it is easy to figure out who is taking care of the Big Brother’s role. What you may want to do next is figure out who is/what is the current Immanuel Goldstein? Who controls the opposition?
* Mammonism the obsessive pursuit of material wealth and possessions.
“Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep.” Slavoj Zizek (2006)
Traditional Left Ideology sets out a vision of how the world ‘ought to be.’ The Left’s view can be summed up as the belief that social justice is the primary requirement for improving the world, and that this better future entails the pursuit of equality in various forms. The Left ideologist believes that it is both ethical and moral to attempt to approach equality in terms of civil rights and material wealth.
But if the Left focuses on ‘what could be,’ the Right focuses on ‘what is.’ If the Left operates where people ‘could be,’ the Right operates where people ‘are’ or at least, where they believe themselves to be. The Right does not aim to change human social reality but rather to celebrate, and to even maximize it.
Left ideology, accordingly, is shaped like a ‘dream.’ Aiming for what ‘ought to be’ rather than ‘what is’ induces a level of utopian illusory detachment and depicts a phantasmal egalitarian world often removed from our abusive, oppressive and doomed reality. In this phantasmic future, people will just drift away from greed and gluttony, they will work less and learn to share, even to share that which they may not possess to start with.
This imaginary ‘dream’ helps explain why the (Western) Left’s ideology rarely appealed to the struggling classes; the masses, consumed by the pursuit of bread and butter, were hardly going to be interested in utopian ‘dreams’ or futuristic social experiments. Bitten by the daily struggle and chased by existence, working people have never really subscribed to ‘the revolution,’ usually because they were just too busy working. This perhaps explains why so often it was the middle-class and bourgeois agitators who became revolutionary icons. It was they who had access to that little bit extra to fund their revolutionary adventures.
The ‘Left dream’ is certainly appealing, perhaps a bit too appealing. Social justice, equality and even revolution may really be nothing but the addictive rush of effecting change and this is perhaps why hard-core Leftist agitators often find it impossible to wake from their social fantasy of transformation. They simply refuse to admit that reality has slipped from their grasp, preferring to remain in their cozy phantasmal and delusional universe, shielded by ghetto walls built from archaic terminology and political correctness.
In fact, the more appealing and convincing the revolutionary fantasy is, the less its supporters are willing to be awaken by reality. This blindness helps explain why the Western ideological and political Left has failed on so many fronts: it was daydreaming when the service economy was introduced, and it did not awaken when production and manufacturing were eviscerated. It yawned when it should have combatted corporate culture, big money and its worship, and it dozed when higher education became a luxury. The Left was certainly snoring noisily when, one after the other, its institutions were conquered by ‘New Left’ Identitarian politics.
It is most important to point at the contemporary American so-called ‘Left’ that was deeply asleep when the American working classes drifted away to the Republican party. The American Left was so deeply consumed by its ‘revolutionary fantasy’ that it didn’t notice the embarrassing fact that an abrasive multi-billionaire real estate tycoon morphed into a populist revolutionary icon for hard-working people. The American Left was so thrilled by its self-worship that it pretended not to see that its entire operation was practically sustained by Wall Street tycoons and globalists of the worst type. The American Left has become a controlled opposition apparatus. It practically went to bed with the bitterest enemies of peace and justice let alone anything that resembles ‘social justice’ and human harmony.
In one of his most insightful moments, Slavoj Zizek delved into a comparison between Freud and Lacan’s perception of the dream: “Why do we dream?” Zizek asked. “Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep.”
According to this perception, the dream is there to sustain the slumber against all odds. It represses the external disturbance (whether it is depression, anxiety, noise or even an immediate threat) by incorporating it into the dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells a story of a father whose young son has just died. The father falls asleep and dreams that the child is standing by his bed in flames, whispering the horrifying reproach: ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ Soon afterwards, the father wakes to discover that a fallen candle has set fire to his dead son’s shroud. The father had smelled the smoke while asleep and incorporated the image of his burning son into his dream to prolong his sleep. Zizek wonders: did the father wake up because the external stimulus became too strong to be contained within the dream-scenario? Or was it the obverse, that the father constructed the dream in order to prolong his sleep, but what he encountered in the dream was even more unbearable than external reality, so that he woke up to escape it?
In the ‘Left Dream,’ the cosmopolitan revolution occurs by itself, as its conditions are ‘determined’ by an inevitable mass consciousness shift. In the ‘Left dream’ the revolution is inevitable so to say. In the ‘Left’s nightmare,’ however, reality proves the complete opposite; the condition for the revolution are ripe on the verge of ultimate but then, pretty much out of the blue, the same script keep repeating itself, a ‘Hitler’ figure appears ‘out of nowhere’ and steers the masses away from the ‘revolution’ to the ‘flag.’ But one thing is clear. In the Left Dream there is no escape route to reality. Unlike the father who awakes devastated by the image of his son being burned, there is no Left dream where the struggling masses can have their say. In the American Left Dream, for instance, there is no room for ‘White uneducated males’ who pop out of the blue and ask: what about us? Why have you forsaken us? In the American Left Dream these kinds of ‘white’ people are called ‘Trumpsters,’ ‘Deplorables,’ White Supremacists,’ white nationalists, and so forth. In the Contemporary American Left dream there is no path back to reality. Those few Leftists who are awaken by any sort of reality check are effectively pushed out, left with no other option but flipping (political) sides. This may explain why demographic studies reveal that people are most often born Leftists and die Conservatives. Maturity, so it seems, involves a growing acceptance of ‘realistic pessimism.’ People tend to wake up, but the dream doesn’t.
One may wonder: where was the German Left when Hitler’s popularity increased amongst Germany’s Working class at a speed that puts Covid-19 to shame? Where was the British Left when Margaret Thatcher, who destroyed many of Britain’s industries and undermined the unions, became so popular amongst British Working people for making it possible for them to own their homes? Where was the British Left when Corbyn and Labour’s popularity minced into dust? It is also fascinating to look at the Israeli Left, as Israel was formed around the idea of Labour Zionism. The Israeli Labour party that dominated Israeli politics until 1977 literally vanished as its ‘dream’ of a Hebraic proletarian metamorphosis couldn’t sustain itself. Due to the fact that Labour Zionism was shaped and operated in a dream mode, it could never adopt to a political reality that was molded by its own dream.
The Left is often too blind to the political and social conditions in which it operates. It never detects the growing wave of resentment it brings upon itself because operating in a dream mode inflicts a severe form of detachment. As Freud realised, the dream is there to sustain the slumber. It ignores political opposition by reducing it into an outer ‘noise.’ It either sets regions of blind spots (political correctness) or alternatively defines growing regions of ‘political outcasts’ (Trumpsters, Fascists, Racists, Deplorables, White supremacists etc.)
In November 2016 Hillary Clinton was in a state of a total shock when she woke up to learn that Donald Trump won the election. In her dream Hillary already won the election, the act of voting was just a formal procedure. Four years later, Biden, the DNC and pretty much the entire Mainstream media followed the exact same pollsters who were totally off-mark in 2016. They anticipated a ‘landslide victory.’ The fact that Donald Trump was meeting so many supporters in his open rallies must have been realised within the context of the ‘Left Dream’ as noisy disturbances. When Michael Moore warned the American Left that the GOP and Trump could make it again, not one in the American progressive universe cared to address his concerns. When people are asleep you are expected to walk on your tiptoes.
I assume that the contemporary American Left’s wet Dream is easy to describe: You go to sleep with Donald Trump in the White House, you wake up and he is gone. This simple dream describes exactly what happened in the early morning of the 4th of November. America went to sleep accepting that Trump, against all odds, did it again. In the wee small hours bookies all over the world put their money on his success by a rate as high as 7 to 1. In the morning suddenly the situation flipped: Trump was on his way out. On the face of it the American Left dream has materialised.
America is obviously divided in the middle. Those who favour Biden insist that he won the election. Those who support Trump are convinced that something unusually dishonest happened during that night and in the days to follow.
I do not have the means or the intention to tell or even try to determine who won the election but it is clear that the DNC, Biden, Harris and the entire American mainstream media do not let the tsunami of mistrust interfere with their ‘materialised dream.’ Biden doesn’t seem too concerned by the fact that America currently looks like a banana republic. Like in a banana republic, Americans do not trust their political system nor do they trust their institutions. People who live in banana republics learn quickly to expect the unexpectable to the point that the unexpectable is becomes the new normal. Biden doesn’t let reality interfere with the dream. As ‘president-elect’ he doesn’t waste time, he works with his transition team, he keeps the fantasy afloat. America is on the verge of a civil war but even that doesn’t bother the ‘president-elect’ and his transition team. In the progressive dream, vowing to ‘unite the nation’ is way more forceful that the reality of a sharp divide.
Back in 2006, Zizek provided a Lacanian insight into the reality that we currently see in the USA. “Reality,” Zizek wrote, “is for those who cannot sustain the dream.” It is always the hard-working people struggling for bread and butter who can’t sustain the fantasy of social change. It is always the working classes that push for concretization. They want America to be great again (Trump), they want Great Britain to be as ‘Great’ as implied by its name (Brexit), they want France to be French (Yellow Vests). Before it is too late, those who watched the so-called ‘Trumpsters’ yesterday in Washington DC should accept that the patriotic reality embodied by the flag must at least be as meaningful as the Identitarian ‘dream’ of ‘others united.’
On election day, countless progressive and liberal commentators throughout the entire mainstream media were foolish enough to admit that the battle at stake wasn’t really about ‘Trump or Biden’ but about the ‘American way,’ the future, so to say, of the public discourse and public life in the USA. Progressives and liberals were confident enough to believe that with nearly 100 million ballots given in before election day, Americans had already cast an unprecedented spectacle of rejection of everything that may even mildly resemble ‘conservative values.’ They were convinced that America had made its choice already. For them, I must assume, the election was just an act of formality. The battle was basically won already.
But then just a few hours later, it became clear that the pollsters failed them completely once again. The ‘Trumpsters’ refused to evaporate. They grew substantially and even expanded demographically into some ‘unexpected’ electoral territories traditionally associated with Democratic politics.
The clear meaning of the election is that America, like most other Western states, is divided in the middle into two opposing societies that have very little in common. Far more worrying is the clear fact that the two sides of the divide cannot tolerate each other.
As much as the Left, Progressives and Liberals are convinced by the absolute validity of their way of thinking, to the point that they insist to dictate them by authoritarian and tyrannical measures, at least as many people do not buy, follow and even reject those values. Many Americans do not accept the identiterian shift. Many Americans are not convinced at all that gender isn’t binary. I assume that most disappointing and worrying for the DNC is the fact that members of ‘diverse minorities’ as the Democrats call them, have switched sides. They became vocal Trump supporters.
This is very easy to explain. The Democratic Party offers Blacks, Gays, Latinos and so called ‘diverse minorities’ to be marginalized forever in an amalgam of ‘Others United’. The GOP is offering those people an immediate integration as ordinary people into the American realm. All you need to do is get yourself a red Trump baseball cap and join your next local Trump rally. It is this most basic existential togetherness that was so vivid within the Left revolutionary discourse, but only materialized into a populist sustained tsunami of political resistance within the contexts of right-wing populist politics.
In the upside-down world in which we live. The Republican party has become the party of the American working-class people. People who are defined by their adherence to family values, the church, hard work and see themselves as the ‘Americans.’ The Democratic party that claimed to be the voice of those working people, has gradually morphed into an urban identiatrian conglomerate. A collective of ‘as a’ people: humans who insist to identify with their biology: ‘as a Woman,’ ‘as a Gay,’ ‘as a Trans,’ ‘as a Black,’ ‘as a Jew.’
In the upside down world in which we live, the Left ended up adopting the most embarrassing and problematic Hitlerian ideological aspect: Unlike Italian fascism that adhered to the concept of ‘socialism of the Italian people,’ or early Nazism that pushed for the idea of ‘equality of German speaking people,’ Hitler insisted upon ‘socialism of one race.’ Hitler believed that people’s politics is intrinsic to their biology. As opposed to traditional inclusive Left thinking that was class oriented, the contemporary Left pushes people to identify politically on biological terms: ‘as a woman,’ ‘as a black,’ ‘as a gay,’ ‘as a trans’ etc. The GOP on the other hand, is coming closer and closer to universal class politics.
On the morning of the 3rd of November, the liberal press was ready to announce that the ‘as a’ philosophy had won. But as things stand right now, this battle between the ‘as a’ people and the ‘Americans’ may escalate into a real violent conflict as there is no one in America or anywhere else who knows how to unite the people into a simple concept of peoplehood. Again, this is hardly an American phenomenon. The exact same division and the lack of a political unifying prospect is currently apparent in every Western State.
On Thursday, Wall Street rose substantially. Naturally, many commentators believed that our oligarchs and financial tycoons were excited by Biden’s likeliness to win the American election. But it may also be possible that Wall Street was way more thrilled by the prospect of a possible civil war. When people fight each other, capitalism, mammonism and usury can be celebrated mercilessly and boundlessly. This is exactly what Wall Street is after.
It may as well be possible that in the global universe in which we live, in a world where all existential concerns reintroduced themselves as ‘global threats’ to do with: global warming, global financial turmoil, global pandemics etc., a state of bitter civil war is exactly where global capitalism wants us the people to be. Democracy and the fantasy of political choice, as such, are just a camouflage. It is there to convey the image that the current chaos is merely our own choice or fault.
To understand ID politics and its disastrous impact on contemporary society read Being in Time
From my youth I had a strong connection to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but I did not know precisely why. His name was mentioned in our house. His friends were friends of my parents.
Solzhenitsyn was supposed to spend a summer in the late 1970s with our family in Alaska. That was the plan, one that excited me. In preparation, I attempted to read Cancer Ward, the semi-autobiographical novel Solzhenitsyn completed in 1966, a dissection of the cancerous Soviet police state. I was 12 years old. I was unprepared for such a thing. It would be a long time before I had the maturity.
Solzhenitsyn in that spring of 1978 gave the famous commencement speech at Harvard, where he publicly shamed the country’s elite, to an America unprepared to accept such a thing. And it would be a long time before the country even had the maturity to understand and could really do so.
Solzhenitsyn did not visit us in Alaska that year.
Now, I’m over forty years older, Donald Trump is America’s 45th President, and the country is revisiting the prophet’s words. Because President Trump is up against the same angry Harvard crowd.
Under a False Flag
From the earliest days in the build up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, as part of a purely political strategy, Vladimir Lenin attacked Tsar Nicholas II for his alleged mistreatment of Jews and publicly denounced not only all manifestations of antisemitism but everything but the kitchen sink that could be associated with it.
After the Revolution, when Lenin took power in Russia, he endorsed the establishment of special departments for Jewish affairs in both the ruling Communist Party and in the relevant ministry, the Commissariat of Nationalities, headed by Joseph Stalin. Lenin had taken note of the higher percentage of Jews in the revolutionary movement than their proportion in the population, and he initiated the promotion of Jews to higher positions in the state and party apparatus. Lenin essentially took from Oliver Cromwell’s playbook. And, voilà, an elite Jewish politburo was born.
“With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders,” said Sir Winston Churchill referring to the Soviet government.
The Bolsheviks claimed power on November 7, 1917 and two days later the fledgling government issued its famous “Decree on Peace.”
The Balfour Declaration, a letter dated November 2, 1917 from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, was then published on the very same day as Lenin’s “Decree on Peace.”
This was kept secret, because in 1917 the British government, through international bankers, offered a national home for Jews in Palestine, at the expense of the land and future of the Palestinians.
The promissory note to Lord Rothschild for the Zionist Federation, the Balfour Declaration, partly drafted by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Louis Brandeis, and underwritten by U.S. Congress has cost and continues to cost American taxpayers billions of dollars a year.
The year 1917 was a very big year, indeed. A revolutionary one. A transparent cabal of British and American financiers backed Vladimir Lenin and the so-called Jewish “Bolsheviks” set out to destroy Russia and murder tens of millions of Christians, at very same time the Balfour Declaration backed by a secret cartel was signed to establish a Jewish state in the Middle East where Palestinians would be mass murdered, as if by Biblical design.
In “Under a False Flag,” Lenin described a three-phase development of capitalism, culminating in reactionary and militarist imperialism, sustaining itself through super-profits used to secure the support of an aristocracy. It is a Biblical account of opportunism. Then, in “The Deception of the People by the Slogans of Equality and Freedom,” Lenin warns about the elaborate false flag operations and deception perpetuated under the disguise of democracy.
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves,” said Vladimir Lenin.
Much has been written about that event. Much has still gone unsaid. I plan to say some of the unsaid things.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the grand 19th century Russian literary tradition who represents our plight today to defeat violence and lies, the twin pillars of 21st century authoritarianism, in America. The twin pillars of the totalitarianism in the East in the 20th century that Solzhenitsyn warned us from that day forth.
On that day at Harvard in the 20th century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s words had the same effect as the preaching of John the Baptist. Both had a sharp message to deliver to an audience they believed had grown complacent and morally decadent.
Solzhenitsyn tried to shake up the exact people he believed were responsible for the decline of the West and installation of a politburo, the shrill war mongers in Washington DC. Similarly, John the Baptist denounced the moral depravity of King Herod and his politburo. The politburo was the principal policymaking committee in the former Soviet Union, founded in 1917, to oversee the violence and lies of the state. It is the most appropriate word.
For his prophetic word, John the Baptist was thrown into a dirty dungeon. Then, on September 11th of that year, to be exact, his head was offered on a platter as a gift from Herod to his equally depraved daughter, Salome. In 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was banished from the intellectual set in America. Harvard, the New York Times and DC’s politburo put his head on a metaphorical cocktail tray.
When the most influential group of American intellectuals, liberals and Neoconservatives alike, united against one man, a Russian refuge in a New England town, there was unquestionably a John the Baptist vibe. Both prophets were dismembered, dismissed for saying too much.
Speaking of prophets, the esteemed Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said wrote that “American Orientalism” is unique because it is seen almost entirely thru the prism of Israel. To be precise, the Zionist Israel of the Ashkenazi European Jews. He’s been dead for nearly 17 years. But the British are pathologically relentless in their perverse cruelty and continue to this day post mortem to brutally smear Edward Said for saying too much. He has been dismissed by the Zionist powers even in death.
Today, we simply cannot dismiss the most uncomfortable part, the distinct roles that atheist Jews have played in empire and in the installation of a suzerain or politburo in the Holy Roman, Habsburg, Russian, French, British, and American Empires, and in the outcomes of the Israel project via the World Wars and the British Zionist enterprise today. But, let’s get one thing straight. Capisce? We are talking about a policy making minority of white, liberal, atheist, intellectual elites, not Jews, in general. Not by a long shot. John the Baptist and Solzhenitsyn were warning us about the conspiracy of identity politics, not about Jews. They were warning us about rich, atheist oppressors. They were not fingering religious Jews.
I think Zionism in America today is best understood as what is left of the politburo —decades of clandestine operations of a rogue network of military-industrial complex officials and intelligence agents involved in an invisible government supporting a British enterprise. Zionism has more in common with a corporation than a religion or even a political ideology. Zionism has got little to do with religious Jews. In fact, Zionism is opposed to Judaic dogma and is thus heretical. Not to mention that Zionism is next level schismatic.
The Schismatics
Let’s start at the beginning. There are three Abrahamic religions, a group of Semitic-originated religions that claim descent from the Judaism of the ancient Israelites and the worship of the God of Abraham. According to the Hebrew calendar, this is the year 5,781. Christianity was founded 2,020 years ago, and Islam 1,450 years ago. Each religion was originally a whole one. Over time, each has encountered schism.
A schism is a division between people, usually belonging to a religious denomination. The word is most frequently applied to a split in what had previously been a single religious body, such as “the Great Schism” of Christianity in 1054 between Orthodoxy (true faith) in the East and the Roman Catholic Church in the West. Then, the Western Church became highly political and split into a million pieces.
A schismatic is a person who creates or incites schism in an organization or who is a member of a splinter group. Schismatic as an adjective means pertaining to a schism or schisms, or to those ideas or policies that are thought to lead towards or promote schism. In religion, the charge of schism is distinguished from that of heresy, since the offense of schism concerns not differences of belief or doctrine but promotion of, or the state of, division.
However, schisms frequently involve heresy, but it becomes the matter of a political point of view rather than a church law. For instance the Orthodox Church considers the Roman Catholic Church heretical but the Catholic Church says that the Orthodox Church is schismatic. Because the Orthodox Christian Church is not a political organization.
While Christianity was intended as a beautiful religion of peace, some of the schismatic pieces are heretical, politically aggressive and even war-like.
Orthodox Christianity is one of three original true Abrahamic faiths —Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Judaism and Orthodox Islam. Each has suffered schisms and with each spilt, like cancer cells, the divisions have increased toxicity, chaos and conflict and decreased full unity and peace.
As breaks in a religion increase and church laws or canons are broken in favor of a new branch, the least canonical branches become the most political. While, there are several formal branches of Jewish faith (Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Reconstructionist Judaism), Zionism is purely political but has somehow retained a religious imprint. This is because Zionism is a product of the British Empire, namely Western intelligence services.
The schisms within Orthodox Christianity today are regional and related to the Catholic Church, such as what has been going on in Ukraine —all orchestrated by Western intelligence services such as America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6. A schism in Orthodox Islam emerged into public consciousness at the end of the 1970s —the Sunnis and Shias. In 1978, the Islamic revolution in Iran, orchestrated, once again by the CIA and MI6, brought politics front and center.
This political strategy of cancerous attack on a faith, religious metastasis, is a fundamental aspect of atheist philosophy as it is applied in the ideologies of Nazism, Bolshevism, and Neoconservatism. It is the basic principle of divide and rule, but applied to a sovereign religion, not a sovereign state.
Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, co-founder of the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I in Poland, was a journalist who died as Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1940, near Hunter, New York. He founded the militant Zionist Revisionist movement that played an important role in the establishment of the State of Israel. During the 1920s and 1930s, Jabotinsky and his movement were frequently called fascist.
Polish Zionist Jabotinsky and his buddies implemented a staggering number of permutations that did divisive harm to Judaism. At the same time, the permutations enabled Polish Zionism to appeal to a broader base of supporters than any other Jewish political movement. This created an elite leadership that was vastly out of touch with the majority of Jewish people.
Sound familiar? It should. Because Zionism is the living definition of identity politics. It is a perversion. Like “angiogenesis” in a cancer, which is perversion of a normal cellular process, a perversion that is an essential requirement for the development of cancer. Thus, attempts to stop the spread of a cancer in a human body that can easily result in killing the person. The Western intelligence services attack in a political war-like fashion the immune systems of the peaceful Abrahamic religions.
In his 2008 book, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Stephen J. Sniegoski describes in great detail how Neoconservatives were the driving force behind the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, their motivation was based on their belief that American interests in the Middle East are virtually identical with the Israeli Likud party’s beliefs about Israeli interests in the region, and these mutual interests lie in destabilizing Israel’s adversaries and reconfiguring the environment rather than in the traditional American policy of stabilizing the Middle East.
They began to see McGovern and Carter Democrats and the Nixon and Ford Republicans as insufficiently devoted to anti-communism, military strength, interventionism and Israel and gravitated first to Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA) and then to the Reagan Republicans.
Sniegoski argues that, while the Neoconservatives were the driving force for the war with Iraq in 2003, the basic idea of offensive war to weaken Israel’s neighbors, induce regime change and reconfigure the region has been an element of Zionist thinking since Vladimir Jabotinsky in the 1920s.
The barbaric Zionist Jews that caused the Great Terror remained in power in the Soviet Union until Joseph Stalin had to purge (murder) them. Consequently, U.S. Senator Jackson went on to become the patron saint of those outcasted Soviet Jews and his legacy, while mostly clandestine, can be glimpsed at briefly through the Henry Jackson Society, a Transatlantic foreign policy think tank based in London. Its purpose is “the promotion of liberal democracy across the world,” and it is currently focused primarily on “supporting global democracy in the face of threats from China and Russia.” Importantly, the Henry Jackson Society in England is the sister organization to The Atlantic Council in America, a den of vipers.
“Senator Henry Jackson, the Solzhenitsyn Affair, and American Liberalism,” by Jeff Bloodworth (2006) provides a sanitized version of how Jackson exploited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with his anti-communism campaign. Clearly, the CIA was heavily involved and poached Solzhenitsyn as its asset. And it did not go well.
For his “defense of the rights of the Jewish people,” in 1983 an international panel selected the late Senator Henry Jackson as a recipient of the first “Jabotinsky Prize: Shield of Jerusalem” award.
Identity Politics
There is a unique historical relationship between capitalism and Jews that is crucial to understanding America. Why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalism, the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in the fate of Jews. In a way, Jews unknowingly were the early agents of globalization.
Like today’s web strategists and technologists, Jews were keen on building networks across national borders. And like today’s high-tech entrepreneurs, the global Jewish diaspora managed to utilize this network for their benefit. Who wouldn’t? The relationship is best understood in the context of identity politics and the function of conspiracy inherent to capitalism.
Identity politics in America began in 1973, the year the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipeilago was published in the West. In fact, if you take a look at the “Solzhenitsyn affair” which involved Neoconservative U.S. Senator Henry Jackson, President Nixon, Vice President Gerald Ford, the birth of “human rights,” the Helsinki Commission, and the emigration of millions of Soviet Jewry to America, you get a much better understanding of the people who consider themselves to be the elite in U.S. today.
In response to Republican President Nixon, it was Democrat Senator Jackson and House Representative Charles Vanik who passed a bill in 1974 denying the Soviet bloc most favored nation trading status unless it granted Jews freedom to emigrate. The first piece of U.S. legislation inspired by the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the Jackson‐Vanik amendment has acted as a catalyst in hastening Soviet Jewish emigration policies.
Since the mid-1960s, nearly half a million Jews from the former Soviet Union have settled in the United States. They constitute the largest single group of Jewish immigrants to enter the U.S. since the 1920s. Although they share kinship ties with the many American Jews whose roots are also in the pre-communist Russian empire, their lives have been shaped by different forces: the Bolshevik revolution and life in a communist state. Like American Jews, contemporary emigres are distinguished by high levels of skill and education, are urban and disproportionately professionals. Unlike most American Jews, they have had minimal exposure to formal Jewish training and Jewish religious life, and no experience with a highly organized Jewish community.
This is a tremendous piece of American history. Soviet Jews have been steadily streaming into the U.S. for decades, to the point of even insulting Israel, which campaigned hard on their behalf and had hoped to populate itself with the Jewish emigres. The U.S. has long had an open policy to Jews, which continued even after the Soviets cracked open their borders. Soviet Jews were not forced out due to war, famine or natural disaster and didn’t seek refugee status. This is an important point today. Because some may have been fleeing prosecution for crimes against humanity during the Great Terror.
Enormous resources were invested in this immigration of Soviet Jews by the U.S. Government. Accordingly, Soviet Jews in the U.S. created an ecosystem of prosperity around themselves and the Jews who mass migrated to Israel.
According to Pew, after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Israel’s largest wave of Jewish immigrants arrived from Russia and other former Soviet republics. These immigrants far outnumbered those from other countries since Israel achieved statehood. According to Pew, Soviet Jews brought a secular mindset to Israel, and more than two decades later, Jews who were born in the FSU continue to be noticeably less religious than Israeli Jews overall. Secular means atheist: 81% FSU-born Jews in Israel self-identify as secular. Importantly, 25% of Israel’s population is made up of Jews from USSR and these Soviet Jews are running Israel’s Likud government.
We must insert Canada here. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Canada has been one of the most active centers of former Soviet Jewish immigration. Toronto has attracted disproportionate numbers of immigrants: over 47% of all new immigrants to Canada have settled in Toronto in the late 1990s. About 70% of former Soviet Jewish immigrants to Canada reside in Toronto. According to the 1996 Canadian census, nationally there were about 16,000 Jews born of Russian/Soviet parents, mostly refugees – arrivals of the 1970s and 1980s.
Toronto is the most Zionist community in the world. Toronto is also an international hot spot for all types of bigotry and heinous hate crimes. Toronto is important to our story for one reason. Zionist operatives there are complete morons, so much so that they exposed with their own incompetence the biggest subversive cultural revolution in the history of the world.
Identity politics as a school of thought is Hitler’s racist ideology with a fresh coat of paint. The paint comes from an exclusive manufacturer that gives each paint color the thoughtful name of a Pantone pedigree which can used across global industries with ease.
Zionism is Slippery
Zionism is an especially slippery one, and that is its most marked characteristic.
On November 10, 1975 UN Resolution 3379 passed which defined Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Soviet Union originated the idea leading up to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. What national consensus influenced the Soviet Union to take such a step?
Remember, Zionists Jews played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role effectively dominating the Soviet terror regime during its early years and in a genocide of tens of millions of Christians.
In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 3379, which “determine(d) that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Fifteen years later, on December 16 1991, that resolution was revoked. The UN had defined Zionism as a racist ideology. It was repealed in 1991 when Israel and the U.S. initially refused to participate in the Madrid Peace Conference.
The Madrid Peace Conference, held from October 30 to November 1, 1991, marked the first time that Israeli leaders negotiated face to face with delegations from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and, most importantly, with the Palestinians.
The year 1991 was also the year that communism fell. That year and the George H.W. Bush legacy in the Middle East —the Gulf War and the Madrid peace conference— continue to shape U.S. policy in the region a quarter century later.
Most people do not seem to understand that Jewish is not a race. However, how Jewish today is applied has subversively made it one. Jews come in all sizes, shapes and colors including black. A Jew is not just a willow thin white lady with a Harvard degree and a Park Avenue apartment full of Chanel suits who works as a staff writer at the New York Times. The Manhattan doyenne is literally the racist version.
Zionism dictates racial and religious supremacy. Israel, a state built on ethnically cleansed land, thus operates under the veil of a democracy in which the Jewish population is the exclusive beneficiary of the democratic process. However, Israel’s Jewish population is itself stratified within an ethnic hierarchy, where prosperous Ashkenazi (white Jews of European descent) dominate the economy, media and politics. In comparison, Mizrahi and Sephardi (Jews of MENA descent) suffer socio-economic hardship.
If you have ever been to Jerusalem, you know what I am describing. The disparity is shocking. It is like going to the Jim Crow South in America. It is a type of white supremacy. It is racism. It is apartheid, but even worse. It is severe brutality, communist strength brutality. This type of racism means that white lady at the New York Times can write about everybody else and decide on their narratives. Moreover, like anti-Semitism, racism is part of the racket of the Zionist Cultural Revolution.
Racism is all too evident in Israel. Ruling class Zionists cause the hardship that the Mizrahi and Sephardi suffer. Through rhetoric and vitriol they’re able to redirect anger toward African migrant communities who’re victims of greater oppression themselves. It’s a mess, but you never hear about it. The media, the Jerusalem press corps, sees to that.
Zionism is a white, Ashkenazi phenomenon, based on the denial of the Orient and the rights of both Mizrahi Jews and the Palestinians, “the other.” You could call it white supremacy and you’d be right. Solzhenitsyn detailed it in the banned book, 200 Years Together, which documents the mutual understanding between Russians and Jews of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn could have easily been writing about Neoconservatives in America.
The Zionist Cultural Revolution
There’s an uncomfortable similarity between the Zionist Neoconservatives in America —and their dedicated “intelligence community” such as the CIA and the NSA— and the Zionist Bolsheviks who ran the early Soviet terror agencies that committed all of the atrocities: NKVD, Cheka, KGB, and GRU —80% of Stalin’s Soviet government, from bottom to top. Zionists were responsible for The Great Terror and the genocides of tens of millions, “The New Martyrs” —all of those who were martyred in the years of severe persecutions against the faith and the Orthodox Church, which continues in the world for over 70 years in the 21st century.
The persecution started immediately after the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks took over. The persecution against the faithful was purposeful and long, and surpassed in cruelty all the previous persecutions against the Church, including those by the Roman emperors in the first, second, and third centuries. The Bolsheviks created an antihuman and criminal ideology to guide rulers for decades. This ideology led to millions of victims, the people of different beliefs and social status. They began with the class struggle against the nobility and merchant class followed by the dispossession of well-to-do peasants, then resettlement and destruction of whole ethnic communities. One destruction campaign followed another and these criminal actions continued for several decades. The Russian Orthodox Church was only one of the targets of that suicidal campaign waged by the authorities against their own people.
The number is unknown, whether it was tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions, because the whole truth about those years will never be revealed. Not all the archives will ever be opened so that the records could reveal who remained faithful to the end and who stumbled. Besides, there are many forgeries in the transcripts of interrogation we use to restore the story of a given new martyr. Some recorded as having renounced their faith did not actually do that.
Revolutions are always atheist in nature. The Zionist cultural revolution is the revolution of revolutions. In fact, it seems to have been modeled on the fall of Byzantium. Atheist revolutionaries spread religious disunity and divide the majority of people as a means to gain political or territorial advantage for a minority of atheists. A revolution can manifest as an inner enemy which appears within the bowels of society to break its spirit, turning the majority into a helpless victim of the minority or suzerainty as it did in Byzantium after nearly twelve hundred years of peaceful living.
I wrote this a year ago: “I am not going to go into detail about the Neocons because there’s really not too much to say beyond the salient fact that they are a deliberately constructed social group, almost like a secret society, that has only one unifying principle: to make money and do it anyway they desire, because when you are morally bankrupt the world is your oyster of possibilities. Neoconservatives identify themselves as whomever is paying them to do so. In layman’s terms, we would call them con artists.”
From a policy perspective, the reference that makes most sense to the Neocons and racist Zionist Jews, in general, is the one instance in our country’s history of American authoritarianism — the one party terror state that was the Jim Crow South — was built on minority rule. The degree of discrimination against blacks under Jim Crow was unparalleled. Yet elite opinion at the time sanctioned it as legally-mandated white supremacy. This is exactly the same kind of warped thinking and public manipulation we see among Neocons today.
The “intelligence community” believes the U.S. was built on this superiority of white men. Their professional culture was shaped by that system. Slavery and Jim Crow may be behind us, and attitudes have no doubt become more open and tolerant over time, but they remain unchanged.
Racist Neoconservatives have run Washington DC this way. The Zionist elite minority and their cult-like war machine. Their think tanks, in particular, should all be abolished like slavery and then segregation was.
What is the difference between the oppressors in the U.S. “intelligence community” and the infamous oppressors of Nazi and Soviet secret police? Nothing. The slightly longer answer to that question is that the Americans are clumsy to the point of incompetence and even more arrogant than the Germans and Russians.
“Stalin’s terror” is, in fact, Zionist terror. Anti-Jewish sentiment is widespread among people of the former USSR because Jews played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role effectively dominating the Soviet terror regime during its early years. In turn, Neoconservatives carried this torch to America and along with the fabricated “war in Iraq” in 2003, lied their way to achieve nearly every war since World War Two.
The use of terror to revolutionize society is an historical precedent established by the Bolsheviks. We need to talk about the bullies in America’s politburo. We need to talk about their exploitation of religion. We need to talk about the British Zionist enterprise —The Saker (Andrei Raevsky) calls this the “AngloZionist Empire” —in relation to America’s alliance with Israel. We need to look at racial trouble in the U.S. and issues like “cancel culture” with respect to the Zionist Cultural Revolution.
U.S. President Trump has encouraged these conversations. You just were not aware that this is part and parcel of “draining the swamp.” He’s turned the British Zionist enterprise upside down. He’s called their bluff. Donald Trump is essentially “containing” Zionism to use a word that the Neocons understand. The Zionism he seeks to contain is the toxic part, the white supremacist ideology. For example, Trump is pushing back against the rising tide of Marxist critical theory. He’s quietly containing the Zionist cultural revolution in America. In order to contain today’s cultural threats, the oppression must be eliminated.
At the same time, Israel is rejecting that political Zionism. Slowly. It’s a process. A very slow one. Apartheid in South Africa was not resolved over night. Apartheid is a cancer in the body politic of the world. One of the largest Christian denomination, the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), used Christian theology to argue a theological support for the Apartheid regime. The Dutch Reformed Church, with 3 million Christian members, remained the “official religion” of the Apartheid-supporting National Party.
How the Zionist regime and settler colonialism will be brought to an end is an important question to discuss. The clearest and most practical vision to date seems to be that, as in South Africa, the Zionist state will have no choice but to capitulate.
How the Zionist cultural revolution will be brought to an end is the question we all must face if we want to stop the chaos in the world. We need a mutual understanding of the answer.
Live Not By Lies
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote the essay “Live not by Lies” in 1974 on the same day in February that year that secret police broke into his apartment and arrested him. The next day he was exiled to West Germany.
Everybody today knows that the media is a horrific problem. The extent of lying in the press is simply out of control. Now we need to better understand why journalists gesticulate wildly on social media, wave their arms in the air at the New York Times, shout at the crowd from CNNand MSNBC, invent things in the Washington Post, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve in The Atlantic.
All those years ago, Solzhenitsyn attempted to inform the world that the Bolsheviks committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. And he said the fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the “fourth estate” —the press, the media, and the profession of journalism— is in the hands of the Bolshevik perpetrators. He was warning that the “fourth estate” is the “fifth column.” Today the media is visibly filled with the “intelligence community.” Simply turn on CNN; former intelligence agency officials are now political commentators.
Julian Assange reported that nearly every war that has started in the last 50 years has been a result of media lies. The “intelligence community” has him locked up in a British prison.
The Balfour Declaration was only considered to be a first step that would enable the British Government to entreat the sympathies of world Jewry, for the Entente war effort and a British Palestine. To that end, the Government quickly embarked upon an elaborate and extensive propaganda campaign. This endeavour was undertaken with the ever present advice and work of Britain’s Zionist supporters in London. Together, British officials and Zionists sought to create and disseminate the myth that the Jewish nation was about to be reborn in Palestine under British auspices, which would capture the Jewish imagination but would in no way commit the Government to anything beyond the vague terms of the Balfour Declaration.
This was the sum of British policy towards the Zionist movement for the remainder of the war and the extent of the Anglo-Zionist alliance, as it was originally conceived by the British Government. Journalism has been a British military strategy since 1917.
Journalism in America today is, in fact, Zionist “hasbara” and therefore, by design, is intended to hide the truth. Hasbara is the Israeli word for how Zionists explain to the world through the Jerusalem press corps their slaughter of Palestinians. It is almost never the truth. Zionist propaganda and the most ridiculous lies. The sole purpose of Zionist hasbara is to side step conspiracy.
For example, maybe the biggest historic example, in fact, whenever there’s an attempt to discuss ancient Christianity and its legacy of Eastern Orthodox Christianity —iconoclasm, persecution, martyrdom, and subsequently a massive, Holocaust-like, genocide of Christians— it is shut down in the same manner that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others were when speaking of Jews as perpetrators.
Simply put, the Orthodox Christian Church is not a political organization. While the Church is a global body, it does not function like a transnational corporation. Any “power” has been decentralized. Inasmuch as there is no PR, marketing, or even a spokesperson to be found, the Orthodox Church is even without the Madison Avenue language necessary to express the concept of the “New Martyrs” in secular terms.
In other words, Christian imperialism exists in the West today in the person of the Pope. In the East, it was and remains a temptation. Orthodox Christianity peacefully held the nations of Byzantium together for twelve hundred years, not imperialism. Since 1453 and the fall of Constantinople, anti-Christian forces worldwide, and destructive forces inside the broader Christian Church itself have carried out the real imperialistic plans.
Christians are the victims of worldwide persecution and this does not minimize the Holocaust nor demonetize Islam. The untold story of the 20th century is the murder of over 50 million Christians, mostly at the hands of communist and Islamic regimes. Christian genocide has continued into the 21st century. In an era when we get get statistics for nearly anything at our fingertips within seconds, some how the number of Christian lives lost to terrorism, war, genocide and mass murder is strangely missing.
It is estimated that the number of Christian martyrs during the 20th century far exceeds that of all the martyrs who died for Christ during the first three centuries of Christianity. Simply combine Christian mass murders worldwide.
The political scientist, adviser and academic who spent more than half a century at Harvard University, Samuel P. Huntington has been credited with forecasting the cultural and religious context in which a 9/11-type incident could emerge. In 1993 Huntington argued that with the collapse of communism, ideological rivalries would no longer drive global affairs. Conflict would occur between groups defined by culture, religion and identity. His thesis was propped up amid NATO’s fresh attacks on the Slavic (Orthodox Christianity) fraternity.
Huntington is the Zionist cult scholar who inspired “Israel Lobby” book by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Another Zionist cult political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski (the father of corporate media maven Mika Brzezinski), back in 1997, in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives wrote: “After the victory over communism, we need a split of Orthodoxy and the breakdown of Russia, and Ukraine, where betrayal is the norm of public morality, will help us in this.”
When Zionist Brzezinski died, Zionist Radek Sikorski, the former foreign minister of Poland and “a distinguished statesman at the Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies” wrote a very telling love letter to “Zbig” in the Washington Post. Zionist Sikorski is married to an American columnist, Zionist Anne Applebaum. Applebaum and her husband serve as British foreign agents of influence. Lucas is British. Are Sikorski and Applebaum the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of the 21st century? Communists? Maybe not, but they have not been playing for Team USA. Applebaum has spent the better part of her dreadful writing career trashing the conservative Catholic majority of Poland, which is literally all of Poland. The country is at least 93% Roman Catholic in faith. Also, Anne Applebaum heavily plagiarized Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (several books worth) and censored out the parts incriminating the cabal of atheist Jews and the Anglo-American “intelligence community” or their unspeakable crimes in Soviet Russia, so there’s that.
According to U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, Brzezinski, after the collapse of communism, the Zionist West’s main opponent became the Orthodox Christian Church. The Balkan wars manufactured by NATO in the late 1990s were a manifestation of this concept. Samuel Huntington peddled an international conspiracy theory that became the cornerstone of NATO after the fall of the USSR.
I wrote this a year ago and it has taken me that long to get the full depth and vastness of the terror: “Remember, the true religions prevent the New World Order, that is the crux here. With that in mind, you should know, if you don’t already, that Orthodox Christianity is the truest form of Christianity. It just is. Don’t argue with me, just accept it. Here comes the worse part. After the devastation that NATO caused in Serbia in the 1990s people started to notice a pattern with NATO operations after the second World War, specifically that the Alliance was bombing Christians. For a person like me, I don’t normally think in such terms so that before the recent crisis in Ukraine, I myself brushed it off as a conspiracy theory. Well, guys, it is not.”
Zionist Albright spelled out the first two decades of the new millennium in 1998: “As we prepare to undertake NATO’s first post-Cold War expansion next spring, prior to the Summit, the Alliance is considering its vision for the future, and initiatives critical to preparing NATO for the 21st century.” The transparent cabal have focused on so-called “disinformation.” Check out Albright’s speech at the Atlantic Council in 2017 regarding the alleged threat of “digital disinformation.”
Life is full of disinformation, it’s called lying.
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
The very first adventure of one of the world’s most beloved cartoon characters.
If someone would give me a handsome book deal, I’d love to do a children’s book or even young adult franchise in tribute to 1929 publication, “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” and Belgian cartoonist Hergé, where Tintin discovers the truth about the Bolsheviks, specifically the theft of the country’s wealth by its leadership.
Listen, Vladimir Lenin was a grifter who exploited the Jews. This is a simple and easily understandable message that we ought to convey broadly. In fact, in the original book, Tintin stumbles upon the secret cache of riches that Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky have stolen from the Soviet people.
Armed with this knowledge, Tintin flees Russia with his faithful dog called Snowy returning safely to Belgium and is greeted with great pomp by the rapturous public. The ending to my book would be just as magnificent as the original. Because in my book the pathological hatred for President Trump, the Neoconservative fifth column and their think tanks in our nation’s capital would be really explosive.
I would update the story for 2020 in America and my character would visit “the Land of the Neoconservatives.” Because the Bolsheviks —Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky— were a British cabal in Russia just like the Neoconservatives are today in America. A sneaky fifth column of total frauds supported by the same dark financial structure in the City of London, in the interest of the global elite. I might even use the phrase “Davos Man” Samuel P. Huntington penned in a paper about elites and “an emerging global superclass” of “Davos men” or “gold-collar workers.”
I am actually quite serious. The mutual understanding is one that we ought to be teaching kids as soon as they can understand that conspiracy is a part of modern life. Importantly, convey the message that conspiracy aims to divide us and is a most always blamed on the victim.
No, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was not a Jewish plot. In fact, kids ought to learn about the function of economic conspiracies and the political perversion of the religions so they don’t grow up to be adults who fall for hate propaganda and deceitful intellectual ideologies.
To find unity, let’s bring conspiracy out of the shadows.
While Solzhenitsyn’s work was a significant contribution to such mutual understanding, many were offended by his suggestion that some Jews also need to come to terms with their sins. I take a different stand, maybe because I have the benefit of hindsight and luxury of progress. I say we need to look at ourselves. Look within U.S. foreign policy. Look at the trillions of dollars that America has sent in aid to fund the Israel project. Don’t blame the “Jooz.”
I believe that we are at an important crossroads of knowledge. It is time for everybody to take a closer inspection in the mirror to reflect on how we arrived here, in order to fully shift the understanding internally. The mirror reveals it all, crystal clear, if we’re willing to look.
The veil of the mutual understanding was lifted in Ukraine. Did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn change the course of either the East or the West? Maybe not back then. But his words have had residual impact since the Harvard speech, for certain, and we are only now really starting to appreciate them as we should, four decades later.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke of a “moral revolution” that would move beyond the excesses of modernity, yet without returning to the spiritual despotisms of the past. Because he instinctively knew that the so-called “intelligence community” was up to no good and was scheming to split peaceful religions and society, in general. The Bolsheviks had relied on those covert actions. And ascetic religions were and are the enemy of the “intelligence community,” back then and now, because these religious practices allow a man to take control of himself in a powerful way, to think for himself.
Thus, the immediate threat to American national security is our military-industrial complex and specifically its intelligence agencies that pervert religions around the world. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it all those years ago at Harvard. But he used words we did not understand at the time. Because we were not prepared to hear them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood that spiritual genocide, a cancer resulting from a system, like communism, can be not only be difficult to recognize—and many people are entirely unaware that this type of terror even exists.
Let’s try internal realization instead of finger pointing. When we seek knowledge about the world’s damaged bullies through compassion and understanding, we will eventually come to a state of full unity through mutual understanding. This is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tried.
They need to understand that we know. We need to understand that they are human.
Solzhenitsyn sought to encourage a mutual understanding between Russians and Jews. He even cooperated with the CIA until it became clear that they like the Jewish politburo in the Soviet government were equally as perverted, equally as corrupted from their original course.
The mutual understanding is that the peaceful religions have been been perverted for the purpose of terror. We only now can begin to understand all of this. Because we are finally having a spiritual awakening in America.
On a policy level, this leads to better decision making. Because humility fosters critical thinking. It is also important in ending wars and in conflict resolution. It enables a policy where a nation is more likely to accept that it wrongfully provoked war. And this kind of public policy starts with education of the very young.
“It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility,” said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Nicholas Molodyko is a writer in Chicago who writes about Western popular culture and politics in relation to the secret history of the Eastern religions. After writing professionally in the fields of public health research and international development, while working in Europe, Asia and Africa, he is now writing independently at Mediapart in France.
On this extended interview I delved together with Steven and Jana Ben Nun into some of the most troubling questions to do with my work on Jewish ID politics and the true meaning of drifting away from Athens and its ethos. I can already see that many people have watched this interview in the last few hours. I hope you like it and share it with friends and foes.
Thanks for supporting Gilad’s battle for truth and justice.
My battle for truth involves a serious commitment and some substantial expenses. I have put my career on the line, I could do with your support..
Earlier this month, I conducted an interview with Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University, to discuss different issues such as racism, economic inequality, and partisan polarization. He was very generous with his time and provided us with in-depth analyses of such fundamental issues.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky is John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at Stanford’s School of Medicine, and a research associate at the Institute of Primate Research of the National Museums of Kenya. He is a recipient of a MacArthur genius fellowship and the author of several books, including Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress-Related Diseases and Coping (1995) and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017).
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Question: Thank you very much for being with me, Dr. Sapolsky. Now, let’s start with the recent events in the United States, especially the police killing of George Floyd and the protests that broke out afterward. When something like that happens, what’s the first thing that comes into your mind?
Answer: I think basically racism is the single biggest historical problem in the United States. To use a religious word that I use as someone who is not religious, I think it is the “original sin” of the United States. And it did not end with slavery ending in 1865. It did not end with racial segregation ending in the 1960s. It remains just as much of a problem.
The only difference between the George Floyd case and so many others is that somebody videotaped it this time, not that the police actions are new. This has been happening for more than a hundred years or so. All that is happening is people are being able to document it to prove what is actually occurring. All of that said, we’ve now had videotapes of numerous African-American men being killed by the police in the last few years, and each time it causes some protests. This is the first time it has caused protests this big, and maybe this is going to cause meaningful changes, but I’m not optimistic about that. People have short memories in this country.
Q: So, do you regard racism as a cultural issue, or is it an innate characteristic of human beings?
A: Well, in so far as I think the science shows, race is not a particularly strong innate category in our heads, and racism can be changed as an unconscious category surprisingly easily. We are not looking at biology here. It’s cultural, but it is very deeply cultural.
“I think basically racism is the single biggest historical problem in the United States,” says Dr. Robert Sapolsky.
In some ways, the most depressing version of it was a study in the 1950s by a husband-and-wife pair of psychologists that horrified anyone who thought about it. It was this famous first study where they took black kids and gave them a choice of playing with a white doll or a black doll and asked them which one they wanted to play with and why. It showed that black kids in America, even at age seven, were already saying the white doll “is prettier”, the white doll “is nicer”, and the white doll “isn’t scary”. Seven-year-old black kids have already been taught to think about themselves that way!
When there was this famous case in the 1950s in the Supreme Court, where they finally ruled that you cannot have racial segregation, that you cannot be like South Africa, and that you cannot have separate schools for black kids and schools for white kids, that study was one of the most cited reasons behind the court’s decision.
Researchers are STILL finding the exact same thing. Your average black kid today still prefers to play with white dolls, because they’re “nicer” and they’re “less likely to hurt you”. So, racism is such a deep, deep phenomenon here, and few things say that more clearly than when people have been conditioned to have negative, racist feelings about themselves.
Q: As a neurobiologist, what do you regard as viable solutions to the issue of racism?
A: Well, there are slight hints of things to be optimistic about from the standpoint of neurobiology. For instance, if you put a white American in a brain scanner, and you quickly flash up a series of pictures of faces on a screen, and you flash up the face of an African-American person, in approximately seventy-five percent of white people, there’s an activation of the amygdala, which is a part of the brain that has to do with fear and anxiety and aggression. Oh, my god! This is fascinating and so depressing at the same time.
Also, the part of the brain that processes “faces” (called the fusiform cortex) does not activate as much in those seventy-five percent of white people looking at a black face, because it doesn’t count as “a face” as much. It’s not as much of a person. So, oh my God, this is so depressing and so horrible!
But wait a second, what about the twenty-five percent of the people where that does not happen? The answer is those are white people who grew up with close friends who are African-American. Those are people who had a romantic relationship with an African-American somewhere along the way. In another word, it is not inevitable but some of the best solutions for that start when you’re two years old.
Current racial segregation in schools in the U.S. is not because of laws, but because of economic inequality and cultural factors, the professor remarks.
However, in many parts of the United States in the big cities, the level of racial segregation – the extent to which if you’re black you are likely to be going to a public school, where 95 percent of the other kids are black, and if you’re white, the same thing in that direction – is as bad as it was in the 1950s. It’s not because of laws, but because of economics and cultural factors.
So, it is the massive issues that need to be changed starting early in life. Although it is possible to take an adult who was a racist – even on the most implicit, unconscious level – and change him or her, but it’s hard work and it’s a lot harder than preventing a three-year-old from becoming a racist in the first place. But the other issue is just such enormous economic inequality in this country by race. It’s so deeply structured in the economic and educational system here that all it does is find ways to become stronger each generation.
Q: You mentioned economic inequality and how being poor or rich leads to some kind of economic segregation. Now, I want to know what the findings show about being poor, especially with regard to children who are born into poverty.
A: I spent years studying what stress and stress hormones and poverty can do to the hippocampus – the part of the brain relevant to memory and learning. That’s so important and so interesting. However, I now think I spent thirty years of my life wasted because I was studying the wrong part of the brain. Much more interesting is studying that a stressor such as poverty not only makes you have less of a memory, but it also makes you more prone to depression. Even more importantly, it makes you more prone to fear and anxiety. Even more importantly, it makes you prone to making bad decisions when you have to make them quickly. And what I’m now starting to think is the most important one, it makes you less empathic toward other people.
Everyone focused on how poverty makes people less healthy. Poverty also makes for a more violent world, and it makes for a less kind and less humane world. That last part I think is the most important one. Even today, we know a little bit about what’s going on in the brain, in a world in which people are stressed and their brains have changed in response to stress from the time they were a fetus because stress hormone levels in pregnant women vary as a function of poverty levels. In other words, higher stress hormone levels in pregnant women are already affecting the brain of the fetus. Even at that stage, you are already changing aspects of the brain that could be for your entire life, that are going to make for people who make a society that is less kind and less safe and less healthy and less intelligent in every possible way that could go wrong. That’s just enormously depressing.
Q: You have spoken and written extensively about how economic inequality affects an individual and a society. Could you explain how that works?
A: When you look at poverty, you see that it is a predictor of poor health, more violence, less kindness, and all of those things. But even more important than poverty is inequality, which is not so much about being poor, rather, it’s about being reminded every day of what you don’t have and what others have. It’s the comparison.
Researchers have spent a lot of time showing that when inequality increases, the health of the poor gets worse, their crime rates go up and all of those bad things happen. But something that is even more interesting in some ways is that when inequality goes up, the health of the WEALTHY gets worse too. Of course, not as much as the poor, but it gets worse for them as well.
It’s not that if you are in the right part of society you can selfishly say that it’s their problem, because even if you’re wealthy and you don’t care about anyone else, living in an unequal society is even bad for your health, because it stresses you. For example, you have to spend more of your income on your house alarm system. You have to spend more of your income sending your children to private schools because the public schools are “too dangerous”.
It’s very stressful to try to construct a world in which nothing stressful can happen to you. In other words, it’s every level of society that pays for it and I think we see that in the United States. That’s why most of the wealthy vote for Donald Trump. Because they suffer too.
The voting patterns show that the wealthy in the cities are more in the direction of supporting the Democrats and are a little more liberal, in contrast to the wealthy in the suburbs and in rural areas. If you’re wealthy in a city, for example, if you’re going to the opera and you’re paying a crazy amount of money for it and you’re wearing a tuxedo and your life is wonderful, even just getting out of your limousine and going to the opera, you’re gonna have to step over somebody who is sleeping on the sidewalk because he is homeless. Even on the level of selfishness, you would say, “We have to do something about the homeless because it’s really very uncomfortable to go to the opera and have to see homeless people.”
But if you live in the rural areas and you’re a billionaire and you go to a rodeo of cowboys steer roping, if that’s your idea of fun, you’re not gonna have to step over homeless people – it’s a different world than that. But even the wealthy here pay a price for inequality.
Q: So, inequality is generally another category to divide the world into Us-es and Thems, which in turn would lead to more public anxiety.
A: Absolutely. And as a measure of how fast that could happen, you do studies where university students play an economic game, and then you introduce inequality to the game. For instance, half of the subjects start the game with ten units of money, and the other half start with a hundred units. Two minutes ago, the students were economically roughly equal and they were from the same dormitory. But now, even within minutes of artificially introducing inequality to the game, you already begin to see some of those behaviors.
According to Dr. Sapolsky, when there’s rampant economic inequality in a society, even the wealthy are negatively impacted by it.
It is so fast and it is so strong. To see one of the reasons why kindness and empathy go down, suppose you have a world where everybody gets one of two different incomes: Fifty percent of people get ten units of money a year, and fifty percent get a hundred units a year. That’s so unequal! But even with that, at any given point, half of the people in your world at least have the same income that you do. At least economically they are somewhat equal to you.
But if instead, only one percent of people in the country are getting the same income you’re getting, the inequality spreads out enormously. There will be fewer people who are your peers. A greater percentage of the people around you are either poorer or richer than you. If they’re poorer than you, you are afraid of them, or you want to keep them away, or you’re disgusted by them. And if they’re richer than you, you resent them and you envy them. So, you don’t have equals. The more inequality there is, the more of a hierarchy there is, and the more of a hierarchy, the fewer peers you have whom you are more likely to be kind to, and who are more likely to be kind to you. It makes for a more awful world by definition.
Q: Like the U.S., my own country, Iran, has turned into a very divided nation in recent years. However, when I follow the U.S. news, I feel that the level of polarization in the United States is perhaps much worse than that of Iran. What are the roots of such polarization? And what do you think is the solution?
A: Well, to begin with, Donald Trump is not the cause of it. Donald Trump is a symptom of it. He is the complete logical outcome of what the issues are here. I think basically what has happened is inequality has gone up, employment has gotten worse, and poverty levels have gotten worse, because so many jobs have been sent to poorer countries by the corporations here that don’t care or because so many more jobs are being automated.
And what happens as people get more stressed and more angry and more worried is, whether you are a rat or a baboon or a human, the basic neurobiology is to turn on somebody else and to have a very hard time realizing that it’s the fault of the people up on top, instead of the person who’s standing right next to you hoping for the same job.
The people in power are brilliant at making you turn on the person standing next to you instead of on them. And all it does is make things worse. If you are in the most dangerous part of the population in the United States, which is if you are an older white guy who never got much education and has now spent thirty years getting less proportionate income each year, and thirty years watching more and more people competing for your job, especially people who do not look like you, and seeing more and more of the teachers at your children’s schools not looking like you, and the people on television not looking like you, and the people getting elected not looking like you, and all of that is unconsciously telling you over and over that it is not your culture anymore, that you do not rule this place anymore.
Q: So, in this context, the idea of bringing people of different backgrounds together doesn’t resolve that issue, right?
A: No, because you have to do it the right way. People used to say “Ooh, if you could take people from two different groups who don’t like each other, if you could bring individuals together and let them spend time together, they will learn to see each other as individuals and they will learn that there are more similarities than differences and it would be wonderful, etc.” However, sixty years’ worth of research on contact theory has shown that most of the time it does not work, because it has not been done in the correct way. And if you do it the really wrong way, you will make things worse.
It takes a lot for it to work correctly. You can’t do it for a weekend or even a week. It takes contact lasting for months. It has to be on equal grounds. It has to be in settings where you are not seeing the other group’s symbols, which are a constant reminder to you.
“What happens as people get more stressed and more angry and more worried is … they turn on somebody else and have a very hard time realizing that it’s the fault of the people up on top, instead of the person who’s standing right next to you hoping for the same job,” says the professor.
This past summer, my family and I went to Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants have been killing each other forever, and in the 1990s, they amazingly worked out a treaty and it has become much more peaceful. Nevertheless, the capital, Belfast, is still a completely divided city. There’s a Catholic half and a Protestant half, and there’s a wall in-between. We took a tour where, for the first half of the day a seventy-five-year-old man who used to be a fighter for the Catholic groups takes you on a tour through the Catholic area, and then around twelve o’clock, you go to the gate and he hands you off to a protestant guy, who was a gunman for the Protestant group for years when he was a young man but now runs the tour of his side. Both of those men had been in jail. Both of those men killed people.
Now, you go to one side, and it has nothing but Irish flags on every single house, and the other side has nothing but British flags on every house and pictures of Queen Elizabeth, and how wonderful she is, and so on. The point is, you know, you can’t do it where you are being reminded every minute what they [pointing to the right] did to your ancestors 200 years ago, or what they [pointing to the left] did to your ancestors in the seventh century.
So, it takes a lot of work to do it right. One of the areas where it has been most studied is in summer camp programs for Palestinian and Israeli teenagers, where you bring them together and you try to do it right. You get them in a neutral setting, and you give them something they all have as a shared goal. For instance, they’re brought to a place where they have no symbols – they cannot have flags or anything like that – then you show them this field full of boulders and rocks and weeds, and you say, “Okay, if you guys wanna work together like crazy for the next week to turn this into a football field, go for it. There you go. That’s the only way you’re gonna have a football field.” And then they work like crazy, and they work in teams together, which is the sort of thing that actually helps, and you show that when they leave at the end of these two weeks, some of them have had a change in their attitudes.
They’ve been doing that for twenty years, and despite that occasional good news, what the studies have also shown is that no person who ever went to one of those groups on either side has become a leader of a peace group; next to no person on either side has stayed in touch with the person they became friends with; no person has caused other people to change their opinions. What you get instead is that the researchers come back to them one year later to ask them about the other side, and they say, “Oh, those people? They’re terrible! They’ve stolen our land,” or “They’re terrorists. They’re terrible, rotten people.” But then they say, “Oh, I knew this one guy though… He was a good guy. You know, they’re not all that way. You know, but there was this guy… I should email him to see how he’s doing,” and then they never do that. But the overall prejudice does not go away, and whatever changes there have been in your attitudes, you do not spread them to anybody else. So, it takes so much work. It takes years.
Q: And goodwill on both sides.
A: And goodwill! You have to want the change to occur. You have to actually accept that the current situation is not good. People here often say, “Oh, what’s the cause of Islamic rage against the West? It’s history. They used to be the Ottoman Empire. They used to be the Moorish Empire. They used to be amazing and now look at them. They’re just upset at what they lost in history.” So, what’s Donald Trump about? “Make America great AGAIN!” AGAIN! And what does that mean? As a secret sign to the people who support him, make it a country again where, if you are a man, you rule your home. If you are white, you rule your country. If you are Christian, you are in charge of the religious culture in your country. It’s “Make America great AGAIN!” And you are saying, “I am part of the people who feel like history has left me behind, and this used to be my place to rule, and it’s no longer like that, and we need to go back.” It’s the same historicism.
Q: Now, I also want to talk about your book, “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst”. In your book, you argue that “knowing a judge’s opinions about Plato, Nietzsche, Rawls,” and other philosophers “gives you less predictive power about her judicial decisions than knowing if she’s hungry.” Could you elaborate what that means?
A: Yeah, it’s wonderful! I love that finding – that finding and the finding that if you put someone in a room that smells bad, people become more politically conservative about social issues. I tell those findings to an audience and you could hear people say, “Whoa!” Or whenever I’m speaking to law students and I tell that one about judges, you can just hear people laughing a little bit in the audience and saying, “Oh, my God! What is wrong with us?”
Q: So, would you explain what happens in the study?
A: Okay. In this study, the researchers looked at parole boards. A parole board is a panel of people who decide whether a prisoner has behaved well enough that they should be released early. So, it was a study looking at parole board judges’ decisions, and it showed that the single biggest predictor of whether a prisoner was paroled or sent back to jail was how many hours it has been since the parole board judges had a MEAL. If you appeared before a judge right after they had a meal, you had a sixty-percent chance of being paroled. By three hours later, it was down to a zero-percent chance.
And then you ask the judge afterward, “Wow! That’s interesting! You let this guy [pointing to the right] free two hours ago, but now you sent this guy [pointing to the left] back to jail. How come?” And they will talk to you about Aristotle and Plato. They’re not gonna say because I’m hungry. But the biology of it shows that that’s the case. When their blood sugar levels are low, people become less generous, they become less empathic, and they become likely to cheat when they’re playing an economic game. And why is this? Because the parts of your brain that have to make you do the harder thing when it is the right thing to do have a higher metabolic rate than other parts of your brain. In other words, they demand more energy.
It takes energy to think twice about someone instead of just saying, “They’re rotten! Throw them back to jail.” Stopping and saying, “Well, let’s see. They grew up in a world that I never experienced. What was the world like for them? What is…” That takes more work! And that takes more brainpower in a very literal way. The frontal cortex, which is central for making you do the harder thing when the harder thing is the more difficult thing, needs more energy. Literally, your brain needs more energy to think about somebody else’s perspective on the world than thinking about your own.
After the study was published, everybody came up with what they thought was a confound, saying, “Here’s why they did the statistics wrong.” However, it has completely held up as a finding.
Q: That’s really interesting. You said that the finding has held up against criticisms. So, has it been replicated?
A: I do not know if it’s been replicated. But there were a number of responses to it. For instance, the critics said those who conducted the study had brought the prisoners from the less dangerous prisons early in the day and brought the more dangerous prisoners later in the day, and that’s why later in the day you’re more likely to send them back to jail. However, they controlled for that, and they showed a whole bunch of possible controls that ruled that out. Basically, all of the confounds that people have pointed out were found not to be real problems.
Also, another version of this same idea is one I just mentioned, which is you put someone in an economic game, and if they’re hungry, they cheat more, they’re less generous, and they’re less kind to other players. Now, showing what it’s all about, you either give them a drink of fruit juice that is full of sugar, or as an experimental control, a drink which is full of artificial sugar, which does not do anything to brain metabolism. So, give somebody actual sugar afterward and they will now become more generous. It’s the biology [laughing]. It’s not because of having a great meal. It’s literally the biology of it. And we’re biological machines. Big surprise!
Q: Let’s also talk about the roots of conservatism and liberalism and the studies with regard to this subject, which I believe are crucial in understanding the roots of conservatism and liberalism.
A: Sure. If you’re trying to understand why someone becomes a liberal or a conservative, or what their attitudes are about economic systems, causes of poverty, causes of violence, etc., I think there are two critical factors that no political scientist thinks of. The first thing is to find out how easily disgusted someone is. Because if they have a low threshold for feeling disgusted, they’re going to more easily be disgusted by people who need their help, instead of feeling empathy for them. The second thing is do they feel excited or scared by something that is new or uncertain to them? If it’s exciting, you’re likely to be a liberal. New people, new ideas, new facial appearances, new foods, new beliefs, etc. are exciting to liberals. But if those things are scary to you and cause you to have an anxiety response, you’re gonna be a conservative. Because it’s always gonna be the case that the past is more comfortable for you than the future.
Look at somebody’s heart rate in a circumstance like that and that is a predictor of what their attitudes are going to be about issues that split conservatives and liberals. Show people pictures of something like a wound that is infected and full of flies, and see how much their stomach lurches – and people whose stomachs lurch a lot are more likely to be social conservatives.
Take a five-year-old child and their mother in a room where there are some new toys to play with. The kid is excited to be playing with them, but after a certain amount of time the mother leaves the room and you measure how much time it takes for the kid to look around and see that mom is not there anymore and to begin to cry, versus continuing to play with the toys. How easily five-year-olds have an anxiety response to novelty is predictive of their voting patterns twenty years later.
This has been shown in different studies by now. Five-year-olds do not sit there and think, “Well, is a Marxist model or a free market model better for solving inequality?” Five-year-olds sit there and feel whether the world is a scary place or is it an exciting place. And that’s the most fundamental difference in terms of the novelty-anxiety connection.
Back to the finding about conservatives and liberals tending to differ on their thresholds for disgust – on average, conservatives have more different kinds of soap in their bathrooms. They have more cleaning products! If you are a conservative, the world is a place where you need to spend more time and money on cleaning than if you are a liberal. These findings tell you that political differences are about unconscious emotional issues, rather than you thinking about whether you can trust Vladimir Putin or not.
Q: I suppose people also move to the extremes on both sides based on the circumstances. What do you think about that?
A: Well, that’s certainly the polarization that has gone on in the United States. Traditionally, liberals and progressives are more tolerant of other opinions than conservatives are. They are more in favor of the freedom of the press. They’re more in favor of pluralistic societies. So, by definition, they are more open to other viewpoints. That’s always been the case. But even liberals have become less open over the last four years. Now, they’re now spending more time attacking other liberals for not being quite as perfect of liberals as they are. When the left – at least in a place like the United States – turns ugly, what they do is they write terrible, mean essays about other people on the left. When the right turns ugly, they kill black people, or gay people, or Jews, or immigrants. But when liberals become really scared, what they’re mostly good at is deciding that other liberals are not as good of liberals as they are!
As another example, when somebody asks people, “Would you be upset if your child married someone from the opposite end of the political spectrum?” even liberals are now more upset than they were four years ago at the prospects of that. Of course, they’re less upset than a conservative would be. But even they have become less tolerant. So, yeah, people move to the extremes.
Q: Dr. Sapolsky, this was such a fascinating conversation, and it was great to hear your thoughts on these issues. Thank you very much for your time.
I had an incredible time yesterday with Adam Green, we covered the most problematic aspects associated with Jewish ID politics (both Zionists and so called ‘anti’). We looked at projection, PRE TSD, Israeli war crimes, blindness, the Hasbara spin and many other topics.
Thanks for supporting Gilad’s battle for truth and justice.
My battle for truth involves a serious commitment and some substantial expenses. I have put my career on the line, I could do with your support..
I wonder if Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda will ever understand the real truth about why his play is so popular…?
Miranda probably believes that if he had written a play about Eugene V. Debs (America’s greatest socialist) his talents, approach and techniques would have produced a spectacle of similarly spectacular success, LOL….
The believers of Broadway are nothing if not wilfully naive (i.e. stupid), unsinkably optimistic and totally oblivious to the jingoistic propaganda which is self-centeredly, brayingly warbled at the top of everyone-on-the-stage’s lungs in the vast majority of Broadway musicals, Hamilton included. Non-Americans often roll their eyes at the inevitably absurd “Hollywood ending” of many US movies, but what can a viewer do when confronted by the endless fake cheer and perpetual smiling of Broadway besides beg for temporary blindness?
Indeed, one of the great results of the coronavirus is the shuttering of Broadway’s lights – may it always be dark inside that incredibly empty-headed art. I find very few things as physically disagreeable as all musical theatre (Bertolt Brecht and Monty Python are exceptions which proves the rule). Opera is just as atrocious, and may I give you a news flash: nobody cares about opera. It is a totally outdated art, and yet the vast majority of public arts funding in much of the West is directed towards opera. Why? The answer is also linked to the success of Hamilton – elitism and 1%-er domination of Western governance.
Musicals are not so very elitist as opera, but the average American man only sees a Broadway play after constant arm-twisting from the missus. And yet… we have had this broad success of Hamilton. How can we explain it? Why must we endure it? When will the American musical finally die, ending their assault on our ears and especially the ears of those poor, suffering parents of high school drama club members?
The answer is clear: the US is a bankocracy, and Hamilton is its unparalleled propaganda
I have not seen Hamilton and I never will – if I hate musicals already, why would I like one which is built around mythologising, propagandising and lying about the greatest central banker in American history?
The popularity of Hamilton is completely attributable to the total domination of corporate media in the 21st century. My last article, US national media is useless – so tell me the good local news sources?, thus had to be published before this one: it discusses how ever since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed the rise of monopolistic media conglomerates, to watch one national US media is to watch them all – there is total uniformity. I also discussed how in music there used to be such a thing as a “local hit” within different US regions, but since 1996 a banal song can be a #1 for as long as 5 months because the conglomerates decide to support it and replay it, replay it, replay it, replay it.
The same goes for Hamilton: advertising works, and the conglomerate media saw a “pro-central banker” play, squealed with delight, and decided it should be bigger than The Bible.
This omnipresence explains why I truly do not need to see Hamilton to write about it intelligently (though I did interview people who have seen it – hey, I’m not a bad journalist who doesn’t do homework) – the US has been OBSESSED with it for years.
But nobody seems to realise why because in all of the drooling, gushing reviews nobody gets at the economic aspects inherent in a play about a central banker. Nobody seems to make the link between the economic program of Western central banker collusion (Quantitative Easing), the reality of a US & Western “bankocracy” (a 10-part series I wrote on this issue can be found here) which has been crystal-clear since 2008 to anyone with half a brain, the elevation of central bank policy over democratic votes in the Eurozone, and then this absurd adoration of Hamilton?
How can it be a mere coincidence that at a time when central bankers have become more powerful than ever we also cannot – still – turn anywhere without being exhorted to love Hamilton? Just as rap music is the musical propaganda of modern Western capitalism, Hamilton is clearly its musical propaganda.
The pro-central bank propaganda is apparently overt during this 3+ hour show: a large part of the show is dedicated to showing how the US central bank was created, and of Alexander Hamilton persuading them of the worth and necessity of a central bank. Hamilton may not use the phrase “QE”, but how can anyone fail to see the link between inequality-creating, 1%er enriching, 99%er impoverishing QE and this stupid play? Like all great art Hamilton apparently does indeed capture the moment – too bad it is the “moment” of ravenous, society-destroying elite bankers.
Since 2015 I have said that the proof that there is no true left in the US is that I have not read of even one stink-bombing of a Hamilton performance. That the US left has not been able to mount any counter-attack on this neoliberal propaganda shows how appallingly clueless they are. Ishmael Reed Tries to Undo the Damage ‘Hamilton’ Has Wrought from The Nation was so notable because it stuck out so very much – it’s the exception which proves the rule.
The US left has been steamrolled by Hamilton and provided (as usual) so very, very little resistance, but Hamilton is a perfect example of just how easy it is to propagandise the US public – such is the extent of the dominance of their corporate media. Media concentration in the US is so absolute that if they decide something or someone or some concept should be promoted – one simply cannot escape it. And, I am sure, talking about Hamilton in this way at a US dinner party is to ensure that you are not invited back, LOL.
How was this central banker propaganda so effectively repackaged into suitable American jingoism?
In July 2020 even the World Socialist Web Site is decrying the attacks on statues of Lincoln and Jefferson; after decades of trying, corporate sponsors are going to force the rabidly anti-American Indian Washington D.C. to finally give up their “Redskins” football mascot/slur – so why on earth aren’t they coming for Hamilton?!
Alexander Hamilton bought and sold slaves, he married into a wealthy slave-owning family – it’s a no-brainer. If you support Hamilton and have some stupid liberal sign up in your front yard YOU are part of the problem (as much for liking awful Broadway as for being an obvious fake-leftist).
However, when we actually consider the economic ideology all over Hamilton we should easily grasp that the corporate-dominated US media is not about to permit sustained attacks on this spectacularly successful pro-central banker propaganda piece. What they are going to do is what places like The Washington Post just did, print lies about how Hamilton “despised slavery”.
Why would Miranda care – he did the same whitewashing. Of course he wasn’t going to talk about how the central banker Hamilton was all about debt slavery (no corporate media gushing in that case), but it’s pretty artistically opportunistic and cynical to make Hamilton some sort of abolitionist just to sell out his stupid musical. Tellingly, Miranda was forced to publicly admit he was wrong to be silent for so long regarding the George Floyd protests, but the guy adores Alexander Hamilton in the QE era – did you really think he was anti-establishment, LOL?
Reading drama reviews always produces plenty of eye-rolls – they are full of hyperbole and purple prose worthy of the biggest off-off-off-Broadway ham; everybody is just so very, very, VERY SPECTACULAR and AMAZING and TALENTED – but The New York Times lead movie critic writing that he “can’t escape tears” when watching Hamilton… how can we explain that?
Like I said, I’m not going to watch Hamilton to find out. I’m not even going to read its plot summary on Wikipedia. I have been unwillingly forced to acquire adequate Hamilton knowledge via cultural osmosis, but I also did ask around.
Part of its appeal, per reports, is undoubtedly based on jingoism and revisionist history – we’re all just so proud to be American (and to be led by heroic bankers in our wonderful bankocracy).
However, what is more shocking is how the play apparently significantly plays up the anti-monarchical, republican roots of the American Revolution for Independence by… upholding the pro-monarchy Alexander Hamilton? Jefferson said of Hamilton: “Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” I hear Miranda’s next play is about the great abolitionist Robert E. Lee.
So the apparently underlying theme of Hamilton is how revolutionary and cool the anti-monarchy stance was (way back in the late 18th century), and it is these ancestor worship-heartstrings which produce tears in fake-leftist pseudo-intelligensia like A.O. Scott. How could they possibly pick Alexander Hamilton as a leader of the fight against aristocratic privilege? Answer: in a bankocracy bankers are the vanguard party, so they simply must be whitewashed as spotless leaders.
Thus we can refer to Scott’s headline – ‘Hamilton’ Review:You Say You Want a Revolution – to get at the heart of what helped draw in so many American males to willingly watch Hamilton: make being conservative “revolutionary”. The play does what Westerners always do – try to end history long before 1917 by perpetuating the false belief that Western liberal democracy is somehow still “progressive” and not fundamentally aristocratic (bourgeois); the play obviously perpetuates the false Western belief that the summit of democracy’s reach is Western liberal democracy and not 20th century socialist democracy. However, with every passing corona hysteria day it’s more and more obvious that in the 21st century the latter is vastly outperforming the former, which did nothing but replace monarchy with bankocracy (thus it was merely a bourgeois/aristocratic revolution).
There are secondary propaganda bases for the success of Hamilton, mainly how it successfully espouses 21st century US liberal (fake-leftist) identity politics. But a huge part of this is merely technical and based entirely on what I can easily prove is the fundamentally reactionary nature of Broadway itself, because absolutely nothing is “Whiter” than Broadway in US culture.
Musicals like Our Town, Oklahoma, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, The Sound of Music, Music Man, Carousel – these are all whiter than Wonder Bread on a styrofoam plate in a snowstorm in themes, composition and musical styles. How can The Unsinkable Molly Brown be played by a Latina, after all? There are no Hindus in Our Town. Finding a young Black girl who can sing, act, AND has red hair is going to make staging a production of Annie difficult, but making Depression-era Daddy Warbucks Black is historically impossible. This is why playgoers have remarked how they have been thrilled by the mere presence of non-White actors in this type of a musical, but also in any musical. All of this supports my assertion of what a fundamentally reactionary institution Broadway is.
The use of rap was also another mere technical – and not intellectual or artistic – pseudo-achievement of Hamilton; that fundamentally reactionary Broadway required 40 years to finally use rap music and Hamilton was the first – big deal? The good news is: nobody over 50 can keep up with such rapid-fire spoken word poetry, and thus many of the elder showgoers surely missed out on the undoubtedly fascinating rap lyrics about the meetings to build the US Treasury.
(Of course, does every rapper think his or her every word is totally fascinating and worthy of your complete concentration and attention? Rappers dominate whatever music they sit in on – in jazz this is the sin of “overplaying” and overplayers are not invited to the next jam session. Sadly, US corporate media rams rap down our throats and refuses to broadcast jazz music literally anywhere, probably because jazz cannot proselytise for individualism and capitalism like rap does with seemingly every breath.)
Western democracy does indeed have two classes: Bankers and everyone else
Making central bankers “cool” – which seems impossible – is the greatest achievement of Hamilton in its effort to propagandise the American public into accepting QE, ZIRP and the post-2008 policies which have gutted the US and left it poised to plummet into prolonged socio-economic chaos following the hysterical corona overreaction.
By portraying Alexander Hamilton as an outsider who worked his way to the top the play undoubtedly allows viewers to maintain a certainly outdated belief in the fiction that the US is a “classless” society; this is just as the election of Barack Obama allowed the creation of the myth that the US had progressed to a “post-racial society”. If that was true – why the George Floyd protests? Miranda thinks Hamilton is a hero mainly because he knows nothing about QE, economics, the class struggle, and because he obviously admires the gangster/bankster values of rap.
If Miranda knew any of those crucial leftist analyses he would have known that in order to maintain this fiction of a “classless” American society absolutely everything must be burned before it: What is identity politics but an endless assertion that absolutely anything – from race to religion to gender to sexual to preference to party affiliation to ___ – is more important than class? Anything to not focus on class!
This explains the reactionary, divisive words of Hamilton as found in the play’s popular song, “Immigrants— we get the job done”. I’m not going to listen to it because when is Broadway very truly funky or cool? However, it surely seems to be an insult to the hard-working capabilities of White Americans – are how is that leftist or progressive? Due to Miranda’s political ignorance and obviously reactionary beliefs he was only too happy to write a song which seeks to divide the worker class based on their country of birth. What’s his next divisive attack, one wonders? May I suggest: “Left-handers do the job a bit differently but still get’er dun”. A pro-immigrant song can be a fine thing, but not coming in the context of banker worship, LOL – it’s an obvious contradiction, and obviously an attempt to distract from Hamilton’s overall capitalist-imperialist ideology with divisive identity politics.
So… not a single stink bomb at a Hamilton performance? Not a single call to take slave-dealer Hamilton off the $10 bill amid these rebellious times? Idiots will deface a statue of Cervantes (the Arab-loving “Multicultural Dreamer”), and steal a Frederick Douglass statue, but the Alexander Hamilton statues outside the US Treasury, in NYC, in Chicago and elsewhere remain standing because he’s apparently “that cool leftist guy from the cool leftist play”?
Alexander Hamilton – cool? Broadway – cool?!?! Hamilton – a leftist play?!
Clearly, the US left has no idea what they are doing, and that’s why we still don’t hear any leftist demands for media discussion about the links between QE, central banker dominance over Western liberal democracies, and the endless corporate promotion of Hamilton.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the NEW ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.
After reading The Saker’s post “The systematic collapse of the US society has begun”, and watching the accelerating social and political disintegration of the United States, I decided to take a look at the origins of this current phenomenon, differentiate between the two opposing factions that have been slowly metastasizing before our eyes over the past two decades and to gauge the likely outcomes of the inevitable conflict that is coming. The mainstream media would have us all believe that the violence and lawlessness that we are seeing on the streets of U.S. cities is due to a popular uprising against systemic, institutionalized racism that permeates every aspect of U.S. life.
The Democratic party and every pop culture figure, athlete, and entertainer that can be put in front of the camera has parroted this idea. Huge corporations have voiced support for “social justice” organizations like of Black Lives Matter. More importantly, they have “donated” hundreds of millions of dollars to such organizations. Seemingly, all of these forces spontaneously allied themselves in response to the police brutality that resulted in the death of yet another innocent, angelic black man on the streets of Minneapolis. This is what you call crafting a narrative.
On the other side of the social, cultural and political divide are those that do not accept the argument that the United States is systemically racist, and do not accept that physical violence, vandalism and theft is an appropriate answer to the perceived injustices put forward by the other side. This side not only rejects the notion that racism is a massive problem that is still the glue that holds together our social and political lives, but also rejects the identity politics that are increasingly peddled by the left. They also see law and order as essential to maintaining a just and functional society. Largely reactionary to the growing political power and social impact of the racism-is-everywhere crowd, they do not enjoy the economic, political and media power wielded by their opponents. They lack the bully pulpit and the war chest of the left. Although lacking the media coverage, this represents the majority of the population.
The Democratic Party’s Old Strategy: Identity Politics
The Democratic Party has always used identity politics to advance the aims of the party. They are masters at it and have engaged in it for over 150 years. A short history lesson would reveal that it was the Democratic Party that supported the institution of slavery in the United States, supported segregation and the Jim Crow laws that ensured that African Americans were second class citizens in a nation that had lost over a half a million lives in a war that resulted in slavery’s demise (at least in the United States).
The Klu Klux Klan was established by Democrats to aid it in enforcing the party’s racist policies, by terrorizing and brutalizing blacks and their white allies for decades. At the height of the party’s policies of racism and segregation, the KKK membership in the country stood at approximately 4 million. Let it not be forgotten that many U.S. Senators and Representatives were former high-ranking members of the KKK. They were all Democrats. Abraham Lincoln; however, who emancipated the slaves, was a Republican. Woodrow Wilson, the supposed “progressive” Democrat, re-segregated the U.S. Armed Forces during his administration. Franklin Roosevelt, another Democrat, interned Japanese Americans in concentration camps during the Second World War.
How does the Democratic Party hide this history of leveraging racism to advance their aims and to maintain their hold on power? By creating the great myth of the “strategic flip”. They have peddled the myth that the Republican party decided to steal their mantel of racism to win support in the southern states. So, we are to believe that the Democrat and Republican parties decided to do a mutual 180 degree turn on racism and segregation just before the height of the civil rights movement in the country?
If this were true, how come most of the politicians who fought against the civil rights movement in the south and resisted the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 were Democrats? The governors and mayors using fire hoses, police dogs and batons on black and white civil rights protesters were largely not Republicans. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a strategic political play by the Democrats. Realizing that the majority of the nation would no longer tolerate their racist policies of the past, the Democrats decided that they would not only go with the turning political tide, but would actually take credit for it. President Lyndon Banes Johnson famously stated that, “I’ll have these n*ggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” It is forgotten that a higher percentage of Republicans (81.8%) voted in support of the bill than did Democrats (68.6%). Two of the Democrat senators that fought against the bill and voted “Nay” were Robert Byrd and Al Gore Sr. Yes, the same Robert Byrd who was a former KKK Grand Wizard and who was glowingly eulogized by the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama upon his death in 2010. And yes, Vice President Al Gore’s father voted in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Academia and the left-aligned media have propagated the strategic flip lie for decades, and most U.S. citizens are too lazy or occupied to investigate their own nation’s history. Apparently, playing video games, watching Tik Tok videos and looting Nike shoes while “protesting” is more important that educated yourself about U.S. history.
Is it any surprise that now that they have no policy initiative other than defeat Trump at all costs, that the Democratic party would align itself with the most radical voices decrying that racism is the underlying cause for all of the challenges we face as a nation? They are embracing the tried and true strategy of identity politics once again. Why? Because it works.
Out with the KKK, In with BLM and Antifa
Perhaps one of the most telling signs of the abandonment of anti-black racism in the U.S. is the current state of the old thugs of the Democrat party. The membership of the KKK in America is estimated today at approximately 3,000 members. The population of the nation stands at roughly 325 million people. It would be a gross understatement to say that the KKK holds any relevance at all today, yet its meteoric fall can be extrapolated to illustrate the equally dramatic fall in support for the racist ideas it espoused.
Now that the political left in the U.S. have put forward and fully invested in the same old racism ploy, what identity will now be labeled as the cause of all our ills? Who will be the new scapegoat, the new pariah, the new Juden? Apparently, now it is the “white” peoples turn, and any institution that can be perceived as aiding the white race in its hold on power of course, namely the police. Not just the handful of bad cops on any department. No half-measures this time. All cops are evil supporters of the white power structure we are told.
It is apparently irrelevant to the left that all of the major cities that have experienced high rates of violent crime (mostly committed by young black males against young black male victims) have all been controlled by Democrats for decades. Minneapolis for example has a Democrat mayor. The chief of police is black. The Attorney General of the state is a black man, Keith Ellison. Yes, the same guy that was once in the running to head the DNC and was caught up in a domestic abuse scandal. The same Keith Ellison who espoused the radical racist idea that African Americans should take over a few U.S. states by force and create a separate country only for blacks. He wrote many of his radical ideas in a student newspaper column while attending Minnesota Law School. Minneapolis is just one example. Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis all have political and police leadership that are either Democrats, African Americans, or both. But I thought that white people, especially conservative or Republican voting white people, were the problem?
The political left has decided that all those of the Caucasian race will now fill the void of the once vilified Negro. But who will be the force out on the streets terrorizing neighborhoods, ambushing police, assaulting people, destroying property, vandalizing government buildings and historical landmarks? The KKK just won’t do these days. Americans in an overwhelming majority rejected them and their racist beliefs long ago. Their membership is almost irrelevant as far as boots on the ground are concerned, not to mention they do not possess a war-chest of hundreds of millions of dollars. Who do the Democrats use to leverage their political aims with violence, coercion, and intimidation?
The answer to this question should be quite clear. All you have to do is follow the money and the positive media coverage. The media has been falling all over themselves to exalt the virtuous ranks on Antifa since this openly communist organization first started its “resistance” to Trump’s administration. They have even been compared to the brave American soldiers that stormed the beaches of Normandy to hep liberate Europe from Fascism. Millions of dollars have been funneled to Antifa groups via NGOs over the past three years. U.S. Antifa groups have even travelled to conflict zones in the Middle East to acquire military training with paramilitary groups that espouse socialist or communist ideologies. The symbolism of burning a black church to the ground in the 1960s has been replaced by that of a police station or a corporate retail store being burned to the ground in 2020.
A lot of Americans have rejected the positive spin afforded to Antifa and are aware of the Marxist ideology and violent tactics embraced by the movement. They may even know that Antifa’s origins as the street thugs of the Communist Party of Germany in the Weimar Republic are well documented by history. For this reason, Antifa alone cannot advance the aims of the Democratic party (and more importantly the Deep State) in its quest to regain control of every aspect of political and social life in the United States. Another, more palatable, yet no less radical organization needed to be brought to bear. Blacks Lives Matter fits this bill perfectly.
The mythology behind Black Lives Matter (BLM) is that it was created at the grass roots level, as the result of a spontaneous tide in public opinion that rose in opposition to the illegitimate, indefensible murder by white police or white citizens of unarmed African American children. The killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri and the killing of Travon Martin by an armed citizen are two examples of such incidents that supposed lead to the establishment of BLM. It is always a tragedy for family and friends that lose loved ones, and this is true in the case of both of these young men; however, a massive amount of disinformation was pushed by the mainstream media that tried to portray the black “children” as totally innocent, angelic figures. This was demonstrably false in retrospect. Michael brown never put his hands up and implore “don’t shoot”. He in fact assaulted a police officer and tried to wrestle his firearm away from him when shot. Travon Martin was shot when he physically assaulted a citizen who happened to be armed. Michael Brown was a 6’4”, 292 lb., 18-year-old adult upon his death, while Travon Martin was one year away from legal adulthood at 17 and was just under 6ft. tall. Neither remotely resembled the cherubic photos presented at nauseum by the media.
Enter BLM. The “trained Marxist” founders of this “civil rights” organization (those are the admissions of co-founder Patrisse Cullors not my words) appeared on the scene in the wake of a small number of propagandized incidents of young black males being shot and killed by non-blacks. Almost immediately, leftist NGOs, celebrities and corporations donated millions of dollars to promote social justice as envisioned by BLM. A quick read of the BLM mission statement reads as if it was written by the DNC in regard to a host of other political and social justice issues. Maybe this is why BLM supports Democratic candidates in elections and donations to BLM are handled through ActBlue, which also handles donations to the DNC and its candidates. It would be interesting to see a financial audit of BLM in light of these obvious connections. A number of conservative and libertarian media outlets jumped at the ActBlue connection yet miss the deeper connection between BLM and the Democracy Alliance.
Politico (surprisingly) reported in November of 2016, that the Democracy Alliance (DA) had been involved in secretive meetings with BLM and a number of other similar minded activist groups. The Democracy Alliance aims to start another “Color Revolution”, but this time in the United States. A cabal of super wealthy leftists including George Soros, Tom Steyer, Paul Egerman, and Rob McKay amongst many others, the DA aims to support and encourage a leftist political and cultural revolution. The article goes on to state:
“The DA, as the club is known in Democratic circles, is recommending its donors step up check writing to a handful of endorsed groups that have supported the Black Lives Matter movement. And the club and some of its members also are considering ways to funnel support directly to scrappier local groups that have utilized confrontational tactics to inject their grievances into the political debate.
Movements that are challenging the status quo and that do so to some extent by using direct action or disruptive tactics are meant to make people uncomfortable, so I’m sure we have partners who would be made uncomfortable by it or think that that’s not a good tactic,” said DA President Gara LaMarche. “But we have a wide range of human beings and different temperaments and approaches in the DA, so it’s quite possible that there are people who are a little concerned, as well as people who are curious or are supportive. This is a chance for them to meet some of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, and understand the movement better, and then we’ll take stock of that and see where it might lead.”
As BLM gains in power and influence it has become more like a political party or political power broker, and one that does not shy away from encouraging acts of violence and lawlessness, nor efforts to destroy anyone that voices any disagreement with their views. These views are almost always in line with the official DNC platform. As recently as June 19th, co-founder Patrisse Cullors also voiced the intention of the group to “get Trump out of office” during an interview on CNN. Anyone that challenges BLM is labeled a racist or white supremacist and is publicly shamed.
Corporations like Warner Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Comcast gave donations of $100 million each to social justice organizations like BLM just this month. I mean, we all know how underrepresented blacks are in the music industry. Apparently, the U.S. music industry had decided that promoting gangster culture, violence, drug use, and objectification of women for decades in rap music hasn’t been quite destructive enough in perverting black culture in America. They needed to do more by donating millions to organizations that literally burn, pillage and loot in poor black communities as well.
To summarize, what we are hearing from the mainstream media, Hollywood celebrities, Antifa and BLM who both admittedly embrace and espouse Marxist political ideology, are the same views put forward by the Democratic Party. They are all doing their part to remove Donald Trump from office by any means necessary. To them, the end justifies the means. This is literally the ideology embraced by modern terrorism. Regrettably, the left in the U.S. seems to have only the unifying principles that aim to destroy or dismantle. The DNC is running on the platform “Remove Trump”. That is, it. They will use any allies that share this aim, even leveraging racial division, violence and lawlessness in their pursuit to remove a duly elected president and to regain a monopoly on power.
The Disorganized Opposition
I have to state that I have never been a fan or supporter of Donald Trump. No one should be surprised that he is a loudmouth, a narcissistic egomaniac, and a self-promoter. He always has been. I did not vote for him, although I do believe that his presidency has been immensely transformative. How? Because it has removed the veil of legitimacy from the entire U.S. political system, and the democratic processes that are supposed to secure our constitutional republic. The Deep State and all its political, corporate and media allies were forced to unmask themselves. All Americans should now realize that they have been lied to for decades by every major institution that they are supposed to trust. Let’s face it, we have little to no influence over the political process at all. Trump’s election was an outlier, not the norm.
I truly believe that the overwhelming majority of all Americans want nothing to do with the progressive left agenda, nor do they believe that the country is irredeemably racist. Most Americans of all races get along with one another just fine on a daily basis, and do not harbor any animosity against other racial groups based on a belief in the inferiority of any other race. Most also understand that there have been instances of police brutality over the past two decades, yet they also understand that such instances are uncommon, and the statistics do not support the assertions that blacks are disproportionately represented in these cases. Assertions to the contrary are simply not factual and are only used to advance an agenda of division.
Regrettably, the silent majority is being silent once again. So, who has decided to step up and voice a dissenting opinion to counterbalance the leftist narrative and the acts of wanton destruction? Although very disjointed and disorganized, many dissenting voices have appeared, and many have been silenced and destroyed by the leftist mob and their allies in big tech and the media. If you so much as question the validity of any aspect of the narrative, you are labeled a racist, a white supremacist, or an Uncle Tom (if you happen to be black). People are losing their ability to speak, as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube electronically gag them. They are losing their good reputations, and their peaceful lives by the woke mob that destroys them on social media. And they are increasingly also losing their jobs and livelihoods for the crime of dissenting from a delusory and untrue narrative. Who has stepped forward to stand up for these people?
Alternative or non-mainstream media is on the frontlines of speaking out against the false narrative and calling for law and order to be restored in so many of the cities that have been racked by riots, violence and looting. As far as mass media is concerned, only Fox News seems to have broken from the establishment media that is totally committed to peddling the narrative; however, it must be noted that only host Tucker Carlson is really putting himself out there and honestly and candidly speaking his mind. God only knows how long the establishment, including Fox News, will tolerate this. I can see Fox jettisoning Tucker as soon as the outcry from the left becomes too uncomfortable for them to bear.
Some members of the Republican party have voiced opposition to the looting, violence and vandalism that have taken place over the past few weeks, but when push came to shove, most acquiesced to the mob by not calling out as the false the very foundation of their narrative, that the country is permeated and built upon systemic, all-encompassing racism at every level. This fantasy can be easily disproven by any reasoning, logically thinking person. So why have they “taken the knee”? The answer is pretty obvious to any critically thinking person from any generation not completely brainwashed by an academia totally saturated with leftist ideology. The Republican party is largely just a foil for the Democrats to provide the illusion of choice. At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of Republicans in high office are as corrupt as their political “opponents” in the Democrat party. The days of principled Republicans standing up for constitutional law, limited government, civil rights and desegregation are long gone. Those men and women are long dead and buried and any monuments to them are due to be defaced and removed in short order.
The more voices that question the narrative being pushed, the greater the censorship. It has gotten to the point that big tech’s excuses and explanations for canceling people on their platforms have become utterly meaningless. Their blatant hypocrisy and obvious leftist politics are now staring us all in the face. They are now, digitally burning books and movies, and chastising and shaming dissenters in the public square. This is not limited to those with conservative or right-wing views. All of these labels are quite meaningless anyway, as the left took over the terminology years ago. Any student of Noam Chomsky could tell you that first, totalitarians manipulate language to advance their goals and to label their enemies.
A Rising Tide of Discontent
I happen to believe that my friend The Saker holds out hope that the people of the United States will resist the lunacy and not succumb to the call to violence that would mean a civil war in this country. I am very much on the fence as to whether or not a second civil war is inevitable at this point. History reveals a very powerful country that became an empire, and in doing so, lost its way and its national identity. Corruption has permeated every political institution in this nation and has resulted in a welfare state dependent upon war, debt and theft. Only a tiny minority of oligarchs and their henchmen benefit at the expense of the majority. This is always the case with empires, which leads to their inevitable collapse. History presents us with no exceptions.
Only when this nation’s government returns to a path of non-intervention (both international and domestic in scope) will it be able to reclaim the better aspects of its heritage. Only when a government that abides by the Constitution as it was written, can it hope to ever aspire to be a government of the people, for the people and by the people. This can never be accomplished by giving government greater power (nationalism, socialism, communism), but only by taking power away from the government and distributing it to the people at a local level. The framers of the U.S. Constitution wrestled with this very understanding for over two years (1787-1789) in attempting to form a government.
The Saker surmises that the U.S. has two likely roads ahead, either balkanization or a general collapse akin to that of the Soviet Union. I happen to believe that balkanization is inevitable at this point, and that an eventual rebuilding and complete unification after a Soviet style collapse is highly unlikely. There are numerous historic and cultural ties that bound the Soviet Union together and continue to bind the various republics of the Russian Federation together. Almost a thousand years of shared experience make all the difference. The United States by contrast was born of shared classical liberal ideals. The American Revolutionary War was actually more akin to a civil war between the colonies and the British Empire and was a very close-run thing. The Continental Army was close to defeat a number of times. It spanned eight years, and only approximately 3% of the population actively fought for the cause of independence. It is true that ideals are powerful, but what happens when a sizeable portion of the people no longer embrace these ideals, but when they actually despise them? Such a state of being is untenable for very long.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 