Category: Fascism

January 7, 2024

Harvard President’s Ouster Makes Visible the Rising Power of the Far Right

The recent resignation of Harvard’s first African American president, Claudine Gay, which was brought on by an orchestrated campaign mobilized by the far right, made visible the threat of organized fascism on university campuses. Claiming victory, the far right propagandist Christopher Rufo posted on social media: “SCAPLED: Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns” (and quickly clarified that he…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
January 7, 2024

Social Formation

1. The overview

If you often ask yourself “How can people believe those lies and deceptions?” when facts clearly indicate them to be untrue, you are not alone. If you ask how so-called leaders can get away with a policy that guarantees disastrous, anti-human consequences, you are not alone either.

In order to examine these questions, let us look at how our minds operate. We have the conscious part of our minds and the unconscious part of our minds. Both operate together. They can be separated into an instinctual part, a daily operational part, and the part that guides us with set principles. Freud described these as id, ego and superego. As we live in our given social framework, all parts of our minds operate within the imperatives of the social formation. As our minds develop, our instincts are trained to fit what we perceive as reality. Reality, our social interactions, and the ideas and rules generated by society condition and shape our daily thoughts and routines.

Our idealistic principles are ultimately formed according to the prevalent ideas of good and bad, how things should be and so on. This transfers a collective sense of ideal notions into the guiding principles of individual minds. This basic mechanism allows us to be social beings working together to achieve the goals and objectives of the society. We are individuals with our own ideas and interests, but we are also parts of an entity we perceive as our society. We are individual entities, but we also exist as a collective, as a species in a vast geological time frame.

But what if our social relations are subservient to the values, norms, and beliefs of the ruling class? What if social institutions are dominated by wealthy and powerful people? What if our society is flooded by their propaganda?

Our society is highly hierarchical based on financial power. It forms a caste-like system, with social mobility bound by conditions set by ruling class imperatives. No kingdoms in the past achieved the degree of accumulation of wealth we observe today. Social media platforms are built to facilitate divisions and commodify collective power within the capitalist framework. Digitalization allows corporate entities to cultivate certain public opinions while excluding others. AI technology can effortlessly steal collective ideas while reinforcing prevalent ideas firmly within the acceptable range of the authority. The advent of the Internet, AI, and financialization of the economy have strengthened the ways to condition people according to the rules stipulated by the money dominated social institutions. All of these are manifesting in new ways to place our thoughts, our ideas, and our social relations within the acceptable range of the ruling class.

The capitalist social formation has an inherent contradiction that leads to periodic crises: The capitalists– the ruling class– get too much money and the rest of the people stop having purchasing power, while unsold products pile up. This has been the primary cause of the major predicaments of our times.

The ruling class shifts its mode of exploitation and subjugation in order to keep the basic structure intact, generating new ways to profit and maintain its dominance. The actual crisis of capitalism is constantly replaced with distorted and narrowly defined prepackaged “crises” which provide pretexts for the economic and social restructuring necessary to float the economy.

For example:

The deprived living conditions, poverty, and destruction of inner-city communities—all stemming from the crisis of capitalism—were portrayed as an emergence of inner-city criminal youth, “superpredators.” The demonization, along with the slogan “tough on crime,” exacerbated the momentum for gentrification, militarized police and school-to-prison pipeline, contributing to enriching associated industries.

Muslim populations have been demonized as “terrorists” as their leaders are called dictators, allowing embargoes, economic blockade, proxy wars, and military assaults against them, ultimately resulting in western corporate powers restructuring their societies to accommodate western corporate interests.

Legitimate environmental activism has been shaped to narrowly focus on CO2, which has created a myriad of environmental issues of its own. This has destroyed the momentum for real environmental activism based on actual damages and accountabilities, while creating a momentum for “green capitalism” for profits. The CO2 focus has also created the carbon trade pyramid scheme for the rich while punishing those developing countries without the capacity to invest in new technologies and infrastructures.

We are flooded with crisis after crisis—“war on terror,” “global warming,” “pandemic,” “Russian threat,” and etc. And the pace of the cycle accelerates as the crisis of capitalism continues to be insolvable, and the western hegemony faces the economic as well as military powers of countries which have been defying the western colonial trajectory.

Meanwhile, our minds, facing obvious manipulations and deceptions, struggle to maintain their integrity by keeping certain things conscious and others unconscious in order to exist within the given social formation. This has been facilitated by active propaganda, educational indoctrination, political rituals, and structural violence against the oppressed. We are given false narratives to swallow in exchange for keeping our positions in the social hierarchy while our livelihoods and well-beings are at gunpoint. This conscious/unconscious process of swallowing the status quo by omission of facts ties us to an invisible cage of the ruling class imperatives. Our minds are forced to employ various psychological defense mechanisms to further disassociate ourselves from the root of the problem.

This has resulted in an enormous decrease of our abilities to perceive ourselves, our relationships to others and the social formation. It has also been eliminating facts and our history from our minds. Our minds and bodies are conditioned to go along with the social imperatives, and the process diminishes our capacity to grow as human beings.

This parallels the increased powers of those who profit from our collective labor and our collective knowledge. The acute concentration of wealth allows the rich and powerful to dominate social institutions. This allows them to impose their agendas and policies through many layers of conditions and extortion regimes against those who are trapped in the social hierarchy.

One might not keep his job or social position if he holds disagreeable opinions about the authority. Or those with disagreeable ideology could be excluded from various social networks.

Let’s say that you hold a position in a community organization, and you are an anti-war activist. Your position can be taken away easily by a few wealthy donors with political motives. They effectively blackmail the organization, saying that so and so is on the side of the enemy country, advocating terrorism, and etc. They threaten to boycott the organization unless you are removed. The little organization, which you have been part of, has struggled so hard to serve the community with no resources of its own. The organization has no choice but to ask you to step down. And having struggled together with the organization for years, you can’t risk damaging the organization by making the event public. The anti-war activism suffers, and you are traumatized by the expulsion. In the process, the organization is shaped to stay within the imperial framework.

Similar dynamics are at work against all individuals who hold views which are unacceptable to the authority. Under the current social formation, our individual productive activities can be exploited by profiteers who set the goals and the objectives, while those who engage in actual activities are deprived of access to the actual collective results. The pattern of domestication of ideas and social relations is not restricted to those who sign contracts with their employers. The fact that social institutions are dominated by the ruling class means that our social relations in general are under the guiding hands of the ruling class.

For example:

-Even though they might have good intentions, volunteers for NGOs can be guided to perform activities within the framework of the ruling class, since the NGOs rely on funding from the wealthy. Even if the NGOs survive co-option by the wealthy, their policies and agendas can always be limited by obstacles presented by capitalist dominated social institutions.

-Grass roots activism can also be at any point co-oped by the interests of the ruling class or neutralized by corporate backed institutions.

-If you happen to be good at anything and garner popularity among the people, sooner or later, your activities can also be forced to conform to the imperatives of corporate entities. Or, you could be excluded from one social network or another as your world view collides with money dominated entities along the way, until you find it unsustainable to be in your field.

This is basically the same mechanism observed by Robert Owen in the 19th century as noted by Frederic Engels in Utopian and Scientific. Owen noted “If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.”

This fundamental dynamic of exploitation and subjugation and use of the collective power of the people to shift the course of society for the interests of the ruling class has evolved for the past two centuries, fully normalizing the hidden mechanism, while cultivating layers and layers of protective mechanisms to prop up the basic structure. Our social relations are filtered through so many layers, constantly being scrutinized to fit the current social formation. In exchange for contributing to the harvesting of the collective power, we receive money which can only be used within the economic markets which are dominated by the capital. We are deprived of our powers and in exchange we receive smaller powers which can be used to support the economic structure, which is controlled and manipulated by various institutions. What suffers in the process are things we can’t buy with our tokens: love, friendship, community, culture, nature and etc.

The strength of colonization through the economic structure can be observed as we see how a regional economy in the global south can lose its tradition, sustainable local economy, and communities with the introduction of Wall Street style economy. As the economy shifts to a winner-takes-all, profit oriented structure, social relations shift to conform to the interests of the rich. This goes along with importation of media, where entertainment commodities are geared toward imperial propaganda. Hollywood movies are filled with western-centric narratives. How many of the movies that we see have Russian villains and Muslim terrorists? Mainstream media outlets, now owned by a mere 6 corporate entities, have been serving the corporate and military interests of the west for generations. Western NGOs can also operate with western funding to spread narratives friendly to the west while demonizing the local authority, which defies the infiltration of western propaganda, cultural imperialism and economic restructuring favorable to western corporate interests.

2. The Hierarchy

Here it should be strongly noted that there is a real sense of community, warmth of togetherness and potentially sustainable social relations among those who are engaging in building community momentum. No one can deny those feelings and the actual benefits. This is obvious when we see people finding the real sense of belongingness, pride, and meaning in the communities they build. This can even be said about institutions more obviously facilitated by the intentions of the ruling class —religious, political, military and so on. However, the point here is that our nature to be social and find collective goals to survive can be systemically and structurally co-opted by the structural arrangement of exploitation and subjugation. This should be noted throughout this text, especially as we discuss the inner workings of individuals. Accountability for inhumanity should be squarely placed against the system and its beneficiaries. The purpose of unfolding the mechanism here is not to blame the people who are victims of the domestication. Doing so would bring us to the cynical conclusion that it is human nature to be exploited and brutally attack each other. We must not equate the nature of humanity, however we term it, with the conditions created by the current social formation that allows the ruling class to domesticate the rest of us while depriving us of our humanity and causing devastating consequences to the environment.

The difficult part, of course, is that we can say with certainly that slave owning landlords or those who appeared in lynching post cards smiling right next to black men hanging from a tree probably had happy families and friendships amongst themselves. But as soon as you stepped out of the stipulated boundaries of the community, the smiley faces of your fellow humans could turn into the faces of terrifying perpetrators of lynching. The happiness one gained by belonging to the community had dual functions: ensuring your livelihood and well-being while augmenting the then legitimate social institution of slavery. The enormous sacrifices paid by the enslaved people co-existed right next to the happy families of “good old times.”

When the values, norms and beliefs of the collective are subservient to the ruling class imposed framework of the social hierarchy, it automatically normalizes the most brutal and inhumane discrimination and biases in institutionalized forms throughout the “democratic” sphere. This is the true nature of the notion of “rule by the majority”– a prominent feature of western democracy today.

This mechanism is at the core of US imperialism. When western corporate entities restructure a country with their neoliberal economic policies, it expands its “democratic” sphere, normalizing exclusion and discrimination, which, in turn, facilitates the exploitation and subjugation.

In this regard, the age-old colonial view of “others” still dominates the underlining momentum of western colonialism. The most important psychological element of colonizing is to define the subject population as inferior to the colonizers. The sub-humans must be helped so that their lives can rise to the level of the colonizers, or more precisely, modified to serve the colonizers.

The sense of mission allows the colonizers to do whatever necessary, regardless of the actual well-being of the subject population. All sacrifices among the population are worth it in the end for their own good.

A military action against them is always justified but the resistance against it is always denied as “inhumane”, “barbaric” and “brutal” because ultimately the counter action does not serve the subject population according to the colonizers. Countless lives of the subject population simply do not weigh the same as the lives of colonizers in the imperial minds.

This sense of mission is also very useful in exploiting and subjugating oppressed people within the country engaging in the colonizing. The grievances and dissenting voices against the ruling class are set aside in order to instead fight the “barbaric people.” Those who oppose this would be defined as traitors, terrorist supporters and so on.

In this broader overview, it is clear that the problem is not the “barbaric people who need help” or “terrorist supporters”. The problem is clearly with the colonizers.

The social hierarchy, with its very bottom tier, the very top and everything in between, is the clear manifestation of the social formation of exploitation and subjugation. The political institution of so-called western democracy manifests itself somewhere between social democracy and fascism. In either case, the political parties are backed by capitalists. Their policies and agendas stay within the interests of the owners of the political parties. The constant move between “left” and “right” within acceptable politics creates the sense of political struggle and progress, but in reality, all is restricted within the corporate interests.

However, capitalist hierarchy as a whole doesn’t only shift itself between its fascist mode and social democracy mode in perpetuating itself. The class analysis of the social formation reveals the elements of fascism and socialism within the existing social formation.

The effect of the corporate domination and measures implemented against the people can be felt severely among the most oppressed people while the benefits of state protection and favoritism are felt by the rich. The elements of fascism–authoritarianism, social hierarchy, suppression of opposition, censorship, militarism, and so on—are literally the reality among the oppressed without waiting for the fascist dictatorships to come along. For the rich the state functions tremendously to forward their interests. The political notion of fascism to describe political opponents by the “left” only appears when the interests of the privileged class are threatened, while the political notion of socialism to describe political opponents by the “right” only appears, again, when the interests of the privileged class are threatened. The true liberation of the people can only be possible if we grow out of the hierarchical social formation based on money and violence.

Extreme suffering equivalent to suffering under a fascist dictatorship is inherently present for the oppressed population structurally at all times. The incarceration rate in the US is by far the highest globally. In particular, the rate of incarceration for black people has been higher than apartheid South Africa. Every major city in the US contains tent cities where people are subjected to life without basic human rights. One out of five children is facing hunger in the US. The number goes up twice as much for minority children. Without universal healthcare, the cost of major illnesses would easily bankrupt the average household. Three people are killed by police officers every day on average in the US. Meanwhile, the wealthy people often avoid jail time with their political connections, better lawyers, and ability to pay bail. The richest among the US population pay less tax than the average household. The overwhelming favoritism for the rich in the social layers has been institutionalized in various ways, allowing three people in the US to own more wealth than the bottom half of the US population. “Socialism” only for the wealthy is well functioning for the ruling class at all times.

In order to fully perceive and appreciate life for the benefits for all, we must recognize the overwhelming role of ruling class imperatives in the formation of collective values, beliefs and norms among us. The class hierarchy and the process of “othering” based on the dominant world view play significant roles in determining our perceptions.

3. The Minds

Now, getting back to our minds, the fact that we internalize the authority as our guiding principle in order to form society creates an unintuitive phenomenon—our thoughts and behaviors follow the ruling class imperatives automatically. All commonly known psychological defense mechanisms are fully employed by individual minds to cling onto the existing social formation. Instead of recognizing the exploitive nature of the system as a whole, our minds are forced to blame “others” for not following unjust laws and ruling class-centric ideas. For example, economic insecurity and poverty due to austerity measures, job exports to overseas, lower wages and etc. would be blamed on immigrants, who are forced to migrate to the US due to the US imperial policies within their home countries. Inconvenient contradictions and world shattering facts stemming from the systemic exploitation are simply repressed as individuals face cognitive dissonance. Accountability for imperial war crimes, colonial policies, and brutal oppression by the authority are projected onto propagandized characters of “enemies.” Unsolvable contradictions lead to regression, resulting in violent behavior against others.

The social structure is not forcefully activated by top-down coercion only. Each individual plays a significant role in helping to mobilize the entire structure. This is the secret of “western democracy” managing to reign as an imperial power in the name of “freedom,” “justice” and “humanity” and exploiting and subjugating the global south for so long. The collective power of the imperial mind acts like a power steering wheel, allowing a handful of the ruling class to set their goals and objectives in how to use the stolen collective power of the people.

This is facilitated by the fact that the social formation, which doesn’t allow social relations based on one’s own interests, deprives one of the ability to perceive their surroundings correctly. Instead, “the reality” is projected onto the people as prepackaged corporate narratives through the media industrial complex, educational industrial complex, political industrial complex and so on. One is either forced to swallow a prepackaged social framework or one develops a personal world view based on one’s own position in the social hierarchy. For those who embrace the prepackaged world view, dissenting opinions become threats to their very own existence—an attack against the authority literally is an attack against a part of their psyche, the internalized authority. For example, the dissident voices against the US proxy wars and the military actions against other countries would appear unpatriotic, “terrorist supporting” and so on in their minds.

For those who develop personal world views based on their own position within the hierarchy, it also creates a desperate struggle to embrace that position, instead of offering to understand the view which derives from a different circumstance and work together to eliminate the root cause. The legitimate grievances of minority groups to access job markets, social safety nets, equal rights and so on are seen as threats among the rest of the already struggling population. This results in divisions amongst the subject population and lack of understanding amongst the people, while augmenting the social hierarchy as a whole.

Dissident groups often split or disappear as emerging crises reveal their narrow interests within class hierarchy, resulting in infighting. For example, some among those who have vehemently opposed measures forwarded by the medical industrial complex—forced “vaccination,” profit oriented Covid measures, the associated media censorship and etc.—have been quick to side with the establishment in Israel and its allies’ settler colonial violence after the 10/7/23 Palestinian military operation against Israel. Those who oppose losing their human rights within the imperial framework have failed to recognize over 75 years of colonial occupation, apartheid policies and genocide against Palestinian people by the US imperial project in the Middle East. This has resulted in devastating divisions among activists. The power which should be directed against the thieves of the collective power is directed toward one another, within the hierarchy.

Quite often a social mobilization is expressed as “war”–war on drugs, war on crime, and so on. A state of war does not allow discussion, alternate views, or reconciliation on a personal basis or collective basis without the commander in chief saying so. Instantly, dissenting actions are deemed “treason.” The urgency and seriousness of “war” is orchestrated by media propaganda, educational indoctrination, political measures, legal restrictions, and so on. The internalized authority in people’s minds creates a massive storm of self-censorship, infighting amongst families, friends and communities under the notion of absolute allegiance to the authority. A McCarthyism-like social atmosphere appears every time we are subjected to this sort of mobilization.

Without understanding the structural mechanism as well as the psychological mechanism, one can also develop a warped abstract notion of a collective enemy—Jewish bankers, globalists, Illuminati, and so on. These prepackaged enemies can serve the system by preventing people from seeing the actual mechanism of exploitation and subjugation, while depriving them of the actual measures to dismantle the system.

For many, these processes involving psychological defense mechanisms are unconscious, while the framework of the society where they belong is upheld unconditionally. The cage of capitalism stays invisible to the subject population. Also, the fact that we are deprived of access to facts and history due to the domination of social institutions by capital adds to the confusion while making the authority a single entity to obey.

For those who manage to be conscious about the contradictions and unjust policies coming out of the authority, the situation is very difficult. Most of us do not wish to fight a systemic mafia enterprise operating in our neighborhood. If they demand a protection fee, many will simply pay instead of having their houses burned down at night. In this case, we are talking about the entire system colluding with institutions to run its operation. It is unlikely that any legal system, any media outlets, and so on, will take your side. In most cases the idea gradually subsides into unconsciousness, turns into cynicism, or creates various sorts of mental dysfunctions amongst the subject population.

Yet, conscious efforts to point out the problem of this social formation have been with us for centuries. Unfortunately, history is abundant with violent repression against dissidents with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist views. The degree of the use of violence is unimaginable to ordinary people. The brutality and scope of the violence defines the determination and criminality of the ruling class to perpetuate its dominance over the subject population. Assassinations, imprisonment, systemic eradication of dissident organizations by state violence, various war crimes committed by its military and so on have created an aspect of the authority as an invincible “mafia enterprise.” This notion lurks on the border between the unconscious and the conscious as we wonder about the legitimacy of the authority and the grave violence committed by it in the name of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “humanity,” as it quietly demands compliance by its threatening presence. This is far from how a “free country” is said to run its business.

The internalization of the authority is a colonization of the mind in each and every one of us. Trauma creating events due to economic oppression, lack of social safety nets, destruction of communities and so on strengthen the presence of the internal authority, just like victims of domestic abuse cling onto the abusers. Pain and suffering are a firmly integral part of the social formation.

The collective wounds of a trauma—racism, sexism and so on—can also be utilized to augment capitalist measures and imperial measures. These create opportunities for the same system which institutionalizes trauma-inducing discriminations to effectively enlist people of stigmatized identities who are willing to collaborate in exploitation and subjugation. The first black President Barak Obama came in with a thundering popularity. He managed to bomb seven countries, effectively working with corporate entities to install neoliberal restructuring regimes in many areas, while protecting the interests of the criminal banking system. The legitimate criticisms against him were termed racist, while the actual deep seated racist sentiment amongst the population muddied the aim of the legitimate criticisms as well. A similar mechanism is at work in Israel’s brutal imperial settler colonialism. The Israeli government, along with the western establishment, has been openly equating opposition to Israel’s apartheid policies and settler colonial violence against Palestinians with anti-semitism. This has created a vicious cycle of anti-imperial momentum advertised as “anti-semitism” through corporate media, adding to the escalating violence against Palestinians with impunity. This has allowed Israel to function as a military base for the US empire in the middle east and beyond for generations. The US financial aid to Israel surpasses the aid to any other country, amounting to over $317 billion since 1946. The vast majority of the aid goes to the military.

Moreover, social activism for equality and justice has become strategized tokenism within the system instead of a struggle to eliminate class hierarchy and ruling class abuses. This trajectory has been openly supported by the establishment in the name of “diversity.” The corporate backed “diversity” firmly operates within the structural imperatives of the established order. Those with minority backgrounds who embrace corporate policies and imperial agendas are chosen for their diverse backgrounds; however, in reality, their corporate orientations and their subserviency toward imperialism reinforce the actual capitalist hierarchy and contribute in exacerbating actual sufferings of the oppressed.

As we grow as humans, we grow in this mold, thinking and acting so that you won’t offend the authority and the internalized authority. Dissenting voices are structurally excluded, deprived of facts, of history and resources and constantly forced to make deals with the establishment to keep themselves alive.

When we shift our attention to the mental states of agents of the ruling class — politicians, bureaucrats, establishment backed “experts,” and super rich individuals — one can’t avoid witnessing psychopathic qualities present in how the interests of the ruling class are blatantly forwarded at the expense of a vast suffering majority. We saw president Obama joking about killing people and joking about drone bombing. We saw Hilary Clinton laughing about assassinating Gaddafi. We heard Madeline Albright stating it’s worth killing half million Iraqi children. Some remarks by president Trump certainly belong to this category as well.

The wealth driven social structure requires leaders who can ruthlessly forward the interests of the ruling class. Psychopathic characteristics are necessary parts of this social formation.

In a society which operates based on the interests of the population in harmony with nature and life forms, psychological repression is a defense mechanism that protects individuals from devastating traumas. Psychopathic behaviors are treated as unsuitable personal traits for responsible positions in society. However, defense mechanisms are an integral part of the dynamics of the collective mobilization and they are crucial in making the capitalist cage invisible in this social formation. The social formation also utilizes psychopathic individuals in forwarding inhumane exploitive measures.

Suffering and pain create infighting amongst the oppressed, while hopelessness and cynicism turn into self-harm or random violence. The internalized authority in the subject population’s minds directs their attention to their fellow humans, to themselves, or forces them to regress into committing violent actions. These tendencies have been drastically augmented by the prevalent use of mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs in recent decades. Researchers have been noting the devastating consequences brought out by drugs with side effects such as suicidal ideation, psychopathy and so on. (Big pharma makes money, and again, suffering caused by the exploitive environment has created opportunities for industry.)

Where is a formation like this heading in the geological time frame, let alone the development of a few centuries?

4. The Social Institutions

Our social lives revolve around certain networks in our careers, our interests, our backgrounds and so on. This allows us to find livelihoods and meaning in our daily lives away from the structural issues devastating parts of our population. However, the measures and the policies of the ruling class are also imposed through those networks within the social formation as well. Social institutions, under the strict control of capital and backed by the internalized authority of individuals, quietly guide us to the imperial framework. In a functioning society, a social institution allows facts and history to accumulate in a given field, creating collective assets of knowledge and wisdom. This is a column supporting what we perceive as “civilization.” But what is the implication of it functioning as an element to divide people and impose draconian measures under the umbrella of the ruling class authority? What are the consequences of such oppression for those who are eager to protect the integrity of the institution? And how do we understand our surroundings, facts and history when those change according to the agendas? We lose our common ground to stand on. Our communities are destabilized and ultimately forced to stand on official narratives.

Religious institutions, political institutions, science and etc. often play such a role. For example, the political institution has been reduced to a machine to form and legitimize ruling class agendas in the name of “democracy” in which money dominated corporate parties meticulously choose and curate problems that will give opportunities for corporate entities. Narratives, slogans and talking points are provided to party members according to their affiliations. The parties, backed by corporate interests, encourage party members to engage in this controlled competition in which rules and objectives are set by corporate interests. This effectively eliminates an actual political process for the interests of the people while giving an illusion of “democracy.” Participation becomes a ritual in which the collective power of the people is stolen in the name of ensuring the betterment of the people.

Just as the collectivity of indoctrinated individual minds acts as a power steering wheel for capitalist agendas, social institutions have become an integral part of the driving force of ruling class agendas. In particular, corporate funded NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, research institutions and so on, play a crucial role in formulating effective measures and policies for achieving lucrative goals at the expense of the exploited and subjugated population.

5. Perpetual Now

The depth of the colonization of minds is reflected by how we perceive major events of our time. For example, the people who desperately screamed “Stand with Ukraine” are nowhere to be seen as we are forced to swallow the new slogans on the Palestinian conflict. The 500,000 Ukrainian deaths resulting from the US proxy war do not appear anywhere. We clearly remember the images of 9/11. But there is no accountability for the deaths of millions of innocent people in the Middle East. The non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, “dead incubator babies,” “viagra supplied soldiers,” and other emotionally charged accusations against the “brutal dictators” do not find any reasoned connections to the actual events and their consequences at all. We are forced to consume incoherent segments of the broken dreams of the ruling class, with ample excuses and justifications, as if we are watching a series of rationalization dreams of the ruling class mind with our wide awake minds. In this collective process, we are totally detached from history and material reality as we are forced to embrace the fictitious notion of “perpetual now.” This colonization of our perception, with forced consumption of incoherent propaganda narratives, leads us, sleep walking, into colonial projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberal restructuring.

Our lives count on the healthy functioning of social institutions and social relations based on our interests. We internalize the imperatives of the collective as guiding principles. We naturally build respect and trust for those who protect social institutions with their wisdom and knowledge. We build communities to build social relations based on our interests. Our internal sense of the collective manifests as tradition, myths, culture and so on. We learn to organize ourselves so that we can live harmoniously with ourselves, with each other, with other life forms and with nature. We create art to reflect who we are while also reflecting how things can be, reaching out to the vastness of the universe.

The capitalist hierarchy and its beneficiaries replace these dynamics with imperatives that keep their order intact. Our psychological traits, our collective social mechanism, how we perceive, and the actual facts themselves and history are being manipulated, altered, and abused. They have been taken apart and put back together to form an invisible cage of caste-like social hierarchy which is constantly being shaped and maintained through the process of trauma and conditioning. Our species is being domesticated by the ruling class, which is harvesting our collective powers to pursue this destructive path.

6. Growing Out of the Social Formation

In this writing I have attempted to lay out the psychological aspect, as well as the structural mechanism, of collective mobilization of the people under capitalist domination.

All these processes clearly indicate structural as well as active efforts by the ruling class to impose policies and agendas against the subject population. This particular social formation is extremely inefficient and unproductive in terms of realizing the potential of the collective power of humanity since the captured power has been largely used to concentrate the power of humanity in the hands of a few without regard to the ultimate trajectory of the species as well as our real potential to actualize our capabilities in harmony with our surroundings. The process diminishes our capability to perceive ourselves, each other, and our environment, while depriving us of our abilities to create and grow as human beings. We have yet to see the real potential of our species at this point. Continuation of this trajectory will deprive us of it.

To end this writing, I must add one thing. I find many people in the US to be friendly, kind, and extremely sophisticated in their areas of specialization. I have seen so many of them displaying great ingenuity, relentlessness and creativity in what they achieve. As an artist, I do feel waves of corporate pressure against creative freedom and the structural impediments of co-optation. But I also do feel the resilience of artists quietly but surely spreading roots in examining what it is to live and what it is to be humans. The sense of freedom and optimism which has overcome slavery does shine through the spirits of the people. The progress we make for the betterment of all people must stem from the historical reality and the characteristics of the people. Yes, slavery has morphed into current forms of exploitation and subjugation. Yes, the accumulation of wealth and the disparity among haves and have-nots has been exacerbated. We could see these facts as proving the strength and resilience of the capitalist formation. However, we could also see them as evidence proving the criminality of the social formation as a vast pyramid scheme imposed on the majority. As the list of criminal acts continues to expand, our yearning for life and nature also expands.

It is very difficult to understand the mechanism of exploitation and subjugation which involves many layers of our social structure as well as that of our minds. Our examination makes it clear that the social formation consists of many elements working together in highly complex ways. The ultimate solution cannot be narrowly defined by one magic bullet. Although focused measures are necessary to counter immediate risks and impediments to well-being, a narrowly focused solution will ultimately allow the system to morph and absorb that measure into the existing system. The transformation of society from a ruling class-centric one to a people-centric one requires a fundamental shift of social power to the hands of the people.

The discussion leads to new questions:

The system cannot function without the help of the internalized authority in every one of us. Our understanding of the system and our role in it helps us to do away with the spell put on us by the system, allowing us to have opportunities to refuse to act against our own interests which, in turn, can stop the momentum of the system. How do we educate ourselves?

The system attempts to commodify love, friendship, community, culture, nature and so on. All of those have been shaped and defined by the capitalist society to be sold and bought, only to be seen less and less among us. If we make right choices for ourselves and for others, not for the interests of the ruling class, we can cultivate truly meaningful social relations by valuing what really matters to us, which could lead us to building social institutions which function for us. Social institutions which work for the interests of the people are the basis of a well-functioning social structure for the people. How can we achieve that?

We are social beings by nature. We can achieve by working together what we cannot achieve by working alone. This collective power belongs to us all. How do we ensure that our power serves the livelihoods and well-beings of us in harmony with nature and other life forms?

Countless people in the US and across the globe have raised their voices against this social formation from various angles. We have much to learn from the successes and failures of people who live under the socialist form of government. We have a vast wealth of knowledge and wisdom going all the way back to the beginning of our species examining how to be as a collective and how to be as individuals. We are one with those people from the past, from now and from the future in our path to outgrow the current social formation.
The post Social Formation first appeared on Dissident Voice.
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December 18, 2023

Pressley Bill Would Classify Discriminatory Book Bans as Civil Rights Violations

As Republicans pursue a wave of book bans across the country seeking to censor Black history and LGBTQ representation, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) has introduced a bill that would classify many of these bans as violations of federal civil rights laws. Introduced last week, the Books Save Lives Act would make the disproportionate exclusion of books that include content on certain…

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December 18, 2023

Report: Trump Wants 300K Troops to Build “Detention Camps” at Southern Border

Former President Donald Trump would send an unprecedented number of U.S. military troops to the southern border if elected president again in the 2024 race, tasking them with building migrant prisons and other infrastructure to punish migrants, sources told Rolling Stone Magazine. At least three sources familiar with the situation confirmed to the publication Trump’s intent to use “hundreds of…

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December 12, 2023

There Is Power in Grief. We Must Resist the Normalization of Mass Death in Gaza.

This is a hard time of year for many of us, and this year, it’s even harder. In addition to our usual woes, such as seasonal depression, or the grief the holidays may rekindle for us, we are now witnessing a genocide in real time. We watch as Palestinian neighborhoods are leveled, as premature babies are left to die and decompose in their ICU beds, while doctors and parents are forced out under…

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December 8, 2023

Pennsylvania School Board President Sworn In on Stack of Banned Books

A newly inaugurated school board president in a Philadelphia suburb took an oath of office Monday evening by placing her hand on a stack of books that have been targeted by book bans. Karen Smith, an incumbent member of the Central Bucks School District board, won reelection in November, helping to lead Democrats in taking control of the board from Republicans who had sought to implement…

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December 5, 2023

A Trump Reelection Threatens to Make America Fascist Again

On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.

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November 30, 2023

Trump Calls for Government to Punish MSNBC Over Reporting on Him He Doesn’t Like

Former President Donald Trump demanded on his social media platform earlier this week that the government shut down MSNBC News over the network’s criticism of his statements. Trump’s Truth Social post wrongly claimed that the network is broadcast over the air, thus warranting the government regulation he sought. But the channel is actually a cable news station, and therefore not subject to rules…

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November 20, 2023

Mike Johnson Once Said Only God Gives Authority for Presidents to Take Office

At a Baptist church in Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana in 2019, the then-relatively unknown House member preached on his beliefs on the relationship between the Christian God and the government. In an unearthed video recording, highlighted by Accountable.US in research provided exclusively to Truthout, Johnson hailed his conviction that God, and no one else, gives presidents and the…

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November 13, 2023

Trump Allies Forming “Army” of Ideological Loyalists for 2025 Power Grab

Powerful, well-funded allies of Donald Trump are testing followers on the depths of their far right ideology in order to determine their loyalty to the former president — and build an ideological army to help carry out Trump and his team’s authoritarian agenda, new reporting finds. Officials familiar with the plan told Axios that Trump allies are screening ideologies of thousands of people in…

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November 13, 2023

Trump’s Threat to Handle the “Vermin” Is Straight Out of the Nazi Playbook

You might think that after being confronted with the party’s leading candidate for president ranting in public about “Communists, Marxists, Fascist and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the chair of the Republican National Committee would be compelled to say something other than “I am not going to comment on candidates and their…

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October 27, 2023

Is the US turning into a Christofascist state?

Jeff Sharlet has spent two decades covering the intersection of extreme Christian nationalism and the far-right. In his new book, Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, he gives snapshots of a country rapidly devolving into a Christian fascism state. He captures the rage, the despair, the dislocation, the alienation, the aesthetic of violence, and the magical thinking that are the foundations of all fascist movements—forces that are now coalescing around the Trump-led Republican Party. The bizarre conspiracy theories and buffoonish quality of many who lead and embrace this movement, such as Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, make the use American fascists easy to ridicule and dismiss. But Sharlet implores us to take them seriously as an existential threat to what is left of our anemic democracy. Jeff Sharlet joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his new book and the rising tide of Christofascism threatening our democracy.

Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Speaker 1:

(singing)

Chris Hedges:

Jeff Sharlet has spent two decades covering the intersection of extreme Christian nationalism, what I have defined as Christian fascism, and the far right. In his new book, Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, he gives us snapshots of a country rapidly devolving into a Christianized fascist state. He captures the rage, the despair, the dislocation, the alienation, and the aesthetic of violence as well as the magical thinking that are the hallmarks of all fascist movements, a fascist movement that is coalesced around the Trump-led Republican Party.

The bizarre conspiracy theories and buffoonish qualities of many who lead and embrace this movement such as Republican representative Lauren Boebert make the term “American fascism” easy to ridicule and dismiss, but Sharlet implores us to take these Christian fascists seriously as an existential threat to what is left of our anemic democracy.

Joining me to discuss his new book is Jeff Sharlet. So, Jeff, I’m going to have to skip your first chapter, which is gorgeous. Everyone has to buy the book and read it on Harry Belafonte. Just really moving and beautifully written. Of course, Belafonte being this amazing figure. The book is really snapshots from around the country. I find your insights into Trump supporters extremely prescient. I think because of your experience covering the Christian right, those I called Christian fascists over a decade ago in my book, and I think you do use the word “fascist” now in a way that perhaps you didn’t then.

But I just want to begin with because you make a distinction between Trump’s first run and his second run that I found particularly fascinating. His first run drawn from Norman Vincent Peale’s the Prosperity Gospel. I think Norman Vincent Peale married him and Ivana Trump. For those who don’t know, this is the very well-known, unfortunately, Presbyterian, I’m Presbyterian preacher, who argued that if you are right with God, you would be blessed in material ways, extremely popular, especially with the rich like the Rockefellers.

But let’s begin with the evolution, because the evolution I thought was really sharp and of course, very frightening. But let’s talk about the first Trump and his congregants. I think you in one point even may even call it the Church of Trump and what’s happened the second time around and where we’re moving.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah, I think from the first rally I went to was an early 2016 in Youngstown, Ohio, which is, of course, a town just absolutely destroyed, a steel town just decimated and there was a big crowd as the airplane hangar. And the first thing I noticed and would realize was a staple was while the press, which was all penned up, they all agreed to stay in a little metal cage basically so that they can be used as like a prop in Trump’s passion play was twiddling their thumbs. He was introduced by one of the most right-wing preachers I’d ever heard, just a local preacher, but a very, very militant guy. And I’ve heard a lot of right-wing preachers.

And in fact that this was a staple of this and it was a sort of a combination of that kind of wrath of God. But also, at this particular, or I think it was at this … No, it was a different rally. Black preacher who often introduced him would say, “I don’t see Black, I don’t see white. The only color I see is green.”

And I would listen to the people around me talking about while they waited for his plane, Trump Force One to come in. Remember, this is not a president. He’s coming in his own presence and we talk about all the gold with it. The plane was literally heavy with gold. And I realized that what was happening here was this appeal to the prosperity gospel.

When Trump says, “We’re going to win so much you’re going to get tired of winning.” He wasn’t saying that, “I’m just like you.” He was saying like prosperity gospel preachers always do. “Look at my blessings. Look at my airplane, my riches, my beautiful suit. I am obviously more blessed than you. But by falling behind me, falling into my wake, you can partake that blessing, too.”

And you raised Norman Vincent Peale, who he referred to as his preacher, we make a lot of Trump’s irreligiosity, but of course, I think we’re confusing religiosity with piety. He’s certainly impious. But he grew up really fascinated by Billy Graham on television as a charismatic figure and Norman Vincent Peale, the power of positive thinking. He described Norman Vincent Peale as part of his holy trinity of mentors his father, Fred, from when he learned toughness, Roy Cohn, the legendary Red Scare warrior from whom he learned cunning.

And Norman Vincent Peale, you could argue from whom he learned bullshit that the point is the sale. Norman Vincent Peale boiled the gospel down to a salesman’s manual. And he carried that forth. And that’s what was happening in 2016, I think was really was he was saying, “Vote for me and you’ll get a piece of the riches. You’re going to get some of the gold. You’re playing, too, will be heavy with this precious cargo.”

Chris Hedges:

In that sense, he really replicates the role of a mega preacher completely who is idolized, who can’t be questioned on the root to physical prosperity. But the second time Trump runs, which you also cover, you say the whole landscape has changed in a much darker way. How did it change?

Jeff Sharlet:

Well, by 2020, of course, we’re into the pandemic. “You’re going to win so much you get tired of winning,” we can’t really go with that. There was the aborted slogan tag, “Keep American great,” but MAGA just worked so well that he stuck with that. But it was darker in the sense of he had been using conspiracy theories.

And I think what’s fascinating with that kind of narrative world that he was creating, was winking at, he’s a little bit like a drug dealer who starts using his own supply. And I write in the book of a particular interview with Laura Ingraham in, I think it was in 2019 actually, no, the summer of 2020 and talking Laura Ingraham is doing what the right-wing press did for him, which was always to kind of take his words, broadcast them, but also channel them into some kind of reason.

And he was resisting it, sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, looking very uneasy, talking about dark forces, men in black uniforms circling in the plains above him right now. He’s using the present tense. And you could see Laura Ingraham trying to reel him back saying, “By dark forces, you must mean Obama’s people.” And he’s like, “No, no, I mean people. You don’t know who they are. I can’t tell you the name.”

And he’s no longer winking at the conspiracy theories he’s trafficked in. I think he’s sort of fallen into the abyss. And that kind of conspiracy thought was so definitive of the rallies I would go to where there’s always a lot of blood and gore in the rhetoric of a Trump rally. And that’s been one of the failings of the press and not really addressing that. They would just ignore those stories.

But now, he would go on at length about decapitations and disembowelment and bad ombres as he put it, creeping in through windows. Lots of this sort of horrible horror movie kind of rape fantasies and things that he knew that he couldn’t even tell you about. And it struck me as a kind of modernized Americanized bastardized gnostic gospel, Gnosticism. And I know that you’ve read deeply in this literature.

But just to boil it down in the simplest sense, an idea that there’s an elect or a small group initiates who have secret knowledge and what’s on the surface isn’t real. And in fact the actual God you see isn’t real. There’s a deeper power behind that. And of course, Gnosticism even has its own variation of the deep state, the bureaucracy that gets in the way of the truth. I don’t think Trump actually believed QAnon, but he believed in this kind of Gnosticism, this secret knowledge that you obtained not through rationalism but through a kind of mystic connection. And of course, this starts to sound a lot like fascism, which it is.

Chris Hedges:

Gnosticism is the heretical or was the early church to find it as a radical, these various gospels that could get very fantastic, but it was based on secret knowledge and initiants had this secret knowledge that others didn’t have. I think you’re dead on when you describe this as a kind of form of modern Gnosticism.

And just to go back the earlier iteration of Trump is that he would say these outrageous things, particularly to the press you write about this, who are kind of caged off and he would call in essence for violence against the press or they should be … But then say it was just a joke. But he doesn’t do that in the second time around. It changes.

Jeff Sharlet:

No. He still does it. It’s the joking not joking method and he still does it. And I think we encounter it all the time and a lot of our colleagues in the press are like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football, but Lucy keeps holding and they just keep going up in the air every time. I mean, even the second time around, there was a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, so-called sweetest place on Earth, where the streetlights are actually shaped like Hershey’s kisses. And it was a very violent speech, but none of that was reported. The takeaway was he says, “Four more years, maybe eight more years, 12 more years. Oh, I’m joking. Or maybe I’m not.”

I think when you compare them before to a megachurch preacher, I think for a lot of secular folks, there’s an imagination of these preachers as pious and proper as opposed to the reality. And I think you make this very good point of the mini cults of personality that a megachurch preacher can create in his own ecosystem in which outrageousness, lies, winks, funniness, hypocrisies, all that becomes a part of the performance and it becomes in a way sort of sacralized so that if Trump says one thing at one rally and then kind of contradicts himself at the next, and that happens and people will hear it.

You’d meet people who’d gone to 50, 60, 100 rallies. They were like deadheads traveling around the country. There’s all kinds of little sex and cults that have their own ideas about what happens at the rally that travel around. They would hear those differences and yet they would not hear it as evidence of falsehood, but as evidence of truth. They would say, “There’s something deep here. This is a signal. This is an invitation for me to consider.”

And I think now this is really hard for anyone who after Trump to really reckon with is to say they’re experiencing that as a kind of intellectually stimulating encounter. They’re being asked to participate in meaning-making as they understand it. Meaning-making that is submissive to the great man, the great leader, but they are not passive receivers. They experience themselves as more engaged than they do otherwise in politics. That is in no way, I don’t want anyone to hear that as like saying, “Oh, you’re saying that Trump has something of value?” No, no. The meaning that he’s making is horrific, but it is a collective project.

Chris Hedges:

Well, Hannah Arendt makes this point that it’s not about truth or reality or consistency. It’s about catering to the emotional needs of the moment. So, you can completely contradict what you said even the day before, as long as you’re catering to those emotional needs. We’re going to get into fascism, which of course I agree with you. I think it is the right word and I think people have to begin to use it. But first I want to talk about, I know this again was extremely thoughtful. You talk about the call, the snake and the bullet, so explain.

Jeff Sharlet:

So, one of the things again that I feel like you hear this phrase sometimes, pundits use this, they’ll say something [inaudible 00:14:11], they’ll say, “It’s just theater.” And I always get very confused by that as a person who loves the arts. What do you mean just theater? Theater is powerful. Theater, there’s no such thing as just theater. It’s theater. And yes, Trump did theater, he did performance, and yet so often, these bits, these skits that he would do, sometimes there’d be comedy skits. He’d do multiple voices moving around the stage.

And the first campaign, three that would show up pretty reliably where the call, the snake and the bullet. And the call was he would do both sides of a phone call with a company that he was just going to call when he becomes president, “This is how we’re going to handle sending jobs overseas.” He’ll just call them up and he would play out the whole phone call and the crowded cheering because he’s telling off the boss just the way they wish they could.

The snake, he takes actually a song originally written by a Black civil rights activist. It’s a little poem and he would take it out and very sort of elaborately unfold the paper, although he didn’t need it, he had it memorized. And it’s about inviting a snake in a woman who picks up a snake who cries for help. She picks up the snake and the snake bites her and the snake scolds her and says, “You knew what I was.”

To him, this is a metaphor for what is happening by immigrants coming to the United States. We let immigrants in and then they bite us. And that would always be accompanied with a kind of litany of martyrs. He would name these individuals, usually white individuals who had been killed by undocumented people of color and a fair number of people in the crowd knew those names. Although I think we talk about it later, I think the age of martyrs really came post January 6th.

But then the bullet, the bullet is just an astonishing piece of work. He’s talking about the Muslims and they chop off heads and he’s imitating chopping off the heads and he’s imitating putting people in cages and lighting them on fire. But he’s got a solution, General Black Jack Pershing in the Philippines in the 19th century.

Now, the history here is it’s not history. This didn’t happen, but what he says happened, and he acts it out, he plays it out is that he had 50 Muslim rebels, prisoners of war. And he takes 50 bullets and he dips them in blood and Trump mimes it out, swishing it around in pig blood, pig blood. They’re going to shoot the Muslims with pig blood soaked bullets and then he shoots 49 of the prisoners kills them. Trump acts it out. The crowd is cheering. They’re ecstatic. And it’s not righteous violence. It’s ecstatic lustful violence. It’s pleasure.

And you say, “Caters to the emotional needs.” I think that’s one of the really key things is he works across a lot of emotions that politicians don’t normally address. He leads one bullet and he gives it to the last prisoner and he says, “Take that back to your people and tell them that that’s what I’ll do.”

And this was a whole performance and the crowd would like it so much. He’d say, “You want to hear it again?” And they’d say, “Yes,” and he would perform it again. And the press meanwhile would be sitting there saying, “Well, let’s see, did he say anything about policy or did he indicate anything about appointments and so on,” because they’re dismissing all that as just theater. That’s not just theater. That is the substance of Trumpism.

Chris Hedges:

I want to ask about martyrs. You write quite a bit. In fact, you go kind of in search of the history of Babbitt, who was killed on January 6th. Talk a little bit about Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, writes about the importance of martyrs to a new movement like Hassell was to the Nazi party.

And you were writing about how they reinvented her, particularly I think she was in her 30s, but then her age keeps dropping I think until she’s 16. But that also Canetti said that these martyrs, it’s a fictional narrative. They have to be the most innocent, the most pure, and that these movements need that these martyrs to essentially initiate their followers into these campaigns of violence. Talk about that and then I want to begin to talk about Christian fascism.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah, I think that’s well put. I think if we understand Trumpism theologically, we can see the first campaign as the prosperity gospel, the second as the gnostic gospel. And what we’re in now, and I would argue since January 6th, we’re in the age of martyrs. And that’s a big step as you said, for initiating people into that kind of violence.

I think Trump had been trying to cultivate that beforehand, but none of these victims of undocumented people were just well known enough to work. And then on January 6th, Ashli Babbitt, this 30 something year old white woman, blonde hair, southern California, military veteran wearing a Trump flag like a cape and an American flag backpack tries to lead a charge through a broken window. And they would famously say she was unarmed, she was not. There’s the evidence photo of her knife on my cover of the book. She was very clearly there for combat and her own writing and what she understood she was going to do to storm the capitol.

And we see the hands of a police officer, a Capitol Hill police officer shooter. And they’re the hands of a Black man. And as soon as I saw that, I said, “Well, that’s one of the oldest stories in American history.” That’s the lynching story. A Black man who kills an innocent white woman. That’s the story of Birth of a Nation, first movie ever screened in the White House, 1915, white woman fleeing a Black man who leaps to her death. And thus, the heroes who in the movie literally are the Ku Klux Klan, who ride in to action.

And so, it starts happening that day and I’d had one idea for the book, but on January 6th I sort of had to throw out a lot of stuff and make room because I said, I’m going to watch this martyr to myth in form and in action and we start to see flags, the Black flag, a white silhouette of Ashli, a drop of red on her neck where the white woman has been killed. Actually, she was shot in the shoulder. Proud boys give these out as challenge coins. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? Trump finally starts using, even though he knows. He knew who shot Ashli Babbitt, but the idea was everyone who is his enemy shot Ashli Babbitt. And so, she becomes a martyr.

And I like what you say very much about initiating into violence. Now, I think of one man who was arrested. I think his name is Garret Miller. And he’s kind of a comic story when the FBI show up at his house, he’s wearing a T-shirt that has a picture of the capitol on January. It says, “January 6th, I was there.” And it just seems like a doofus. But what they were arresting him for was he had been planning online a vengeance killing for Ashli, who he imagined as a little girl. And they always sort of, not only would they say she was younger than she was, they’d say she was smaller than she was.

The same time, she did double duty because she was a military veteran. So, she’s therefore the stabbed in the back, which is an old fascist ploy, too. They were stabbed in the back. We would righteously win. But traitors in our midst, a cop mowed her down. I don’t think she’s the end stage martyr of Trump. I think there’s a way in which you can understand her and him understanding her as keeping the cross warm until he can hoist himself up there, which he now has, which is what we saw on display in the courtroom.

Chris Hedges:

Well, he hasn’t done it. We’ve done it for him.

Jeff Sharlet:

That’s true. That’s true. He knew we would do it. Yeah.

Chris Hedges:

It’s a terrible conundrum because he should have been charged for all sorts of crimes probably from the first day of his presidency under the emolument clause. But as you point out, it plays completely into his own martyrdom or his own sense of martyrdom and the sense of martyrdom of his supporters. So, we watch now in the trial in New York, it’s just a big campaign event.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah, I think, was it the eve of which of the indictments? I can’t remember. It’s now become so regular. Once you go to a Trump rally, it’s a little bit like Hotel California. You can never leave. You can never get off the email list, the text list. You can cancel as much as you want. They’ll keep coming five, 10 a day.

But the eve of the first or second indictment, he sends this fundraising email and says, “Dear friend, this may be the last time I’m able to write to you.” And it’s got this air of, “It’s a noble thing I do,” and I couldn’t help but think of … Some listeners will remember from their high school reading a Tale of Two Cities and Sydney Carton bravely going off to [inaudible 00:23:58]. It’s a Christ move, right? He emphasizes that, right? “I’m the only thing standing between them and you. They’re doing this to me because they’re coming after you.” I mean, yeah, he got a slow pitch and he knew how to hit it.

Chris Hedges:

I want to talk about fascism. I think both you and I feel that that’s an appropriate word to describe this movement. Trump has embraced what I would call the fascistic ideology of the Christian nationalists or the Christian right. But of course, its face doesn’t look like past iterations of fascism. Fascism always cloaks itself in national symbols, of venerated national symbols and venerated national mythology.

And one of the things that, and you point this out in the book, I’m just going to read a little passage, because of course it can’t embrace the race purity that was very much part of particularly of German fascism. You write, “The purification project of the old fascism has also ‘been proved’ too extreme to be practical for a nation in which the rightest ascendancy can contend for the loyalty of a third of Latinx voters. This time, white supremacy welcomes all. Or, at least, a sufficient veneer of ‘all’ to reassure its more timid adherents that border walls and ‘Muslim bans’ and ‘kung flu’ and ‘Black crime’ and ‘replacement theory’ somehow do not add up to the dreaded r-word, which anyway these days, in the new authoritarian imagination, only happens in ‘reverse,’ against white people.”

So, let’s begin to talk about what this new fascism looks like. I certainly saw its genesis within Christian fascism, the Christian right, but the full-blown flower of fascism in Trump does have differences with the traditional Christian right. You know the Christian right very well. And your book, The Family is a great work on it. So, I’ll let you go from there.

Jeff Sharlet:

Well, first, I want to give you credit for that early book, American Fascist. And around the same time I was writing The Family, there’s actually a chapter in the family called the F word. The F word is fascism. I’m writing about this. The Family is this kind of very elite Christian nationalist group based in Washington but international and they hold something called the National Prayer Breakfast. On the surface, they’re quite banal. Within, they’re quite extreme.

And in the post World War II years, they actually went around and recruited former Nazi war criminals, senior war criminals. So, that’s about as close to fascism as you can get. But what they would say to those guys is essentially, you have to switch out your loyalty to the frere and give it over to the father. And I argue then, and I was wrong, and I write this in the new book, I was wrong to argue against the word “fascism”. I wasn’t saying it’s not as bad. I said, there’s more than one kind of baton in the sun.

But I said fundamentalism I thought then was a kind of break on fascism because in American Christian right, Christian national and whatever you want to call it, they weren’t ever going to go for that cult of personality. They wouldn’t switch out Jesus. And I think you rightly argued, no, the cult of personality was there and every significant church around the pastor that they adopted that kind of power and Trump’s move was to consolidate it nationally.

And to strip away some of the respectability politics that still lingered around it. The idea of American political life has always been noble, but now we have the open celebration of violence. You go to a Trump rally in ’16 or ’20 or now, and as you say, there’s that moment where he points to the press and the pen and he says, “They’re the enemy of the people. They’re scum.” And the whole crowd turns around and they fly bulk birds in the air and they’re screaming and they’re having this pleasure thinking about the violence they’re going to commit.

Very first Trump rally I went to, one of the very first people I met there, nice old sort of hippie grandparent couple, a lot of turquoise jewelry and nice people and they’re talking. And then Gene, the husband says, “I want to get a hold of a protester and beat the crap out of him so I can get on TV.”

And his wife looks at him as if I think she’s going to rebuke him, this is too much. She says, “Oh, Gene.” And she sort of melts into him and then she leans over to me and uses language I don’t think she used often like this. She’s whispering because she knew she was being naughty and smiling and she was speaking about Hillary Clinton and she says, “Don’t she look like she’d been rode hard and put up wet.”

And that combination, I think of it as there’s a great German historian of the right, Annika Brockschmidt. We did a discussion about this, about militant eroticism. This idea of violence as a kind of sexual pleasure, a kind of lust, a kind of authenticity and truth. You know you want to do it. You know you want to hit them.

Trump says, “Wait.” One of the things he says, “You know you want to hit him and I want you to hit them. It’ll feel good.” I think this changes things. I think, too, it’s worth talking about. I know you’ve thought a lot about this, that fascism in 2023 is not fascism in 1936. America is not Germany and that was a regime. This is still right now a movement. It doesn’t have anywhere near full control, but it’s mutating and it’s changing rapidly, and that’s one of the things.

Another historian I’d refer people to is Anthea Butler, great short book called White Evangelical Racism. She’s a church historian. And she writes about the promise of whiteness and the promise of the whiteness and the way it can seduce even Black folks into thinking, “I can be part of this power.”

And every time I go to some far right event, whether it’s a Trump rally or a militia meeting, I come back and my nice liberal friends. They just assumed that it was all white and it never is. And I try and tell them. There’s a church, a militia church in Omaha, Nebraska in the book, more diverse than any church around here where I live in Vermont, about a third people of color and a full on civil war church.

They look forward to civil war. They are armed. They are ready. Bring it on. They are fairly openly white supremacists. They preach relentlessly against Black Lives Matter as a metaphor for Blackness itself. And yet, they’ve drawn in. Fascism has gravity. Fascism has power. And if we recognize it as such, it shouldn’t be that surprising to us that this iteration in America in 2023 is not quite the same racial purity project as happened in Germany 1933.

Chris Hedges:

I think you made the point that it’s defined more by feelings or the embrace of what they describe as white victimization. So, as long as you embrace that, it doesn’t matter what color you are.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah. And in fact, actually in the martyr role that Trump uses of people killed by undocumented folks, he often talks about a young, very promising Black football player. And in a sense, bringing this guy in under the umbrella of whiteness. But this is the same guy who’s telling a story. He likes to tell a story of this is sort of the twisted rape fantasy that I spoke of.

“Imagine you’re a traveling salesman,” he says. And you’re thinking, “Traveling salesman? Is there such a thing who goes around knocking on doors selling Bibles anymore.” “But imagine you’re traveling salesman in your way and your pretty blonde wife is at home asleep and a bad ombre comes up and he opens a window and he crawls in.”

And the crowd is just, they’re thrilling to it the way you do to a horror movie, but it’s charged with a perverse sexuality, which is the rape of the white woman, which is a fantasy being twisted into the mind, I think, of white supremacy, and yet he’s making that available to a broader sense.

I’m not going to go out there and argue the absurd that Trump is ever going to win any significant or he’s going to win a significant number of Black votes. He’s not going to win the majority. He doesn’t need to. And I feel a lot of liberals are leaning on this idea that diversity will save us. And I’ve been hearing that as long as I’ve been hearing that the young will save us. I’ve been hearing that since I was young, 30 some years ago.

There’s this sort of passivity. We’re waiting for Godot to come and solve the situation as opposed to embracing a radical politics of organizing and real vital democracy that we have to do ourselves. Every one of us.

Chris Hedges:

I just want to throw in there that of course, especially in the south, all through slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the women who were raped were Black. Mary Chesnut in her diary, even writes about visiting plantations where there were some two dozen mulatto children because of course the chief slaveholder was raping the Black women. I mean, that gets into the paranoid style of American politics.

Let’s talk about civil war. I’ve covered civil wars. I think in some ways from my perspective, it’s even more frightening. It’s less a civil war because it’s not like Weimar Germany where you had armed communist militias battling brown shirts in the streets. It’s more the uninterrupted rise of heavily armed fascist, proto-fascists, Trump supporters with small arsenals in their homes and those who don’t have any violent counterpart.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah. You’ve covered civil wars. I accidentally, as a younger person, stumbled through one in Algeria. And I know that this is not that. And I am aware of the risk of hyperbole using this phrase I use in my subtitle, Scenes from a Slow Civil War. A slow civil war, and it’s my way of thinking about it.

In 2021, what I started noticing was academic historians who are very cautious, rightly so. They understand the history moves slowly. I’m married to an academic historian. I understand this and I think it’s the right way. Starting to say, “Oh, some of the conditions of an actual civil war here.” And that language had always been there mostly on the fringe of the right, but now, it was moving as a rhetorical ploy more centrally. And I started thinking about the ways, how could we understand slow civil war as a kind of an institutionalization of violence.

I think the laws, for instance, I write about this in the book. I was in Wisconsin when Roe fell, which became the only blue state in which abortion was completely outlawed. It reverted to 1849 law. And you would hear these stories in the press of a woman who nearly bled out or bled out or something else went horrible happened because she couldn’t get access to reproductive care. And as journalists, we know for every story like that we hear, there’s a lot that don’t go reported.

And I said, there’s a way in which more harm now is being done than all the abortion clinic bombers. It’s very easy to see an abortion clinic bomber. And there was a lot more of that than people realize as a kind of at least a desire to spark civil war. And yet here it is. And I thought of the ways that you have these armed militias, these groups of men who line up outside school libraries and churches and bars having drag shows and so on.

And there’s been a few shots fired, not many. And so, people can say, “Well, come on now. Nothing’s really happening.” And I’m like, “Well, this is like we’re striking matches and flicking them into dry grass and so far, the flames haven’t caught and so we think everything’s fine. How many times can you line up a group of men with guns.”

To what you say though about there not being this counterforce like in Weimar, Germany. I mean, there is a scene in the book where in Sacramento had a rally for Ashli Babbitt. Antifa and Proud Boys show up to battle and they kind of all know each other and it’s a kind of a ridiculous fight, although I wouldn’t have wanted to have one of those blows land on me.

But I’m a nonviolent person, but I’m also an all hands on deck person. I think anyone who says, “Here’s how we beat fascism,” we don’t know yet because we haven’t done it. We haven’t done it yet. So, I’m like, “Wherever you feel called, do that.” That said, I do hear on the left this idea of the John Brown Gun Club and these right-wingers think they’re the only ones with guns. I’m a gun owner myself. There’s 400 million guns in civilian hands in the United States, and all you need to do is drive it outside your blue bubble to understand very quickly the disparity of those guns.

I don’t think there’s ever going to be a militia marching. And I spent time with those militias and I know you have as well. They’re not going to march. That’s not the threat. The threat is the simmer of violence, the drumbeat of mass shootings. I would argue the epidemic of queer and trans youth suicide, which has many causes, but one of the big ones is an ongoing campaign of criminalization. You can’t tell your child anymore, “You’re being paranoid.” You’re not. The state if you’re in Florida, if you’re in Texas, if you’re here in New Hampshire, the state is out to get you.

And I think that is what we look at as a slow civil war simmering violence. And I think we fool ourselves if we say just like with the matches, if we say, “Well, surely that could never get worse.” It could. It doesn’t have to. Fascism’s big lies inevitability. Fascism wants us to believe something’s inevitable. Nothing is.

Chris Hedges:

Well, fascism also uses channels of official violence, but always militias brown. I mean, that’s a component of fascism. It was a component of Stalinism. And I’m wondering if the historical analogy isn’t better of the 1920s in Soviet Russia because we forget that there was resistance to the rise of Stalinism just as certainly from 1933 to 1938. There was pretty significant resistance within the institutions against the rise of fascism. It took Hitler several years in order to gain control.

I’m asking you, but my fear if Trump is reelected is that it won’t look like anything like the former Trump presidency, but it will come back with an open vindictiveness and viciousness. And so, I am curious as to whether rather than civil war, what we’re seeing is that the last gasp perhaps of a very ineffectual liberal institutions and liberal elite trying to stave off a group that rules through open fear, intimidation and violence, both through official channels and through these rogue militias where the Proud Boys and et cetera, Three Percenters, where you can sort of separate yourself the way Hitler separated himself from the brown shirts.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah. Oh, yeah, certainly, stand back, stand by was just such a moment. And in the book, I write about a militia in Marinette. The leader claimed 6,000. I think that’s not true, but there was clearly massive arms, massive equipment. And the presence of a militia like that, they’re not doing anything. They do lots of training exercises. And so, who’s going to stick their head up at that moment? So maybe there’s no civil war because people just sort of say, “It’s too far gone.”

I met folks on the right who felt like that as well. They said, “I’ll never need to bring the guns out because the new world order has already won and is controlling us with radio waves or whatever it is.” All those little fringe conspiracy theories. By the way, I think this is important. Another way that a lot of people, they dismiss someone’s ideas because they’re kooky.

When I was driving around Wisconsin talking to people who were celebrating the downfall of Roe, everybody, every man, especially that I spoke to had a profoundly bizarre theory of human reproductive biology. They really didn’t know how bodies worked. And so it was easy to dismiss them as kooks instead of saying, “Wait a minute. All these kooky ideas, all these little strange theories put together make this movement,” which yeah, then maybe suppresses. That maybe the slow civil war is one for the right.

I doubt that because look, I don’t have to defend liberalism to point out that it’s not that gentle. And I think, I mean, I keep wondering what’s going to happen when we already know there’s a number of underground abortion providers working in some of these red states.

What’s going to happen when one of them is arrested and tried for murder and they’re from New York and New York says, “No, no, no. You are not putting our citizen on trial.” What’s going to happen when these performative stunts like Ron DeSantis with his white alligator guard, his militia that is answerable only to him or North Carolina Republicans, who have just created their own semi-secret police. What’s going to happen?

Again, it’s a little bit like you keep lining up men with guns and a certain point, the bluff gets called. One of the things I don’t write about in the book because I try to stay close to the ground, folks, but I think it’s important having written about the military before. We imagine, a lot of people imagine the military is monolithic. Maybe they like the military, maybe they don’t, but they imagine it as sort of uniform because they wear uniforms.

It’s not at all, of course. And I think you know this and I know this. In the past, there’s always been people like General Mike Flynn, the Trump advisor who’s got all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories, but the military mostly contained them. Maybe your job is to get the Jeeps there on time. All right. And you think the Jews secretly control all the banks, but you get the Jeeps there on time and no one pays attention.

I think that fragmentation, which has been developing for years of these fault lines, especially through Christian right organizations in the military, that’s really dangerous. There was a number of state national guard commanders who decided that they were not going to follow the orders, the vaccination orders, so this put them in a kind of level of low level mutiny against the Biden administration. Biden could have, I’m not a great fan, but I’ll say he could have said, “All right. No, no, no, you’re complying. I’m nationalizing you and you’re going to do this.”

Seven states let it ride, which again, I don’t like to get that far off the ground, I think was the right thing to do in that case. That wasn’t worth the fight. I think it’s only a matter of time until someone picks a fight.

Chris Hedges:

Jeff, you know even better than I do, that the Christian right, the Christian fascists have essentially seized the chaplaincies within the military, heavy recruitment, and what a lot of people don’t know is that the military is a large organization, but among combat units. Believers in the ideology of the Christian right are quite high. I don’t remember the percentages. But frighteningly high. And so, there’s been a huge infusion, prayer services at the Pentagon, et cetera. There’s been a huge infusion, a huge effort on the part of the Christian right to co-op huge segments, not just of the military, but law enforcement as well.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah. They’ve had the chaplaincy for 15 years and nobody noticed that. Your kind of Presbyterian is no longer welcome-

Chris Hedges:

That’s right.

Jeff Sharlet:

… to serve there or even a kind of conservative, traditional mainline guy, forget it. Do not apply.

Chris Hedges:

You’re coming out of Liberty University or Oral Roberts or wherever. So, I just want to close. I mean, you end the book, it’s very pointy. You end the peak skill, and I don’t have time to go into it, but this is wonderful or incredibly powerful scene with Paul Robeson and he’s attacked by the townspeople. I think he’s almost killed. I mean, it’s quite dangerous.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah. Mob of 5,000 people backed up by New York State Police helicopter.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah. I know, I know, I know.

Jeff Sharlet:

1949.

Chris Hedges:

But that’s how you end the book. And it’s kind of wistful, it struck me, that in a way, you said where … And I’m paraphrasing. But I thought the question you raised is where are these people now when we need them? The people like the Robesons, you talk about Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and all of these great radical artists, writers, musicians. And it’s not in the book, but let’s talk about the Communist Party. The Communist Party was an important bulwark against the rise of our own version of fascism in the 1930s, so that’s even completely erased and written out of history. I’m not a communist, but they were important.

Jeff Sharlet:

Oh, yeah. No, I think this is one of the most frightening things. This is a moment of global fascism. It’s not just the United States. It’s all around the globe, but there’s not a countervailing force. But my idea of ending with that and the mighty Lee Hays, who wrote all the lyrics to those people.

Chris Hedges:

I know, you go find him. That was amazing.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah. And it’s the same. We skipped over Harry Belafonte in the beginning. The reason I bookend this very dark journey with Harry Belafonte, who was in the struggle, every one of his days, died angry at 96, and a good anger, he was in the fight, was because I think fascism wants us to embrace this language of hysterical crisis, that either we’re going to win or we’re going to lose.

Now, the struggle’s going to happen. What happens if Trump wins in 2024? Man, I had a heart attack at a very young age a few days before Trump won in 2016. I remember waking up thinking, “Well, fascism is here, but at least I’m alive to see it.” And what happens if he wins in 24? We go on.

I bookend it with those old heroes, those mostly sort of forgotten smoothed over sharp edges, the radical edges smooth down to remind us that the struggle is long. That that’s the hope. The struggle is long. Trump could win in ’24. That’s not the end. We keep going. We keep going. We keep going.

Chris Hedges:

Well, that’s the moral imperative of keeping going, whether you’re winning or not. As I’ve often said, we don’t fight fascists because we’re going to win. We fight fascists because they’re fascists.

Jeff Sharlet:

The good fight. The good fight. The last chapter is called The Good Fight Is The One You Lose.

Chris Hedges:

Yes, that’s right.

Jeff Sharlet:

The one that you undertake, not because you’re going to win, but because of the thing you do.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. That was Jeff Sharlet on his new book, Undertow. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
October 10, 2023

Layoffs at West Virginia University Expose Right-Wing Trends Sweeping Higher Ed

The current crisis at West Virginia University (WVU) is a case study demonstrating not only the telltale signs of manufactured neoliberal austerity, but also the underlying acceptance of right-wing extremist trends in higher education masquerading as “necessary” budget cuts for the financial survival of the university. On August 11, 2023, the board of governors at WVU released a long-anticipated…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
October 4, 2023

Trump Wants Shoplifters to Be Shot

Just days after Donald Trump suggested that U.S. General Mark Milley — the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — deserved to be executed for not being unflaggingly loyal to Trump’s every whim, the ex-president came to California to fantasize about more violence. In front of an enthusiastic gathering of California Republicans at a convention in Anaheim, Trump declared that it is time for…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
October 1, 2023

Trump’s Death Wish For “Disloyal” Military General Is Textbook Totalitarianism

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, years into the Great Terror, the Soviet secret police began rounding up military leaders. In 1937, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was arrested on manufactured charges of spying for the Nazis. After being tortured into confessing his “crimes,” he was summarily shot. Over the next two years, in the run-up to World War II, an estimated 35,000-plus Soviet military officers were…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
October 1, 2023

Veering from the Slipstream: Vonnegut

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.

What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bennington College Address (1970)

Something compelling and sad about that life. Kurt. Born and raised in Indianapolis, (1922-2007). Iconic. More than Slaughterhouse Five.

I remember the reading, at UT-El Paso, my first year in the English graduate program — why that, and I was working for newspapers, had a language gig, one-on-one, in Juarez with a Mexican engineer working for Packard Electric. I was deep into writing stories and a novel. Lots of cross border ruckus stuff. Drugs and some other cross-the-tortilla-curtain smuggling. That was October 19, 1983. Two feet from fame.

It may have just been a coincidence it was a Homecoming event, but he was there, speaking to graduate students in a classroom. Then after the reading, a party. The obligatory after-reading-party.

Wine, whisky, tequila. Kurt was looking for Pall Malls, and I had two packs ready — cheap cigs from Juarez. I brought a bottle of mescal, with the worm, and we talked — me, Vonnegut and two other folk. But he and I talked face to face. I had no fear, no compunction to put anyone on pedestals, and we talked about Dresden and some of my life.

I grabbed Dixie cups, threw some lime wedges into each one and poured me, Kurt and the two other people shots of the agave drink.

These guys and gals are many times inquisitive about the people who parachute into their lives — young people, like myself. Twenty-six and with a donkey cart full of stories already. I had family who survived that bombing in Dresden — in fact, my Canadian mom, divorced from my German father, had the sugar, salt, flour and grease ceramic flower containers that were buried for safekeeping in Dresden. They survived that bombing.

Vonnegut never survived that role he played as a captured US soldier picking up the carcasses of the dead in Dresden. He was deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse, schlachthof fünf (5). He survived the allied bombing.

We’re talking several days of heavy bombers from US Air Force and RAF, up to 1,350 aircraft in total, with their payloads ready for factory, neighborhood, family and town — 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices. Like all UK-American bombing, a firestorm ensued, which destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city and more than 25,000 were killed with so many more wounded, and yet more psychologically scarred.

Kurt was one of those who never recovered. His book, Slaughterhouse Five, took years to write, coming out in 1969. It is an anti-war book. I saw him again 20 years later, in Spokane, at a reading and then, the proverbial party afterwards. Pall Malls he still chain smoked. This crowd was a bigger crowd, and I remember having that chance to go over to him and rejiggering his memory. The party in one of the faculty’s houses in New Mexico. Two horses and the fields of giant green chilies growing. And the bottle of worm-blessed mezcal.

I know this seems narcissistic, but the guy remembered me, recalled that night, and the drinking of the agave fermented elixir. He asked about that mezcal again. I repeated that I had just come back from Mexico a few years earlier, and spent time in Oaxaca where there are thousands of acres of agave plants (200 varieties) grown for tequila and mezcal. I told him about how the curanderos and even the narcotraficantes use the liquor in their ceremonies and baptismals, as in vetting their sicarios in the drug runners mafia. Hired killers.

Some of what we talked about went back to El Paso, and then he kept asking me about my life in Mexico, and the booze. He wondered why this time I hadn’t brought a bottle of the mezcal with the gusano (worm) sunk at the bottom. I told him that tequilas were becoming trendy and boutique brewed. I said that mezcal was becoming popular too, thanks to the marketing of it in Mexico on the international stage.

He told me he recalled being really inebriated, and that he had some crazy dreams. “No hangover in the morning. I so wanted to call you to let you know you were right. The dreams and the lack of headache.” He laughed hard, smoke pouring out of his mouth around bedraggled teeth.

His memory was jarred, and he laughed at something he remembered out there in El Paso. He liked the wild west aspect of the town, and the good Mexican food, and he liked the mix of people. Almost all the students who listened to him were of Mexican descent. The department — English Department — wasn’t 87 percent Latino (like the town), but we did have a few in our ranks. The school itself drew people from around Mexico, Latin America and Africa. Engineering. Nursing. Mining. Not many documented or undocumented immigrants were rooting for their children to go get a useless degree in English literature or creative writing. For the most part. In Spokane he was railing against Bush and Cheney. The neocons. He was only a few years from his untimely death.

He and I talked intensely (as intensely as Kurt could be because he always had that raspy laugh, like a two-stroke lawnmower engine choking down, barely hanging onto a spark). He laughed a lot. But when it came to Bush and war, he was serious. He talked a lot about Bush. He asked about El Paso. He asked about my own threadbare travels and even more threadbare writing (paid publishing) career (sic).

I told him the Mexican saying — “Para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien, también; y si no hay remedio litro y medio” — For all bad, mezcal, and for all good, as well; and if there is no remedy, liter and a half.

He asked how the hell I got from Mexico and El Paso to Spokane, to Gonzaga. I tried to squeeze in as much as I could before our talk was overcome by hangers on, the groupies. I told him that even now, after 20 years, I was still teaching as an adjunct, and that I was still organizing part-timers in a union. I also told him I was fiddling around another degree, a masters in urban and regional planning. He knew who Jane Jacobs was. The two of them lived in New York, and Kurt was also a fan of her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He too was against the Robert Moses’ project to kill the Village, with the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

This all is percolating inside after watching the Weide documentary, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. The life of this man, and the life of his family, is laid out, but Robert Weide had an unusual relationship with Vonnegut — more than two decades of friendship. Lots of letters back and forth. The project about this man’s life. Weide was a fan of Vonnegut in high school. He became a filmmaker, and he wanted to capture Kurt’s life in film. This too took Weide a lifetime to produce. It’s a compelling piece, one that is about Kurt, about his failings and his features, about what his kids have to say about Kurt the dad. The ups and downs and ups and downs of his literary life. He was obsessed, and he was almost always a writer.

In so many ways, the movie is about a man out of his own time. He was too old for the Love and Peace Generation, but they adopted him with his iconic books held deep in their souls. Many Vonnegut fans were fans, having never really read his work. I’ve read six of his books, not all of the ones he wrote. I was happy about his books, but I wasn’t obsessed.

Watching this flick, I have a deeper regard for the man, for the country he believed in (one I never believed in) and his world which was big and large on one level, but in many ways, very finite and small. He was a New York and East Coast guy, and he was an icon, a guy who actors and painters and celebrities went to. In his presence, he was a simple guy. I never thought of him as literary. I have been in the company of many literary folk, poets, novelists, journalists.

This is why I adore the time I had with Kurt — limited, two feet from his fame, and now part of the fabric of my own tattered quilt. My life. Failures, mostly, in the literary sense. And this is still stuck in my craw, but I am more resigned with that fact. Timing, disposition, vision, limitations, focus, and a dream. His background is so different from my own. His parts to his whole so different than mine. I’d say nothing we have in common. Nothing, really, but writing, or the knowledge that that is a private and profound thing — to write, to make up and to be a journalist too.

In the documentary, there is a real loneliness that reverberates in this guy’s life. Watch it if you can. About a time long gone. In the context of now, too, with Nazi’s in Ukraine, with the American ghostlands, all the same actors he railed against with the Bush Family and the wars. But, a man like Vonnegut, while immense on many levels, still believed in a lot of goodness in people. Even those in politics. He held a belief that someone was good, something was good about Clinton, and this was before Obama. I can only guess what he would have thought about that charlatan, that war criminal.

They all are. And, now, seeing the propaganda machines in the USA, around the Western world, in the UK and EU, and down under, in Australia, it must be said that the same criminals who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are the same ones fomenting war and hatred with the psychological operations. With the corporate-legacy-mainstream-commercial media part and parcel of their slick Goebbels-Edward Bernays lying game.

Amazing to see the script flipped, and the USA supporting Nazis, and the complete revamping and rewriting of history. Putin as Hitler: What a fucking sad time making that comparison. Sick, Russia lost 27 million defeating the Germans. Putin remembers, and he never knew one brother who died in World War Two. Relatives killed and wounded. What a creepy country, USA, and it is also my mother’s birthplace, Canada, that is creepy. My grandparents from UK, Scotland, that part of the world = creepy. And, well, those Germans, what are those countrymen saying about Putin? Hitler and Putin? It makes no sense. My family was forced onto the Russian front as German conscripts. My grandfather was a pilot in World War I.

Talk about a sick bile in my throat.

Fascism- A History

Slaughterhouse Five, and the Nazis, and the Allies. One in the same.

Imagine the time I could have spent with Kurt if I had had the chance to pull him aside, take him to Chihuahua, spend a week with him in Mexico. Imagine the education I would have gotten, and the one Vonnegut would have gotten.

Sometimes that slipstream comes from a place of mythology, a dream, some biscuit of exceptionalism. All the soured lies of history. But Vonnegut knew that. He wrote about that. Kids in high school were assigned those books. Breakfast of Champions. Cat’s Cradle. Mother Night.

Bly —

Bly’s Call to Duty

By Paul K. Haeder

Each of his poems puts a chink in the armor of the war makers. Robert Bly’s Friday night appearance at SFCC will be part touchstone for peace and part riling-up of the audience to bear witness and take action.

Bly, a preeminent American poet whose 80-year-old voice and intellect have helped to sculpt an important vision of literary art and cultural reclamation, will speak as part of Spokane Falls Community College’s “Lit Live!”

While Bly is a sought-after voice of reason and lyrical charm, his poetic pulse has been stimulated by a life alone, working far from the rarified atmosphere of college or university settings. His roots are in Mansfield, Minn., and in the furrows of hard-working immigrants where his reverence for land and people germinated.

Translator of such great poets as South America’s Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Antonio Machado, India’s Ghalib, Spain’s Lorca and Jim & eacute;nez, and Norway’s Rolf Jacobsen and Olav H. Hauge, Bly’s output of articles, essays and criticism is matched by his more than 40 books of poetry.

Enwrapped in solitude, Bly spins ruminations shaped by other cultures, other poets — as in “Meeting the Man Who Warns Me”:

I dream that I cannot see half of my life. “I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car./ So much just beyond the reach of our eyes, what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep, the hoof marks all around the cave mouth…/ what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.

Also slated for the Music Auditorium stage on Friday night are four male drummers, pounding animal skins as a tribute to “the wild man” in Bly’s Iron John. His 1991 book examines the dichotomy between Savage Man, who is both wounded and inflicts wounds on earth and humankind, and Wild Man, the shaman-healer, Zen priest or woodsman. In Iron John, we have a book about men and the lost energy of visions, fairy tales and the male drumbeat of power and depth. It’s a book of healing and reaffirmation of soul.

Bly also helped redirect the creative surge of Modernism’s influence on poetry by unraveling his words and lines into what Victoria Frenkel Harris has called “incorporative consciousness.” Bly believes that the poet or creative thinker must go “much deeper than the ego … at the same time [becoming] aware of many other beings.” In a sense, he believes that “leaping out” of the intellectual world and into what we intuitively hold as our own realities best explores the paradoxes of two worlds: the world of our psychic pain, and the world in which we must adjust to observing the rules.

Bly came to prominence during the Vietnam War era — a time that tore at the psychic integration of American culture. He recalls how controversial his work was then: “Most of the English teachers in the universities hated our doing ‘political poems,’ as they were called. That still happens,” he recently said about those heady days of the ’60s. “When I’m at a reception at a university these days, an English professor may come up to me and ask: ‘How do you feel now about those poems you wrote during the war?’ They want me to disown the poems. I say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t write more of them.’”

Bly, along with David Ray, created the group American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The first important protest volume was A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1966), edited by Bly and Ray.

In one of his poetry collections, The Light Around the Body, Bly cast a beacon of hazy light upon the symbiotic relationship of poverty and racism and the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

But now, in 2006, with the stink of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah still enveloping Mr. Bush’s war, Bly speaks with singular impetus in his recent work, The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War. “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake any American administration has ever made,” he says. “The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism,” he writes.

For aficionados of the poetic form, The Insanity of Empire embodies both Bly’s disdain for immoral governments and Bly as an the artful practitioner of the ghazal, an Arab poetic form:

I don’t want to frighten you, but not a stitch can be taken/ On your quilt unless you study. The geese will tell you/ A lot of crying goes on before the dawn comes.

SFCC’s literary publication, Wire Harp, and the endowment for Lit Live! will not be the only beneficiaries of Bly’s incantations on Friday night (50 percent of the gate goes to the endowment). Conscious Living — a local business that creates events including the annual Celebrating Body, Mind and Spirit Expo and A Psychic Affair — is partnering with SFCC.

As a reminder of Bly’s continuing relevance, consider that he’s an anti-war activist of long standing. In the Dec. 9, 2002 issue of The Nation, Bly was one of the first to beat the earth drum against the impending war, in his poem, “Call and Answer”:

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days/ And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed & r & The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?/ I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense/ Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer!”

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
September 25, 2023

El Salvador’s ‘gang crackdown’ and the permanent state of exception

El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele has now suspended the rule of law in his country for 18 months, during which time more than 70,000 people have been rounded up and imprisoned without trial in the naming of stopping crime. While Bukele’s approval rating has skyrocketed, many families of the incarcerated paint a much grimmer picture of suspended civil liberties and indefinite detention. TRNN contributor Mike Fox joins Rattling the Bars for a look at El Salvador’s permanent state of exception and the growing signs of a return to fascism in the region.

Studio: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Mansa Musa: Thank you for joining me on this edition of Rattling The Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. In Blood In My Eye, Conrad George L. Jackson observed that the characteristics of fascism are an international quality. He stated, “We will never be able to completely define it because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any set of problems that arise to threaten the capitalist ruling class. He noted, “But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define it in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.’”

Today, fascism is re-emerging throughout the hemisphere as authoritarian regimes throughout Central America increasingly concentrate their power under the banner of reform. This includes the rise of President Bukele in El Salvador, who dubbed himself as the coolest dictator and is regularly called the “Trump of the Tropics” and ruled with a far-right populism that historian Professor Federico Finchelstein referred to as a “wannabe fascist.”

Here to talk about the current state of El Salvador and the wannabe fascist is reporter Mike Fox. Welcome Mike.

Michael Fox: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Mansa Musa: Introduce yourself to our audience. For those that don’t know you on Rattling The Bars.

Michael Fox: Sure. I’m Michael Fox, a freelance journalist based in Latin America, former editor of NACLA, and the host of Brazil on Fire, which was the podcast we put out last year with NACLA and The Real News. And we’re working on a new one now called Under the Shadow which is all about US intervention, in particular, Central America for this first season. There’s a really good connection to everything we’re going to be talking about today, I’m sure.

Mansa Musa: So let’s jump right into Central America. Now we recognize that the US has an interest in the hemisphere. We recognize that for a long time, they’ve been very active in trying to destabilize Cuba. We recognize that when it comes to Latin America and Central America, they’ve always been in that space. Ralph Agee, in his book Inside the Company, was the first one to educate people on what was going on in Central America and Latin America.

And now we are on the anniversary of the assassination of Salvador Linda from Chile. But here we are now in the 21st century talking about the rebirth or the continuation of fascism and more importantly, how fascism looks today in the hemisphere. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on in El Salvador and we are going to segue into other countries that are replicating this model that we can attribute to the US.

Michael Fox: Well, the big thing in El Salvador, and this goes back about four years, is a man named Nayib Bukele, who’s the president; He won in 2019. He is extremely authoritarian, takes power moves to take control. First, he won the presidency… If we look back, he actually was a member of the FMLN, which is the traditional leftist party. Of course, that was the gorilla movement that came out of the Civil War in ’92; It became a political party. They won office several times and he was actually a mayor for the FMLN in Nuevo Cuscatlan and then in San Salvador. The FMLN kicked him out because they said he was creating divisions between their party and then he went independent. And that’s how he went into office in 2019. But from there, he had a very clear idea about trying to… He was an outsider, very inspired by Trump, the idea of trying to break the traditional two-party system that had come out of the Civil War where you had the right-wing ARENA party and the other one was the FMLN.

His focus has been on crime, and battling crime. Now he’s a very interesting character because what he’s done is consolidated more and more power around himself. He was able to elect, in 2021, the majority of Congress that were members of his party, and then by making coalitions with others, he was able to take over two-thirds of Congress. Then, on the day that the new Congress came in, they basically eliminated the previous Supreme Court and put in Supreme Court members and justices who were on his side. So it’s been this power move all the way. And what he did starting last year was an absolute crackdown on crime. Now, if you remember going back a long, long time, El Salvador’s had a very, very difficult battle with gangs. The country’s had an extremely hard time.

Now here’s the fascinating thing about Bukele. Right now he has a 91% approval rate in the country. 91%. And that’s because of the massive crackdown. He said, we’re eliminating habeas corpus, we’re limiting the rule of law, and we are going to take people and lock them up. And basically, he’s locked up more than 70,000 supposed “gang members,” many of them innocent, and they’re sitting on trial. They’ve been extending the state of exception that they instituted roughly a year and a half ago; The 18th time they extended it recently. It now is the country with the highest prison population in the world and the problem is that no one is actually going to trial. There’s no justice that’s happening, people are literally waiting for something to happen, and many, many, many innocent people, hundreds, have died since he started his massive crackdown.

We know it’s at least 200 but the movement of victims of the regime say it’s over 300 now. And everyone’s held incommunicado: Families cannot speak with their family members in jail. They can’t even speak with lawyers. So it is a state of absolute exception. It is extremely concerning. But of course, the country people are seeing their lives have changed for the first time. They can walk the streets freely at night, they don’t have to worry about crime, which is amazing in a country that has been battling gang situations for so, so long. It’s a very, very complicated situation in the country right now.

Mansa Musa: And that’s the contradiction that I want to talk about in terms of this current state of El Salvador as it relates to what people perceive to be safe. As opposed to what it was before. I’m of the opinion that what you’ve accomplished, in terms of making this country safe, could have been accomplished without these repressive acts. El Salvador has one of the biggest prisons in the world and you did it in the same fashion that the US did with Guantanamo. This is Guantanamo on steroids in El Salvador. But my question to you is, what’s the population’s attitude overall? I’ve seen in one report that you gave where you have people saying they’re safe. Then you have also the family members of these 70,000 people and growing, some of them, they say less than 30% can be identified as gang members. What are the people saying, overall? Is there anybody in agreement with them or do we have opposition?

Michael Fox: Well, that’s it. Obviously, there’s opposition. In fact, I was there on May 1 and there was a big march, thousands of people in the march, marching downtown calling for their family members to be released, calling for the innocent to be let go. There was one woman I met, and she had a really fascinating take, she said you don’t really know what the reality is until they come and take your loved one away. And now I know. Now I know. Because her husband’s been in jail for months, she has not talked to him, he has diabetes and she can’t get him medicine. And that’s the thing is you can’t send a care package to people in jail. They have a certain amount of money that you can be paying per month to increase the amount of food that they might receive but you can’t say, oh, it’s somebody who’s sick and so we’re going to send them something. That doesn’t work.

And you don’t even know if your loved one is actually receiving the benefits of that money that you’re putting in there. There are a couple of cases in which a family member continued to pay that money for several months and only then found out that her husband had died months before. She had been paying money for him to get extra amounts of food and different types of food throughout that time, and she was never told. So there is obviously opposition. The opposition is growing because the more people are locked up, the more family members and people realize that, hey, there is something happening that is very sinister. But like I said, it hasn’t touched your family and you’re seeing Bukele doing things that they never thought would happen, then they’re willing to go along with it.

This is why it’s such… Like you said, the contradictions… It’s such a complicated moment in the country now. And here’s what’s really scary: The elections are next year. In El Salvador, legally, and constitutionally Bukele should not be able to run again, you’re not allowed to run for reelection. But since he has a majority in the Supreme Court – Since he’s basically locked up the legislative assembly, he’s locked up the Supreme Court – Three months after the new Supreme Court came in, they basically said, no, no, he’s good to go for reelection. He’s already said he’s going to run for reelection. Not only that but he announced earlier this year that he’s going to be transforming the municipalities and the look of the municipalities, basically gerrymandering across the country, in order to shore up support there.

So there’s going to be big elections next year where they’re going to vote for new mayors, new legislative assembly members, and they’ve decreased the number of municipalities and the number of local officials by 90%. And why? It’s because he knows if new people are going to be elected, the majority of the population is going to vote for people from his party. So it’s basically this massive consolidation of power and there is no end in sight of the state of exception. There was no one expecting that he was going to lift the state of exception, going to have trials, and let those people who were innocent go home. That’s not happening. And it’s really concerning.

Mansa Musa: And this is in fact, terrorism. Then we look at the impact that El Salvador is having in that hemisphere. I recall that in history, it was Eisenhower who came up with this concept of what he called the “domino effect.” And historically they were saying the domino effect was that any country or anybody that was communist-leaning would fall to the influence of Russia, which was the dominant communist country during that period. But this is the domino effect when it comes to fascism. Talk about how this is impacting other countries in that hemisphere.

Michael Fox: Right. There’s something else interesting about the domino effect. If you remember back in the 1980s when Reagan came in, he was afraid of the domino effect happening throughout Central America. Because obviously Nicaragua was able to overthrow the dictatorship and then El Salvador was fighting and trying to overthrow a dictatorship there. And then you had Guatemala: same situation. That’s when Reagan was willing to throw in a ton of resources and funding and of course, funded the Contra War in Nicaragua to try and stop all that. So Central America has seen the US fight against so-called communism in the region and its domino effect. It is what we’re seeing… So Bukele has been so successful and everyone has seen how his approval rating has completely spiked over the last year and a half since he’s been able to crack down on gangs and put people in prison.

And so we are seeing this domino effect in neighboring Honduras where gangs have also been out of control — And don’t forget that Honduras is so close to El Salvador. These are small countries — And so what we understand is that many gang members who weren’t locked up fled the country and went into Honduras and other neighboring countries. So that’s something that President Xiomara Castro has also said: I’m going to institute a state of exception. We are going to crack down because we cannot have the levels of violence and gangs that we’ve had in the past.

Now Xiomara Castro is interesting because she is of course, the wife of Mel Zelaya. Zelaya was the president in 2009, a leftist president who was overthrown in a US back coup. And here’s the interesting thing: He was overthrown in a US back coup in Honduras because people said he was going to try and call for reelection. He wasn’t going to; He was trying to consult the population about a new constitution. And then the people that came in from the US-backed regime eliminated reelection and they did it themselves. But she was voted into power last year. She’s the country’s first woman president and she’s been battling so many things because of course, she’s on the left. The first person since Mel Zelaya. Many people have been calling that a dictatorship for years.

So she finally comes into power but she’s also been battling rabid sexism and people trying to block the success of her government in any way possible. And so she’s picked up the call for a state of exception in order to crack down on these gangs. So that’s shifted into Honduras. And then the other places that we’re seeing… We don’t know what this is going to look like. But of course Costa Rica – Which is down the way, that’s where I am right now – Costa Rica voted in, basically, a man fashioned in the likes of Trump. His name is Rodrigo Chavez, he was also voted in last year. He’s a former officer at the World Bank, worked there for 30 years, an outsider who studied in the US, and he has also had big authoritarian tendencies.

Now, crime traditionally in Costa Rica has not been a big deal but we’ve seen it spike by 40% in violent crime and homicides over the last year. And many people are concerned that he might be preparing to do a similar thing to what we’ve seen in El Salvador and Honduras. Of course, this is a different situation here because there is no military in Costa Rica but that does not mean that the police aren’t strong and important. And so there is no doubt that Bukele is having a major impact on the region particularly because he’s the sign of a supposed outsider, who has come in with a libertarian Trump agenda, who’s shaken up the country. And he has a massive approval rating. So many leaders are saying, well, if he can do it there, then I want to be able to do it in my own country.

Mansa Musa: You know what? The crazy part about this is when you talk about fascism… I was reading George Jackson and he was talking about fascism. He said one of the things that when you look at the characteristics of fascism, the one thing that you can identify when you see a fascist phenomenon is reform. And all of them are coming in with a set of social conditions that they created by virtue of not creating a quality of life: jobs, medical, education, and all those things that create a quality of life that will make people be more apt to have a sense of community about where they live at and be more prone to be more protective of the environment. You create massive unemployment, you create violent conditions, and then when the results say that people revert to criminal activity, now you have the perfect set of conditions to come in with this reformist mentality.

That’s going to give you an inflated popularity because you’re popular now, as you said earlier, until they come for your family member later on that night, or you’re popular now until all three of these countries then become aligned. And now you have a fascist blockade going on where everybody is looking away and the US is sitting back saying, well, we know these are successful regimes because they’re fighting crime. But you created the crime, and by creating the crime you create the narrative for Bukele, you create the narrative for Guatemala, you create the narrative for Honduras, you create the narrative for Costa Rica. Talk about the economic conditions in all three of these countries.

Michael Fox: All of this is very similar and exactly what you said. One of the things I talked about last year on my podcast, called Brazil on Fire, was specifically looking at the rise of fascism in Brazil and the connection between the US. One of the things I really hammered home the whole time was for the rise of fascism, you needed to have a crisis scenario, you needed to have an outsider who comes in with an authoritarian demagogic approach, oftentimes nationalistic – But also us versus them who’s attacking the other people saying that I’m coming in and I’m going to make… It could be attacking the immigrants as we saw with Trump, or it could be attacking the left or the communists, whatever it is – And then the absolutely anti-democratic and the authoritarian push in order to try and retain power.

And so that’s what we’re seeing. That’s what we saw with Bolsonaro. It’s obviously what we saw with Trump. It’s what we’re seeing in the case of Bukele and then also with Rodrigo Chavez here. And like you said, the conditions are the crises that the countries have been sunken into rising poverty, rising inequality, crime, particularly in the case of El Salvador, and also in the case that’s been rising in Costa Rica. And so the leaders that come in say we’re going to break with this traditional parties, we’re going to shake things up. We’re going to change things for the better. And here’s one of the things that’s been fascinating, even in Costa Rica: There are people that I’ve met while interviewing people on the street that have actually said, yeah, Rodrigo Chavez is all right but I wish we had Bukele. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard that in Costa Rica. I’ve heard that in Honduras. So there is a certain amount of the population that wants even more. They want more crackdown which is really concerning because they’d like to take it to a whole other step.

Now, is Rodrigo Chavez in Costa Rica willing to do that? That’s another question. In Costa Rica, there was a stat… I was interviewing somebody the other day for a story that I was working on here and he said that 30 years ago, Costa Rica had one of the lowest inequality rates in the entire region and lowest poverty rates – Which, that’s the image you have of Costa Rica, right? You imagine it’s a peaceful country, everybody’s cool, it’s fine, it’s all green, it’s perfect — And he said it went from one of the lowest inequality rates in all of Latin America to one of the four highest, in 30 years. And that’s from gutting the social welfare states, from gutting the social programs. And here’s the thing, Rodrigo Chavez comes in and he comes in on a discourse, which he says, I’m going to save the country. But he’s also as a discourse of gutting the social programs even further and of gutting social security.

And so it’s a contradiction in terms but he’s able to do it because he comes in as this image. And social media. Social media, it was huge for Trump, it was huge for Bolsonaro. That’s how they won their elections. Bukele is like a social media star. And Rodrigo Chavez, himself spoke at the World Economic Forum not long ago in which he said, look, I won because of social media. If it was not for social media, I would not have won this election. And what he said was, the rules of democracy are changing and we have to understand how they’re shifting and changing and we have to not only change with them but push them in a way that helps us achieve our ends.

And that’s an extremely concerning idea. Because they’re saying we don’t need the traditional media, we don’t need to roll with what we’ve rolled with before. We now have the power of social media in order to influence people and push fake news. Bukele has created these troll farms where they’ve been basically undercutting and attacking using fake news and whatnot, people who are his opponents, we’ve seen some of that start to happen here in Costa Rica. And there was a massive campaign which they called the “fake news propaganda team” in Brasilia that was part of Bolsonaro.

So all these different countries have so many things that are very, very similar, and all of them burgeoning fascist states, of course, in the case of Bolsonaro, he was voted out, but he still has a lot of people who are very close to him that are in key positions in Congress and the legislature. His people, still 25% of the population of Brazil are still all on board with Bolsonaro. They say they’re Bolsonaristas because that’s what you build with this fascist mindset this “us versus them” and you create a different reality with fake news so that people believe that if the other guy gets in, then they’re going to destroy the country. Because they’re communist and they’re going to ruin everything and stuff. So it’s really concerning.

Mansa Musa: And Bukele, he said – This is showing you how extreme this insanity is – He said that he’s the coolest dictator there is. You actually branded yourself as a dictator. One social scientist called him a wannabe fascist but the reality is this here: The social conditions are so deplorable in this country that it makes it right for a Bukele. When we see Trump, he sets the template for how to be an idiotic politician: Don’t break the norm when it comes to anything that’s supposed to be standardized, act ignorant, be outlandish, and say outrageous things. You’ve got people that are dissatisfied with the current state and once you see that you can get people to say, yeah, crime is bad. Crime was bad in El Salvador but the reality is that the crime was bad, not because of the people who wanted to commit the crime, the crime was bad because you create a climate where you don’t give people an alternative.

Then as they run amuck, now you create the climate and you got the conditions to become a Bukele, or you got the conditions for Costa Rica or you got the conditions for El Salvador. Talk about going forward. One thing I know for sure and do think for certain is that there’s always going to be opposition to fascism, no matter what the case might be. There is always going to be opposition. But how do you see that playing out? Because he didn’t manage to get controlled institutions. So basically it’s a sterilized coup that he’s doing. These are the new coups that have come in place now. The coups where you systematically set up the climate, where you take over the institutions, then you get elected in and you say, well, I’m duly elected. Y’all want me here. That’s why I didn’t come in with a gun. I didn’t come in and shoot nobody. I didn’t overthrow y’all like they did in El Salvador. And I came in with y’all blessings.

But going forward, how do you see this playing out in terms of the opposition? Because he got this all the way across the board. You got this model where you could easily say, oh, you’re a communist or you a gang. Really? They took the communists out of the equation there. The communists don’t even really matter much. Oh, you are a gang member. So how do you think it’s going to play out in this hemisphere?

Michael Fox: There are two things that are happening in El Salvador and you touched on one of them, and that’s Bukele’s image of the cool dictator. He even tweeted out a few months ago, that strong men create good times. And what’s fascinating and what’s really interesting, and we can’t forget this, is that he has this image. Because remember, he was the one that brought in Bitcoin. He created the first country to welcome Bitcoin as legal tender in a country. And so there’s been a large amount of libertarians that have come into El Salvador. They’ve been spreading the word that he’s not that bad, that this is a great spot, this is a great place to go, now it’s safe. And so on the one hand, he’s trying to build this image of this, hey, this really cool guy, this whole authoritarian thing isn’t that big of a deal and I’m into Bitcoin, I’m into changing the world, and we can do that together. So that’s one image.

The other reality is that what we’ve been talking about before is this power grab authoritarian on the ground. There will always be opposition. The more that people are jailed, the longer that they are in jail, the opposition will obviously grow. But it is concerning because like I said, next year he’s going to be reelected. There’s almost no doubt he’ll be, there were polls that came out a little bit ago in which they said if the election was right now, he would win with 65% of the votes. And his closest challenger had 4%, 5%, or 6%. So there’s no way he will lose, he’s going to win. And then also he’s going to have the power grab on the local, municipal, legislative, the courts, he’s going to sew it all up. Bukele – I believe, and this is my own personal opinion – Part of the reason why he didn’t go in looking for gang members but anyone could looked like a gang member… The reason why he was going to pick up anybody is because he wanted to show that he was powerful and he could do it. It didn’t matter if you were actually guilty or not.

He’s a power-hungry man. He’s going to continue with that. And what he’s creating though, is now over 100,000 people are in jail, 70,000 locked up over the last year and a half. He’s also creating a power keg because if he continues with the state of exception, continuing to keep innocent people in jail month after month, year after year, what does that mean? At some point, people are going to have to go to trial. You can’t hold people indefinitely. Unless that’s his plan to have a lockdown, authoritarian, never-ending dictatorship government. And his plan is to keep people in jail forever. What happens when there’s a reckoning within the legal system, within crime, within criminality, whether or not Bukele leaves or if he’s still in power, what happens then? So there are major concerns.

Now in other countries Congress still has, for instance, in Costa Rica, the president, doesn’t have a majority in Congress. His party has maybe up to 10 people. So he doesn’t have a majority in Congress. So he is not able to push things like he would like to. The courts have been pushing back against Rodrigo Chavez here in Costa Rica in a lot of ways recently. And so it’s going to obviously be hard for Rodrigo Chavez to do the things that he wants to do. In Brazil, we saw that Bolsonaro’s power moves were substantial and if it wasn’t for the Supreme Court, governors, and whatnot consistently pushing back against them, Bolsonaro may have been able to accomplish way more. But the Supreme Court held the line and they were able to stop Bolsonaro from acquiring enough power to keep himself in power for much longer, to hold elections that would show that he should have won or whatever else, even though his people believe that that was the case.

Mansa Musa: Go ahead, Mike.

Michael Fox: So to close, I’d say we’re seeing a situation in the region where some people are holding onto power, but other people, like in the case of Trump and the case of Bolsonaro and Brazil, are going to say, fine. After they tried to commit fraud and do everything else, okay, I left. But they’re going to try and come back into power four or five years later and in some cases, they may be winning. And that’s another concern is what this fascism looks like in cases where someone authoritarian has taken power. In the case of El Salvador, Bukele came in to win it and to hold on and not let go but other people might be playing the long game, like in the case of Trump. And so it is very concerning. But I will say this: Central America, Latin America is a region of resistance. These countries have lived through decades and decades and decades of dictatorship; They know what it feels like, it doesn’t feel good, but they also know how to hold out and they know how to play the long game for a long time. So in the end, people will achieve democracy, will reign and there’ll be a turnaround. But the problem is how long will that actually take? In the case of El Salvador, it’s really concerning.

Mansa Musa: Mike, as we close out, talk about what is your next project, and what you’ll be doing next.

Michael Fox: Yeah. I’m working on a podcast called Under the Shadow which looks at Latin America under the shadow of the US whether that was coup attempts or intervention invasions that they’ve seen for the last 200 years. This year is the 200-year anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. This is a doctrine set by Monroe 200 years ago that said Latin America is ours and we can’t have intervention from other countries but we are the ones that are going to control this region. So for the last six months, I’ve been traveling around Central America to all the countries in Central America, going into key places where things happened in the past, to understand what happened there, to make those connections, and to tell the stories of US intervention abroad in Latin America. So the podcast should be out beginning in January. I’ve launched a Kickstarter that I’m trying to raise funds for, and people will be able to find that on The Real News’ site pretty soon. That’s what my big focus is right now.

Mansa Musa: There you have it. Mike, you rattled the bars today. You really educated our audience on all the things that are going on in the hemisphere. But more importantly, you educated our audience on understanding that when you don’t speak out against fascism when you don’t speak out against totalitarianism, then what you’re going to get in the end, you’re going to get 70,000 people locked up, you’re going to get a domino effect, and other countries following suit.

We ask that our audience continue to support The Real News Network and Rattling The Bars. It’s only here that you’re going to get this information such as Mike and his upcoming documentary and his upcoming podcast, where you are going to get insight into what this country, the USA, is financing, and what your tax dollars are promoting in countries where they don’t have a rule of law. And because of this, you have innocent people who are being locked up under the pretense that they are making this country safe. Thank you, Mike. Thank you very much for joining us today and continued success in what you’re doing.

Michael Fox: Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
September 23, 2023

Mouths Full of Blood: Trump and His Backers Spread Lies, Violence and Fascism

Former President Donald Trump has achieved a unique status in United States history. He is the first president to be indicted for conspiring to overturn a presidential election, defraud the U.S. and obstruct official proceedings by attempting to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. It’s now a matter of public record that Trump faces four indictments and 91 felony counts for his criminal…

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August 8, 2023

Trump-Appointed Judge Orders Airline Lawyers to Take “Religious Liberty” Course

In the latest move from the judiciary branch to advance Christofascism in the U.S., a Trump-appointed judge in Texas ordered lawyers for Southwest Airlines to take a “religious liberty training” by a far right Christian group on Monday as part of a lawsuit brought by an anti-abortion flight attendant. U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr ordered three senior lawyers for the airline to take eight…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 8, 2023

Mainstream Democrats’ complacency will doom us all

Max Elbaum is on the editorial board of Convergence Magazine and is the co-editor, with Linda Burnham and Maria Poblet, of Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections.

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with us. And welcome to another installment of the Rise of the Right and Real News’ look at the coming elections. Now, I’ve been railing for a while about the lack of media or public strategy by Democrats. As we watch this meteoric rise of the right-wing racist power in this country that controls at least 22 state governments, changing voting laws, manipulating political districts, and rolling back much of what people fought for in this country.

So why is this happening, and more importantly, what do we do about it? We explore this today with Max Elbaum, who’s been on this show many times before, and who wrote this article called, “Who’s Got the Power? Balance of Forces 2023” for Convergence magazine, where he sits on the editorial board. He’s the author of numerous books like Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. He’s co-editor with Linda Burnham and Maria Poblet of Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections and has been an activist for many decades. Welcome back, Max. Good to see you.

Max Elbaum: Great to be here with you, Marc.

Marc Steiner: Let’s talk a bit about what you wrote here. And I do want to start with something that, maybe you didn’t write about but allude to a lot in the work you’re talking about, of where we are politically in America. And why do you think the Democrats seem to lack any real organizing or media strategy to take on this growing right-wing power in this country?

Max Elbaum: The Democratic mainstream, led by Biden, has a certain faith in the American system that they think is inherently democratic. And they’ve also spent a tremendous amount of most of their political careers working in tandem with the Republican Party. And they have not really accepted the fact that the MAGA block is something different, that it has taken over the Republican Party and it constitutes a different threat to the communities we care about, but even to the mainstream Democrats themselves than existed in the 1970s or the 1980s. So there’s a tremendous amount of complacency there. It varies from individual to individual and some of them have various moral issues around why they are more or less committed to the fight against the right, but it’s American denialism, American exceptionalism. It can’t happen here. They’re wedded to that thinking.

Marc Steiner: There was an article that you linked to in your article, that was in the New York Times. It was written by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman, entitled “Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025.” When I read that article and read your article in convergence, what’s clear is that if Trump wins again, he intends to institute power like we’ve never seen before in this country. And in presidential power to dismiss people, dismiss civil servants, take over agencies, and put things in place that will overturn the democracy that we have: banning abortions, right-to-work laws, and numerous other things. That’s what gets to me is that this is a real threat. This is not like the elections when we were kids, when we were younger. This is an actual assault on the entire future of this country, in part brought on by the lack of will and policies from mainstream Democrats, but it’s real. That’s what we face. That’s what frustrates me that they don’t seem to get it.

Max Elbaum: To reinforce your point, let me read you a quote from the main architect of this new Heritage Foundation report, which is called The Promise of America: The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, for what happens if Trump or another Republican wins in 2024. “Project 2025 is not a white paper. We’re not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan and we are marshaling our forces.” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation told the E&E news, “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”

To bring all federal agencies under direct presidential control ending the operational independence not only of the Department of Justice and the FBI but also of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board. They’re very explicit. They want to dismantle all the programs of the 1960s and the 1930s, bring them under direct presidential control of a Republican president, and reconstruct the state in the image of the authoritarian and fascist states of the 20th century and early 21st century.

It is a bit mystifying how the mainstream Democrats don’t see the level of threat. Part of it has to do with the constituencies. There’s a certain class complacency here. The biggest consequences of this will fall on the working class, on communities of color, on women, on youth who are looking for a future, and on those communities in areas most affected by climate change and environmental problems. And the mainstream Democrats, their base is a different class, a different layer of class forces. They’re opposed to MAGA, but they concentrate on trying to figure out to the extent they have a strategy, how to persuade people that they consider to be middle voters.

Whereas the progressive wing, the left and radical wing, sees the importance of mobilizing, galvanizing, and organizing into long-term power-building groups, the working class, and the poor, communities of color. And building powerful organizations with a strategy that not only talks about fear of MAGA but offers something concrete, a restructured society that would be in the interest of those people. And to the mainstream Democrats, that’s not what they want, so they’re hesitant about the left and complacent about the right.

Marc Steiner: Let’s talk a bit about your thoughts, about what you see as an alternative and how you see that building, and where does that come from? Where does that power come from? Your whole writing around the block and build, let’s talk a bit about that.

Max Elbaum: The block and build framework is that we need to block the right which includes defeating MAGA candidates in elections up and down the line. But we need to do so in a way that builds the independent power of social justice groups and those with an agenda for radical change. That’s the build side of the block and build. The book you mentioned, Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, that contains 22 chapters with 40 organizers who were on the ground in 2020 and talked about how they approached the election to not only beat Trump in 2020 but to build the power of the groups they worked with.

There were union groups like Unite Here, SEIU, and the National Nurses Union. Workers groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance. State-based power-building groups like LUCHA in Arizona, Pennsylvania Stands Up, New Virginia Majority. Those organizations are year-round organizations that have a membership. They do campaigning, they don’t disappear after elections. They build up their membership and they conduct issue-based campaigns in their states. Blue Chain Arizona transformed Arizona from a right-wing bastion, which in 2010 was the center of gravity for the worst anti-immigrant legislation in the country. They spent 10 years in the course of that. They kicked out Sheriff Arpaio in Maricopa County, who was openly breaking the law in a racist manner. And they’ve transformed Arizona into a purple state and have started to elect their own people to office there. So they’re not in it to defeat the Republicans and go back to a Democratic Party that might offer a few concessions but be basically a status quo party; they’re out to transform and build power and make a real difference.

I don’t think it’s an accident that in Minnesota and Michigan, where the new administrations where the Democrats hold a trifecta, have initiated protections for abortion, labor protections, all progressive legislation in those two states. Because of the progressive wing, there are grassroots progressive organizations, ISAIAH and others in Minnesota, We The People Michigan, which has a chapter in that book, that has a base and is able to mobilize people, they have some of their own people in the state legislatures, and they make a real difference in people’s lives. And then that’s a springboard toward more victories going forward. So we can’t be satisfied with blocking MAGA. We have to build independent strength in order to move the country in a different direction.

Marc Steiner: I remember that book that you wrote and this most recent article that you wrote for Convergence in the last few weeks. And the question is, is it even possible to stop and how do you stop this right-wing wave in this country without some national convergence of the progressive world coming together with backers to confront it? And do you see that happening?

Max Elbaum: We are seeing the building blocks of that coming together, but it hasn’t congealed yet. We definitely could use something like the Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s or the block that the CIO centered in the 1930s which was organized, coordinated, progressive forces that fought in both elections and outside the electoral arena, and elected their own people. They were in alignment with more centrist forces to keep the fascists and the right out of power but exercise their own influence and were able to coordinate work, decide where there were priorities, allocate resources, and have coherent messaging. The Republican right issues talking points and within 20 minutes there are Fox News and millions of people reach them. We don’t have that coordination, so we definitely need something like that. And there is more and more conversation among the different components of the progressive movement that could lead, and will if we get the space in 2024, will lead to something.

It won’t look exactly like the Rainbow Coalition, it will look somewhat different, but it will serve the same function in American politics which is, there’ll be a progressive poll with a mass base, a national structure, and a brand, coherent messaging. In the ’80s, those were progressive Democrats. They were the Jackson people. Like in the last few years, people talked about the Berniecrats: it had an independent identity and it could reach a broad mass of people. Unfortunately, out of Bernie’s campaigns, that did not emerge, but it’s in the cards going forward. And the different forces who have a vision are trying to stir the pot and promote that alignment building.

Marc Steiner: One of the things I enjoy always talking with you, reading what you write, Max, is you do have that positive outlook. It can happen, it will happen, we’ll make it happen. And it’s an important message to bring out because we do face this rise, as I said earlier in the program, this rise of the right in this country. And if you look at the history of our country, there have been periods like the ’30s through the ’60s, the attempted reconstruction, and the early 20th century where labor laws were being changed in the push was making a place in this country to change things. But then the right always comes roaring back and roaring back with intense power. And it seems that when I read the article in The Times that I talked about earlier, you can see the power of the MAGA right in this country, with or without Trump. Though clearly, his messages about how he wants to increase authoritarian power in this country are out there but nobody seems to be using that against him.

Max Elbaum: The rhythms of American history that you point out are very sobering. For the first 60 years of this country as an independent country, the southern slave power was the dominant force in the country. They controlled the presidency most often. We were chattel slavery. And it took years of the abolitionist movement’s agitation from below, the coalition behind Lincoln who was not an abolitionist but became one in the course of the struggle in order to defeat the Confederacy, and reconstruction, which Du Bois called the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was the most progressive state government in US history, overthrown by a combination of racist violence and disenfranchisement: the KKK, and then we get a hundred years of Jim Crow. Jim Crow is overturned by the upsurge of the 1960s and we’re now living through the most dangerous phase of the backlash. Essentially, the Trump administration is the latest phase of the backlash that started with Nixon’s Southern strategy and Reagan’s election.

It’s all proceeded through different stages but we’re living through the backlash against the 1960s. The dilemma for the left has been that it has always, during the abolitionist period, during the 1930s labor upsurge, when the communist party played an important role, and during the sixties upsurge, we were able to influence national politics. But in the wake of those victories in previous times, the right roared back and the left was also under attack from the forces it had allied with against their earlier struggle against the right. We got pushed back, we got pushed out back to the margins.

And that’s the challenge today: how to beat MAGA in a way where we can’t be pushed back to the margins? How to beat MAGA in a way that we develop a secure spot in mainstream politics, a mass influence, and we’re able to take the initiative and become the leading force in the anti-right block, and force our swell partners to either move with us or defect and to be strong enough to deal with their defection? This is not easy. This has not been accomplished in any country. The revolutions that inspired so many of us and inspire people today all happened in countries where there weren’t electoral systems. They were countries with very weak states that were either propped up by foreign domination or as in Russia’s Tsarism, a very narrow social base. So making a structural transformation in a country with a developed so-called bourgeois democracy has not happened. So it’s a tough job. There are no easy roads, no pre-ordained paths. We have to make that path.

Marc Steiner: When you see the power of the Heritage Foundation, what they’re planning, how they are really part of the intellectual force and part of the organizing force behind the Trumpian MAGA right, let’s come back to what you were talking about earlier, both what you wrote about in your book and what you see happening on the ground. And where you see the forces of the progressive world in this country making headway. And how you pull them together nationally so there’s no resistance but victory against this surge.

Max Elbaum: There are two important points there. In the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections, what we saw was that there is a majority of people in this country, that when MAGA candidates are on the ballot, they get defeated. They get defeated. The majority of people are not in favor of the MAGA agenda and when they know that it’s on the ballot, they’ll vote against it. We won big victories in 2018. We kept Trump out in 2020 and in 2022 when everyone was expecting a red wave, they got the red wave in the red states and in states where the Republican candidates disguised themselves, but where MAGA candidates were on the ballot, they lost. So the first point is, we have to root ourselves in the idea that we are the majority. We speak with the moral high ground of a majority that wants a different country. And the key constituencies, the growing constituencies in this country, young people and people of color, lean heavily in the progressive direction.

The reason that the Republicans were defeated in 2018, 2020, and 2022 was not because a whole bunch of people changed their minds who had been voters. It’s because many new voters, people who hadn’t voted before, got mobilized, higher turnouts in 2018 and 2020, and a tremendous youth vote, which leans two to one; much higher than the older age cohorts and voting against MAGA. That’s the source of our potential strength and now we need to organize that strength. And the key things there, one, we have to revitalize those organizations that bring people together because of their structure, where they sit in the society, not only because they have a political view. In other words, labor organizations, unions, tenant organizations, and community organizations where people are part of something because they share the conditions of life of other people. Those have traditionally been the strong point of the left. The labor movement and the Black church have been the anchors of the US left in historical periods. We have to revitalize those institutions.

And then we have to build organizations that are political organizations that can fight both electorally and non-electorally. And as you’ve pointed out, Marc, they can’t be siloed. They have to bring people together. They have to be able to function in a coordinated way. Those things have come together, the informal coalition behind Martin Luther King in the ’60s, the Rainbow Coalition in the ’80s, and the CIO-led block in the 1930s. There’s a political space there, politics like nature abhors a vacuum, and that political space is going to be filled. There’s a whole range of groups, the national organizing networks like People’s Action and CDP, and Community Change. Then you have groups like the Working Families Party, Progressive Democrats of America, Justice Democrats, and DSA. There are conversations going on among these groups and there’s a revitalization going on in the labor movement. We saw a big victory with the Teamsters winning big concessions from UPS, the Teamsters under Reform Leadership, and what’s going on in the UAW.

The teacher’s unions are being more active because they’re so under attack. National Nurses United has a Nurses for Democracy program. All these building blocks are in place. I wish I had a formula for how to bring them together. I don’t have a formula but compared to 2015 and 2016, there is a lot thicker interaction and the prospects for that taking shape are very good. I am not sure something like that can come together before 2024 because people are already making their plans and those groups that are engaged have made plans and set their priorities for different states, districts, and messaging. But if we can block MAGA in 2024, the prospects for a more united progressive movement are better than they’ve been since the 1980s.

Marc Steiner: Now, what you said, before we conclude a little bit, this is a really important, positive message about what can be done and how it should be done. And that we should be actually doing more to cover these organizations around the country doing this organizing, as Max Alvarez here has been doing with covering all the labor struggles around the country. But when you look at the coming election, that would mean following the logic that you posited, and this is with big debate, having to support the Democratic Party, having to support Joe Biden is president again, if, in fact, he’s the candidate again, in order to stop MAGA from seizing power and the right-wing from seizing power in this country. It’s a really difficult situation.

Max Elbaum: It’s a difficult situation. Two of the most savvy politicians on the progressive end of the spectrum in the US today, we have a lot to learn from them. Bernie Sanders and Brandon Johnson, who was elected mayor of Chicago, both of them have endorsed Biden. Neither of them is a Biden fan. Bernie, however, leveraged his strength in the 2020 election, he’s the chair now of the Senate Budget Committee. He got some elements of his program into the Biden agenda. His strategic perspective is to set a working-class anti-corporate poll within the broad anti-MAGA alliance and try to have people move into those networks of progressive organizations and not vote a certain way. Voting is a part of it but then to move people in.

Brandon, who had 3% support in the initial polls and rose to win the election in Chicago, ran against a person who was nominally a Democrat, actually more funded by the Republicans, a school privatizer. Somebody who ruins school systems across the country, who was supported – And Biden didn’t take a position, but some of the people close to Biden endorsed Brandon’s opponent, Paul Vallas – And the leftover Obama machine in Chicago supported Vallas, as opposed to Brandon Johnson. Brandon came out of the Teacher’s Union in Chicago, which is a key anchor of the progressive organizing networks in Chicago and has been for many years. Brandon won, turned around, and beat Vallas, a huge grassroots victory, the most important thing progressive in Chicago politics since Harold Washington in the eighties. And he turned around a week later and endorsed Biden for president.

Why did he do that? Because he needs to be flanked. He knows that to get what he wants to change in Chicago, he has to have a relationship with the mainstream Democrats. If MAGA controls the federal government or the state government in Illinois, they’ll do the thing that the Republicans are doing in Texas which is denying Houston the right to do anything. Or in Mississippi, where they’ve essentially taken control of Jackson, the Black-majority capital, and forbid using their power in the state government to basically disenfranchise the people in Jackson from running their own affairs.

So it’s a question then of who gets the goods. There’s that saying, who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog? There’s a fight between us and the mainstream dems about whether we’re going to be the dog or we’re going to be the hunter. But we got to get the prey and if the hunter and the dog don’t work together, they don’t get the parade. So we’re stuck. We can’t beat MAGA without the centrist Dems, and the centrist Dems, for all the things that you correctly pointed out: their complacency, they don’t get it, targeting so-called median voter instead of realizing that you win elections by turning out people who are enthusiastic when you make something really happen for them, for all of that, they figured out that in most places, most of them have figured out that they need the progressives to win too.

So that’s why the Bernie-Biden thing has held because Biden and many people on his team may not like it, but they need the Bernie voters. So we have some leverage, we don’t have as much leverage as we need but that’s the way we have to work. We have to build organizations on the ground. If people are connected to an organization that they have confidence in and they’ve seen that it doesn’t disappear the day after the election, they’ll take the organization’s guidance that it’s better for us to vote for the lesser evil candidate. Lesser-evil-ism is when all you do is vote for the lesser evil candidate and you don’t try to build your independent power at the same time. If you’re trying to build your independent power and you have an organization to do that, of course, it’s better for you to have a worse person.

Charlene Mitchell, the first Black woman to run for president in the US on the Communist Party ticket in 1968, always said, worse is never better. And she was right about that. We can’t settle for the lesser evil, that’s not a strategy. But voting for a harm reduction candidate when you’re building your independent power, that only makes sense. And we have got a lot to learn from people like Bernie and Brandon who are on the front lines and know what the balance of forces in this country actually is. It’s easy to criticize one or another position they take, but they’re the people in the thick of the fight. Bernie’s probably more responsible than any other single individual for revitalizing the idea of socialism in the US in the last five or eight years. So it doesn’t mean we have to agree with him on everything or something like that but we should learn something from his savvy politics.

Marc Steiner: Max, I hope this is the beginning of many conversations and the thing that inspired me from our talk, A, there is a way out. B, that some of the groups you’ve described, we should be getting here on The Steiner Show, to take a deeper dive into groups that are organized around the country. Also to give inspiration to others saying, we have to stand up. This is our time not to allow the righteous to seize power. And I do appreciate the work you do and appreciate the time you always take when I call. Let’s have a conversation. So Max Elbaum, thanks for the work you do, and thanks for joining us today.

Max Elbaum: Thank you, Marc.

Marc Steiner: I hope you enjoyed that conversation today with Max Elbaum and we’ll be linking to his article and more on the site so check all that stuff out. And I want to thank you all for joining us today. And thanks to Cameron Grandino for being behind the glass and Kayla Rivara for being behind the scenes to make all this happen. And please let me know what you think about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll write right back to you. And while you’re there, please go to www.therealnews.com/support, become a monthly donor, and become part of the future with us in this summer campaign. So for Cameron Grandino, Kayla Rivara, and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
August 5, 2023

Election Fever: A Fever Dream?

With nearly sixteen months to go, we are well into the silly season. The campaigning, fund raising, maneuvering, plotting, and mud-slinging have already reached a fever-pitch. We are told that the 2024 Presidential election — like every Presidential election in my lifetime — holds the fate of the country in its grip.

But it is almost impossible to see how the existing political machinery — the two-party system, fueled by vast sums of money, and lubricated with the influence of a toadying, sensationalist media — can generate any real answers to these challenges.

The system’s apologists like to write and speak of “our democracy” — in supposed contrast to the shifty authoritarians. But what kind of democracy requires a billion-dollar-or-more war chest to gain access to the state’s highest executive position? Under those terms, only a handful of rich and powerful people could realistically become President of the US by convincing other rich and powerful people to support and sustain their effort. Isn’t this akin to the “democracy” of the Roman Senate?

Of course, on the lower rungs of the political hierarchy, there are elected officials who are able to fund their campaigns for far less — entry level costs are much lower. It is possible to parlay social activism, media exposure, and a popular base into a modest fund-raising apparatus that propels some representative faces into government. But they are quickly seduced and obsessed into building an even greater fund-raising machine and locating themselves in the narrowly defined political space occupied by the two parties. The weight of the system and its conventions soon drains their independence.

It is hard to find optimism under these circumstances.

Faced with a Democratic Party that has inexorably moved to the right from its New Deal roots, many argue for nonetheless uniting behind the Democratic Party to halt the Republican Party’s inexorable movement to the right. It is a strange strategy.

Odd as it may be, it is sold to the left as building a buttress — a united front — against fascism.

It is the word “fascism” that conjures up the notion of a united front across class, across identity, and across political loyalty. For those with some minimal knowledge of twentieth-century history, fascism triggers memories of powerful nationalist movements that arose in response to a potent anti-capitalist workers’ movement and a crisis of capitalist rule, even a challenge to the very existence of capitalism. These were alone or together sufficient conditions for the rise, the threat, or the political success of historical fascism.

The post-World War One economic crisis and the rise of a militant industrial class in Italy and intense class struggle in the Italian countryside gave birth to the first self-described fascist movement in Europe. The Italian ruling class awarded it power when it accepted Mussolini as the decisive barricade against intensifying class struggle.

Similarly, of the many nationalist movements that sprung up in Germany, the Nazi Party was the one best equipped to address the rise of a growing, powerful Communist Party during the economic collapse of the Great Depression. German industrialists showered the Nazis with money, and their representatives expeditiously turned over power to Adolf Hitler.

We may extend the term “fascism” to other 1930s regimes in Europe — Mannerheim, Pilsudski, Antonescu, Admiral Horthy, Franco, Salazar, Petain, etc. — because they were puppets of Naziism or shared the same anti-Communist zeal which was sparked by intense class conflict within their respective countries.

Whether one prefers to confer the terms “quasi-fascist” or “semi-fascist” instead of “fascist” on the military coups — Greece, Chile, Indonesia, etc. — arising from political instability and left insurgency since World War II is a matter of little import. Nonetheless, they all share — perhaps with some nationally specific differences — the conditions that gave rise to fascism in the 1930s. Significantly, they also all established an “open, terroristic dictatorship” as defined by the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935 — a political edifice built on the ashes of the previous structure.

It would take an enormous stretch of the imagination to suggest that the US ruling class is under siege from a revolutionary workers’ movement, that US politics has reached a stage of lethal instability, that the US economy is on the verge of collapse, or that there is a force empowered and dedicated to the elimination of bourgeois democracy.

Confronted with these historical anomalies, it is hard to see the danger of fascism as anything imminent in the US. Certainly, there are fascists in the US, even fascist organizations. Moreover, there are many fascist-minded people and people with fascistic ideas, even in positions of power. But fascism is neither around the corner nor on the near horizon.

Yet the unjustified threat of fascism is a useful tool in uniting the left behind a soulless, gutless Democratic Party — a shell organization built around fundraising and fright-mongering. If there were no fascist bogeyman, or Communist bogeyman, or Russian bogeyman, today’s Democratic Party would have little on which to base a campaign.

That is not to deny that the people in the US are in crisis. It is certainly true that there is growing dissatisfaction in the US, as in Europe and other advanced capitalist countries. Opinion polls show a broad, deep distrust in long-established institutions. From the courts to the political parties, citizens have lost confidence in the old ways of doing things (for example, in a Quinnipiac University poll, 47% of respondents indicated that they would vote for a third party in the US, should there be one).

Nor should this argument be taken to mean that there is no threat from the right. In response to the mass dissatisfaction, movements and parties have sprung up, exploiting the thirst for the new, speaking to the neglect of various economic, class, and regional interests, and promising to voice the concerns of the majority against the arrogance of elites. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Professor Thomas Greven of the Free University of Berlin noted that “A right-wing populist backlash… was inevitable.” A scholar of right-wing populism in the US and Europe, the professor then points to the key reason: “For me, it goes back to the failure of center-left, social democratic parties to manage, in a socially acceptable way, increased global competition.”

The breadth of dissatisfaction is shown by the rise of right-populism in many countries. And, as Professor Greven argues, it is the failure of the center, especially the left center, that allows right-populism to grow. Today, as in the 1930s, the cravenness of social democracy creates a political vacuum. The opportunist right has only to fill it. In the case of the 1930s, the ruling classes saw stark choices between revolutionary socialism and fascism. They too often picked fascism and nursed it into power.

Today, there are no stark choices. In Europe, faddish, rebranded social democratic parties like Podemos, Syriza, The Five Star Movement, or The Greens fall as quickly as they arise. In the US and the UK, Labour and the Democrats don’t bother to rebrand, they simply put “New” in front of “Labour” and “Democrats,” offering their services as the acquaintance that you know as opposed to the other that you should fear.

So, if we are to understand Professor Greven, then it would make no sense to embrace social democracy– including the Democratic Party in the US and Labour in the UK — when the rise of right-wing populism is itself a response to social democracy’s failings! How can clinging to the Democratic Party — the party that betrayed the cause of working people– be the answer to the rise in popularity of its right-wing movement posing as an alternative? Surely, this is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

But once again, as in so many election cycles, leaders of labor, civil rights organizations, environmental groups, and other worthy causes are lining up to support the Democratic Party– regardless of its betrayal of working people.

Those wise enough to recognize the Democratic Party’s many decades of spinelessness propose that the left conspire to infiltrate or take over the party, to operate both outside and inside the Democrat apparatus.

But to what effect?

In its long history, the Democratic Party only embraced working-class interests when pressed by independent forces outside of the Democratic Party who directly threatened the party’s most urgent agenda — to retain or gain power. That is the story of the Democrats’ moments of glory: the New Deal and the Great Society. In both cases, the social movements led and the Democrats followed. Today’s urgency to rally behind the Democrats is foolish — counterproductive foolishness.

Plenty of charlatans and hucksters join with the misinformed and delusional to pressure the left to steer clear of third-party movements and back the Democrats for one more round. Like the serial abuser, they ask the victims to give them one more chance.

Another apologist grants the need for separation, but suggests something called a “dirty break” instead of a divorce. Citing the long, tortured break with the UK Liberal Party that spawned the Labour Party in 1906, he recommends supporting the Democrats until the pain is so great that working people will flee the Democrats and form their own party, a process that may need several decades to ferment. Of course, that is the same Labour Party that recently ambushed its progressive wing and banished its left agenda back to the margin of UK politics.

The same author urged the same patience with the Democrats in 2017, then based on the long transitional “dirty break” that the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party made with the Democrats. The Farmer-Labor Party is long gone, but we will probably hear of the “dirty break” again in 2027.

It is a striking fact that most of our self-described left does not want to have a discussion of a third-party campaign. The mere thought of an alternative to the Democrats is seen as an assault on Enlightenment values, endangering the chances of defeating whatever candidate the Republicans turn up! It is inconceivable to them that pressure from the left might even strengthen their candidates in the distant election. It’s too risky…

For the rest of us, there is no way to begin to break the fatal chokehold that the Democrats have on the left other than supporting an outsider, an independent voice. It must be understood that the process will be long, tortured, and with many setbacks. Yet there will never be a better time when it will not be long, tortured, and with many setbacks.

It is not so important that we have the best standard-bearer or that we agree with every position he or she holds. But a good candidate does exist with good positions on the most important questions: Cornel West!

For a strong case for a third party and Cornel West’s candidacy, I recommend Chris Hedges’ article: “Cornel West and the Campaign to End Political Apartheid.”

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
August 4, 2023

Fascism is the Western Answer to Class Struggle

Setting aside culture war animosities for the moment to consider the direction of politics in the US— to the extent that doing so is psychologically and / or economically possible for dedicated culture warriors, recent revelations that the FBI and CIA were active participants in the 2016 and 2020 national elections run headlong into longer history. While ‘American democracy’ has always been tenuous and abstract (‘representative’), the US has now returned to a pre- and inter-War melding of state with commercial interests. The American political ‘system’ now fits the Marxist-Leninist conception of the capitalist state. More

The post Fascism is the Western Answer to Class Struggle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rob Urie.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
August 3, 2023

DeSantis Says He Will “Start Slitting Throats on Day One” as President

Over the weekend, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — who has been waging a fledgling 2024 presidential campaign — used violent rhetoric to suggest that he’d go after federal employees he felt were disloyal to him should he become president. “We’re going to have all these deep state people, you know we’re going to start slitting throats on day one,” DeSantis said during a New Hampshire Public…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 3, 2023

2 Dead Bodies Found Stuck to Buoys Texas Officials Were Ordered to Take Down

The Mexican government has reported that officials found two dead bodies stuck to buoys — installed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to make it more dangerous for asylum seekers to cross the southern border into the U.S. — which the Biden administration ordered to be taken down last month. Mexico Foreign Relations officials said that the Texas Department of Public Safety notified the Mexican…

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August 1, 2023

DeSantis’s “Freedom” Is a Force for Domination, Not a Key Form of Empowerment

We live in a time of menacing freedoms and the rise of fascist politics. Freedom in the current historical moment has turned ugly. The presence of “ugly freedoms” is not new, and its history is repeating itself with a politics that is as cruel as it is dangerous and widespread. This is an age inextricably defined by the question of who qualifies as a citizen of the United States and what kind of…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 26, 2023

DeSantis Staffer Fired After He Shares Video With Gov in Front of Nazi Imagery

An employee of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-Florida) presidential campaign was fired on Tuesday after he produced a video featuring Nazi imagery and posted it on Twitter. Nate Hochman, who served as a speechwriter for the DeSantis campaign and previously wrote for the right-wing publication The National Review, created a meme-filled video promoting DeSantis and disparaging former President Donald Trump…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 15, 2023

We Are in Collective Alexithymia

No words for emotions — alexithymia

New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.

Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.

While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.

Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.

Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.

Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.

My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.

Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.

In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)

All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).

Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.

Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)

I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.

It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.

Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?

The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.

Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.

“Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”

“I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”

Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.

So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.

This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”

Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.

And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”

Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?

Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.

But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:

The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)

The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.

So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.

China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.

The preface to the Chinese edition warns:

Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].

At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.

There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:

He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.

Hmm: why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

“Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”

Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?

This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:

An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.

“Little children working,” the visitor replied.

Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)

Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?

Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:

Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders. An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)

Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.

[Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}

Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.

Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.

A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.

The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.

The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”

“Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)

It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:

While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.

Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.

The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”

So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.

The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.

Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.

CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)

If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
July 3, 2023

“Fascists Go Home!”: Philadelphians Reject Far Right “Moms for Liberty”

Early on Thursday, June 29, banners were dropped over Interstate-95 coming into Philadelphia that read “Philly Protects Trans Kids” and “Bad Things Happen (to fascists) in Philadelphia.” This very Philly welcoming of the attendees of the Moms 4 Liberty (M4L) annual conference at the Marriott hotel from June 29 to July 2 set the tone for what would be four days of high-energy protests against the…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 26, 2023

TERFs Are Drawing on the Same Fascist Arguments as Torture Advocates

On both sides of the Atlantic, anti-trans hatred is gaining momentum. In the United States, several states have criminalized gender-affirming health care, leading campaigners and scholars to state that the U.S. is involved in a trans genocide and to observe without hyperbole that we are witnessing “a global assault on trans and queer life” which is “part of escalating fascism and authoritarianism…

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This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 22, 2023

AOC Is Boycotting Modi’s Address Over “Deeply Troubling” Human Rights Record

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and a number of other progressives in the House have announced that they’re boycotting far right Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to Congress on Thursday, citing Modi’s abysmal human rights record and erosion of free press and religion rights in India. Modi is slated to speak before Congress as part of a trip to the U.S. on an invite from…

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Category: Fascism

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