Charlottesville 2
by Paul Craig Roberts, August 16, 2017
What the liberal/progressive/left is trying to do with Charlottesville is to associate Trump supporters with White Supremacists and in this way demonize Trump supporters so that they will not have a voice when Trump is overthrown in a coup. Or it can be put in a different way: Charlottesville is being used by someone to discredit Trump and the people who elected him in order to pave the way for a coup, and the liberal/progressive/left is enabling the plot.
Upon reflection, I think that for most of the liberal/progressive/left the denunciations and one-sided interpretation of Charlottesville are just the ingrained knee-jerk reaction of people brought up in Identity Politics. In Identity Politics, everyone is a White Hat except racist, sexist, homophobic, gun-nut white males. The only tolerable white males are those who accept this characterization of themselves. All others are “white supremacists” or “nazis.”
From what I read on progressive websites, those imbued with Identity Politics are letting the emotionalism of the politics run away with them. My friend, Rob Kall, who is fair and open-minded and posts my columns on OpEdNews, including those to which he takes exception, writes: “Trump is Now the Leader of White Supremacists and Nazis.” Rob reaches this conclusion because Trump held both sides responsible for the violence in Charlottesville. By seeing equivalence between the two sides, Trump “made it clear that he was siding with the White Supremacists, giving them aid, support and encouragement.” https://www.opednews.com/articles/Trump-is-Now-the-Leader-of-by-Rob-Kall-Donald-Trump_Hate-Groups-Neo-Nazis_White-Supremacist-170816-650.html (You might remember Jean Kirkpatrick who denounced liberals for seeing moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the US.) I doubt this is the way Trump saw his statement. From the news videos I saw, there seemed to be plenty of hate on both sides. Certainly, there is plenty of hate for Trump among progressives.
In the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri finds Trump’s words condemning the violence on both aides to be “despicable words.” Petri apparently thinks that, counter to what the news coverage shows, the counter protesters did not engage in any violence, or else she thinks that violence from this side was justified but not violence from the other side. She condemns Trump for his statement: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” In her opinion, the last three words, “on many sides” shows that Trump is partial to White Supremacists. http://www.denverpost.com/2017/08/15/donald-trumps-despicable-words/
Richard Eskow joins the chorus. He links together deaths in Charlottesville, New York, Portland, Charleston, under “white nationalist terror” and hands them to Trump.https://www.opednews.com/articles/Trump-Won-t-Say-It-But-We-by-Richard-Eskow-Hatred_Terrorism_Trump-Mental-State_White-Male-Effect-170814-424.html
The Daily Kos also equates Trump’s blaming both sides for the violence, which is what the media reports show to be the case, with a defense of “white supremacist/neo-Nazi violence.”https://www.opednews.com/articles/Trump-defends-white-suprem-by-Daily-Kos-Protest_Trump-Insults_Violence_White-Male-Privilege-170815-734.html
Joe Macare at Truthout tells us that “Truthout will continue to report on the threat of neo-Nazis in the street — as well as those in the White House who are in lockstep with their agenda. We’ll talk to the people organizing against fascism on all fronts. We won’t equivocate or condemn ‘both sides.’ We won’t blame the Nazis’ targets for the hate they receive. But we know that these are not the only faces of racism. Whether it manifests itself in education policy, in gentrification, in economic inequality, in racist policing or in the United States’ immigration and ‘defense’ policies, Truthout will continue exposing white supremacy in all its forms.”
Truthout’s Anna Sutton expresses her “Heartbreak, Anger.” She doesn’t know where to begin. But she sees a fundraising opportunity. Make a donation and Truthout will “tell it like it is” against the “corporate and right-wing media” that are “bending over backwards to normalize Trump and the violence and xenophobia displayed by his rabid followers.” One wonders what corporate right-wing media she is talking about, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, all of which denounce Trump 24/7?
How do we avoid the question: who is over the top, the “alt-right” at Charlottesville or their progressive critics?
Over at CounterPunch, a remnant of America’s left-wing, John Eskow tells us that he has walked among white supremacists “since I first learned to walk. They surrounded me in blue-collar Utica, New York—an early capitol of Rust Belt America, back in the 1950s.”
Here is Identity Politics’ association of the working class with White Supremacy. The all-powerful, all-threatening White Supremacists could do nothing to prevent—who?—from offshoring their jobs to Asia. But these people, who are so powerless that they could not even save their own jobs, are a great threat to us good people, who sat sucking our thumbs in unconcern while their economic lives were snuffed out. https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/16/among-the-racists/
CounterPuncher John Wight, prior to affirming the dogma that from the very beginning America has been “synonymous with white supremacy,” first unleashes both barrels on the liberal/progressives: “Strident declamations against fascism in Charlottesville from those who supported fascists in Kiev, calls for action to be taken against extremists in America by those who’ve been supporting them in Syria. What is this if not rank hypocrisy?”
Ah, so, why did the liberal/progressives align with the military/security complex and the neoconservatives against Donald Trump who declared, to his undoing, his intention to normalize relations with Russia, thus removing the enemy needed to justify the $1 trillion annual budget of the military/security complex? These vast monies could have gone into health care for the unprovided, into public assistance for the unprovided, but the liberal/progressive/left would not have it. If the liberal/progressives are so against violence and hate, why do they support the hate campaign against Trump and Russia?
Has Identity Politics made the liberal/progressive/left deaf, dumb, and blind such that their reality is limited to the emotions that Identity Politics produces?
This is a valid question. It is not meant to be derogatory. It is meant to lead to an understanding of our plight as a country. How does a country in which blacks are taught to hate whites, women are taught to hate men, and whose history is explained as white oppression successfully deal with the defining issues of our time?
Indeed, such a country is incapable of even recognizing the real issues. It seems clear enough that our doom is certain.
Identity Politics has such a firm hold on universities, media, all sorts of subject areas in public schools such as black studies, women studies, race studies, native American studies, and in Democratic Party politics that reality is absent from the picture. Most of what is deplored by Identity Politics are simply products of history, not of the evil intentions of white males. It once was the case that the function of liberal progressivism was to reform what was inherited from the past and had been morally outgrown. But this progressive agenda has been abandoned to hate that is just as wrong and deadly as the hate to which the liberal progressives object. So we are left with what: hate against hate. This is not promising.
We have to come back to the question, why is the liberal/progressive/left comfortable with being aligned with the warmonger neoconservatives and the military/security complex against President Donald Trump who intended, until he was blocked, to reduce the extremely dangerous to all of mankind tensions between the US and Russia created over 24 years by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes? If you are really against violence, why oppose the only president we have had since Reagan who wants to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict?
I have asked this question a number of times. I have never had an answer from the liberal/progressive/left.
Are we to conclude that they are unaware, lost as they are in their hatred of white, heterosexual males, that they don’t care, that they want Trump destroyed even it Pence, the replacement, leads us into unwinnable war with Russia and China?
Why do the environmental and wildlife preservation organizations jump on the anti-Trump bandwaggon. Are they unaware of the consequences to all life of nuclear war?
What explains the total unreality in which Americans exist? We are supposed to be the leaders of the world. How can we lead when we are so utterly, hopelessly blind and stupid and consumed by hate?
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“John Perkins has some interesting things to say about the Iranian coup. He points out that the US learned a valuable lesson when it sent in Kermit Roosevelt to engineer the coup. You could do this sort of thing without an army. Also, avoiding Congressional oversight was indispensable, because avoiding letting the people in on your criminal activities was desirable. The CIA was a step in the right direction in this regard. The one downside to the CIA’s involvement, though, was that it was still ‘government’, albeit with quite a bit of plausible deniability and clandestine character. But the fullest plausible deniability would come from private sector involvement in regime changes. Enter the private sector players, like MAIN (now defunct) and it’s former employee turned whistleblower, John Perkins. Enter the Economic Hit Men. Non governmental organizations, with a few acting independently, today have carried on as extensions of the CIA. How often have progressives read articles in which NGOs were found to be at the center of regime change here or there? And very recently, F. William Engdahl wrote a book (which I hope gets translated into English and can avoid an Udo Ulfkotte treatment) in which he examines in detail the role of NGOs in the US’s imperialism.”
I’m going to have to break up this lily white circle jerk for a minute, and, to use a catchphrase beloved of white nativists, “tell it like it is”. It think this was a thoroughly stupid and even racist article.
While trying to downplay and trivialize the continued deadly and empirically demonstrable legacy of white supremacy in the imperialist United States (a legacy inextricably intertwined with the class exploitation of colonialism, slavery and capitalism), the author of this article scores a number of spectacular (and spectacularly embarrassing) own goals by demonstrating his own white supremacist blind-spots and leanings.
Apparently for him (and I’m going to make a guess here: he’s white), the cry-baby man-children rallying in Charlottesville, who are have been handed pretty much advantage in life but can’t stand it that black people hate being murdered by racist cops, is nothing more than a “free speech” thing. Thus can he equivocate the “violence” of the other side (i.e. self-defense from fascist goons) with “violence” in general and agree with Trump’s “innocent” remarks condemning “the violence of both sides”. But observe how racist and condescending that must sound to a black person, for whom a white power rally is NOT simply a free speech issue but is a LIFE AND DEATH issue. White supremacy is the affirmation of the correctness for non-whites to be subjugated and sidelined. White supremacist “speech” is inherently violent and threatening. Those who most angrily deny the existence of white privilege and white supremacy are those who invariably afford themselves the luxury of hiding behind it whenever they want to ignore discomforting realities that might force them to engage in self-reflection. There’s no greater privilege than being able to shut one’s eyes and ears to the screams of other people when one doesn’t want to think about them and to consign these screams to the status of irrelevancy. Black people have no such luxury; white people do. That’s the very epitome of privilege.
The author slips in allusions to the working class, as though most of the marching man-children weren’t privileged clerks. Again, imagine being among the most privileged people in the world, and taking time out to express disaffection that the world doesn’t favor you ENOUGH (as though the world owes it to you), and that this constitutes “oppression”. One of these clowns went on television and proudly stated “I’m alt-right because I’m pro-white”. The only agenda being served there is reactionary, gutter-racist sludge, not anything praiseworthy.
The author also, it seems, sees “the real issue” in America as not being that there is a massively disproportionate number of black and Latino people in prison on trivial drug “offenses” (or other stitched-up “crimes”), or that racist killer cops keep getting away with the brutal slaying of black people, but that he has to keep HEARING about these things. That, for him, defines the “plight of our country”: that blacks and women are not polite enough to him when he chooses to shut out their screams. If only everyone was more “civil”, that would set “our country” back on track (but to what, exactly? Perhaps he can spell out what he thinks is so praiseworthy about “American leadership”).
While denouncing identity politics, the author stupidly forgets that the white power marchers (and yes, that’s exactly what they are, given that some of them were displaying NAZI SYMBOLS – pretty hard to get away from that – and the rest were marching WITH THEM) are themselves the most vocal proponents of identity politics, in this case white male identity politics. The author chimes in with them, with his supposition that in the US “blacks are taught to hate whites” and “women are taught to hate men”. He validates the white supremacist mythos of a siege against whites while trying to deny that there is white supremacy.
And look at this vile chauvinist trash:
“What explains the total unreality in which Americans exist? We are supposed to be the leaders of the world. How can we lead when we are so utterly, hopelessly blind and stupid and consumed by hate?”
Ha??? Who appointed you “leaders of the world”? Who told you that you’re “supposed to be” its leader? Perhaps it’s this author is who hopelessly blind and stupid. This disgusting capitalist pigsty, which offers up the “choice” between reactionary gutter racists like Trump and liberal imperialist war criminals like Clinton, needs to be smashed and overturned, not “preserved”, not “made better”, not “made to lead”. Saying that you’re a “proud American” or that you think “America should lead” is simply a further incitement to violence against the Third World. That is, open incitement to racist violence, the sort of which the US has habitually engaged in throughout its entire history.
This author doesn’t actually want the working class to be emancipated from the grip of capital, because, being a capitalist ideologue, he’s on the side of capital. He doesn’t want the international proletariat to be emancipated from the grip of imperialism, because he’s on the side of imperialism (“American leadership”). He wants to perpetuate the historical legacy of US imperialism (i.e. genocide against the Third World), wherein it’s simply assumed that the terrorist American state “should lead”. And he wants white males to continue to spearhead this project, unmolested by the concerns of blacks and women. Liberal imperialists want non-whites and women (within the borders of the terrorist imperialist state) to share in the spoils of empire on a more equal basis; reactionary chauvinist imperialists like Trump want white males to adjudicate the spoils (while apportioning themselves the greatest share for the “brilliance” afforded by their “racial heritage”).
This commenting system is broken. My long reply to this article isn’t visible but when I try to repost it it says that it’s a “duplicate comment”.
Does this commenting system still work? Testing.
Yes, it does.
@BigB!
“Reagan: a nuclear dove – ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!”
I think the author of that concept, in this article, must be. Kidding, I mean. Or something worse.
It’s always amazing to see people awarding credit to politicians for the noble-sounding bullshit, written by staff writers, that politicians read aloud in their speeches or say “unscripted” at photo opps. As I always say: *and that’s why Nigerian email scammers even bother… * lots of people may or may not be so gullible to fall for the scam, but more than enough are gullible enough to spend the time weighing the pros and cons of believing in the ridiculous. People who go back and forth on the matter of whether there’s a guy called Jesus, for example, are already Christian enough… they just don’t know it. “Skeptics of the Mainstream” who say, “but on the other hand, Obama/ Reagan/ Clinton/Trump was the only president who…” aren’t really Skeptics at all. They’re driving downhill with the brakes slightly on.
[from the article’s end] “What explains the total unreality in which Americans exist? We are supposed to be the leaders of the world. How can we lead when we are so utterly, hopelessly blind and stupid and consumed by hate?”
You/ we Americans are not supposed to lead, have not been asked to lead and don’t (if you’re referring to anything but perhaps a few hundred men) lead. Not being “hopelessly blind and stupid and consumed by hate” is its own reward. Being “leaders of the world” is not on the table. Enough with this asinine propaganda.
Re: Charlottesville: so many possible reasons for it, on top of the obvious “strategy of tension” thing. Trying to guess which combination of items on the menu were the actual motives is a fun parlor game but the only solidly rational position is to refuse to be led in any direction in which the MSM sheepdog is trying to push us. The best way to achieve this goal is to ignore what the MSM presents.
IMO: We need to reach a point at which we are not defined and consumed, at any given moment, by our reaction to the events… real, staged or wholly fake… they throw at us every few days. Perhaps actually ignoring all but the most obviously pivotal events is the way to go. One rule of thumb could be: wait for a few weeks before even bothering to notice…? Eg: would it have had a negative impact on “The Movement” if we had utterly ignored the Manchester event? How about the Trayvon Martin event? How many thousands of hours of concentrated Alt Left/ Skeptic thought/argumentation were spent on that… and to what end? We get the gist of 9/11 and we get the gist of faux “lone gunman” massacres and real/fake race-war-trigger-bait etc. Why not turn our backs on the bullshit On Stage, largely, and focus on nailing specific players to specific crimes?
Eg: 1) Tony Blair/ Bush re: lies that got “us into” Iraq…. 2) dozens of major domestic and international Clinton crimes…. 3) Obama re: war crimes (drone edition) and Banker collusion/ corruption…. 4) (and this will be controversial but I still can’t believe how well the DNC Damage Control Campaign worked on this one) Tony Podesta on pedophilia; because whoever covered all those red flags with the goofy-sounding “pizzagate” banner certainly knew his/her lumpen psychology well. Enough consistent popular pressure on the “pizzagate” issue probably would have caused a Podesta or Alefantis “suicide”. Instead, they had us obsessing over three or four irrelevant event-lets, in a row, on the level of “Manchester”.
When MSM calls something “absurd/ ridiculous” and Stephen Colbert “laughs” at it: that’s when it’s time to pay attention . And when they make a big fuss and show lots of hand-wringing and tribute concerts and crowd-funding and hero stories? That’s the signal to ignore the bullshit and focus on the ongoing task of creating some momentum.
@Steve!
I was reading the article quite calmly till I got to that claim. I’m sure you must know, but PCR was Asst. Sec. Treasury under Reagan and is known as “the Father of Reaganomics”… as such, was part of the team that got us into the current economic merde. Since then, he has done some sterling work, particularly as a defender of the Palestinian cause: whilst retaining a rose tinted GOP soft spot for his former boss.
America leads all right: to be the hegemonic eco-genocidiare in the race to the bottom…
Re: C-ville – I think Bannon let the cat out of the bag in the rants that got him fired:
That said, seems the anti-racists won the day in Boston this weekend.
Re: Podesta – that story has rolled into the Seth Rich case. HRC, DWS, Imran Awan… there are so many crimes, so many cover-ups… it’s hard to see them all going away. Would love to write more, but am being shouted at to walk the dog! Catch you later…
BigB: spot-on, as ever! But do attend to the exigencies of the home-life, that your parapolitical efforts enjoy support! (Just like me: I finished making Offspring’s lunch before typing this, and tidied the kitchen up, to keep Wife romantically happy. laugh). I know fellers of the radical persuasion who aren’t so careful and they end up not only “woke” but alone!
St Aug: having earned my romantic brownie points; the point I was building up to make was this…
Leaving the J’aimes les Enfants salaciousness aside: the Clinton crimes do not just implicate the upper echelons of the DNC – they are structural and foundational – implicating much of the international capitalist Aristocracy in a web of governmental bribery, corruption and treason. They will NEVER go to court. All eyes are focused on the bottom: but with Imran Awan (no doubt) singing like a bird, I would be looking to expect Debbie Wasserman-Schulz to be caught in a ‘botched robbery’… or if the whole Russiagate narrative goes into nuclear implosion (which it may well do): expect a Clinton car or ‘plane crash’??? I for one wouldn’t shed a tear.
StAug, Reagan the dove, that contradiction in terms, is a very worthwhile civics lesson. Nancy Reagan credibly said the INF treaty was Reagan’s proudest achievement, and that he aspired to more nuclear disarmament. How to square the circle? Like all presidents after Kennedy, Reagan was a CIA puppet. Bush had him shot before he even found the White House men’s room. He made it to the hospital only due to insubordination. Even before Reagan was a vegetable, he did not know what went on. CIA gets away with it all by getting simpletons to blame the other party for what CIA does.
“Bush had him shot before he even found the White House men’s room…”
Well, it worked for LBJ, right? If it ain’t broke…
St Aug; NAW: Reagan signed the INF for no other reason that US Strategic Command were shit scared of the SS-20: a mobile MIRV-capable missile system to which NATO had no counter. This ‘justified’ the deployment of the Pershing 2s and ‘Gryphon’ cruise missiles…
[all the more fascinating for the fact that the US enabled the MIRV capability for the SS-20]
How to square the circle (or at least come full circle)? It looks like Congress intend to rip up the INF, and return to intermediate range missile production… presumably to be deployed in Europe… committing the Russian federation to an unneeded internecine nuclear arms race they can barely afford… instigated by NATO as a form of economic warfare in order to bankrupt them… just as they did in the ’80s… if it ain’t broke…??? 😉
Yes, on every point, and especially:
“Re: Charlottesville: so many possible reasons for it, on top of the obvious “strategy of tension” thing. Trying to guess which combination of items on the menu were the actual motives is a fun parlor game but the only solidly rational position is to refuse to be led in any direction in which the MSM sheepdog is trying to push us. The best way to achieve this goal is to ignore what the MSM presents.”
That the CIA is busy trying to bring down the Trump presidency is really none of “our” concern. That the lunatic fringe like antifa and the alt-right are going at each other in the streets, is also neither here nor there. (The issue of war is altogether another matter, however: we need to know that no war is being fought on our behalf, though our daughters and sons and brothers and sisters do the fighting, and that all wars are always and primarily about expropriating and murdering and enslaving ordinary people, that war is really an act of aggression by the ruling classes perpetrated against both ourselves and people like ourselves.)
Pointing out “why” none of what the M$M would have us obsess over matters to the majority however, may be important and instructive and disillusioning if contrasted with what from a working class perspective is important: that “you,” as a wage slave, are in the majority, are the target the establishment’s intent to profit, and from that establishment’s perspective, you matter only as a source of profit; that your interests on any issue are not those of the political and corporate class; that your perception is being manipulated in every way possible, that the lies are ubiquitous and constant; that your best hope for the future is to ally yourself with the majority and that you should to do your part to raise the level of awareness among the working class about the complete irreconcilability between its welfare and for profit production and distribution, because under the current circumstances, those among us who understand the social and political terrain in which we are engaged are as yet too few in number to potentially incite the stirrings of a mass movement to seize control of the direction of the social development of our communities.
Yes, we need to stop listening to them, that is to say, to stop engaging in conversation among ourselves on their terms.
We need to re-appropriate our conversation as our conversation on our terms, about the the issues that matter to us and as grasped from our perspective, and not get caught up in the distractions over which our so-called “leaders” would have us completely waist ourselves and our time.
Or, in a nutshell… FACT ONE: all Wars are always waged against all of US by the same small group of people. Since MSM will never admit this, it’s best, in the end, to ignore MSM entirely while we formulate a worthy response to FACT ONE.
(consider the evil genius of it: enlisting Serfs to kill Serfs in your War on Serfs; for TFIC it’s win/win/win as they grab assets/ thin two herds simultaneously/ inflame antagonisms between Serfs… War was always their favorite tool and we need to focus on that)
That the CIA is busy trying to bring down the Trump presidency is really none of “our” concern? I think it’s a mistake to draw focus away from CIA criminals toward this big vague Establishment. The Establishment does not have impunity under US legal pretext. They can’t kill you or torture you and get away with it. Only CIA can do that. The Establishment without its CIA goons would be an ordinary kleptocracy ripe for overthrow. With CIA as their goons, they’ve got a totalitarian state that is subjecting its domestic civilian population to armed attack.
CIA is the Achilles heel of the US ruling class because the outside world has agreed that CIA’s impunity has got to end. CIA is only thing that keeps these rich parasites in control.
I agree with you. It is indeed a mistake to draw focus away from the criminal nature of the CIA, just as it is a mistake to get drawn into arguments about the relative merits or demerits of this or that politician, as if the person occupying the utterly corrupt institution of the U.S. presidency was anyone other than someone who wasn’t very much a part of the “vague” establishment that cares not a whit about ordinary Americans, an establishment elite albeit perhaps possibly at odds with this or that faction of the establishment, say, like the Pentagon on whether a war with Russia shouldn’t come first before engaging China, and the like.
It’s not so much the issue, but the relevance of the issue for “us” that matters.
And not to quibble with the spirit of your reply, with which I concur, but a minor point of disagreement, but not really, since you yourself obliquely underscore the point: the CIA is very much a part of the establishment, not only purposed to subvert recalcitrant regimes on the geopolitical scene, but to police, so to speak, the ruling American kleptocracy. As you put it, without the CIA and the rest of all the alphabet soup agencies, the establishment would be ripe for overthrow, from both within and without . . .
Finally, I would also quibble with what is or isn’t the Achilles hell of the US ruling class: it is the dedicated ranks of honest technocrats, without which the bureaucracies cannot function, who are the greatest potential source of the system’s downfall: they are educated, they can think, and they know how to leverage talent and organization. Should an ideological shift happen among this stratum of American society, a substantive political and social revolution would be at hand . . .
Until the rank-and-file who work for the state, and especially those engaged in the security branches of the state, come over to the side of their very own class interests, which are the interests of the majority, America will remain what it is, “a totalitarian state.”
“it is the dedicated ranks of honest technocrats” I am sitting here pointing to my nose. Yes. I’m sure everybody remembers the pivotal election that precipitated the collapse of the Warsaw Pact… Oh wait, right. It was disgusted apparatchiki who gleefully dismantled their own pointless state. That’s the root of CIA’s ‘insider threat’ panic.
The core criminal enterprise, the NCS, is sadly somewhat less prone to onset of decency, since it’s all brain-damaged jarhead washouts. Their ripped axons hurt when they think so they just take orders. In Africa they would be painstakingly rehabilitated as child soldiers but CIA likes them brutalized and crazed.
Right. Because no one in any military anywhere ever mutinied against their superiors. Not that 1917 saw any soldiers go over to the side of the popular masses, or that fragging ever happened in Vietnam . . .
Do you fancy that the onset of decency is being posited as something that would be sudden, or that a certain amount of time and effort might be required to, to to speak, “educate” enough people so that a radical point of view might be closer to “common sense” than it now is? Otherwise, why bother, eh?
Or do you think people will be able to organize their own secret militias, to then take on the armed to the teeth jarhead washouts in their millions or so?
How will change ever happen, do you think?
Oh but US indoctrination capacity has greatly improved since WWII, when the vast majority of sane soldiers just sat there crapping their pants and never fired a shot. Even since Vietnam. The domestic violence and random carnage blamed on PTSD or Lariam or barrel-scraping recruitment is actually a testament to the effectiveness of the brutalizing dehumanization known as training. Brainwashing fails now and then, of course. That’s why CIA dispatched scumbag coward cutout Robert Roche to decapitate Scott Olsen with a tear gas grenade (state policy, as FBI records show.)
Having seen die Wende happen in the COMECOM states, it looked like a example of the ANC maxim, people will change their minds. People did. In a few short years. It gains momentum catastrophically like an avalanche. We are closer than most people think.
“We are closer than most people think.”
That I might live to see the day!
Great write. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the MSM has conducted emotional engineering for years and has constructed exactly what it intended to build. An American public unable to discern the truth and so easily programmable to produce the chaos their MIC Masters require. And all this confusion they can do pretty much anything they want to in total anonymity(The Matrix). American Empire is teetering on a variety of fronts and dying Empires, especially with huge militaries are extremely dangerous. Nothing much surprises me anymore.
I agree with most of PCR has to say, as usual. However, i also wondered, as another person commented, if America is supposed to lead the world. Why should America lead the world? Lead it where, I wonder. Perhaps the world doesn’t need one leader.
Best to just work together through the UN or whatever and takes things one step at a time, the way life is lived.
Actually, maybe the dissolution of the US into smaller countries might be nice. Like have California, Oregon, and Washington all join together to make one country. Maybe the southern states could do the same. Start all over again! Colorado and New Mexico have legalized pot. People who like that lifestyle could move there. Maybe they could even have their own armies, for those aggressive people who like doing that kind of thing, and fight amongst themselves, leaving all the other countries alone!
PCR completely loses me with his America must lead the world comment. His America is cursed, which is to say damned. It’s a godless state. All states are godless and all will disappear, in my cosmology. But there’s ‘disappearing and anti-God’ and ‘disappearing because something else is coming’.
Re Eric Blair (first) The strange thing about Naked Capitalism is that the proprietors are old enough to remember CIA’s polarization trick. But when it happens again they take sides reflexively, again. CIA is a one-trick pony: destabilizing violence as a pretext for pre-planned repression. When it was Nixon that CIA wanted to purge, the synthetic strife was hardhats v. hippies – both sides infested with CIA provocateurs, just like now, both sides equally against CIA war.
http://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archives/chapter-nine-defeated-%E2%80%93-president-and-protestors
Nazis v. antifas is new labels on the same divide-and-rule trick. Just like then, Mockingbird media cranks out tightly-circumscribed pro-and-contra to trick you into having an opinion. Countless dupes will think and think and take a side, and come out with some individual personalized civics essay though nobody gives a shit what they think. They just want you to take your eye off the ball: CIA warding off threats to its impunity. As in 1970, it’s looking like CIA crime doesn’t pay. Then the threat to CIA impunity was international consensus on US aggression. Now the threat is more urgent and diverse:
Legally mandated NARA records release bearing on CIA’s 1963 coup d’état;
International legal pursuit (in inter alia Italy, Poland, Germany, Spain, and Canada, with international civil society including CCR and CJR) of systematic and widespread CIA torture and disappearance amounting to crimes against humanity;
Civil society legal challenges to CIA’s serious crimes (including Abdul Wahed Shannan Al Rabbat v. Blair, Saleh v. Bush, and prospective JASTA suits,) which, when quashed, will support ICC admissibility of crimes the state is unwilling or unable to prosecute;
NWC and BWC treaty bodies openly denouncing US proliferation effected by CIA assets including Marc Grossman, Will Cathcart, and Robert Garry, in the 2015 NWC Review Conference and in ministerial-level Russian statements exposing US efforts to thwart the object and purpose of the BWC.
And at this juncture, after a quarter century of CIA cadres installed to head the executive (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama,) a president under insecure control takes office. Of course CIA has to cripple him or destroy him. So they polarize, polarize, polarize. Make everyone forget that everybody’s common enemy is the state.
Standard operating procedure for a lot longer than I probably realize. The older I get, the more I read, the further back it goes to where I don’t fully know yet. For some time I’ve been saying World War II was the beginning but I’m pretty sure now that its roots started well before
Indeed. I read recently that Kaiser Wilhelm and the Tsar of Russia – who were actually cousins, were, in 1914, frantically sending telegrams begging each other to work towards peace, but the military-industrial complex later mentioned by Eisenhower wanted war, and war it got.
It always wants war, and war it always gets.
“CIA is a one-trick pony” I completely agree and Alfred McCoy has helped to see why that is the case. In a nutshell, it is too free. I could say that about power generally, but the CIA is more free even than the Pentagon, the FBI and any number of other deep state entities. For that reason, it hasn’t had to deal much with law and bureaucracy. It’s not polished. It’s just a hammer.
A site I sometimes visit (nakedcapitalism.com) featured people from across the ideological spectrum discussing often contentious issues in a reasonable and respectful manner. That came to an end after Charlottesville and the admin turned comments off.
The breakdown in communication there is worrying because, similar to OffGuardian, it was one of the few places I know of that “kept its cool” so to speak and disagreement didn’t manifest itself as people angrily shouting each other down. Until now.
There is a propensity amongst proponents of identity politics to assume every “white” person who doesn’t partake in ritual self-flagellation is a racist white supremacist neo-nazi and that is as illogical as it is dangerous and self-defeating. At the same time there is also a knee-jerk contrarianism, as displayed by PCR in this piece, that effectively claims that the existence of violent racists amongst Trump supporters is a media fiction and “all sides” are equally violent. This is demonstrably wrong.
In the United States there is no equivalent on the left to the right-wing, often racist, thugs and “militias” that breed people like Timothy McVeigh. I understand that not every gun-toting paranoiac is a virulent racist but to claim that the Antifa and black bloc idiots, who were infiltrated by provocateurs at at least one demonstration (Quebec City, forget the year) and have no broad support on the genuine left, are equivalent to the armed nutjobs on the right is just silly. Maybe you think they are not nutjobs but “defenders of the constitution”, fine that’s your prerogative, but don’t pretend “all sides” are equally armed and prepared to do serious violence.
There is also way too much focus, IMO, on parsing Trump’s words and trying to divine what Trump “really means”. A few years ago Trump sang the praises of Bill and Hillary Clinton and there are photos of them laughing it up at a party. They were guests at his wedding(s). At the time he claimed to be a “liberal” and supported “liberal values”. Trump contradicts himself regularly and says whatever he thinks will help him come out on top and line his bank account with a few more bucks.
His only honourable position is (was?) his seemingly genuine desire to make peace with Russia. The man is a money grubbing capitalist through and through. However, I do not support the media and Democrat/Republican tag team trying to kick him out of office. He was elected playing by the same rules as his opponents and if Americans don’t want their country to tear itself apart faster than it already is they have to accept that.
Liberal/progressive/left is a mask various people and groups use to hide their support for Israel and racism toward non-White folks.
It has become a political framework that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts, the kind that keep them from ‘imposing their morals’ like the bad guys do.
Don’t forget, it was the so-called “liberal/progressive/left” which supported Jeremy Corbyn in the first place – but as soon as showed his impartiality to UK’s Jewish power and Israel-Hamas conflict – he has been hunted like a pro-Hitler.
Corbyn has been accused of antisemitism for suggesting that London should stop blaming Hamas and Iran of terrorism and hold dialogues with them. He is also against British support for the Syrian rebels fighting Assad government.
https://rehmat1.com/2017/05/22/theresa-may-corbyn-victory-is-scary/
Roberts doesn’t understand what “identity politics” is nor does he understand how it has turned into “identitarian” politics fusing radical right with libertarians and spaced out “queers” like the transgenderedist transgenders wanting the privilege for straight males to wear dresses and take a piss in the women’s restoom, thereby setting off White Ring Radical Christianists and creating a circus sideshow that distracts from talking about the subjugation of women, the reality of apargtheid America, the probability of nuclear war and the probablility of species extinction aka ecocide. Or anything else useful, like real democracy (like Venezuela) and real socialism (again like Venezuela.)
Roberts also doesn’t understand that the Clintons created the “identity politics” brand with the “ah feel yore pain” to AVOID doing ANYTHING for ANYONE in the Democratic base, especially Blacks, Latinos and workers. The Clintons DID MORE DAMAGE to the US with the brand of “identity politics” than can be expressed in this comment. It USED to be CIVIL RIGHTS and HUMAN RIGHTS. Then it was IDENTITY POLITICS, CLintons style. NOW IT IS IDENTITARIAN RIGHT WING POLITICS.
I have patiently tried to explain this all to him but he is a rather slow learner …
“What explains the total unreality in which Americans exist?”
a) A lack of understanding of the essential characteristics of capital: that capitalism is a destitute and politically neutralized population, constrained at bottom by force to slave for a wage, with the interests of the billionaire class and their bought and paid for minions being diametrically opposed to those of the overwhelming majority, the working class.
b) A monopoly over the channels of information production and distribution expressly commissioned to misinform, miss-educate and confound the general population about the nature of the society in which they live and about those events and trends and policies that bear most heavily and directly upon their lives, both as individuals and members of a broad collectivity.
c) A concerted and permanent campaign orchestrated at the behest of the establishment, the politically most active and aware and organized among the rich and the powerful, to exaggerate and foment existing and potential cultural divisions among the general population, so as to make it virtually impossible for the majority to come together as one to elaborate a common, collective awareness about their true and objective collective interests and conditions, thereby staving off any real challenge to the odiously oppressive and violent power structures of capitalist society.
You can argue for the rectitude of this or that POTUS, and you can make it your life’s mission to extirpate overt expressions of “white supremacy” and the like, or you can dedicate yourself to deepening your comprehension of the truly consequential structural imperatives of your society – most of which have already been mapped out for you if you would only make an effort to read firsthand, say, a bit of Marx or Engels or Lenin or countless others who have made of their original and relevant insights their own – and to sharing what you will have learned with a friend or two or more . . .
Nothing changes if the working class doesn’t learn to think for itself and in the end develop an independent and true appreciation for the manner in which it is being oppressed and exploited as a class under the current conditions in which it is constrained to exist.
The huge liberal lurch to the right politically is… bizarre, an entire class willingly accepting the conditions for their own demise. But, given their role in society, did they have a choice?
I’m beginining to think that ‘history’ can be defined today, as the crimes of the past being used to justify the crimes of the present. At least within the political/ideological spheres.
In the US vast swathes of the left, liberals, progressives have been successfully ‘played’ to a quite extraordinary degree. It’s incredible. How this happened, how we got here, is a huge and complex subject.
Reagan: a nuclear dove – ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!
Reagan brought the world to the brink of Armageddon and gloated over the prospect (some biblical BS about Ezekiel). He put Pershing 2 and nuclear cruise missiles in Europe; railed against SALT; had SAC buzzing Soviet airspace and doing fake bombing runs on Moscow; had NATO incessantly drilling nuclear and biological warfare; so much so that the Soviets were forced to believe that Able Archer ’83 was the real thing; instigated Trident, the B-1 bomber, Star Wars…
When he said he wanted to see a world without nuclear weapons… or some such other Obama-type BS – HE WAS LYING!!!
[Actions speak louder than words.]
If it weren’t for sustained public pressure (yes, I was there); and the incipient break up of the Soviet Union… WE’D ALL BE DEAD… THANKS TO REAGAN.
/RANT.
I see the general commentary furor since the Charlottesville horror the same way as Assange. I add UK to US in the quote.
“US neo-(iberal/cons) and their MSM press pets are in overdrive conflating the massive anti-DC left+right with the tiny alt-Reich+Antifa.”
https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/897808386758250496
I’m with Kevin Morris below, I see this ‘event’ being used to push divide and rule and also to discredit by association/conflation with a minority of extremist elements. It is working a treat… I am avoiding, out of frustration, many ‘progressive’ accounts I normally read…
I read somewhere ,”those whom the gods wish to destroy ,firstly makes them crazy” , or something of that nature.
We all have mirrors in our houses.
The progressive/liberal argument has been hijacked by the Democrats who have turned it into a party conflict – as political parties tend to do! The hysteria about Trump being a Russian secret agent doesn’t hide the fact that the Democrats still led by Clinton with allies in the Intelligence agencies and the media would, if they’d won the election, now be fighting Assad and pushing back Russia, China and Iran in their attempt to Rule the World. They are not just the war mongers but those most wedded to neoliberal economics. Just look at the way Clinton, Nuland and Power openly pushed Obama into the Ukrainian Adventure and the destruction of Libya.
Possibly the last line of the article provides clarity
“…We are supposed to be the leaders of the world. How can we lead…”
Why do you think that?
Last week, it was Trump-Russia collusion 24/7 now it’s Trump colluding with Nazis? They need to make up their minds and settle on one propaganda point.
The same people who want to blow up Mt. Rushmore are the ones who are howling for Trump’s head. Looks like that sub-par comedian Griffin will get her wish. Why were they so quiet through Obama’s reign when he was mass-murdering Muslims?
Maybe replace those iconic figures with ones of Joe Stalin, Chairman Mao and Lenin?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-17/lets-blow-mount-rushmore-says-vice
With regards to the Antifa protesters; one should always wonder, when the government, MSM and police are on your side, who exactly you are protesting against? And why does is Antifa flag a mirror image of the 1933 Germany Communist Party flag?
i doubt if the police are on the side of antifa. and they certainly are not on the side of blm. the gov and msm are certainly not on the side of blm. not by a long shot.
No, but the McAuliffe-Soros-antiFa-BLM dark alliance does exist behind the scenes: all linked by Soros’ black money. For whatever reason (yet to emerge): the police were stood down – reduced to spectate. The whole thing reeks of being staged.
i didnt disagree with that. just the notion of the police being on the side of blm. thats absurd.
You assume that the BLM exists to protest the police. What if your assumption is wrong?
so what? what ever their raison detre, the cops are not on their side anymore than they were on the side of the black panthers. some consider the cops the kkk in blue. for good reason.
@nomad: what I was hinting at was that if the police where acting autonomously – you’d expect them to act along previous historic protocols (DAPL, the infamous Ieshia Evans snatch photo). They didn’t: not even forming a cordon or separating the factions, waiting 12 hours to declare a state of emergency. My point is the police are on the side of whoever they are told to be on the side of.
its true the police stood down for whatever reason.
“My point is the police are on the side of whoever they are told to be on the side of.”
No theyre not. They are always the enemy of black people, no matter what. They kill us in street virtually every day. The fill up the jails with us.
Respect. Can’t argue with that. The police are and will remain an enemy of the Black people. What I was trying to get at is the police acted differently at C-ville: uniquely so as far as I am aware. Despite their ongoing deep racial prejudice: no one could accuse the of their usual overpolicing – that’s all.
“Maybe replace those iconic figures with ones of Joe Stalin, Chairman Mao and Lenin?”
What, exactly, would be wrong with that?
“And why does is Antifa flag a mirror image of the 1933 Germany Communist Party flag?”
What, exactly, is wrong with that? The German Communist Party should be praised, not sniveled at, especially given the fate it suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
i dont agree with this at all.
this other republican has a better perspective.
https://www.facebook.com/attn/videos/1475398805828907/
I see 1984 is definitely arrived
Once blogging is finally outlawed and the only take on what is happing is through the MSM. Then TPTB can relax and create more jobs. For instance like Winston in 1984 whose job was to constantly rewrite history of world events to suit the Party Line.
For instance “two legs bad, four legs good” (animal farm) can be replaced with.
A right wing fascist who shouts abuse and hits you with a baseball bat is bad.
Is rewritten to say:
A left wing fascist who shouts abuse and hits you with a baseball bat is good.
Then again whilst we all fight with each other, the real people who manipulate and control the system can carry on as usual. “George Carlin.”
It’s an age old story, well used in the UK by the Tories: Divide and Rule. With disparate groups at each others’ throats, those who really call the shots get on, unhampered.
See also:
“USA: The Efforts to Cover the Struggle for Social Justice and Peace, to cover The Class Struggle by the “Race War” concept”: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2017/08/16/usa-the-efforts-to-cover-the-struggle-for-social-justice-and-peace-to-cover-the-class-struggle-by-the-race-war-concept/
Again, you are conflating liberals and progressives. Liberals are on the capitalists’ side of the economic and class spectrums.
Progressives are on the labour side.
You don’t have to side with the antifa (quite possibly agent provocateurs imo) or whoever to condemn that torch lit march the night before. That had overt intent and significance.
On what do you base your impression that the US “progressives” — forgive me for the scare quotes, but I see them mostly as a totalitarian bunch of self-righteous identity politics advocates — are on the side of the working class?
I think that what Jag37777 means is that if you are someone who calls himself a “progressive,” but are really mostly caught up in the politics of identity, that if you don’t hold to a class analysis of capitalist America, then you don’t by his measure fall into the category of someone he deems to be authentically progressive, but are part of what now fashionably goes by the name of the “fake left,” of people who think they subscribe to a radical critique of modern America, but who actually remain within the domain of an outlook that wholeheartedly embraces capitalism.
If that’s what Jag37777 meant to imply, I agree.
“Progressive” is just a label used by nefarious elements to hide behind and cloak their true intents to the trusting (gullible) public. Every individual thinks themselves to act with “good intentions” to achieve what they consider is “right, just and proper”. After all Cameron and Osbourne tried to portray themselves as moderate and progressive Conservatives, as do the right wing of the Labour Party. After all if there is a choice between being a progressive or a stick in the mud type who would want to align themselves as the latter.
Different people mean different things by the label — I entirely agree. And, indeed, far too many use it deceptively to seduce the politically naive.
But one can meaningfully define the sense in which one uses a term.
By Jag’s definition, if I understand him correctly, it isn’t enough merely to want to change things to accord with what a person considers to be “right, just and proper.”
By his definition, I think, in the realm of politics and social equity, it means someone who understands that in our current circumstances the overriding social antagonism, the social division that most matters and on which we should all be focused, is between the corporate rich and ordinary people, that is to say, a progressive is someone who wants an end to “for-profit production and distribution” and rather a society that privileges the welfare of each and every human being above all else.
By this definition, Cameron and Osbourne are not progressives, as is no one who, however committed to combatting countless other forms of odious injustices, believes in the sanctity of private property and the right to business profits, or just doesn’t see how deleterious and paramount an impact capitalism is having on the lives of everyone on this planet.