Re: [blind-democracy] Re: When Fear Comes

Miriam,
My thought is that the Electoral College is in place to protect the
Oligarchy, not actually our government, just as is the DNC.
It is this Oligarchy, the Ruling Class, the Loyal Subjects of the
Corporate American Empire who have deceived us for generations. We
have been sold a bill of goods. We think that we are a nation of
Rugged Individuals, because that is what our "Handlers" tell us. But
they are well organized. Still, we have been conditioned to believe
the banning together is cowardly, and a Commie plot to take over our
wonderful "Free" government of rugged individuals.
The fact is that there is no true "communism" being practiced. The
first hurdle in establishing such a self government it to find a way
of blocking the Greedy Opportunists from moving in and taking over.
How do we change the mindset of a people who have been conditioned for
so long to believe that riches are the God Given Reward for cleverly
seizing control?

Solve that problem and we might have a chance at survival.

Carl Jarvis

On 1/9/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Everything surely is connected. I keep talking about bureaucracy and size.
> I
> talked about it in relation to community medicaid. I talk about it in
> relation to how badly our society functions and how impersonal and uncaring
> human interractions have become, at least here, where I live. And now watch
> as Trump first, refuses to provide his income tax returns with no
> repercussions and next, refuses to divest himself of all of his business
> interests and put them in a blind trust, with no repercussions. And that
> second refusal will have real consequences for foreign policy. He has a
> private security guard because our government secret service is, I suppose,
> not loyal enough to him in his way of thinking. No repercussions. He became
> President Elect because he won a majority of votes from the Electoral
> College. The reason for its existence is supposed to be to protect the
> country from an unwise choice on the part of the people, a choice of
> someone
> who might, perhaps be mentally or physically ill, or become a dictator. But
> the electors, most of them anyway, followed laws and traditions that say
> they are bound to vote for the person who received the majority of votes in
> their state. So the systems, the bureaucracies, just goes on grinding away,
> heedless of reality or consequences. It's really terrifying.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
> Sent: Monday, January 09, 2017 10:40 AM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: When Fear Comes
>
> First, a salute to Meryl Streep for her heroic act of chastising the
> decadent behavior of the incoming regime. Here's hoping that her example
> of
> speaking out and taking a stand, is infectious. Fear and misdirection are
> the two top weapons of Empires. I believe that it is vital that we read
> again and again the quote in Chris Hedges below article, by Solzhenitsyn:
> "Do not pursue what is illusory-property and position; all is gained at the
> expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell
> night. Live with a steady superiority over life-don't be afraid of
> misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the
> same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to
> overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and
> hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet
> can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, and if both ears can
> hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us
> most
> of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart-and prize above all else in the
> world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold
> them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do
> not
> know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how
> you
> are imprinted in their memory!"
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
> Truthdig
>>
>> When Fear Comes
>>
>> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/when_fear_comes_20170108/
> >
>> Posted on Jan 8, 2017
>>
>>
>> By Chris Hedges
>>
>> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>>
>> Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago," his profound
>> meditation on the nature of oppression and resistance in the Soviet
>> gulags, tells the story of a man who was among prisoners being moved in
> the spring of 1947.
>> The former front-line soldier, whose name is lost to history, suddenly
>> disarmed and killed the two guards. He announced to his fellow
>> prisoners that they were free.
>>
>> "But the prisoners were overwhelmed with horror; no one followed his
>> lead, and they all sat down right there and waited for a new convoy,"
>> Solzhenitsyn
>> writes. The prisoner attempted in vain to shame them. "And then he
>> took up the rifles (thirty-two cartridges, 'thirty one for them!') and
> left alone.
>> He killed and wounded several pursuers and with his thirty-second
>> cartridge he shot himself. The entire Archipelago might well have
>> collapsed if all the former front-liners had behaved as he did."
>>
>> The more despotic a regime becomes, the more it creates a climate of
>> fear that transforms into terror. At the same time, it invests
>> tremendous energy and resources in censorship and propaganda to
>> maintain the fiction of the just and free state.
>>
>> Poor people of color know intimately how these twin mechanisms of fear
>> and false hope function as effective forms of social control in the
>> internal colonies of the United States. They have also grasped, as the
>> rest of us soon will, the fiction of American democracy.
>>
>> Those who steadfastly defy the state will, if history is any guide, be
>> decapitated one by one. A forlorn hope that the state will ignore us
>> if we comply will cripple many who have already been condemned.
>> "Universal innocence," Solzhenitsyn writes, "also gave rise to the
>> universal failure to act. Maybe they won't take you? Maybe it will all
>> blow over."
>>
>> "The majority sit quietly and dare to hope," he writes. "Since you
>> aren't guilty, then how can they arrest you? It's a mistake!
>>
>> "Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man?" Solzhenitsyn asks.
>> "If the condemned man in every cell had ganged up on the executioners
>> as they came in and choked them, wouldn't this have ended the
>> executions sooner than appeals to the All-Russian Central Executive
>> Committee? When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not
>> resist?"
>>
>> "But wasn't everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest?"
>> he asks. "Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their
>> knees, as if their legs had been amputated."
>>
>> Resisting despotism is often a lonely act. It is carried out by those
>> endowed with what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
>> (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Reinhold-Niebuhr ) calls
>> "sublime madness." Rebels will be persecuted, imprisoned or forced to
>> become hunted outcasts, much as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and
>> Edward Snowden are now. A public example will be made of anyone who
>> defies the state. The punishment of those singled out for attack will
>> be used to send a warning to all who are inclined to dissent.
>>
>> "Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people
>> emerges, people who are that and nothing more," Solzhenitsyn writes of
>> those who see what is coming. "And how they were laughed at! How they
>> were mocked!
>> As though they stuck in the craw of people whose deeds and actions
>> were single-minded and narrow-minded. And the only nickname they were
>> christened with was 'rot.' Because these people were a flower that
>> bloomed too soon and breathed too delicate a fragrance. And so they
>> were mowed down."
>>
>> "These people," he goes on, "were particularly helpless in their
>> personal lives; they could neither bend with the wind, nor pretend,
>> nor get by; every word declared an opinion, a passion, a protest. And
>> it was just such people the mowing machine cut down, just such people
>> the chaff-cutter shredded."
>>
>> When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being
>> booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of
>> Iraq, reporters and editors lowered their heads or turned away when I
>> was nearby. They did not want to be touched by the same career-killing
>> contagion. They wanted to protect their status at the institution.
>> Retreat into rabbit holes is the most common attempt at self-protection.
>>
>> The right-wing cable shows were lynching me almost hourly. Soon I was
>> given a written reprimand and public rebuke by the newspaper. I was a
> leper.
>>
>> The machinery of the security and surveillance state, the use of
>> special terrorism laws and the stripping of civil liberties become
>> ubiquitous. The lofty rhetoric of liberty and the reality of the
>> chains readied for the public creates magic realism
>> (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/magical-realism.html ) . Reality
>> and the language describing reality are soon antipodal. The
>> pseudo-democracy is populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts,
>> pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens. Nothing
>> is as it is presented.
>>
>> Demagogues, Solzhenitsyn reminds us, are stunted and shallow people.
>> "Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty,"
>> he
>> writes.
>>
>> "The overall life of society comes down to the fact that traitors were
>> advanced and mediocrities triumphed, while everything that was best
>> and most honest was trampled underfoot," he observes. Ersatz
>> intellectuals, surrogates "for those who had been destroyed, or
>> dispersed," took the place of real intellectuals.
>>
>> "After all," Solzhenitsyn writes, "we have gotten used to regarding as
>> valor only valor in war (or the kind that's needed for flying in outer
>> space), the kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten
>> another concept of valor-civil valor. And that's all our society
>> needs, just that, just that, just that!"
>>
>> This kind of valor, he knew as a combat veteran, requires a moral
>> courage that is more difficult than the physical courage encountered
>> on the battlefield.
>>
>> "This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this
>> obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more
>> frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly," he says.
>>
>> The coming arrests mean that a wide range of Americans will experience
>> the violations that poor people of color have long endured.
>> Self-interest alone should have generated sweeping protest, should
>> have made the nation as a whole more conscious. We should have
>> understood: Once rights become privileges that the state can revoke,
>> they will eventually be taken away from everyone. Now those who had
>> been spared will get a taste of what complicity in oppression means.
>>
>> "The traditional image of arrest is also what happens afterward, when
>> the poor victim has been taken away," Solzhenitsyn writes. "It is an
>> alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for
>> hours on end, a breaking, ripping one, pulling from the walls,
>> emptying things from wardrobes and desks onto the floor, shaking,
>> dumping out, and ripping apart-piling up mountains of litter on the
>> floor-and the crunch of things being trampled beneath jackboots. And
>> nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of locomotive
>> engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing his newly
>> dead child. The 'jurists' dumped the child's body out of the coffin
>> and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and
>> they unwind bandages to search beneath them."
>>
>> "Resistance," he writes, "should have begun right there, at the moment
>> of the arrest itself. But it did not begin." And so the mass arrests
>> were easy.
>>
>> And what at that point constitutes victory?
>>
>> "From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly
>> behind you," he writes. "At the very threshold, you must say to
>> yourself: 'My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's
>> nothing to be done about it.
>> I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die-now or a little
>> later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the
>> sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me
>> those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my
>> body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience
>> remain precious and important to me."
>>
>> "Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble,"
>> Solzhenitsyn writes. "Only the man who has renounced everything can
>> win that victory."
>>
>> The last volume of Solzhenitsyn's trilogy chronicles camp uprisings
>> and revolts. These revolts were impossible to foresee.
>>
>> "So many deep historians have written so many clever books and still
>> they have not learned how to predict those mysterious conflagrations
>> of the human spirit, to detect the mysterious springs of a social
>> explosion, not even to explain them in retrospect," Solzhenitsyn
>> writes. "Sometimes you can stuff bundle after bundle of burning tow
>> under the logs, and they will not take.
>> Yet up above, a solitary little spark flies out of the chimney and the
>> whole village is reduced to ashes."
>>
>> How do we prepare? Solzhenitsyn, after eight years in the gulag,
>> answers this too.
>>
>> "Do not pursue what is illusory-property and position; all is gained
>> at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated
>> in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life-don't be
>> afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after
>> all, all the
>> same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the
>> cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and
>> if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't
>> broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can
>> see, and if both ears can hear, then whom should you envy? And why?
>> Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify
>> your heart-and prize above all else in the world those who love you
>> and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part
>> from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not
>> know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be
>> how you are imprinted in their memory!"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Why Meryl Streep's Golden Globe Speech Is So Important in the Trump
>> Era
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Chris Hedges Talks With Michael Gecan About How to Build
>> Organizations to Empower Ordinary Citizens
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> The Three Big Reasons Republicans Can't Replace Obamacare
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Hollywood Gets a Clue About Inclusion, Meryl Streep Gets Political at
>> 2017 Golden Globes (Video)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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