---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2017 10:12:16 -0800
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] Make America Ungovernable
To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
Cc: jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@gmail.com>, Matthew
<mcblack@gmail.com>, footballmania <footballmania@gmail.com>
This is a "must read". There is so much to consider, and such a short
time until the "loyal opposition" is shut down.
In my opinion, Chris Hedges is a modern day prophet.
Here is a short but urgent warning:
"If we speak back to them in the language of violence,
we will fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat."
On 2/6/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> <http://www.truthdig.com/>
>
> Make America Ungovernable
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/make_america_ungovernable_20170205/
>
> AddThis Sharing Buttons
>
> Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More50
>
> Posted on Feb 5, 2017
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
>
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
> Donald Trump's regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an
> authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil
> liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the
> abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will
> accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda,
> will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be
> launched or expanded.
>
> And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.
>
>
> "We don't have much time," Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation
> Jackson <http://www.cooperationjackson.org/> and an organizer with the
> Malcolm X Grassroots Movement <https://mxgm.org/> , told me when I reached
> him by phone in Jackson, Miss. "We are talking two to three months before
> this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that's with
> massive resistance."
>
> Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish
> the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in
> power—such as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will
> defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the
> Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the
> Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it—are agents of
> destruction.
> In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and
> conspiracy
> theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist
> only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to
> know how long this transformation will take—it may be longer than the two
> or
> three months Akuno fears—but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump
> regime the end result is certain.
>
> "The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy]
> out," said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external
> funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. "They have a
> strategy.
> They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need
> to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this
> up to Trump's pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the
> objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate
> this
> regime and where it is going."
>
> Stephen Bannon, the president's chief counselor, was behind the ban on
> Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries—a
> ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is
> successful
> in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to
> the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim
> organizations
> and individuals
> <http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigrati
> on-annotated> in the United States that, in the language of the executive
> action, have been "radicalized" and have "provided material support to
> terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the
> United States." Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and
> the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are
> dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that
> will
> allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders,
> dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist
> version of Leon Trotsky
> <http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793> 's "permanent
> revolution."
>
> "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too," Bannon told
> writer Ronald Radosh
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-g
> uy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html> in 2013. "I want to bring everything
> crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."
>
> The Trump regime's demented project of social engineering, which will come
> wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly
> seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist>
> pointed
> out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic
> societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the "silken
> threads" of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the "iron chains" of
> dictatorship will impose social cohesion.
>
> "This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections," warned
> Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook "Let Your Motto Be Resistance
> <https://mxgm.org/let-your-motto-be-resistance-a-handbook-on-organizing-new-
> afrikan-and-oppressed-communities-for-self-defense/> " and the former
> executive director of the New Orleans-based People's Hurricane Relief Fund.
> "That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely
> gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the
> consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near
> the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because
> of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both
> chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue
> to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don't
> think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the
> president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces."
>
> "We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity,"
> Akuno said. "Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every
> front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going
> to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil
> disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have
> to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that
> fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit
> to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or
> indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not
> willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the
> proclivities of the society and the forces that run it."
>
> If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with
> violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting
> the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the
> state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of
> the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to
> justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state
> understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the
> government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as
> a
> flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be
> easily crushed.
>
> We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and
> ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the
> police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic
> forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes
> those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active
> support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the
> structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern
> Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held
> marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew
> Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner
> <http://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/11/archives/eugene-bull-connor-dies-at-75-po
> lice-head-fought-integration-less.html?_r=0> "Bull" Connor would overreact
> and discredit the city's racist structures.
>
> The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one
> truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration
> may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with
> one idea—conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes
> a
> sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the
> self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These
> characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest
> aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without
> enemies
> real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a
> heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart
> nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to
> stoke
> counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a
> response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will
> fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.
>
> Bannon and his followers on the
> <https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+alt-right> "alt-right,"
> self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress
> their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic
> delusions. They mouth a few clichés and quote a few philosophers to justify
> bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda
> masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly
> incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate
> about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely
> write off one-fifth of the world's population—Muslims—as irredeemable.
>
> The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the
> humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They
> mistake
> bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate
> fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, "moral
> monsters."
>
> Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human
> personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to
> disappear.
> Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is
> annihilated,
> another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began
> with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where
> they will go from here.
>
> "The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus," the Yugoslav writer Danilo
> Kis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilo_Ki%C5%A1> said. "Nationalism is
> the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled,
> he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that's to say
> national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and
> political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his,
> hell—it's other people (other nations, another tribe). They don't even need
> investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images—as
> nationalists."
>
> Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being
> implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who
> oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giordano-Bruno> at the stake and who
> argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them
> from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with
> people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white—us and
> them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best
> obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become
> inquisitors.
>
> The acts of resistance—including the massive street protests the day after
> the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on
> Muslims, the Department of Energy's refusal to give the Trump
> administration
> a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General
> Sally Yates' refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State
> Department staff members' signing of a memo opposing the immigration
> restrictions—terrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust
> the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press,
> which Bannon has called "the opposition party."
>
> Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned
> that such a call might be premature "because unions don't know if a general
> strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for
> Trump." He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out
> assaults
> on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.
>
> "This shotgun assault effectively divides the left," he said. "Do I defend
> Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to
> Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be
> forced to make."
>
> "We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill," he said. "We
> are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to
> disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure
> out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to
> get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as
> in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases
> locally and link them together."
>
> Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the
> military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as
> Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante
> groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use
> fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.
>
> "It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the
> water
> protectors at Standing Rock
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests> ," Akuno
> said. "Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its
> history
> and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization
> to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit?
> Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist
> logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It
> asked us which will take priority for human beings."
>
> We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much
> time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the
> streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal
> bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be
> accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist
> society. It must reject the Democratic Party's attempt to ride anti-Trump
> sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon,
> but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will
> never stop fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed.
>
> "The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do," Johann
> Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play "Egmont."
>
> Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems
> of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics
> are
> moving with lightning speed. So should we.
>
>
> New on Truthdig
>
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fis
> h_on_how_art_must_20170206/>
>
> Dissident Cartoonist Mr. Fish:
> <http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fis
> h_on_how_art_must_20170206/> 'Saturday Night Live' Is Failing to Deal With
> Trump
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_t
> he_pentagon_20170206/>
>
> What Happens When All We Have Left Is the Pentagon?
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_all_we_have_left_is_t
> he_pentagon_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_
> feared_20170206/>
>
> Methane Emissions From Oil Production Are Higher Than Feared
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/oils_methane_emissions_are_higher_than_
> feared_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
>
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable
> _school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/>
>
> How Jeff Sessions Helped Kill Equitable School Funding in Alabama
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_jeff_sessions_helped_kill_equitable
> _school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/>
>
> Posted on Feb 6, 2017
>
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> Make America Ungovernable
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/make_america_ungovernable_20170205/
>
> AddThis Sharing Buttons
>
> Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More50
>
> Posted on Feb 5, 2017
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
>
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
> Donald Trump's regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an
> authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil
> liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the
> abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will
> accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda,
> will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be
> launched or expanded.
>
> And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.
>
>
> "We don't have much time," Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation
> Jackson <http://www.cooperationjackson.org/> and an organizer with the
> Malcolm X Grassroots Movement <https://mxgm.org/> , told me when I reached
> him by phone in Jackson, Miss. "We are talking two to three months before
> this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that's with
> massive resistance."
>
> Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish
> the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in
> power—such as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will
> defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the
> Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the
> Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it—are agents of
> destruction.
> In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and
> conspiracy
> theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist
> only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to
> know how long this transformation will take—it may be longer than the two
> or
> three months Akuno fears—but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump
> regime the end result is certain.
>
> "The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy]
> out," said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external
> funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. "They have a
> strategy.
> They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need
> to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this
> up to Trump's pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the
> objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate
> this
> regime and where it is going."
>
> Stephen Bannon, the president's chief counselor, was behind the ban on
> Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries—a
> ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is
> successful
> in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to
> the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim
> organizations
> and individuals
> <http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigrati
> on-annotated> in the United States that, in the language of the executive
> action, have been "radicalized" and have "provided material support to
> terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the
> United States." Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and
> the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are
> dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that
> will
> allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders,
> dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist
> version of Leon Trotsky
> <http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793> 's "permanent
> revolution."
>
> "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too," Bannon told
> writer Ronald Radosh
> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-g
> uy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html> in 2013. "I want to bring everything
> crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."
>
> The Trump regime's demented project of social engineering, which will come
> wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly
> seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist>
> pointed
> out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic
> societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the "silken
> threads" of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the "iron chains" of
> dictatorship will impose social cohesion.
>
> "This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections," warned
> Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook "Let Your Motto Be Resistance
> <https://mxgm.org/let-your-motto-be-resistance-a-handbook-on-organizing-new-
> afrikan-and-oppressed-communities-for-self-defense/> " and the former
> executive director of the New Orleans-based People's Hurricane Relief Fund.
> "That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely
> gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the
> consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near
> the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because
> of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both
> chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue
> to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don't
> think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the
> president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces."
>
> "We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity,"
> Akuno said. "Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every
> front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going
> to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil
> disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have
> to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that
> fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit
> to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or
> indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not
> willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the
> proclivities of the society and the forces that run it."
>
> If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with
> violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting
> the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the
> state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of
> the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to
> justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state
> understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the
> government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as
> a
> flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be
> easily crushed.
>
> We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and
> ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the
> police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic
> forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes
> those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active
> support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the
> structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern
> Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held
> marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew
> Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner
> <http://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/11/archives/eugene-bull-connor-dies-at-75-po
> lice-head-fought-integration-less.html?_r=0> "Bull" Connor would overreact
> and discredit the city's racist structures.
>
> The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one
> truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration
> may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with
> one idea—conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes
> a
> sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the
> self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These
> characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest
> aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without
> enemies
> real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a
> heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart
> nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to
> stoke
> counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a
> response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will
> fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.
>
> Bannon and his followers on the
> <https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+alt-right> "alt-right,"
> self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress
> their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic
> delusions. They mouth a few clichés and quote a few philosophers to justify
> bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda
> masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly
> incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate
> about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely
> write off one-fifth of the world's population—Muslims—as irredeemable.
>
> The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the
> humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They
> mistake
> bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate
> fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, "moral
> monsters."
>
> Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human
> personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to
> disappear.
> Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is
> annihilated,
> another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began
> with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where
> they will go from here.
>
> "The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus," the Yugoslav writer Danilo
> Kis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilo_Ki%C5%A1> said. "Nationalism is
> the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled,
> he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that's to say
> national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and
> political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his,
> hell—it's other people (other nations, another tribe). They don't even need
> investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images—as
> nationalists."
>
> Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being
> implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who
> oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno
> <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giordano-Bruno> at the stake and who
> argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them
> from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with
> people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white—us and
> them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best
> obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become
> inquisitors.
>
> The acts of resistance—including the massive street protests the day after
> the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on
> Muslims, the Department of Energy's refusal to give the Trump
> administration
> a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General
> Sally Yates' refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State
> Department staff members' signing of a memo opposing the immigration
> restrictions—terrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust
> the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press,
> which Bannon has called "the opposition party."
>
> Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned
> that such a call might be premature "because unions don't know if a general
> strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for
> Trump." He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out
> assaults
> on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.
>
> "This shotgun assault effectively divides the left," he said. "Do I defend
> Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to
> Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be
> forced to make."
>
> "We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill," he said. "We
> are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to
> disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure
> out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to
> get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as
> in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases
> locally and link them together."
>
> Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the
> military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as
> Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante
> groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use
> fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.
>
> "It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the
> water
> protectors at Standing Rock
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests> ," Akuno
> said. "Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its
> history
> and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization
> to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit?
> Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist
> logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It
> asked us which will take priority for human beings."
>
> We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much
> time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the
> streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal
> bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be
> accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist
> society. It must reject the Democratic Party's attempt to ride anti-Trump
> sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon,
> but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will
> never stop fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed.
>
> "The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do," Johann
> Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play "Egmont."
>
> Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems
> of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics
> are
> moving with lightning speed. So should we.
>
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_editorial_cartoonist_mr_fish
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> school_funding_in_alabama_20170206/
>
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