Words, words, words. The central tool in the Trumpster's bag of
tricks. Words may be used to inform, or to instruct, or to create a
particular feeling. Or, words can be spread out as a covering to
confuse the real intent of the speaker.
Whatever Donald Trump thinks he believes, his words have given license
to Right Wing White Supremacists to creep out from under their slimy
rocks and begin their all too familiar hate mongering.
The recent desecration of over 500 graves in a Jewish cemetery, along
with the burning of Mosques, and the angry threats and insults shouted
at people of Color and those who dress "differently" warn of an era
of oppression. Donald Trump, rather than condemning such acts of
outrage and violence, declares "war" on the Press.
Can it be that average folks don't understand that Trump's entire
upbringing has been one of confrontation? Survival in the World in
which Donald Trump lives, survival depends upon aggression and the
ability to out maneuver your opponents. And every other competitor is
an opponent. The Ladder of Success is built upon the backs of those
you have bested.
I have sat in rooms filled with company presidents and corporate
CEO's, all smiling and slapping one another on the back, and wishing
one another success, until they are out of earshot of one another.
Their charm was a means of gathering inside information to be used
against the other members of their Executive Club. These Men never
respect the weak. They only respect the strongmen who reach the top,
by whatever means.
Cold? Calculating? Hey! These are men who believe that they are
looking out for their family, their children, their employees, as well
as their personal fortunes. Donald Trump is doing exactly what he
believes is good for Donald J. Trump, first. Then he is looking to
take care of his "family", those fellow Super Rich whom he sees as
"his people". Whining and grumbling about it will get us nowhere.
What we are witnessing is the Corporate Capitalist World uncovered.
We have been lulled into believing that our bloated, incompetent
Federal Government is the big problem. Trust me, our big threat is
this Corporate Tank of Sharks.
So, how do we fight back without becoming just like them? Well, in my
humble opinion, we do not do it with anger and violence. That simply
turns us into "them". Just what are the tools in our bag of tricks?
What strengths can we bring to meet and best theirs? Well, for one
thing, we have numbers. Our first challenge is to mend the fences
between our various factions, and unite on some basic issues. The
Trumpster and his Minion will lie over and over in order to keep us at
each others throats. We must find ways of countering these lies and
connecting our numbers. Remember, without us, the Ruling Class cannot
do anything. But without them, we might just go about building a new
People's world.
Carl Jarvis On 2/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Truthdig
>
> The Return of American Race Laws
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_return_of_american_race_laws_2017022
> 6/
>
>
>
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>
> Posted on Feb 26, 2017
>
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
>
>
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
> The warmup act for a full-blown American fascism and orchestrated race war
> is taking place in immigrant and marginal communities across the United
> States: Racial profiling. Random police stops. Raids at homes and
> businesses. People of color pulled from vehicles at checkpoints. Seizures
> of
> individuals with no criminal records or who never committed a serious
> crime.
> Imprisonment without trial. Expedited deportation hearings and removal
> proceedings that violate human rights. The arrest of a beneficiary of the
> Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA
> (http://www.nclr.org/issues/Immigration/daca/) ) program, Daniel Ramirez
> Medina, 23, who along with the program's other 750,000 successful
> applicants
> had revealed all personal history to the government in applying for DACA
> status. Parents separated, perhaps forever, from their children. The hunted
> going underground. The end of the rule of law. The abandonment of the
> common
> good. The obliteration of a social state in which institutions and
> assistance programs-from public education to Social Security and
> welfare-make justice, equality and dignity possible.
>
> White Europeans who are undocumented are not being targeted. The executive
> orders of President Trump are directed against people of color. They begin
> from the premise that white Americans are the true victims of
> neoliberalism,
> deindustrialization and falling living standards. The Trump orders are
> written not to make America great again but to make America white. They are
> an updated version of the Nazis' Nuremberg race laws
> (https://www.google.com/search?q=nuremberg+race+laws&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 ) ,
> the Jim Crow laws
> (https://www.google.com/search?q=nuremberg+race+laws&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=jim
> +crow+laws&*) , the Chinese Exclusion Act
> (https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47 ) and the
> Naturalization Act of 1870
> (http://middleeastandasianimmigrants.pbworks.com/w/page/21495984/Naturalizat
> ion%20Act%20of%201870) . They are intended to institutionalize an overt
> racial hierarchy in the United States, one already advanced by the
> miniature
> police states in which marginal communities of color find themselves. In
> these impoverished enclaves there is no right to trial or due process.
> Militarized police kill with impunity, and the courts lock people away
> often
> for life. Rights are treated as privileges that can instantly be revoked.
> The poor, especially poor people of color, have been exempted from moral
> consideration. They are viewed as impediments to social cohesion. And these
> impediments must be eliminated. This is the template for what will come.
> Jews-their community centers under threats of violence and their graveyards
> being desecrated-will be persecuted. American fascism will be cemented into
> place by uniformed and heavily armed paramilitary squads clutching the flag
> and the cross and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer.
>
> "Little or no prospect of rescue from individual indolence or impotence can
> be expected to arrive from a political state that is not, and refuses to
> be,
> a social state," the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman warned in "Collateral
> Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age." "Without social rights for
> all, a large and in all probability growing number of people will find
> their
> political rights of little use and unworthy of their attention. If
> political
> rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are
> indispensable to make political rights 'real' and keep them in operation.
> The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can only
> be
> their joint achievement."
>
> Presidential chief strategist Stephen Bannon, in his public comments and
> his
> films
> (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/19/i-watched-all-of-steve-ban
> non-s-bad-movies.html ) such as "Generation Zero," has embraced a
> historical determinism worthy of Karl Marx. He posits that Western culture
> has been contaminated and is being destroyed by darker races and barbaric
> religions and belief systems. His conspiratorial view of history and
> society
> sees a global war between the white race and the lesser breeds of the earth
> as not only inevitable but one that will reinvigorate and purify America.
>
> Racists and conspiracy theorists such as Bannon, Michael Anton
> (https://theintercept.com/2017/02/16/trump-official-obsessed-over-nuclear-ap
> ocalypse-mens-style-fine-wines-in-40000-posts-on-fashion-site/ ) , Stephen
> Miller
> (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-
> 2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992 ) and Sebastian Gorka
> (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/sebastian-gorka-has-links-to-a
> nti-semitic-groups.html ) constitute Trump's ideological brain trust.
> Gorka
> goes so far as to argue that the failure to understand the evil of radical
> Islam stems from a "systematic subversion of the national security
> establishment under the banner of inclusivity, cultural awareness and
> political correctness."
>
> In a 2014 speech, Bannon said, "I believe we've come partly off-track in
> the
> years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we're starting now in the 21st
> century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a
> crisis
> of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism." (He delivered
> the talk via Skype to a group of other right-wing Catholics gathered in the
> Vatican. For a transcript posted by BuzzFeed, click here
> (https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-enti
> re-world?utm_term=.bcz0w2Lql#.vt9AQ30eL ) .)
>
> "There is a major war brewing, a war that's already global," Bannon said.
> "It's going global in scale, and today's technology, today's media, today's
> access to weapons of mass destruction, it's going to lead to a global
> conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day that we
> refuse
> to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the
> viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn't act."
>
> Bannon, as Micah L. Sifry points out
> (https://www.thenation.com/article/steve-bannon-wants-to-start-world-war-iii
> /) in The Nation, is a proponent of the theory popularized by authors
> William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books "Generations: The History of
> America's Future, 1584 to 2069" (1991) and "The Fourth Turning: An American
> Prophecy-What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous
> With Destiny" (1997). This theory holds that roughly every 80 years,
> roughly
> an average human life span, the country goes through a cataclysmic crisis.
> This crisis unleashes genocide and other killing that last a decade or
> more.
> In its aftermath the social order is rejuvenated. Strauss and Howe
> highlight
> the American Revolution of 1775-83, the Civil War, the Great Depression and
> World War II as examples of how the cycle works.
>
> "Inside each 80-year saeculum, Howe and Strauss argue, there are four
> turnings, each a generation long, and each as inevitable as the coming of
> the seasons," Sifry writes. "In the first turning, for the generation that
> survives the prior catastrophe, the newly restored society reaches a
> collective apex of social order and economic power. Think of America in the
> post-war boom of 1945 to 1965. Then comes the awakening, as the first new
> generation of post-catastrophe children enter adulthood and, unlike their
> traumatized parents, let loose with their emotions and take risks that
> their
> forebears would never have imagined. Hello to the long 1960s. Then comes
> the
> unraveling, as the once robust order starts to fall apart, people question
> the eternal verities and institutions weaken. The fourth turning is kicked
> off and punctuated by ongoing crises, out of which a whole new order is
> born."
>
> Pseudo-intellectuals such as Strauss and Howe play the role that Paul de
> Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Alfred Rosenberg
> played for the Nazi Party. They give an intellectual veneer to racist
> conspiracy theories, a virulent nationalism, a hatred for culture and the
> lust for domination through violence.
>
> I share Bannon's distaste for globalization, free trade agreements, the
> failure to put Wall Street bankers in jail, the bank bailouts and crony
> capitalism and would even concede that Americans wallow in the moral swamp
> of a culture of narcissism. He is right when he attacks the two major
> political parties as the one "party of Davos
> (https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2017 )
> ." But his solution to the purported crisis-total war by the white race to
> regain its ascendancy-is insane, as are the causes he cites: a New Deal
> that
> turned citizens into whining dependents; the permissiveness of the 1960s;
> white guilt that made the country cater irresponsibly to African-Americans
> by giving them social service programs and undeserved mortgages that led to
> the 2008 financial meltdown; an intellectual and a liberal class composed
> essentially of traitors; and the "new barbarity" of "Jihadist Islamic
> fascism."
>
> Racism, misogyny, the inherent cruelty of capitalism and the crimes of
> empire, from Wounded Knee to Vietnam and Iraq, simply do not exist in
> Bannon's mystical nationalist worldview. He insists that the white male
> aristocratic elites who formed a republic that enslaved African-Americans,
> exterminated Native Americans and denied the vote to women and white men
> without property created "a church and a civilization that really is the
> flower of mankind." This is what he wants to recover.
>
> Fritz Stern, in his book "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the
> Rise of the Germanic Ideology," wrote of the early fascists in Germany,
> "The
> movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised
> present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future.
> They
> were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to conserve, because the
> spiritual values of the past had largely been buried and the material
> remnants of conservative power did not interest them. They sought a
> breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community in which old
> ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance."
>
> Bannon shares these fascist yearnings. He excoriates leftist and liberal
> elites for supposedly poisoning the minds of young people, a point he
> luridly makes in his film "Occupy Unmasked" (2012). A new generation, he
> says, has been brainwashed to see America as evil and the status quo as
> repressive. His mythical past will return through a crusade both domestic
> and international. All forms of coercion, from torture to murder, are
> justified. Any suffering along the way is the price that has to be paid for
> this white, Christian paradise.
>
> The central tenet of fascism is always that war cleanses society and that
> the "virtues" that war inculcates in its combatants and survivors provide a
> new moral vigor. Bannon knows no more about war's reality, which I endured
> for two decades covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East,
> Africa and the Balkans, than he sees in Hollywood movies. But war for him,
> which will come in a confrontation with the Islamic world and perhaps
> China,
> cannot arrive too soon.
>
> This clash of civilizations will be prosecuted in the homeland, too. Within
> the United States it will spawn the darkness endemic to all wars-sadism,
> hypermasculinity, blind obedience to authority, a belief in the efficacy of
> unrestrained violence, racism, hate crimes and the use of the organs of
> internal security and wholesale surveillance to crush all dissent and
> eradicate groups seen as opponents of authority. Those who orchestrate such
> crusades ultimately sacrifice themselves and their nations on the altars of
> the idols they worship. The conflict desired by Bannon and those around him
> could mean the extinction of the human race.
>
> The paramilitary forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which will
> hire 10,000 more agents, and the Border Patrol, which will hire 5,000 more
> agents, along with the Homeland Security Investigations unit of the
> Department of Homeland Security, have deputized local and state police to
> function as their auxiliaries. These paramilitary forces will not disband
> once they have finished terrorizing and deporting some of the 11 million
> undocumented immigrants in the U.S. They will turn on their next
> victims-Muslims, African-Americans, Asians and dissidents.
>
> The paramilitaries relish their power to kick down doors while wearing body
> armor and pointing weapons at terrified women and children. They are not
> warriors, as they imagine, but goons. They have few actual skills. And they
> intend to remain steadily employed by the state. The for-profit prisons,
> reopened for business by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions
> III,
> a man named not for one Confederate traitor but two, intend to remain full.
> The state will make America and the global community inhospitable for
> people
> of color and all those who attempt to stand with them.
>
> Trump is stoking the darkest and most destructive strains of the American
> psyche. Congress, controlled by the Republicans, is unlikely to use
> impeachment powers to stop him. The courts are spineless subsidiaries of
> the
> corporate and security and surveillance state. The elites will not save us.
> If we fail to build mass protest movements, ones that cripple the ability
> to
> govern, we will be enslaved.
>
> Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999) in his book "Defying Hitler
> (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65458.Defying_Hitler) " describes being
> a law clerk at the Prussian Supreme Court. The courthouse was raided in
> March 1933 by Nazi thugs. They grabbed the Jewish judges and lawyers and
> hauled them outside; never would the jurists return to their posts. A
> Jewish
> attorney, a former army captain who had been wounded five times and lost an
> eye fighting in World War I, resisted. He was beaten. "It had probably been
> his misfortune that he still remembered the tone to use with mutineers,"
> Haffner wrote.
>
> "I put my head down over my work," Haffner went on. "I read a few sentences
> mechanically: 'The defendant's claim that . is untrue, but irrelevant. .'
> Just take no notice!"
>
> A brown shirt approached him and asked: "Are you Aryan
> (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aryan ) ?
>
> Haffner shot back, "Yes."
>
> "A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat," he wrote. "I had said
> 'Yes! Well, in God's name, I was indeed an 'Aryan.' I had not lied, I had
> allowed something much worse to happen. What a humiliation, to have
> answered
> the unjustified question as to whether I was 'Aryan' so easily, even if the
> fact was of no importance to me! What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the
> right to stay with my documents in peace! I had been caught unawares, even
> now. I had failed my very first test."
>
> Haffner left the Kammergericht, Prussia's highest state court, and stood
> outside.
>
> "There was nothing to show that, as an institution, it has just collapsed,"
> he wrote. "There was also nothing about my appearance to show that I had
> just suffered a terrible reverse, a defeat that would be almost impossible
> to make good. A well-dressed young man walked down Potsdamer Street. There
> was nothing untoward about the scene. Business as usual, but in the air the
> approaching thunder of events to come."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> John Oliver Looks Into the Worst and Best of Obamacare, Blasts GOP for
> Repeal Attempt (Video)
>
>
>
>
> Would Trump Let Oscar Winner Mahershala Ali Back Into the Country? (Video)
>
>
>
>
> The Art of the Trumpaclysm
>
>
>
>
> Trump Can Prove He's Not a Putin Puppet by Blowing Up the World
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
>
>
>
>
>
> C 2017 Truthdig,
>
>
>
>
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