Aug 31, 2020

American Recessional by Paul Edwards

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Source: ICH

So, the tumult and the shouting--such as it was--dies, the Capitalists and the Cronies depart, still stands this diseased, battered country, reeling in furious confusion, justified outrage, passionate nonsense, and reflex violence as it shifts its focus to the geeks and freaks--the Bearded Lady, Sword Swallower, and Pinhead--who’ll parade their freakish kinks...

No. I can’t do it any more. There’s no zest, no satisfaction, no pride in ridiculing an unmitigated tragedy, and what has happened to America is a tragedy. To make fun, to satirize, to cleverly lampoon it, as if there was a purpose in such ridicule is just too sad, too grim an exercise to justify.

What’s changed? Why won’t the old ways of critiquing our country work any more? It’s because wit, humor, and irony are devices used to impel change for the better. They lose all effect when change is impossible and essential change is no longer conceivable in America.

The root cause is our system--fantasized, mythologized, sacralized--built on injustice, inequity, and engineered privilege, with a profound and tacit hypocrisy that even its purveyors couldn’t comprehend. Our foundation was laid on footings of genocide, slavery and empowered oligarchy and the nation so based and created evolved exactly as it had to do.

The last four years of Trump, has forced into high relief and placed under spotlights, the grotesque falsity and ugliness that our deeply corrupt polity has made hallmarks of our failed state. Yet these years of the Trump Era have altered nothing significant about us, nor have they deviated from the dark, sinister character of our notorious history. Their dull, dense and banal evil were the inevitable result of decades of raw crime that went before.

What they have done--in their bald vulgarity, in their gallumphing, puerile hubris, their refusal to mask our historic amorality with fulsome, exculpatory rhetoric and paeans of high spiritual purpose--is to advertise in grisly detail the vacuous arrogance, blatant cruelty, bottomless avarice, and brazen, bullying aggression that has insulted, violated, and alienated the world.

It is psychological fact that when the gap yawns too wide between what is asserted and reality, when a description clearly no longer matches an object, when what is said bears no relation to what is experienced, then the faith they’re intended to bolster evaporates and is gone. This is what has happened in America. From our beginning, our Exceptionalist mythology, with its heroic gospel, its philosophical poetry and gorgeous, vital imagery had kept its iron lock on the minds and hearts of a vast majority of us. It has taken only one lifetime for it to be exposed, decoded, and sprung.

Americans, long taught that they were a superior people in the most just, honorable, wise, heroic nation on earth have had their faith battered and broken, gradually, against their will, by decades of crime and folly, with each new outrage and imbecility hard-sold to them as what it was not: an action of the most heroic humane kind, for the most admirable of motives.

Perfected in World Wars I and II, sustained with difficulty in Korea, it began to rapidly unravel in Vietnam, and the blatant, bloody fiascos of Aghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and--diplomatically--Iran, have proven the myth a maudlin yarn of bathetic fiction. Only ignorant, blind, propagandized boobs and kooky xenophobes still cling to the gory fairy tale of Exceptionalism and the dirty joke of America’s purity and nobility it trumpeted to the world.

Concurrent with the bloody amorality of America all over the earth, as our government partnered with and coddled dozens of the most brutal, vile, murderous maniacs ever to live, arming their police states, death squads, torture regimes, and mercenary jihadis, the myth was used to hoodwink and impoverish the great bulk of innocents at home who supported it.

For generations the economic security of working people has been actively undermined and their wages eroded by their own corporate government. They were told there was no money for social well-being as they watched a tiny clique of titans of finance enrich itself beyond imagination, and obscene “defense” budgets milk billions via government fiat for the War Machine to kill millions of peasant “enemies” in places they couldn’t find on a map.

Deception and murder overseas; fraud and crushing punishment at home: these are the filthy realities the grotesque fairy tale so long and diligently concealed from us. That horror is ended. It’s deep, fatal effects are not.

The greatest peril to a state occurs when its people no longer believe that it represents them. When that faith fails, as it did in Periclean Athens, in late imperial Rome, Republican Spain, and Weimar Germany, state machinery seizes up, its authority dissolves, and there is war in the streets. That we are nearing such a point is made obvious by the bitter polarity and violent opposition between Trump and anti-Trump factions, but also in a deeper, more dangerous division between the tyrannical, wealthy oligarchy that owns the country and demands endless war and American hegemony, and the great majority that lives as economic victims of that insane ruling clique.

Now, faced with by far the most ominous sociopolitical disfunction of our modern history, and with the overlay of the unknown destructive potential of Coronavirus and the certainty of inexorable climate catastrophe already evident, we are given the Presidential election of 2020, hyped to the max by solemn, phony politicians and hysterical media flacks, packaged as if it addressed, in any way, the interlocking complex of impending disasters.

The absurdist commedia del arte of two old, ridiculously inept, and grossly impaired buffoons heading two sick cadres of leased political whores who jointly serve the .0001%, is the memento mori of America. Regardless of the outcome of this sorry farce, the end of the country in any recognizable form will be accelerated, fast tracked to implosion.

As in any natural process, disintegration will not be sudden or immediate. Dissolution may take as long as creation. As it proceeds, Americans will suffer and their suffering will be intense, acute and inescapable. They will grope and grasp for answers, remedies, fixes, and find none. They have been schooled that all problems have solutions and can be overcome. It is not so. Their myth deceived them.

The end of Rome ushered in a thousand years of darkness in Europe and nothing could prevent it but precedents are meaningless. Modern countries and cultures do not disappear in failure or even war, nor do entire peoples. Matter, says science, is neither created nor destroyed. When a great nation fails and falls apart, there remains the eternal resilience of the life force, which is unending. That force will always be with us.

 

Sleep Is Your Super Power

10 Hours of Deep Sleep Music - Relaxing Music for Sleeping & Meditation by  Soothing Relaxation - YouTube
  “Sleep is God. Go worship.”
― Jim Butcher, Death Masks

 

Aug 28, 2020

Black Politicians: White Supremacy's Indirect Rulers by Christian Gines

 House (of Representatives) Negroes Rally Against Russia

Source: HamptonThink

The Black Community is an internal colony within America. We have a Perpetual Foreigner status and are treated as such. We are socially, politically, educationally, and economically deprived. We have no self-determination. Where there is institutional racism, there is colonization. U.S. Imperialism affects black people abroad just as much as it does at home, and it is sustained in one fundamental way: Black Politicians. Black Politicians are the faces of white supremacy in the black community. They uphold the same structures that we need to dismantle under the guise of them having to “play ball,” which they claim will lead to “useful” compromise. That approach only benefits the individual and not the entire race. Black Politicians are colonial masters. They are indirect rulers and one of the biggest roadblocks to Black Liberation.  

Black Visibility does not equal Black Power. Just because we have black people that look like us in office or in power doesn’t mean that it will benefit us. Just because you have a Black face on a white-supremacist system doesn’t mean that white supremacy is over. It has just adapted to the conditions of society. Take the state of Mississippi, for example. Mississippi has the most black politicians in office. Yet, the state still has one of the highest poverty rates, one of the lowest education ratings, worst healthcare systems, and more than half of our renters are at stake of homelessness because of Covid-19. If we have a black person in power implementing the same policies that the white people are implementing, then that representation has no worth to us. What is good for America does not equal what is good for black people. That representation is only worth something to the white-supremacist structure which benefits from the facade of progress by placing a black face on racism and oppression. 

Black Politicians are the same as the indirect rulers that were in colonies during the Scramble for Africa. They come to us saying that they “see us, hear us, and are going to do something about it.” Then they get into office and say that they can’t speak up about an issue plaguing the black community because if they speak up, they will be ousted from the club. They claim that they won’t have a seat at the table anymore. That shows you the fundamental problem right there. Black Politicians don’t really exercise any real power for the community. They are more interested in their individual wealth and comfort than actually fighting for any real change. They are no more than puppets that, instead of being loyal to the constituents that put them into office, are loyal to a political party. They are more worried about personal status than changing the status quo. 

Take the Congressional Black Caucus, for example. The Congressional Black Caucus is dominated by politicians who are more worried about their corporate interests and filling their pockets than actually representing the Black Community’s interests. Take the race of Jamal Bowman and Eliot Engel. Jamal Bowman was a black progressive candidate running against the incumbent Eliot Engel, who is a moderate white politician. In this race, the CBC decided to endorse Eliot Engel instead of Jamal Bowman. This example right here goes to show you what the goal of black politicians is to protect the status quo of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. They are elected to do the bidding of the ruler. Same as colonial masters. They co-opt revolutionary language to benefit the goals of neoliberalism. 

Look at Jim Clyburn, who was a Freedom Rider and participated in the civil rights movement. When young, he put in work and likely had revolutionary tendencies and thoughts. His effectiveness, though, after being brought into the Democratic Machine, has gone to waste. He no longer articulates the ideas and needs of the black community. What he does now is silence black radical thought and dissent. Take for instance what he said about the protest happening around Defunding the Police. He stated that “Nobody is going to defund the police.” That statement is very disingenuous, seeing that most of the protesters are calling for defunding if not abolition. He is doing his job as a colonial master. He is watering down the movement and  trying to subside the black masses by getting us to settle for incremental change instead of fighting to dismantle current systems of oppression. 

Joe Biden picking Kamala Harris as his running mate displays this indirect rule the most. Right now, we are going through a global uprising against policing and prison systems, with people advocating for the abolition of both. During this time, Joe Biden decides to choose a candidate who is known for criminalizing black and brown bodies by keeping innocent people in jail for labor, defending the three-strike system, withholding police misconduct information, defending the death penalty, defending prosecutors falsifying confessions, and a myriad of other things. This shows you the logic of the Democratic Party. They see black people as political pawns who they can manipulate into giving their undying support to the party by just nominating a black woman as Vice President without substantial policy promises. And this strategy has worked. People who were calling for the abolition of police and prisons in June and July are now the same people supporting the Vice Presidential pick of Kamala Harris.

In Black Power, Kwame Ture quoted Machiavelli in saying, “And here it should be noted that a prince ought never to make common cause with one more powerful than himself to injure another unless necessity forces him to it.… for if he wins you rest in his power, and princes must avoid as much as possible being under the will and pleasure of other.” This is the reckoning that the Black Community has to have because when we hear talks about “harm reduction,” what harm is actually being reduced. Bombs are still going to be dropped, people are still going to get shot by police, people will still be in jail under both presidents. Harris is deliberately being used to sideline the discussions of real change that we need because we have a black face as the possible second-in-charge of the oppression. We had a black face as the head of America for eight years, and the black community’s situation did not get better. Black Lives Matter started under his presidency, and he was hesitant to speak about it, let alone offer substantial change. The Flint Water Crisis was under his presidency, and he didn’t provide any substantial change. Not to mention, he dropped 72 bombs a day on the Global South and helped coordinate the outright destruction of one of Africa’s most prosperous nations in Libya. Black faces in high places are just brokers of White Supremacy sold with the guise of progress. 

We don’t need Colonial Masters and empty representation. It’s not about having a Black person in a position of White Supremacy. We need new institutions in place and new systems that will actually bring about change. Black people are not politically, socially, and economically depressed because of our character or work ethic. Black people are politically, socially, and economically depressed because we are a colonized community. The indirect ruler does not make any colonized situation better. It is just cheaper and easier than having white men run everything in the colony. If we ushered an end to colonization, then we would have an end to our economic serfdom, exploitation, and oppression. We have just as much right to self-determination and freedom than any other colonized group has, and having Black faces doing the bidding of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy is not the way to achieving that liberation and freedom.

Aug 26, 2020

Riots and Lawyers : Donald Trump’s Scheme to Steal the 2020 Presidential Election is Much Bigger Than Just The U.S. Mail

Could Trump Try to Steal the 2020 Election? | Vanity Fair

 

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the Nation, and Rolling Stone. He is one of the United States’ and the world’s foremost experts on voter suppression, vote theft and vote fraud. He is the author of the bestselling books Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His new book is How Trump Stole 2020.

In this disturbing podcast, he warns that the Trump regime and its agents are implementing a massive nationwide campaign to challenge the legitimacy of votes cast in support of Joe Biden.  This is part of a plan that may also include intimidation and perhaps even coordinated violence and acts of terrorism by pro-Trump paramilitaries and other forces against post offices, polling stations and other election facilities. The goal of this chaos is to create a state of emergency where the 2020 presidential election is per the Constitution decided by the House of Representatives -- where the Republicans will put Trump back in the White House.

Aug 25, 2020

How Has Racism Shaped the American Economy?

How Racism Is Destroying America - The New York Times

What is the relationship between American economics and American racism, and can it be severed? How will systemic racism, past and present, slow our emergence from the current downturn? New York Times journalist Eduardo Porter, author of the new book American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, visited Zócalo Public Square with historian and writer Cynthia Greenlee to discuss economic disparities that have been centuries in the making. 

The Late Dr. Sheldon Wolin on Totalitarian America

 

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is wolin.jpg   

He saw it coming....

The Progressive Vision of George Lipsitz

 

Dr. Cornel West and Professor Tricia Rose nail down issues of white allyship, undoing invisible racist ideologies, and the hallmarks of possessive investment in whiteness with their Professor George Lipsitz. Dr. Cornel West and Professor Tricia Rose hold office hours to offer their takes on the removal of racist monuments and its role in the larger work of dismantling systemic racism.’

Books by George Lipsitz

 

Aug 24, 2020

The Ghost of Sinclair Lewis


. . 

 

The prophetic words of Sinclair Lewis ring hauntingly clear in his semi-satirical 1935 political novel, "It Can't Happen Here":


“Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” 

“The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” 

“Well, what if they are?”
 


Aug 21, 2020

Will Whites’ Self-Interest Trump Democracy At The Polls in November? by Leonard Pitts Jr.

Isabel Wilkerson's World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste | The ...

Source: Miami Herald

If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil Rights Movement, drops that question like a bomb on Page 352 of “Caste,” the new book by Isabel Wilkerson, herself also a winner of Joseph Pulitzer’s prestigious prize. There are many moments in “Caste” that bring you up short in the starkness of their truth. But none hits quite as hard as that one, nor cuts quite as close to the bone of American fears.

“Caste” is the follow-up to 2010’s “The Warmth of Other Suns,” a history of The Great Migration, the mass exodus in which 6 million African Americans left the South in search of America. If anything, Wilkerson, a former reporter for The New York Times, is even more ambitious in her new book. “Caste” seeks nothing less than to reframe our understanding of America’s original sin.

What bedevils us, she argues, is not merely “racism,” a word that rarely appears in the book’s nearly 400 pages. Race, after all, is “fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition,” as seen in the fact that Irish, Jewish and Armenian Americans like Conan O’Brien, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Kim Kardashian are uniformly considered “white,” a status their forebears would have been enthusiastically denied.

But caste, the stratification of humanity into desirables, undesirables and those in-between, is “fixed and rigid.”And in America, “Black” people, whether blonde and blue-eyed like former NAACP chief Walter White, or dark of hair and skin like actor Sterling K. Brown, are always at the bottom of that hierarchy.

“Caste is the bones, race the skin,” writes Wilkerson. Which is to say, it is the excuse, the justification.

Germany in the 1930s, she reminds us, was a caste system; in fact, the Nazis modeled their oppression of the Jews on America’s Jim Crow laws, which they greatly admired. India still maintains a complex caste system. On a 1959 visit, Martin Luther King was initially “a bit shocked and peeved” to hear himself introduced to a group from the lowest caste as “a fellow untouchable.” It took him some time to recognize the truth in what he’d heard. Like every other “Negro,” he later wrote, “I am an untouchable.”

Wilkerson’s book arrives at a time when it is sorely needed. It’s not just that we are seeing democracy stolen before our eyes, the postal service under assault, polling places closed, voter rolls purged, Donald Trump openly flirting with ignoring election results — not just the fact of it all, but the why of it all. The soul of this nation is being sacrificed to assuage the abject terror felt by too many white people in knowing that people of color will outnumber them in about 20 years.

One often hears it said that those white folks vote against their own interests, siding with tax cuts for billionaires over their own pocketbooks, refusing better healthcare because that means Black people will get it, too. But Wilkerson says this misses the point. Those people are voting for their interests: It’s just that they have no interest higher than protecting whiteness — defending their caste.

Consider the 2016 election. “They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdown, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most — the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling class in America.”

It’s a truth that lends pungent urgency to Taylor Branch’s question. How many people would choose whiteness over democracy?
November is coming. So we’re about to find out.

 

Aug 20, 2020

Chris Hedges: America’s Death March

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Death-March.jpg

Art by Mr. Fish

Source: ScheerPost

The terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by elections. The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress. These crisis cults, already well established among followers of the Christian Right and Donald Trump, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises — in exchange for all autonomy — prosperity, a return to a mythical past, order and security. The dark yearnings among the white working class for vengeance and moral renewal through violence, the unchecked greed and corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires who manage our failed democracy, which has already instituted wholesale government surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part of the twisted pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering towards oblivion. I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former Yugoslavia. I have smelled this stench before.

The removal of Trump from office will only exacerbate the lust for racist violence he incites and the intoxicating elixir of white nationalism. The ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and then built a mafia state, will continue under Biden, as they did under Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, to wantonly pillage and loot. The militarized police will not stop their lethal rampages in poor neighborhoods. The endless wars will not end. The bloated military budget will not be reduced. The world’s largest prison population will remain a stain upon the country. The manufacturing jobs shipped overseas will not return and the social inequality will grow. The for-profit health care system will gouge the public and price millions more out of the health care system. The language of hate and bigotry will be normalized as the primary form of communication. Internal enemies, including Muslims, immigrants and dissidents, will be defamed and attacked. The hypermasculinity that compensates for feelings of impotence will intensify. It will direct its venom towards women and all who fail to conform to rigid male stereotypes, especially artists, LGBTQ people and intellectuals. Lies, conspiracy theories, trivia and fake news — what Hannah Arendt called “nihilistic relativism” — will still dominate the airwaves and social media, mocking verifiable fact and truth. The ecocide, which presages the extinction of the human species and most other life forms, will barrel unabated towards its apocalyptic conclusion.

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it,” Pascal wrote.

The worse it gets — and it will get worse as the pandemic hits us in wave after deadly wave with an estimated 300,000 Americans dead by December and possibly 400,000 by January — the more desperate the nation will become. Tens of millions of people will be thrown into destitution, evicted from their homes and abandoned. Social collapse, as Peter Drucker observed in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, brings with it a loss of faith in ruling institutions and ruling ideologies. With no apparent answers or solutions to mounting chaos and catastrophe — and Biden and the Democratic Party have already precluded the kind of New Deal programs and assault on oligarchic power that saved us during the Great Depression — demagogues and charlatans need only denounce all institutions, all politicians, and all political and social conventions while conjuring up hosts of phantom enemies. Drucker saw that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Nobody, he noted, “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” The poet, playwright and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933, wrote much the same in his autobiography: “The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.” After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of Ernst Toller” wrote:

            We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
            They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
            The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

The poor, the vulnerable, those who are not white or not Christian, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be offered up in a crisis to the god of death, a familiar form of human sacrifice that plagues sick societies. Once these enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a steady escalation of conflict. This is what made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations. The intoxication and addiction to greater and greater levels of violence to purge the society of evil led to genocide in Germany and the former Yugoslavia. We are not immune. It is what Ernst Jünger called a “feast of death.”

These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and celebrity culture become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder become heroism. Crime and fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. What these cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. At the height of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794 during the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of priests and forced another 30,000 into exile, instantly reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn for self-annihilation.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book “On Suicide” found that when social bonds are shattered, when a population no longer feels it has a place or meaning in a society, personal and collective acts of self-destruction proliferate. Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The breaking of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as “ruleless-ness.”

Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color, nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered some Americans — especially those from the white working and middle class — modest social and economic advancement. The disintegration of these bonds has unleashed a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized. The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States — opioid addiction, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings — are products of this anomie. So is our political dysfunction. My book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” is an examination of these pathologies and the widespread anomie that defines American society.

The economic structures, even before the pandemic, were reconfigured to mock faith in a meritocracy and the belief that hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average middle class family’s net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent. Some four million evictions are filed each year. One in four tenant households spends about half its pretax income on rent. Each night some 200,000 people sleep in their cars, on streets or under bridges. And these stark figures represent the good times Biden and the Democratic Party leaders promise to restore. Now, with real unemployment probably close to 20 percent — the official figure of 10 percent excludes those furloughed or those who have stopped looking for work — some 40 million people are at risk of being evicted by the end of the year. An estimated 27 million people are expected to lose their health insurance. Banks are stockpiling reserves of cash to cope with the expected wave of bankruptcies and defaults on mortgages, student loans, car loans, personal loans and credit card debt. The ruleless-ness and anomie that defines the lives of tens of millions of Americans was orchestrated by the two ruling parties in the service of a corporate oligarchy. If we do not address this anomie, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, the decay will accelerate.

This dark human pathology is as old as civilization itself, repeated in varying forms in the twilight of ancient Greece and Rome, the finale of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, revolutionary France, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia.

The social inequality that characterizes all states and civilizations seized by a tiny and corrupt cabal — in our case corporate — leads to an inchoate desire by huge segments of the population to destroy. The ethnic nationalists Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tudjman, Radovan Karadžić and Alija Izetbegović in the former Yugoslavia assumed power in a similar period of economic chaos and political stagnation. Yugoslavs by 1991 were suffering from widespread unemployment and had seen their real incomes reduced by half from what they had been a generation before. These nationalist demagogues sanctified their followers as righteous victims stalked by an array of elusive enemies. They spoke in the language of vengeance and violence, leading, as it always does, to actual violence. They trafficked in historical myth, deifying the past exploits of their race or ethnicity in a perverse kind of ancestor worship, a mechanism to give to those who suffered from anomie, who had lost their identity, dignity and self-worth, a new, glorious identity as part of a master race. When I walked through Montgomery, Alabama, a city where half of the population is African-American, with the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson a few years ago, he pointed out the numerous Confederate memorials, noting that most had been put up in the last decade. “This,” I told him, “is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia.”

A hyper-nationalism always infects a dying civilization. It feeds the collective self-worship. This hyper-nationalism celebrates the supposedly unique virtues of the race or the national group. It strips all who are outside the closed circle of worth and humanity. The world instantly becomes understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. These tragic moments in history see people fall into collective insanity. They suspend thought, especially self-critical thought. None of this is going away in November, in fact it will get worse.

Joe Biden, a shallow, political hack devoid of fixed beliefs or intellectual depth, is an expression of the nostalgia of a ruling class that yearns to return to the pantomime of democracy. They want to restore the decorum and civic religion that makes the presidency a form of monarchy and sacralizes the organs of state power. Donald Trump’s vulgarity and ineptitude is an embarrassment to the architects of empire. He has ripped back the veil that covered our failed democracy. But no matter how hard the elites try this veil cannot be restored. The mask is off. The façade is gone. Biden cannot bring it back.

Political, economic and social dysfunction define the American empire. Our staggering inability to contain the pandemic, which now infects over 5 million Americans, and the failure to cope with the economic fallout the pandemic has caused, has exposed the American capitalist model as bankrupt. It has freed the world, dominated by the United States for seven decades, to look at other social and political systems that serve the common good rather than corporate greed. The diminished stature of the United States, even among our European allies, brings with it the hope for new forms of government and new forms of power.

It is up to us to abolish the American kleptocracy. It is up to us to mount sustained acts of mass civil disobedience to bring down the empire. It poisons the world as it poisons us. If we mobilize to build an open society, we hold out the possibility of beating back these crisis cults as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. This requires us to acknowledge, like those protesting in the streets of Beirut, that our kleptocracy, like Lebanon’s, is incapable of being salvaged. The American system of inverted totalitarianism, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it, must be eradicated if we are to wrest back our democracy and save ourselves from mass extinction. We need to echo the chants by the crowds in Lebanon calling for the wholesale removal of its ruling class — kulyan-yani-kulyan — everyone means everyone.



Aug 15, 2020

Poet's Nook: "Always Darkest Before Dawn" by Amanda Steel

It's always darkest before dawn

Skipping through endless nights
Trying to keep the spring in my step
Letting the cocoon change me
When this is over, will I be a butterfly?
Or a moth, with all my colours stripped bare
Still searching for that elusive light

None of us will be who we were
Some changed for the better
Others shown in their true light
Judged by our actions
What we did on that endless night
Holding out a torch or stealing all the candles

Every winter has a Christmas
To make the cold more bearable
All storms lead to calm
When the worst is over
All nights lead to daybreak
A new day will arrive

Decide who you want to be
And hold on your dreams
If you can't find your way through
Remember, it's always darkest before dawn
Close your eyes and breathe
Open your mind and just be

 

 

Will Your Vote Count in 2020?

 

How the GOP Plans to Suppress the Vote and Sabotage the 2020 ...

Almost 2 million ballots were cast but not counted in the 2016 presidential race. And not just anyone’s ballot gets tossed. The chance of having your vote simply go uncounted, “spoiled,” is 900% higher if you're Black than if you're white.

Votes get challenged and discounted for a multitude of reasons. You used the wrong color pen, you put an “X” instead of filling in a bubble, you didn't use the correct envelope, or you mailed it with one stamp, when the ballot required two, resulting in postage due. But one of the most egregious reasons your vote can get trashed is that your signature doesn't match the one on file — the one you signed on the form when you first registered to vote perhaps several decades ago.

And since mail-in ballots are far easier to challenge than in-person votes, and with a vastly increased reliance on vote-by-mail due to problems caused by COVID-19, many more ballots are likely to be tossed in the electoral dumpster in 2020 than the staggering 1,913,369 “spoiled” ballots that ended up on the proverbial garbage heap in 2016.

Aug 14, 2020

White Christian Bigotry by James Haught

  

Source: LA Progressive  

 

Racism is much stronger among America’s white Christians than among churchless whites – and it always has been. That’s the message of a new book by social analyst Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity contends that white churches didn’t merely adapt the nation’s surrounding racism – but actually fostered it, locking it into the culture. Today, white Christians display more prejudice than non-Christians.

Here’s a sample: PRRI agents asked thousands of people whether police killings of unarmed black men are mere “isolated incidents” or if they reveal deep-rooted hostility to African Americans. Among white evangelicals – the heart of the Republican Party – 71 percent chose “isolated incidents.” But just 38 percent of churchless whites agreed.

Another example: Some 86 percent of white evangelicals think the Confederate flag is “more a symbol of southern pride than of racism” – but only 41 percent of unafilliated whites share that view.

When PRRI interviewers read this statement – “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” – churchless whites agreed at a much higher rate than white Christians did.

Obviously, white Americans who don’t attend church are more sympathetic to downtrodden minorities than white Christians are.

Jones grew up a Southern Baptist and studied at a Southern Baptist seminary before he awakened to the entrenched racism engulfing him. Now he is combating it.

Personally, when I grew up in the 1940s, racism was absolute in America. Blacks were treated as an inferior subspecies. They were forced to live in squalid ghettos, forbidden to enter all-white restaurants, hotels, theaters, pools, parks, clubs, schools, neighborhoods, jobs and the rest of white society. White supremacy steeped America so much that it seemed normal.

I became an adolescent newspaper reporter in the early 1950s, when the civil rights movement barely had begun. In a staff meeing, our editor vowed that our paper never would print “n—-r weddings.” Later, under a new publisher, the paper became a fierce crusader for integration and equality.

The private lake where I lived had bylaws requiring members to be “white Christians,” excluding Jews also. When I filed a proposal to admit minorities, leaders panicked and canceled the annual meeting. But the lake eventually integrated. (Technically, I didn’t fit the Christian requirement, because I was a renegade Unitarian.)

At that time, I didn’t notice that white churches fostered segregation any more than all other elements of society did. But I defer to the greater knowledge of Jones, who has spent his life studying this field.

As PRRI agents surveyed thousands of Americans, Jones created a “racism index” to identify which groups are most bigoted. White evangelicals scored highest at 78 percent. Irreligious whites rated 42 percent. He told CNN:

President Trump, who has put white supremacy front and center, has brought these issues from just barely below the surface into plain view…. White Christians have inherited a worldview that has Christians on top of other religions, men over women, whites over blacks.

...sigh...


Aug 11, 2020

Slavery of Fear by Gilbert Mercier

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 Source: News Junkie Post
 
 

Flee, fight or freeze

In the natural world, there are two kinds of responses to imminent threats: either flee or fight. Most of the time, in order to maximize chances of survival, the decision has to be made by individuals or groups in less than a split second. On one hand, the option to flee is motivated by this immediate assessment. It has, of course, an important fear factor. On the other hand, the option to fight seems brave on the surface, but intense momentary fear perhaps had to be overcome by a massive adrenaline rush. Fear is a primal and powerful emotion that is essential for survival, but it can also be used as a tool to control people through mental, emotional and even physical paralysis.

There is a third behavioral option when fear completely paralyzes the individual or a group: it is the freeze option, similar to the imaginary sense of the impossibility to act or react for someone going through a deep clinical depression. As a collective or a nation, this freeze or depressed state when facing danger is also possible. Eighty years ago, with the exception of General Charles de Gaulle and a few men who decided to flee to carry on the fight, France capitulated to the German enemy. France froze and became trapped in the ignominy of a collective depression that was the collaboration by the Vichy government.

In human society, during the barbaric lunacy that has been called the art of war, many substances have been used in history to make soldiers less fearful before combat. Drinking alcohol is an obvious one in Europe; chewing coca leaves for South American native tribes; smoking or eating hashish in the Middle-East and Asia — this concentrated form of cannabis is the etymological origin of the word assassin; more recently, during World War II’s spectacular German Blietzkrieg 1940 attack on France, German troops were given the powerful methamphetamine Pervitin. Naturally, the notion of the fearless master-race Nazi soldiers was nothing but a mythology! The intrepid soldiers of the Reich and their beloved Furher, Adolf Hitler, had the fearlessness of crystal-meth addicts. Pervitin kept Nazi troops awake and fighting for days and nights, and increased their aggressive behavior.

Of course, one cannot reduce the apparent fearless madness of the entire German nation during World War II to the massive consumption of Pervitin. What was probably the most sophisticated propaganda machine of the time had been put together by the Nazis; it had been brainwashing the minds of Germans, young and old, for almost a decade. Hitler and co. spent about 10 years molding a sophisticated and cultured society into their ideological monstrosity with the mythology of the purity of blood, master race, and crucially the invention of Jews as evil, depraved and subhuman personified. If this was possible in an advanced society like Germany circa 1930, one must consider that such a gruesome turn of events is possible anywhere at any time, as madness can be a contagious disease.

Fear of other cultures is a crucial component of racial hatred. Once a group of people like the Jews in Nazi Germany or the Africans during the slave trade to the Americas have been thoroughly dehumanized, it becomes easy, almost trivial, to torture and kill them. All propagandists are psychologists. Therefore they understand that their manipulation of fear gives birth to powerful dark impulses. A fear of abandonment as a child can later bring about morbid jealousy and various sociopathic behaviors. A fear of destitution drives the compulsion to greed. Collectively, fear can be a giant web of invisible chains that enslave a society in a psychological straight jacket. In this regard, September 11, 2001 and its aftermath was a turning point, and to some extent the Western world has been conditioned to live in fear ever since.

The war of terror

Putting aside the inside-job narrative, what matters is how crises are used. The net benefit of 9/11 for some was to create a constant sense of uncertainty for the population, and cynically a jackpot for the military-industrial complex. It was the notion that the enemy could be lurking anywhere. The war on terror was, and still is, a conceptual war: an absurd Orwellian war without end because it is supposed to fight diffuse groups of people called terrorists whose only common ground is the use of fear as a weapon. Because fear breeds more fear, the 20-year conceptual war made people, almost worldwide, believe security was more important than personal liberty. The war on terror made people slaves of fear, and they were told it was for their own good.

Do not blame only Donald Trump for the current authoritarian police state in the US. The Department of Homeland Security was a fascist invention of George W. Bush, using 9/11 as a pretext, and it was maintained by Barack Obama, every time with the complicity of Congress. On one hand, the war on terror wrecked several countries: killed or displaced millions at a cost of several trillion dollars. Everyone knew it was not winnable. On the other hand, what worked for the US and its Western allies was the almost 20-year old war of terror that slowly victimized their own populations with the jackboot of a police-military apparatus constantly on their throats. When fear overcomes an entire society it can be beaten to submission. Where fear rules, servitude becomes acceptable.

Strategy of fear and the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has given an entirely new dimension to the slavery of fear initiated on 9/11. There have been almost two decades, which is one generation, of a war of terror on the collective psyche. There could not have been a better introduction to the global fear of a pandemic. A diffuse Muslim fundamentalist enemy who could be anywhere has morphed to an invisible virus that is everywhere. The quantum leap was easily made, because it is intrinsically the same mechanism. It went a lot further than 9/11, because governments managed to convince their populations to submit themselves to various level of lockdown. Imagine this! Almost all complied worldwide, with little resistance and absolutely no organized rebellion.

Just like the post 9/11 world infringed on human rights and privacy with various invasive policies, the post COVID-19 world has adopted its own arbitrary rules. They have in common that they fuel a fear of everyone and everything and engender agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, Stockholm syndrome, and depression. The panoply of mandatory social distancing measures and mask wearing decrees have made people hostile, fearful, and paranoid. Authorities worldwide have been on a joy killing mission. Populations have been successfully infantilized and traumatized by forbidding the most essential human behaviors: the joy to see a smile or the surprise of a flaring nostril; the smell of a ripe fruit at a market; the fortitude of what seems to be a time gone when you could dance with a stranger and perhaps steal a kiss.

More than two hundred years ago, Haitian slaves managed to free themselves, and in the process they defeated the world’s three largest empires: respectively, the French, British, and Spanish. Have we all become such pathetic shadows of our former selves? Are we so weak and cowardly today that we cannot free ourselves from the billionaire class and the fear it is imposing on us?

*****

Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire.

Aug 7, 2020

Musings

 

"For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
 
 
- James Baldwin, “Sonny's Blues”

How A System Of Power Defends Itself : A Case Study

 Systematic Inequality

  

 S Systems maintain themselves through the efforts of many moving parts that need not understand their roles in maintaining the system as a whole, only their specialized task. In this podcast, a case study is presented to show how the system of racism defends itself against attack. Many separate parts, none of which understand how their individual actions connect to the larger system, work in complicated yet predictable ways to carry out this defense of racism much like the many specialized antibodies of an immune system work together to isolate and eradicate threats to the host.

Aug 6, 2020

Rumi: Community Of The Spirit

Spiritual uprising Painting by Dr Oliver Pfaff | Saatchi Art


There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in the circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepard’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.

Don’t accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.

Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.
You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.


Aug 4, 2020

Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. On The Brilliance of James Baldwin

 Eddie Glaude discusses James Baldwin and Begin Again | Brooklyn ...


NPR's Noel King speaks with Eddie Glaude Jr. about his book Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.' 

The Tight Rope: Cornel West & Tricia Rose Talk to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)

Dr. Cornel West and Prof. Tricia Rose Launch New SpkerBox Media ...  


The Tight Rope is rich in creative, unfiltered dialogue on topics ranging from pop culture, art and music, to the contours of systemic racism, philosophy, the power of Socratic self-examination, and the possibilities of a peaceful and just world. The program highlights the professors’ combined expertise to encourage critical thinking, self-reflection, and human connection..  

Learn more at https://www.thetightropepodcast.com  
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetightropepod  
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetightrop...  
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/thetightropepod

Heather Cox Richardson : How the South Won the Civil War




Yes, the Civil War brought an end to the slave order of the South and the rule of the plantation oligarchs who embodied white supremacy. But the Northern victory was short lived -- Southern ideals spread quickly to the West. It's all about America’s ongoing battle between oligarchy and democracy. Listen & reflect on this engaging discussion!

Another Hiroshima is Coming…Unless We Stop It Now by John Pilger

 What is the science behind atomic shadows during the bombing of ...

Source:John Pilger

In a major essay to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, John Pilger describes reporting from  five 'ground zeros' for nuclear weapons - from Hiroshima to Bikini, Nevada to Polynesia and Australia. He warns that unless we take action now, China is next.

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open.

At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite.

I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the river where the survivors still lived in shanties. I met a man called Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead."??Nine years later, I returned to look for him and he was dead from leukaemia.

"No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said The New York Times front page on 13 September, 1945, a classic of planted disinformation. "General Farrell," reported William H. Lawrence, "denied categorically that [the atomic bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity."

Only one reporter, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, had braved the perilous journey to Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, in defiance of the Allied occupation authorities, which controlled the "press pack".

"I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the London Daily Express  of September 5,1945. Sitting in the rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter, he described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague".

For this, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared. His witness to the truth was never forgiven.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the bedrock of America's war propaganda in the 21st century, casting a new enemy, and target - China.

During the 75 years since Hiroshima, the most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and to save lives.

"Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. "Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

The National Archives in Washington contains documented Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US made clear the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Nothing was done.

The US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US Air Force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". Stimson later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the [atomic] bomb".

Stimson's foreign policy colleagues - looking ahead to the post-war era they were then shaping "in our image", as Cold War planner George Kennan famously put it - made clear they were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the [atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis."

The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Harry Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".

The "experiment" continued long after the war was over. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every day for 12 years.

The human and environmental consequences were catastrophic. During the filming of my documentary, The Coming War on China, I chartered a small aircraft and flew to Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls. It was here that the United States exploded the world's first Hydrogen Bomb. It remains poisoned earth. My shoes registered "unsafe" on my Geiger counter. Palm trees stood in unworldly formations. There were no birds.

I trekked through the jungle to the concrete bunker where, at 6.45 on the morning of March 1, 1954, the button was pushed. The sun, which had risen, rose again and vaporised an entire island in the lagoon, leaving a vast black hole, which from the air is a menacing spectacle: a deathly void in a place of beauty.

The radioactive fall-out spread quickly and "unexpectedly". The official history claims "the wind changed suddenly". It was the first of many lies, as declassified documents and the victims' testimony reveal.

Gene Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, "They knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the day of the shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but [people] were not evacuated; I was not evacuated... The United States needed some guinea pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do."

Like Hiroshima, the secret of the Marshall Islands was a calculated experiment on the lives of large numbers of people. This was Project 4.1, which began as a scientific study of mice and became an experiment on "human beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon".

The Marshall Islanders I met in 2015 - like the survivors of Hiroshima I interviewed in the 1960s and 70s - suffered from a range of cancers, commonly thyroid cancer; thousands had already died. Miscarriages and stillbirths were common; those babies who lived were often deformed horribly.

Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been evacuated during the H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini, Rongelap's skies darkened and it rained what first appeared to be snowflakes.  Food and water were contaminated; and the population fell victim to cancers. That is still true today.

I met Nerje Joseph, who showed me a photograph of herself as a child on Rongelap. She had terrible facial burns and much of her was hair missing. "We were bathing at the well on the day the bomb exploded," she said. "White dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the powder. We used it as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair started falling out."

Lemoyo Abon said, "Some of us were in agony. Others had diarrhoea. We were terrified. We thought it must be the end of the world."

US official archive film I included in my film refers to the islanders as "amenable savages". In the wake of the explosion, a US Atomic Energy Agency official is seen boasting that Rongelap "is by far the most contaminated place on earth", adding, "it will be interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment."

American scientists, including medical doctors, built distinguished careers studying the "human uptake'. There they are in flickering film, in their white coats, attentive with their clipboards. When an islander died in his teens, his family received a sympathy card from the scientist who studied him.

I have reported from five nuclear "ground zeros" throughout the world -- in Japan, the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Polynesia and Maralinga in Australia. Even more than my experience as a war correspondent, this has taught me about the ruthlessness and immorality of great power: that is, imperial power, whose cynicism is the true enemy of humanity.

This struck me forcibly when I filmed at Taranaki Ground Zero at Maralinga in the Australian desert. In a dish-like crater was an obelisk on which was inscribed: "A British atomic weapon was test exploded here on 9 October 1957". On the rim of the crater was this sign:

WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD
Radiation levels for a few hundred metres around this point may be above those considered safe for permanent occupation.

For as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the ground was irradiated. Raw plutonium lay about, scattered like talcum powder: plutonium is so dangerous to humans that a third of a milligram gives a 50 per cent chance of cancer.

The only people who might have seen the sign were Indigenous Australians, for whom there was no warning. According to an official account, if they were lucky "they were shooed off like rabbits".

Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is shooing us all off like rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily torrent of anti-Chinese rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the torrent of anti-Russia rhetoric. Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a threat: Wuhan .... Huawei. How confusing it is when "our" most reviled leader says so.

The current phase of this campaign began not with Trump but with Barack Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to declare the greatest build-up of US naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since World War Two. Suddenly, China was a "threat". This was nonsense, of course. What was threatened was America's unchallenged psychopathic view of itself as the richest, the most successful, the most "indispensable" nation.

What was never in dispute was its prowess as a bully - with more than 30 members of the United Nations suffering American sanctions of some kind and a trail of the blood running through defenceless countries bombed, their governments overthrown, their elections interfered with, their resources plundered.

Obama's declaration became known as the "pivot to Asia". One of its principal advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as WikiLeaks revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean "the American Sea".

Whereas Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of marketing."I state clearly and with conviction," said the new president in 2009, "that America's commitment is to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."

Obama increased spending on nuclear warheads faster than any president since the end of the Cold War. A "usable" nuclear weapon was developed. Known as the B61 Model 12, it means, according to General James Cartwright, former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that "going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable".

The target is China. Today, more than 400 American military bases almost encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one US strategist told me, "the perfect noose".

A study by the RAND Corporation - which, since Vietnam, has planned America's wars - is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the infamous catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist, Herman Kahn - "thinking the unthinkable". Kahn's book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a "winnable" nuclear war.

Kahn's apocalyptic view is shared by Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical fanatic who believes in the "rapture of the End". He is perhaps the most dangerous man alive. "I was CIA director," he boasted, "We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses."  Pompeo's obsession is China.

The endgame of Pompeo's extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the Anglo-American media, where the myths and fabrications about China are standard fare, as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the sub-text of this propaganda. Classified "yellow" even though they were white, the Chinese are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an "exclusion act" from entering the United States, because they were Chinese. Popular culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, "sneaky", depraved, diseased, immoral.

An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was devoted to promoting fear of the "yellow peril" as if all of Asia was about to fall down on the whites-only colony by the force of gravity.

As the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China's  modernism, its secular morality and "contributions to liberal thought threatened European face, so it became necessary to suppress China's role in the Enlightenment debate .... For centuries, China's threat to the myth of Western superiority has made it an easy target for race-baiting."

In the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher described those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as "rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows". Hartcher, who favourably quotes the American demagogue Steve Bannon, likes to interpret the "dreams" of the current Chinese elite, to which he is apparently privy. These are inspired by yearnings for the "Mandate of Heaven" of 2,000 years ago. Ad nausea.

To combat this "mandate", the Australian government of Scott Morrison has committed one of the most secure countries on earth, whose major trading partner is China, to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American missiles that can be fired at China.

The trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have formed a vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a delivery rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused in a supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist attacks on Asian-Australians.

"We are not your enemy," a high-ranking strategist in China told me, "but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay." China's arsenal is small compared with America's, but it is growing fast, especially the development of maritime missiles designed to destroy fleets of ships.

"For the first time," wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, "China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack... This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy..."

In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a "blinding attack on China" was planned, "with strikes that could be mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war."

In 2019, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an "Air-Sea Battle Concept for China" - ASB - blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China's access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and Road Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.

In Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, typical of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the ironic title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, brutal Cultural Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the US and Europe. "Many Americans imagine," she said, "that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril has never left them... They have no idea there are some 500 million people being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it's 600 million."

Modern China's epic achievements, its defeat of mass poverty, and the pride and contentment of its people (measured forensically by American pollsters such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or misunderstood in the West. This alone is a commentary on the lamentable state of Western journalism and the abandonment of honest reporting.

China's repressive dark side and what we like to call its "authoritarianism" are the facade we are allowed to see almost exclusively. It is as if we are fed unending tales of the evil super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it is time we asked why: before it is too late to stop the next Hiroshima.



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Aug 1, 2020

Poet's Nook: "Prism" by Silent Lotus

The core is Love ~ 100 x 100 cm ~ Painting by Be-Me-L By Kristin ...



When
We gaze
Into a prism
We shall discover
The light that opens
The door of our prison
And we will infinitely see
With a rainbow of serenity
That love is the essence
Of our core


The New Corporation

  The New Corporation ​is a 2020 documentary directed by Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, law professor at the University of British Columb...