And It Will Not Matter to the MAHAs Whether We're Marxians or New Dealers; Male, Female, Nonbinary or LGBTQ; Caucasian or Peoples of Color; Pagan, Indigenous Traditional, Agnostic, Atheist or Spiritually Indifferent
I BEGAN THIS essay as an intended contribution to the discussion thread of the World Socialist Web Site’s mostly well-done 18 March report about the Nex Benedict atrocity, but the ferocity of my reaction -- delight at the censorship-defying boldness of its disclosures, disgust at its editorial flaws, fury at yet another Christonazi outrage -- seems to have (unintentionally) invoked the Muse. Thus was I thrust into the Zen-like trance that often births the most intense expressions of my sensibilities. A right-brain state defined by the eerie sense of having involuntarily become a conduit rather than a source, its irresistible momentum is as ultimately indescribable as it is welcome. It had frequently enhanced my photojournalistic gavotte and the guitar-accompanied recitals of traditional folk music I am now permanently denied by arthritis, and it has often given me, in a single encounter, the entire content of what might justifiably be considered a poem or at least a poetic rumination, but never until now has it uninterruptedly yielded a complete body of prose. And when my left brain yanked me from its enchantment, I was decidedly startled by its 11-hour suspension of physical awareness and the surprising fact my text had grown far beyond the very reasonable 400-word WSWS comment-limit.
In retrospect, I cannot doubt the death of Nex Benedict was -- at least for me -- the mental equivalent of the proverbial last straw. I am the son of a man purged for his Marxian politics by the post-WWII U.S. government, and much as he was, a near-lifelong student of history. I began learning in my early teens of the historical USian penchant for embracing its own variants of nazism. I recognized nazism's appeal in the skyrocketing popularity -- especially amongst southern whites -- of Ayn Rand's turgid fictionalizations of the übermenschen ethos central to Mein Kampf -- never mind she wrote as wretchedly as Hitler himself. I saw the yearning for nazism implicit in segregation and the federal government's devious censorship of the mainstream press. My father cross-referenced 1964 Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater's speeches to their Mein Kampf origins, a meticulously researched work he offered as campaign ammunition to local officials of Lyndon Baines Johnson's "Democratic" (sic) Party, men who vehemently rejected it, no doubt because, unbeknownst to us voters, the Democrats were even then the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column they have so obviously since become. I've experienced countless flickers of worry and disgust generated by the steady encroachment of USian nazism ever since. But there is a profound difference between my psychologically guarded journalistic objectification of the Christonazi threat and the sudden bayonet-thrust of woe and dread that pierced me to the heart when first I viewed the obituary portrait of Nex and was seized, smitten and overwhelmed by its wrenching similarity to the obituary portrait of the murdered woman who was Heather Heyer.
The psychic kinship of the two photos spawned a momentary mental maelstrom that flashed through my own vivid memories of raggedly impoverished Knox County children needfully scavenging random lumps of coal from Vestal's L&N tracks and churned them into a wrenching spiral of dystopian imagery that mixed wirephotos of assassinations, wars and mass murder with my own decades of textual and photographic witness to socioeconomic despair and its expression via demonstration, riot and metaphysical rebellion. Then it replaced the stab of terror inflicted by the visually confirmed certainty of doom with an indescribably down-pressing pang of grief at cultural loss that lumped my throat and brought tears to my eyes. Suffice it to say my right brain now feels the fist-in-the-face, boot-in-the-crotch, truncheon-across-the-spine toxicity of what my left brain hitherto de-emotionalized by the distancing essential to journalistic abstraction. (I am sorry I cannot say it better; I apologize for my gross ineptitude at expressing my own emotions.)
As a result I now know a bit more about the psychological dimensions of the victimization of Nex Benedict and the martyrdom of Heather Heyer and the skyrocketing frequency of hate-motivated mass murder and the statistically camouflaged but undoubtedly soaring executions of uncounted USians by the murderously weaponized bigotries of intentionally fatal neglect and homicidally relentless persecution and how all these atrocities signify USia's headlong, unabashedly joyful embrace of the same bottomless evil knowingly embraced by the German electorate between the 6-January-2022 equivalent of the 1923 Beer-Hall Putsch and the death-stroke dealt the Weimar Republic by von Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as Reichkanzler a decade later.
The intensity of my reaction was prompted by my realization our masters' deliberate resurrection and re-empowerment of our species' most relentlessly ecogenocidal foes of humanitarian empathy compel us all to reflect on Martin Niemöller's confession and its ever-more-obvious USian variant, "first they came for the women and the LGBTQ people..." thus to recognize the fatal persecution of Nex and the murder of Heather and all the women assaulted in what is now obviously an organized attack by New York City misogynists exemplify the fate the Christonazis will inflict on all of us who dare oppose them regardless of our race, ethnicity, gender, ideology, spirituality or lack thereof. In that sense, we are literally already all targeted as were Nex Benedict and Heather Heyer and every other such victim.
Nor can I doubt our future -- however long it may last before global capitalism's now-obviously inevitable apocalypse terminates the patriarchal perversion of “civilization” -- will be increasingly defined by Charlotteville-caliber violence and the constant escalation thereof.1 As I have repeatedly said to my friends and comrades, if the second civil war I now fear is inevitable actually occurs, the so-called “winner” will be determined by whichever side gets the nukes, never mind the doomsday ruin sure to be inflicted by their use.
A slightly revised version of my original essay -- the writing I initially intended as a comment-thread contribution -- begins beneath this prelude’s footnote.
__________________
1See for example -- if you can find it (and afford its outrageous censorship-by-price cost -- the late David Smail’s profoundly relevant Power Interest and Psychology: Elements of a social materialist understanding of distress, PCCS Books, UK: 2007.
*****
DESPITE THE LAUDABLE breadth of Chase Lawrence's analysis, the WSWS piece that evoked my response is unfortunately headlined “Questions remain surrounding Nex Benedict’s death following release of autopsy summary,” a statement rendered absurd and therefore meaningless by the sort of misplaced modifier that exemplifies the distracting grammatical errors too many of us -- through no fault of our own -- are increasingly too poorly educated to avoid or correct. In any of my years as a supervising editor, I'd have caustically demanded to know if Nex had indeed died while tracking the summary's publication, which is precisely what the head says happened, and which makes it grammatically incomprehensible to those for whom English is a secondary language. But I suppressed that impulse until now, when I realized it is more respectful to flag the error than to ignore it -- and to remind us, en passant, that correct grammar is essential for effective communication, without which the clarity of mind necessary for successful revolution remains out of reach. Minimizing our ability to understand one another is therefore one of the (intended) consequences of our masters' definitively anti-revolutionary restriction of our access to education. It is yet another expression, albeit a far more subtle one, of the zero-tolerance agenda that employs bigotry as thought-control and therefore as (another) weapon to suppress us, we of the 99.9 Percent, the working class, which makes it relevant to the present discussion.
(For the record, here is the head as it should have been written, counted to fit the space of the original and properly phrased -- as all heads should be -- in the active voice: Autopsy summary fails to answer questions of authorities' complicity in Nex Benedict's death.)
Unfortunately, Comrade Lawrence buries his most damning conclusion -- and therefore his proper lead -- in the less-than-adequately developed details of his 12th paragraph; this is the fact the circumstances of Nex Benedict's death prove it to have been yet another psychologically engineered (and therefore "plausibly deniable") murder inflicted by relentless Christonazi sadists. Its burial thus minimizes the significance of how the suicide diagnosis thus becomes -- regardless of its officially authoritative medical source -- a maliciously victim-blaming deception.
Nevertheless, Lawrence's text contains many laudable elements. So does Christopher Wiggens' report, in the 22 March edition of The Advocate. Wiggens leads with how humanitarians are again legitimately infuriated by Oklahoma's permanently Christonazified governance -- this time aboil with wrath provoked by the local obersturmbannführers who've honored Nex's de facto executioners with school-approved, prosecutor-guaranteed, police protected immunity. Wiggens also details the glaring scientific improbability of the suicide verdict, facts of which I don't doubt the mainstream media’s billionaire-owned, for-maximum-profit variant of Josef Goebbel’s Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda deliberately sought to deny us. Like Lawrence, Wiggens exposes the extent to which the methodical, potentially deadly persecution of LGBTQ students is already institutionalized as official policy throughout the emergent Christonazi confederacy. And Lawrence's report includes documentation of the ever-intensified misery deliberately inflicted on all K-12 students, LGBTQ or not, as even the so-called blue states are forced ever closer to unabashed nazism.
But each of these reports follow the seemingly mandatory practice by all USian news media -- whether alternative or mainstream -- of ignoring how our national history shows such persecution is neither sociological coincidence nor cultural anomaly. In infinitely damning fact, the history of USian bigotry is so uniquely ecogenocidally murderous, it -- like its racism-inspired, corporate-financed eugenics, -- were the working models from which Hitler built his Holocaust. These are therefore the only constant (and thus truly defining) qualities this nation has ever possessed. In other words, the alleged “founding principles” of the so-called “United States” have never been more than colossal Big Lies.
A contributing element in Nex's victimization is the fact so many in my generation, like the Baby-Boomers who came after us, were arrogantly delusional enough to convince themselves activism alone had permanently purged USian society of its oft-denied but irrevocably defining ideology of interwoven hatreds. (That same arrogance led many of my fellow activists to foolishly imagine it was our anti-war protests -- not the indomitable courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Army and the sustained militance of their Soviet benefactors -- that forced the USian Empire's panicked retreat from Vietnam1.) Apropos USia's defining bigotry, certainly we knew a few sparks of our nation's signature ethos smoldered on, particularly in the perpetually hateful theocracy of the white Christian South, but we smugly assumed the metaphorical dampers had been closed by legislation, that whatever cinders remained would eventually be extinguished. Obviously we were deranged; our assumption USia's historically dominant lynch-mob ethos2 could be suppressed by any methods less stringent than those by which the Red Army cleansed Europe of the Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazis is now proven false.
The proof -- an irrefutable and properly terrifying real-world parallel to Harry Turtledove's fictional denunciation of pacifism3 -- is of course the fact it took Hitler-disciple Trump and his bring-back-Auschwitz-legions of Christonazi Neoconfederates only a few public exhalations of unabashed hatefulness to blow the seemingly dead embers of bigotry into a nation-destroying conflagration that rages more apocalyptically with every passing minute. Wildly cheering their "grab-'em-by-the-pussy" führer with Zieg-Heil-equivalent chants of "USA! USA! USA!," the malevolent minions of the second of our species' three fatally competitive ecogenocide-by-divine-commandment theologies make no secret of their fanatical intent to replace our sorely wounded republic with a zero-tolerance white Christian male-supremacist theocracy, thereby fulfilling the initially clandestine, now triumphantly brazen4 plot behind our masters' addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.
Thus their favorite acronym -- MAGA (for "Make America Great Again") -- is a lie. Were it truthful, it would be MAHA: "Make America Hate Again."
But the significance of MAHA as the renewal of our nation's longstanding, chronic (and therefore definitive) malignancy remains deftly hidden by one of the most effective means of self-protection the USian ruling class has yet devised -- that is, by cleverly inducing and perpetuating our mind-crippling national aversion to studying history, chiefly by ensuring it is force-fed to impressionable adolescents as an infinitely boring tedium of dates and names of people and locales proctored by so-called “educators,” typically athletic coaches specifically chosen because they are too dimwitted to effectively narrate the dramatic events that connect the names with the dates and geography. Indeed they are but disguised propagandists, too fanatically “American” to dare explore beyond government-mandated texts, much less allow any questioning of the texts’ often misleading or unequivocally false conclusions.
Yes, the standard method of using coaches to teach history, civics and other social studies is yet another manifestation of how our masters -- whose primary intent is obstructing our ability to revolt -- deliberately deny us vital education. A further example is the unquestionably deliberate infliction of ideological confusion by dubbing the emergent realms of Christonazi/Neoconfederate secession as “Red States,” thereby obscuring the original meaning of the term “Red” as a synonym for Marxian and the fact the Red Army literally saved the world from the (primarily) German manifestation of Christonazism’s predecessor.
The One Percenters know that were the resultant ignorance ever overcome, we of the 99.9 Percent would no doubt quickly acknowledge history's overwhelmingly conclusive body of circumstantial evidence -- a weight of proof far beyond what's necessary for conviction in a court-of-law -- that, for example, proves the assassination of President Kennedy was the hinge-pin in a bipartisan, multi-generation, two-century nazification scheme that began with the Bankers’ Plot of 1933.5 History also informs us the Banksters’ underlying ruling-class vindictiveness was nothing new – that it is easily traceable to the bipartisan racist treachery that ended Reconstruction in 1877. .
Our present circumstances, MAHA included, were imposed on us by the ruling class after the Red Army's epic victory at Stalingrad made it clear Germany would lose the war. Their original intent had obviously been to openly ally the U.S. with Germany as soon as the Third Reich and its allies won the war. But fearing the extermination of nazism was the prelude to the extinction of capitalism itself, the banksters of 1933 -- granted lifetime congressional immunity in 1934, and since then ever-more-protected by wealth and privilege -- further reinforced themselves and their collaborators by secretly compelling the government's adoption of innumerable Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals as their co-conspirators. The Original Nazis' unprecedented skill at sadistically industrializing mass murder and irresistibly propagating collective deception was applauded by Hitler himself as heralding the emergence of a fanatically aggressive "new man," representative of a people genetically programmed for unquestioning loyalty to their masters and immune to any moral, ethical or empathetic restraints that might obstruct their obedient savagery. And it granted the USian ruling class precisely the weapons it needed to impose its intended postwar global empire.
Subsequent U.S. history clearly reveals the Kennedy assassination's most undeniable consequence is its permanent reduction of the "Democratic" (sic) Party to the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- the function first irrefutably demonstrated by JFK-successor Lyndon Johnson's subsequently revealed role as chief provocateur of the Vietnam (actually Southeast Asian) War. Since then, the Democrats' Fifth-Column treachery has been repeatedly affirmed by their innumerable betrayals of popular will and the ruinous debacles so enabled, MAHA included. Quoth an old GRU 6 proverb: "once is coincidence, twice is alarming, thrice is enemy action."
What the Christonazis now do openly and without restraint, their "Democratic" (sic) Fifth Column has long enabled in a variety of "plausibly deniable" ways, not just LBJ's Southeast Asian onslaught, but Carter's undeniable Hyde-Amendment betrayal, the Clintons' equally undeniable health-care and welfare betrayals and the apparently deliberate losses of national elections in 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2016. Each of these defeats were foreseen far in advance by suppressed, ignored or media-camouflaged analyses and should thus be investigated as expressions of criminal intent; that each has imposed ecogenocidal triumphs is clear suggestion of motive and purpose. Chief amongst these consequences -- permanent Christonazi/Neoconfederate seizure of the federal judiciary -- is now nullifying every progressive measure enacted since the (first?) Civil War. In this context it is thus entirely rational to assume the Christonazis’ long-range scheming includes the court’s 21st Century restoration of its 1857 Dred Scott Decision.
While the national legitimization of MAHA bigotry that killed Nex Benedict and Heather Heyer is obviously one of the Christonazis' top priorities, the Democrats' backroom role as its enabler proves the two parties' collaboration in its probably terminal nationwide resurrection, not just to former lynch-mob intensities, but ultimately to the death-camp magnitude Hitler-disciple Trump's endorsement of theocracy is again making publicly palatable.
Meanwhile the already unprecedented unpopularity of President Biden is cunningly intensified to a toxicity no propaganda could possibly overcome -- firstly by the (entirely predictable) denunciations of the president by Trumpite functionary Robert Hur, whom the Biden Regime self-destructively appointed as special prosecutor; and now by the USian economy's newest statistical relapse into inflation. Known to be inflicted solely by unchecked corporate greed, that should leave us all legitimately wondering if (or when) it might skyrocket into a Trumpist variant of Pinochet's deadly, University-of-Chicago-sponsored "economic shock treatment."
Thus the irremediable odium of Biden's candidacy is obviously the Democrats' latest "plausibly deniable" method for throwing an election -- clearly another manifestation of "change we can believe in," a magnitude of malignant mass deception Josef Goebbels and his U.S.-adopted henchmen would most assuredly endorse with hearty Zieg Heils.
In this dire context, the MAHA persecution and death of Nex Benedict -- whatever its medical circumstances -- is, like the MAHA murder of Heather Heyer and the attacks on New York women, a terrifying prophecy of all our fates unless we of the 99 Percent set aside our egotistical differences and unite in our species' one remaining option for survival -- the militant socialism of revolutionary working-class solidarity. As Heather said in the eerily appropriate epitaph her last Facebook post became, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
__________________
1Classic photo of the frantic U.S. retreat from Saigon.
2See also "Racial Violence in the United States Since 1526" for a more complete chronology of attacks against Blacks.
3"The Last Article" (full text of the short story in question).
4See also "How 'One Nation' Didn't Become 'Under God' Until The '50s Religious Revival," "How Long Have We Really Been ‘One Nation Under God’?" and "Views of the U.S. as a ‘Christian nation’ and opinions about ‘Christian nationalism’"
5See also the Harper’s Magazine report of Prescott Bush’s central role in the plot and additional details provided by a much more omprehensive report published in Rolling Stone.
6See also Spetsnaz GRU.
LB/18 March-6 April 2024
-30-
