An Apology, an Explanation and a New Apporoach

My apologies to my readers here on Blogger for the confusion of the past nearly three months. I purchased the domain name "Dispatches from Dystopia.net" earlier this year and applied it here,  only to learn that it is probably technically illegal for me to use it outside its original source, the Rolls-Royce-class blog server Typepad that -- in recognition of my former working-press status -- has so kindly provided me a lifetime subscription since 2009.  Hence -- to avoid any possible legal complications in the Internet world (a realm wherein I am hopelessly ignorant of the applicable laws) -- the change here at Blogger back to the original "Outside Agitator's Notebook."

Beyond that, my apologies also for my extended absence, the result of the fact I have been extremely ill. First was a bout with flu that obliterated all my February -- apparently a subspecies of influenza  somehow omitted from the 2016-2017 flu shot -- with the result I was bedridden for 21 days and in a severely weakened state for about 14 days after that: by far the most devastating encounter with flu in my entire life. Then the last week in March I was hospitalized for five days by sepsis, and now I am coming down with another chest cold the cough and congestion of which suggest something considerably more severe. Such is the beginning of my 77th year and another reason -- this in addition to Trump's assumption of Hillary's former role as the personification of thermonuclear apocalypse --  I am starting to question whether I will live to see 2018. Indeed never in my life -- not even with childhood diseases -- have I been so relentlessly, seemingly incurably ill. But then never in any of our lives have We the People -- not just of the USian Empire but of the entire planet -- been in such apocalyptic jeopardy, so perhaps my aged body is only behaving as a microcosm of the broader human condition. In any case, though Trump has reduced me to the resigned hopelessness of utter nihilism, be assured I will continue writing and photographing and working to resist Capitalist tyranny as long as I am able.

Thus the following format change:

I began posting here during the relatively brief period my avowedly Marxian politics got me banned from Typepad, and after Typepad restored my subscription, I have posted the same material here I post there primarily because  -- for reasons I do not understand -- my European and Asiatic readers are seemingly more readily able to access my work here. However in discussions with a couple of comrades who are both friends and Nurds, it was pointed out to me that perhaps all I need do is post here a link to Typepad -- especially since the latter URL also accesses my photographic portfolios. Hence, as an experiment, here are the URLs to my two "Dispatches from Dystopia" posts on Typepad, the first, dated  23 March  2017, and the second, dated today, 13 April 2017:

http://www.dispatchesfromdystopia.net/2017/03/new-name-new-urgency-as-capitalism-bares-its-nazi-fangs-.html

http://www.dispatchesfromdystopia.net/2017/04/notes-on-the-trumping-of-planet-earth-how-prosperity-gospel-christianity-capitalism-and-moron-nation-spawned-the-fourth-rei.html 

My hope is this approach will enable my European and Asiatic readers to more easily access my work, and for this reason I would appreciate whatever feedback might be possible via this site's comment thread. If this approach does not work, I will go back to posting the complete text of my essays here, never mind the fact it requires about two additional hours of precisely the sort of computer drudgery I despise and therefore prefer to avoid.  
 
Meanwhile thank you all.

Loren Bliss
13 April 2017

             

Is Trump's War against Women and Minorities Mandated by 'Secret Fundamentalism' at the Heart of U.S. Power?

Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2011

*

(Prefatory Note: I began this essay after reading and responding to “GOP Attack on Women Continues with House Vote to Deny Abortion Coverage” [CommonDreams, 25 January, here] and “WA: more conservative, and more divided, than you think” [Crosscut, 23 January, here]  But then on the 26th I fell ill – extremely ill – with that weirdo brand of flu that was curiously omitted from this year's flu shot. And not until 1 February – appropriately enough, the feast of Brigid, Celtic goddess of light and enlightenment – was I well enough to resume the work. By then, with Trump's malevolence becoming ever more brazenly evident, the contents had grown accordingly, so that now the text may be too long to be absorbed in a single reading. Hence, to make it more accessible, I have broken it into five subsections, each indicated by a topic sentence in which all the letters in the first three words are capitalized.)

***

AS IF THERE were any lingering doubts, President Donald Trump's “grab-em-by-the-pussy”  regime has made it clear it intends to do just that – to re-subjugate U.S. women by seizing control of their reproductive organs.

Moreover, there is compelling evidence the Empire has been perfecting its strategies and tactics of sexually targeted subjugation for decades. Examples include the re-subjugation of women in Iraq and Afghanistan and the criminalization of homosexuality in Africa – all of which may have functioned as dress rehearsals for the re-subjugation of women and sexual minorities here in the United States. The associated planning has therefore been underway at least since Bush II invaded Iraq. More likely it dates to 1977, when Carter, an avowed fundamentalist, signed the misogynistic Hyde Amendment  into law and two years later began secretly arming  murderously anti-woman Islamic fanatics,  an ongoing effort that has defined the Empire's Middle Eastern policy ever since.

In other words, Trump's war against women is to be of a severity unprecedented outside the Muslim world and hitherto unimaginable by most reproductive-age USian women.  Nor is it really “Trump's war.” It is instead the fulfillment of a long, mostly clandestine campaign of experimentation and meticulous planning by Christian fanatics and their collaborators in government. It is a Pearl-Harbor-type attack on women, minorities whether sexual or racial, and ultimately on liberty itself, an indescribably vicious coup intended to reduce USian women to biological slavery and transform the USian homeland into a zero-tolerance Christian theocracy, an occidental version of Saudi Arabia.

These are the disturbing conclusions that emerge from two stories The Nation broke last week via its on-line service. The reports, “Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination” and “How the US Tests Out Some of Its Most Oppressive Domestic Policies on the World,” are here  and here respectively.

Not part of The Nation's readership – I despise its pay-walled exclusiveness as much as I scorn its endless bourgeois efforts to canonize ex-President Barack Hussein Obama, whose methodical nullification of constitutional governance  cleared the way for Trump's despotism – I accessed the reports via Crosscut, Seattle's amateurishly edited but nevertheless vitally informative on-line daily. The link to The Nation was part of an opinion piece  entitled “Trump's anti-LGBTQ order will backfire – here's why.” Because there are lesbians and gays among my relatives, friends, colleagues and political comrades, I follow such matters closely.

“Leaked Draft” publishes the full text of the proposed executive order, while “US Tests” describes – albeit with typical pseudo-Leftist suppression of the Democratic (sic) Party's role as co-perpetrator –  how the Empire has used the Third World and the Middle East as rat labs in which to perfect its efforts to re-subjugate women and outlaw homosexuality.

“Trump’s announcement today that his administration seeks to 'totally destroy' restrictions on religious organizations’ ability to engage in political activity,” The Nation concludes, “(tells us) we can expect to see more pressure on both public and private health providers in the United States to curb comprehensive family-planning care and reproductive rights.”

Though clearly frightening, the analysis lapses into disinformation because it falls prey to the pseudo-Left's cult of deceptive optimism and fails to acknowledge the even-more-frightening worst-case scenario: legal and extra-legal prohibitions against abortion, contraception and even medical care for sexually active single women, homosexuals and transgender people.

The most egregious aspect of the Trump proposal would allow gravely injured single women and sexual minorities to be murdered by denial of lifesaving treatment whenever doctors, other caregivers or hospital management claims “religious freedom” – that is, Abrahamic misogyny and homophobia – grants exemption from Hippocratic obligation.

Nor is this an even slightly fanciful scenario. During the late 1970s, when I was the investigative reporter for a Seattle-area suburban thrice-weekly, I was told the one hospital that served our circulation area would not allow rape victims in its emergency room, no matter how severely injured they might be. The hospital, owned by a Christian fundamentalist organization, was the only such facility within about 20 miles in any direction.

Word of the hospital's policy was passed on to me by some exceptionally reliable sources in the King County Police. Furious over the treatment refusals – cops and paramedics knew the resultant delays could kill a severely wounded victim – my informants documented seven recent examples and said the atrocities had been going on long before officers started recording them.

So armed, I confronted the hospital's executive director – and was sneeringly told that as a “Christian institution,” the hospital would “never” allow itself to be associated with “sexual promiscuity.” Christian dogma – particularly the notion rape is divine vengeance for unchaste behavior – thus trumped the Hippocratic oath.

But the arrogant “never” quickly gave way to a properly humiliated “always” after my editor ran the story atop Page One. (The hospital is unnamed here because it is now under secular ownership and new management,)

The point, though, is not another triumph of investigative journalism, or how, in olden times, cops and reporters sometimes cooperated in our species' quest for justice. It is instead the innate viciousness of Abrahamic fundamentalists, a viciousness that, like a serial killer's blood-lust, will spring – or more likely sneak – into malignant tyranny any time we the people are lulled into inattention.

It is the selfsame viciousness the Trump Regime would now perpetuate as the law of the land.

Once again we are shown the terrible relevance of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008). Eight years after the book's publication, Trump – allegedly Hillary's primary enemy – is fulfilling the subjugation scheme Sharlet exposed as the purpose of clandestine collaboration between Hillary, Sam Brownback “and others”: “legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it,” for which see page 275.

***

THE ONE PERCENTERS and their political vassals – motivated as they are by biblical capitalism,  (an ideology of divine-right tyranny that in a less-Orwellian world would be damned as “ChristoFascism” or even “JesuNazism”) – obviously intend to reduce USian women to the hopelessly subjugated, utterly degraded status demanded by core Abrahamic doctrine whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic and thus exemplified by women in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.

Even before the advent of the Trump Regime and its “grab-em-by-the-pussy” war against women, our capitalist overlords, their politicians and their often violent, sometimes murderous Christian storm troopers had already closed or prohibited abortion clinics in 90 percent  of the nation's counties. And just before Trump's proposed executive order was leaked, there was already this:

Anti-choice House Republicans on (31 January) voted to further curtail U.S. women's healthcare access, passing a draconian bill that permanently bans the use of federal funds for abortion and prohibits anyone who receives subsidies to buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from purchasing a plan that covers abortion...

Because the JesuNazi leaders are not the ignoramuses we like to self-indulgently imagine they are – in horrid truth, precisely as proven by Trump's victory, they are among the most diabolically skilled schemers and manipulators our definitively self-destructive species has yet spawned – they understand all they need do to reduce women to chattel is outlaw contraception. 

***

BUT WHY WOMEN? What is it about femaleness the One Percenters and their fundamentalist allies find so threatening? It would seem the magnitude and ferocity of Trump's war against women contradicts the keystone of the entire patriarchal order – the notion women are pathetically inferior beings.

Firstly there is the doctrine – the defining force in Abrahamic theology, but in misogynistic truth common to most of the world's organized religions – that women are the root of all earthly evil.

Though a detailed examination of this murderously absurd belief is beyond the scope of this article, the belief itself is no doubt a vindictive reaction to the fact patriarchal theology is contradicted by biological reality, for the deeper implications of which see The Great Cosmic Mother (Barbara Mor; HarperSanFrancisco: 1987), especially pages 230-243.

Given the facts of reproductive biology, how can a deity who is definitively male (and therefore without a womb) create a universe from the void of his own womblessness? “Patriarchy,” says Mor, “must maintain, by force, (this) unnatural system” (page 242). Woman's mere existence thus challenges the entire patriarchal order.

Abrahamic theologians, acutely aware of patriarchy's inherent contradictions, respond by denouncing women as inferior beings, subversives, revolutionaries, witches, vessels of evil – weak and sinful creatures to be subjugated by the divine rights of fathers, husbands and male authorities whether religious or secular.

Prior to Trump's victory, the extent to which such misogynistic views yet prevail in the so-called “modern” United States might have astounded anyone who had not lived (as I have) in the de facto theocracy of the USian South or its post-Reagan expansion into the so-called “flyover country” of the heartlands.

But let us not forget fully 63 percent of the adult U.S. population believes the Bible is literally true,  which like misogyny is one of the defining dogmas of Christian fundamentalism. Given that 53 percent  of 2016's female Caucasian voters helped put Trump in the White House, misogyny is obviously as “American” as the proverbial apple pie – even among women.

At Slate, writer L. V. Anderson suggested the majority of these women supported white supremacy. “What leads a woman to vote for a man who has made it very clear that he believes she is subhuman?” Ms. Anderson wrote. “Self-loathing. Hypocrisy. And, of course, a racist view of the world that privileges white supremacy over every other issue.”

The same self-loathing, as I know all too well from my years as a crime reporter, is what prompts the wives and daughters of misogynists to accept – and worst of all to forgive – the chronic and sometimes deadly abuse by which patriarchy sustains itself.

A second reason for the popularity of Trump's war against women is the oft-repeated Abrahamic claim feminism is a Communist ideology and feminists are agents of the so-called “International Communist Conspiracy” – never mind the Soviet Union has been dead for 26 years.

The following statement  is from a popular Christian website: “Sexual egalitarianism is basically a socialist idea, springing from socialist principles and tending to socialist results. Soviet dictator V.I. Lenin outlined the whole modern agenda of 'women's liberation' in a 1920 interview with the German feminist Clara Zetkin.”

Zetkin's full text of the interview is here.

“Feminism is a lie of the Devil,” proclaims another Christian site.  “Husbands are Biblically to Rule Over their Wives; Wives are to Obey.”

Anti-abortion zealots go even further, condemning abortion as Satanic rite, “ritual blood sacrifice to the god of child murder, Moloch.”

Such are the fanatical beliefs that fuel Trump's war against women. A corollary dogma  is that only Christians – presumably only Christian fundamentalists – are “true Americans,” a view held by 43 percent of Republicans and fully one-third of the total population.

A third reason the Trump Regime is targeting women is that what might be termed the cooperative instincts of females are a direct challenge to the hierarchical tyranny capitalism inherits from its patriarchal forefathers. Capitalism is exploitative by definition;  it cannot function without its rigid hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed.

“Female group behavior – the cooperative care-sharing among mothers and children, older and younger women, in the tasks of daily life...is the foundation of social life and human culture,” says Mor. “If the first humans had depended solely on despotic and aggressive male leaders, or on several males in chronic, ritualistic contention for power, human society would never have developed” (Pages 11-12).

Fourthly there is the morally imbecilic greed that fuels the entire capitalist system – the basic formula for which is subjugation = profit, such that the greater the subjugation of the 99 Percent, the greater the profits so extracted.

The One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals have so thoroughly subjugated the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations populations that most are forced to work at only the lowest possible wages.

Though females are equally subjugated in the workplace – typically they are allowed only two-thirds the income of their male counterparts – Trump's war against women would radically increase their financial hardships, particularly when combined with his intended elimination of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and any other remnants of the New Deal welfare system. The resultant desperation, particularly amongst single mothers, would enable ever-more-predatory bosses to lower women's wages even more – probably below legal minimums – enabling the capitalists to extract that much additional profit.

Lastly, Trump's war against women is prompted by the patriarchal male's inbred belief that not only feminist activism but female independence or even achievement beyond the domains of kitchen and nursery is tantamount to slave rebellion.

It is no exaggeration to say such a male envisions the world as a macrocosm of the Roman coliseum. He views all other humans, regardless of their genders, as competitors and therefore enemies. With the miasma of fear and hatred that is the core of his consciousness confirmed by Abrahamic scripture and bolstered by Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Hitler's Mein Kampf, he sees life as a choice between success or damnation and lives in constant terror he might be condemned by predestination to the latter.

Nothing threatens his perpetually insecure ego more than the woman who demonstrates equal or superior competence in realms that were hitherto exclusively male domains. There is also what should be termed clitoris envy, the psychological reality behind Sigmund Freud's concept of “penis envy,” in truth the projection-onto-women of the patriarchal male's resentment of multi-orgasmic femaleness and its associated sensuality of body and mind.

The fact many gay and transsexual males now openly admit their envy of female sexual organs, multi-orgasmic sexuality and unique sensual capacity  is obviously yet another reason they too are on the “grab-em-by-the-pussy” regime's enemies list.

Barbara Mor again, citing “Visions of a New Faith,” Mary Long's report in Science Digest 89, November 1981, on work by James Prescott, neuropsychologist at the Institute of Humanistic Science, Los Gatos, California: “Contemporary researchers have found neurological connections between religious or trance experience and female sexuality. In women's brains there are unique neural links between the forebrain and the cerebellum, which allow sensations of physical pleasure to be directly integrated into the cortex, or high brain center. This explains why some women experience orgasm so intense they enter “religious” trance, or altered states of consciousness” (page 53).

Sex as sacrament, as connection to the deepest self and what might lie beyond it? Women as Nature's anointed gurus? God – that is, the Abrahamic god – forbid!

Even more terrifying to the patriarchal male is the possibility the same definitively female mind-body connection uniquely qualifies women to synthesize theory with biological and socioeconomic reality and thus to function as our species' most effective revolutionary cadre. Remember it was women – specifically the women of Petrograd's Lesnoy Textile Works – who triggered the Russian Revolution.

Ultimately Trump and his JesuNazi allies target women because the more learned theocrats correctly recognize that what today is labeled “progressive” culture is profoundly anti-patriarchal, whether implicitly or explicitly. As a Socialist Worker essay stated in 1992, “It was clear that, without control over their own reproductive lives, women couldn't be the equals of men – no matter what advances women made in the job market or in higher education.”

Thus the advent of reliable birth control is not just the origin of women's liberation but, far more importantly, it is the epicenter of the entire era of anti-patriarchal progress that resulted from female independence and the vital addition of independent female perspective to the national political dialogue. Thus too Trump's efforts to expand the prohibitions against contraception and abortion – especially if combined with outlawing any sexual identity or expression outside traditional male-female heterosexual marriage – could forever erase that era's accomplishments.

Ironically, just as the Trump Regime demonstrates every day, the enemies of democracy seemingly understand better than its advocates that without economic democracy, there is no democracy at all.

Unfortunately, our enemies also understand that neither is there any freedom without female reproductive freedom – the total elimination of which is the real motive behind the Trump/JesuNazi war against women.

If the JesuNazis succeed, USian women and girls are doomed to rediscover all the oppressive agonies, genital mutilation included, traditionally inflicted by unrestricted patriarchal hatefulness and sadism – not just in the Middle East but in Europe and the Americas.

***

THE FRAGILITY OF anti-patriarchal culture – the very culture Trump and his cabal of  biblical capitalists intend to wipe out – is vividly illustrated by the lives of two women in Afghanistan, a mother who came of age in secular/socialist Kabul and her daughter who has grown up under the misogynistic Abrahamic savagery facilitated by the lavish funding provided Afghanistan's Muslim fanatics by U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his successors.

Albeit without jihad's characteristic reign of murder and torture, the same fragility is demonstrated by the death of the 1960s Counterculture – the first wave of the anti-patriarchal revolution – in the United States. Labeled “a revolution in consciousness” by the late Walter Bowart, the founding editor of the East Village Other, the Counterculture was indeed revolutionary.  But its revolution was cultural, based on hope rather than ideology, which made it easy prey for our capitalist overlords, precisely as demonstrated by how it was suppressed, co-opted, absorbed, commercialized and finally misrepresented as little more than an extended tantrum by over-indulged Baby Boomers.

The Ruling Class, however, took the Counterculture much more seriously than it publicly acknowledged: hence the blueprint for fascism contained in the Powell Memo, a confidential memorandum dated 23 August 1971 that has been the bible of the One Percent and their vassals ever since.

Reading the memo, we see the Trump presidency is not an accident. It is instead the logical product of malevolent but often mutually hostile forces that have been at work in this country since the Bankers' Plot of 1934 unsuccessfully sought to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, topple his New Deal and make the United States the new dominant partner in the Nazi Germany/Fascist Italy alliance.

But it was Powell – responding to the correctly perceived threat the revolution in consciousness might birth a truly revolutionary ideology and thus evolve into economic and political revolution – who united the squabbling factions of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage into the ideologically disciplined, diabolically cunning fascist cabal that has lorded it over us ever since.

While I have yet to see objective proof Trump was from the beginning the One Percent's choice for the presidency, logic and circumstantial evidence allows me no other conclusion. The tweet-by-tweet coverage granted him by the One Percent's (“mainstream”) media – the world's first privately owned, for-profit ministry of propaganda – has no precedent in USian journalistic history, particularly when compared to the near-total news blackout that killed Sen. Sanders' campaign.

In my day, when real journalism was still the national norm, we covered a presidential election on the basis of its candidates' positions on the relevant issues and the popularity of those positions amongst the electorate. Whomever was leading in the polls therefore generally got the most detailed coverage, though we also took special care not to downplay the underdog.

But in 2016, an entirely different set of standards was in play – standards utterly alien to me as a former reporter and editor.

The news value of the Sanders story – how his critique of the status quo was making him 2016's most popular presidential candidate – was rejected. Its rightful place on Page One (and given its historical significance, often as the lead story), was instead given over to Trump's bellicose buffoonery.

It was as if our national denouement had been prophesied by Shakespeare: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” – this to soothe a 99 Percent boiling with definitively pre-revolutionary anger.

What I believe obtained – though it will no doubt take WikiLeaks' best efforts to ferret out the proof – is just as Powell feared the political potential of the Counterculture, so do today's One Percenters fear the far-more-immediately revolutionary potential of the public's anger. Thus they chose Trump as the shortest possible path to the manifest Nazism they need to expeditiously eliminate any individual or group who might provide revolutionary leadership. With Hillary's campaign as a diversionary effort, Trump's victory was from the beginning the One Percent's intended coup de main.

Why else would mainstream media – the One Percenters' most micro-managed monopoly – have given Trump such inexplicably lavish coverage?

In any case we the people have been ambushed as never before in our species' history – an epic betrayal in which the Democratic (sic) Party and the Republican Party are co-conspirators: once more the terrible relevance of Sharlett's revelations in The Family.

***

WITH TRUMP'S FELONIZATION of peaceful protest plus openly theocratic majorities in control of both houses of Congress, there is no longer any recognizable barrier to their despotism.

Many will reply that peaceful protest is a constitutional right, which indeed it is. But like Bush, Obama and in fact every president since 22 November 1963, Trump regards the Constitution as meaningless. And unlike his predecessors, he intends to express his contempt for its Bill of Rights by maximizing his persecutions of dissidents, an embittering truth proven by the felony charges filed against journalists who were jailed for trying to cover the inauguration protests.

Short of suppressing protest and the coverage of protest with deadly gunfire, I can think of no more effective discouragement than the prospect of felony prosecution. A felony charge – even if it results in acquittal – literally destroys one's life forever.

Unless one is obscenely wealthy, the six-figure cost of defense lawyers typically inflicts bankruptcy, and the mere fact of the charge – again assuming acquittal (and unless one is either extremely privileged or astoundingly fortunate) – forever afterward dooms one to a hopelessly wretched existence of minimum-wage jobs and dependence on the few remaining governmental stipends and services Trump will soon genocidally abolish.

I know of what I speak because in a journalism career that began in 1956 and is now winding down as I slowly die of congestive heart failure, I often witnessed such circumstances. Indeed my own newspaper career was forever crippled by a Civil-Rights-Movement-related misdemeanor arrest in 1963, never mind I was acquitted, as were all the others so charged.

Where political crimes are concerned, this has never been a forgiving nation – the deceitful propaganda of the Bernadine Dohrn/Bill Ayres example not withstanding – and now under Trump's reign as neo-Führer, the U.S. threatens to become more effectively vengeful against dissidents than ever before in its history.

This is not to argue against peaceful resistance. It is, however, a warning to resistors to be aware of the malevolently escalated cost of resistance. The Trump Regime is now penalizing peaceful protest as if it were violent protest – using the powers given it for that very purpose by the Clinton, Bush II and Obama regimes.

In terms of irremediable psychological devastation, there is no difference between 10 years in prison (as the journalists arrested in Washington DC now face ) and a lifetime prison sentence – an absolute truth if one is male, does not have the protection provided by membership in a criminal organization, and is therefore the constant prey of rapists and bullies.

As President John Fitzgerald Kennedy so eloquently observed, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Obviously the Trump Regime's intent is to provoke such violence, then seize upon it as a rationale for declaring war against all its opponents and in all probability murdering most if not all opposition leadership.

That “protest is death” is precisely the message delivered by the emplacement of two Avenger missile launchers  at Standing Rock, where the savagery of soldiers, mercenaries and federally militarized police is most likely to provoke a violent response. The Avenger  is the Empire's modern-day version of the Red Army's deadly Katyusha,  which is still honored in modern Russia as a key weapon in the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany.

But would USian troops fire rockets at their unarmed fellow citizens?

One of the other posters in the CommonDreams discussion linked in the prefatory note answered the question:

“I was speaking, over the holidays, to my College Student Nephew's friend, a nice young fellow, who is now in the Armed Forces,” she wrote. “I privately asked him if, given the order, would he fire on his Fellow Citizens.”

“His answer was a shrug, and the explanation 'You gotta do what they tell you.'”

That's what we're facing. Obviously, Trump's war against women is just the opening volley in a political purge the intensity of which this nation has never experienced. And how effectively we respond will determine not only the future of the United States of America, but most likely the futures all the nations of the world – and the future of our own species as well.

LB: 1-7 February 2017

-30-

A Not-So-Fond Farwell to Reader Supported News

Occupy Tacoma's last demonstration, May Day 2012. Click image to view it full size. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2012.

*

WHAT FOLLOWS IS one of those stories I never imagined I would write – a report about an event I never imagined could happen.

When I first encountered Reader Supported News, probably sometime in 2010, it seemed a welcoming haven of uncensored reportage and vital, intelligently expressed dialogue. Hence I soon became something of a regular contributor to its comment threads, and in October 2011, after e-correspondence with owner Marc Ash, I volunteered to cover Occupy Tacoma for the site. I provided both text and pictures – the latter at considerable personal expense because in those days I was still shooting film (mostly in a beloved pair of Leica M4s) – but I no longer had my own darkroom and was therefore dependent on commercial processing.

An Occupy Tacoma activist from the local group's beginning, I stayed with its story until the entire Occupy Movement was crushed the following spring.

I made the picture above, one of my final Occupy Tacoma frames, on May Day 2012. It was as telling an end-shot as any photo-essay-concluding image I've ever made, but it was my one Occupy submission RSN owner Marc Ash declined to run. And in light of subsequent events I cannot but wonder if that was my first taste of his own peculiar brand of censorship, for in the accompanying text, as in many subsequent comment-thread posts, I violated the politically correct taboo against telling Occupy's most embittering core truth – that the movement was as much a victim of its own pseudo-anarchistic anti-intellectualism as it was prey to brutal oppression by the new Gestapo of the Empire's federalized, militarized local police. Apparently Ash considered this alleged heresy to be allowable in a comment thread, but verboten in the more formal medium of a photographically illustrated news report.

Though it is perhaps an aside, I should disclose here that since my teenage years I have been aware, sometimes rather painfully, of the deadly danger of USian anti-intellectualism – the methodically conditioned, socioeconomically fatal mental paralysis first inflicted by capitalism's postwar purge  of Communists, socialists and New Deal Democrats, later by its relentless escalation  to marginalize or silence any politician, journalist or academic who dared show even minimal humanitarian tendencies. But I was shocked to discover, via Occupy, just how thoroughly much of the younger USian population – particularly those who, despite their self-proclaimed  anarchism,  have never heard of Bakunin  or Kropotkin  – has been so irremediably conditioned.

While people who have never before been allowed the opportunity to think and learn often become superior students – that is one of the more obvious lessons of the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions – those who have been taught to despise knowledge and to fear thinking are definitively unteachable. Such is the dreadful rationale behind Moron Nation and the process of dumbing down – of “moronation” – that has reduced the citizenry of the United States to the most notoriously ignorant population in the developed world. Induced ignorance policed by anti-intellectualism is capitalism's ultimate – and ultimately impregnable – defense.

***

IN EARLY 2013, when 15 Now Tacoma emerged from Occupy Tacoma's ashes to rally for a $15-per-hour minimum wage inside Tacoma, which is Washington state's second largest seaport and the third busiest seaport on the West Coast, I volunteered to cover that story for RSN too. But Ash never replied to my inquiries. At the time, early 2013, I assumed Ash dismissed the Tacoma campaign as too local to be nationally relevant and that in any case he was too busy to respond. As for me, I remained a 15 Now activist through the fall of 2014, when health problems – the geriatric afflictions of old age – forced me to drop out.

Eventually the Tacoma electorate, perhaps 65 percent of which has been reduced to official low-income status, was terrorized into semi-submission by Ruling Class threats of retaliatory job losses and thus in November 2015 voted against itself and $15 Now but approved “$12 Later” – a minimum-wage hike begrudgingly proposed by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, added to the ballot by the chamber's Tacoma City Council vassals, and now to be staged in over four years. Again Ash seemed uninterested in the story, and again I assumed it was merely the situation I myself had experienced countless times as a member of the working press, particularly as the news editor (1968-1969) of The Daily Record in Morristown, N.J. – too many stories, not enough news hole i.e. editorial space.

But then last summer, Ash threw all his weight behind the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Of necessity given Hillary's arrogance, lies, corruption and most especially her Goldwater Girl ambition to be the first-ever conquer of Russia and therefore the personification of thermonuclear apocalypse, Ash began noticeably shifting the content of his website. Not only did he deliberately exclude reports critical of Hillary and her Democratic (sic) Party. He also began relying more and more on the material disseminated by the so-called “mainstream media.”

Owned as it is by the same One Percenters who own USian government at all levels, this “mainstream media” is in fact the world's first privately owned, for-profit, Josef-Goebbels-type ministry of propaganda.

Not surprisingly I began to wonder if Ash's rejections of my final Occupy story and all my post-Occupy story suggestions are more than mere journalistic coincidence – if indeed they are perhaps reflective of the same “neo-liberal” (aka fascist) anti-99-Percent bias that in the past year has become one of the ideological cornerstones not just of of present-day Democratic (sic) Party but of RSN as well.

***

THE CHINESE WARMASTER Sun Tzu observed 2,500 years ago that “all warfare is based on deception.” This is never more true than in class warfare which – because it is ultimately a fight to the death to determine who will be the predators and who will be their victims – is the most mercilessly vicious warfare of all time. Both sides employ tactics derived from strategies of deception. One such tactic, used by a tyrannical ruling class to identify, concentrate and neutralize its opponents, is to organize those opponents into false opposition movements.

Perhaps its ultimate example, pioneered by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, is Father Gapon's  Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg. As Lev Bronstein aka Leon Trotsky famously remarked, “in every gathering of three or more revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” Likewise, the post-World-War-II Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was rumored to contain more agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the main USian secret police agency, than actual Communists. Since then, the creation of fake revolutionary cells and the subsequent arrest of their members has become a primary USian secret police tactic. 

The practice of today's Democratic (sic) Party – spouting humanitarian rhetoric like “change we can believe in” while imposing genocidal cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and other socioeconomic services – is another tactic formulated from the same strategy of deception.

To be absolutely clear, I am not – say again NOT – accusing Ash of being a latter-day Father Gapon. But I am saying there's enough of a parallel between Gapon's betrayal of the Petrograd proletariat and RSN's abandonment of and increasing hostility toward the 99 Percent and their (our) hard-Left, invariably socialist, often Marxian advocates to prompt three pointed questions: (1)- When did RSN's now-undeniable alliance with the Hillaryite Democratic (sic) Party begin; (2)-What financial benefits, if any, has RSN received as a result; and (3)-Has RSN offering its services to, or has it been hired by, one or more of the USian secret police agencies as a Left-magnet – that is, a Gaponishka mechanism for identifying, cataloging and perhaps eventually disappearing those us who are genuinely committed to resisting capitalist savagery.

***

RSN PUBLISHED SCOTT Galindez's “Our Opportunity in 2017” on 11 January.  Another of Galindez's fanatically anti-Trump, implicitly pro-Hillary diatribes, the following quotes are taken directly from its text:

“The political revolution must be ready to... transform the Democratic Party...we have to defend progressive gains we’ve made over several decades...I don't believe all Trump supporters are racist, sexist bigots...Trump did convince working-class voters in the Rust Belt that he would bring back the factory jobs that bad trade deals drove out of the country. We have to win those voters back...We have to offer them an alternative that benefits their families. Every time Trump makes a move that threatens the quality of life of working people and the poor, we need to fight hard to stop him. Those fights are opportunities for us to reach new communities...we also must continue to fight for people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women. We don't want Donald Trump's America. We have come too far to let fearmongering take us backward.”

Like all effective wartime propaganda, Galindez's text is a seductive mixture of truth and falsehoods. The latter, designated above and below by bold italic, are glaring Big Lies. Given how the so-called “Reagan Democrats” embraced code-word Republicanism as an expression of their bigotry – the same hatefulness demonstrated by the 77 percent of white USians who refused to acknowledge the murderous racism in the Bush Regime's abandonment  of post-Katrina New Orleans – there is no possible way to win those voters back, not even by an alternative that benefits their families. Among the irrefutable lessons of my nearly 77 years, 56 of which have been in journalism of one form or another, is that white racism and/or homophobia trumps all other considerations – no pun intended.

Because the Democratic (sic) Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, the notion any political revolution can transform the Democratic Party is not only a lie but a contradiction in terms – like arguing Nazism could have cured Germany of Antisemitism or the Ku Klux Klan could end USian racism.

Apart from a few identity-politics victories – pseudo-triumphs allowed only because they destroy the class solidarity essential to the struggle for economic democracy and therefore clandestinely serve our capitalist overlords – there have been absolutely no progressive gains...made over several decades. Galindez's claim is thus a picture-perfect example of the verbal sleight-of-hand by which he tries to conceal the Democratic (sic) Party's post-JFK history as the nation's chief betrayer of the 99 Percent. The last “progressive gain” was the U.S. Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Since then there have been naught but defeats. Many of these debacles are deadly, as in the ruinously impoverishing (and therefore life-shortening) destruction of labor unions or the huge loss of reproductive health care. (The latter is the result of JesuNazi violence, murder included, that is tolerated by Democrats and encouraged by Republicans. As of last year it has left approximately 90 percent of the nation's counties – homes to about 40 percent of the nation's reproductive-age women – without abortion facilities.)

United in the tyranny of ever-more-obviously Nazified capitalist governance, the two parties are in fact a single Ruling Class entity that functions as a good-cop/bad-cop enforcement team. Thus Galindez's claim we (presumably the Democratic [sic] Party) also must continue to fight for people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women is deception of the first order; see for example The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Governance (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008), particularly pages 272-277. A vital companion-book – especially now that Trump's victory has given the JesuNazis absolute power, is American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Simon & Schuster: 2006); see also The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein; Henry Holt and Company: 2007), most notably chapters 14 and 15. In truth the Democrats have been openly waging genocidal war on minority communities since President Bill Clinton's welfare-cutoff and mass-arrest laws were enacted during the 1990s. The Democratic (sic) Party's begrudging support for gay marriage climaxed years of outspoken opposition, and women – supposedly a favored Democratic (sic) constituency – were shafted both by Obama's sneaky gift to the anti-birth-control Christian fanatics and by his massive cuts in food stamps,  its victims including millions of single-mother families.

Moreover there is the now-obvious impermanence of the identity-politics wins – especially since the Trump Regime intends to wage war against gay rights and to re-impose nationwide zero-tolerance marijuana prohibition by mass internments, first in the states where marijuana is legalized or decriminalized, with fatally long federal prison sentences for anyone who survives arrest and is so convicted. Thus Galindez's we have come too far is an especially egregious Big Lie, an attempt to hide the hideous truth we have been – and indeed are being – thrust so far backward, no recovery may be possible.

There is no question we have been in a Dark Age for many years – I would say at least since the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963, maybe since the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. There is now no question it is about to get infinitely darker under Trump, just as it would have, albeit in different and perhaps more universally fatal ways, under Hillary. And history tells us such dark ages typically last 500 years or more – eternity for those who are born and die amidst the darkness.

***

IT WAS IN response to the shameless lies and deceptions asserted by “Our Opportunity in 2017” I fired off a comment-thread post in which I respectfully addressed Galindez as “Mr. Galindez” – a courtesy I always observe in such circumstances whether my reaction is positive or negative – and took him to task for his dishonesty.

I opened with the statement that transformation of the Democratic (sic) Party into a revolutionary organization was no more possible than the transformation of black widow spiders into household pets. I probably noted, much as I did above, that Galindez's ever-more-obvious support for identity politics was not only collaboration  with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, but perpetuated the capitalist governance that had reduced the future of the Empire (and therefore the future of humanity and the planet) to a choice between two Hitlers: Hillary Hitler, who intended to try to conquer Russia via World War III, and Donald Hitler, who intended a new Holocaust as his Final Solution to the Empire's problems with minorities, women and poverty. I ended by pointing out that in such revolutionary times as these, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution, and Mr. Galindez's ideology clearly identified him as belonging to the former category.

Unfortunately my exact wording is lost because I did not save the comment as a word document. I had no reason to believe Ash would suppress it. But suppress it he did. And when I asked that my text be returned, he first ignored my request, than said returning it was impossible. Here is the resultant e-correspondence:

On 12-Jan-17 08:31, Marc Ash wrote:

Loren, Sorry man but we are tired of the personal attacks on our authors. Did not approve you comment condemning Scott. Sorry.

m

On 12-Jan -17 09:11 Loren Bliss wrote:

Mr. Ashe:

Firstly, please do me the courtesy of returning to me the text of what will be my last-ever attempt to comment via Reader Supported News. That comment was not a “personal attack"; it was legitimate criticism that has obviously been suppressed for its (bluntly truthful) response to Mr. Galindez's efforts as a Democratic (sic) Party identity-politics ideologue and therefore his (seemingly) inadvertent role as one of the facilitators of Trump's no-doubt-permanent transformation of the United States into a Nazi nation.

Actually the censored post was relatively restrained as I did not point out that Mr. Galindez's claim "we have to defend progressive gains we’ve made over several decades" is nearly as slick a Democratic (sic) Party Big Lie as "change we can believe in." Apart from one economically meaningless identity-politics victory, there have been no "progressive gains" in this country since the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Indeed the reverse is true: since 1973 there have been naught but skyrocketing progressive losses. Thus Mr. Galindez's claim is but another example of the Democrats' wantonly dishonest rewriting of history to sustain the especially egregious Big Lie the Democrats represent and/or defend progressive values.

In this context, that you would suppress any rebuttal of Mr. Galindez's falsehoods thus unmistakably redefines RSN's purpose, from its hitherto-professed function of speaking truth to power to its now painfully obvious goal of serving the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals by dissemination of the lies and maintenance of the charades -- including those of Gapon-type pseudo-opposition -- deemed essential to the expansion of capitalist governance, i.e., the uniquely USian brand of Nazism now emergent.

Secondly, and very regretfully, your imposition of censorship makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion you and RSN have become a Democratic (sic) Party asset and therefore too an asset of one or more of the nation's 17 secret police agencies. Thus RSN demonstrates an ever-more-obvious similarity to the functions of Father Gapon and his movement on behalf the Okhrana in Tsarist Russia. Thus too, the only valid question is no longer whether RSN so serves but for how long it has been so serving. As I said in the post you suppressed, in revolutionary times such as these, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution; though the extent of your cooperation with the secret police remains unknown, by your defense of the fascism-facilitating Democratic (sic) Party, you and RSN obviously fall into the former category.

Thirdly, given these givens – particularly your decision to escalate your pseudo-progressive facilitation of fascism – I can no longer in good conscience attempt to contribute to your website, particularly now it is obvious you will suppress any genuine dissent.

Please in this context and for future reference be advised I own the copyrights to the Occupy Tacoma photography I contributed to RSN c. 2011-2012 and will, through my ongoing membership in the National Writers Union, promptly take action against any violations thereof.

I am sorry this ends as it does. Though I am not surprised. I have yet to meet a bourgeois self-proclaimed "progressive" who is not invariably more faithful to the bourgeois ethos and is therefore ultimately a (typical) betrayer of genuinely progressive values.

Loren Bliss

On 12-Jan-17 09:45, Marc Ash wrote:

Mr. Bliss,

With all due respect, I’ve known Scott Galindez for 17 years. He is one of the most dedicated grass-roots organizers I have ever met. He has been arrested for going over the White House fence in a peace demonstration. He always defends the weak and the poor and he’s is not afraid to pay the price for doing it. Scott was at Vandenberg in 2002, NY in 2004, Crawford Texas in 2006. And a host of other places most so called activists will never go.

Enough is enough.

Marc Ash,
Founder Reader Supported News

On 12-Jan-17 12:19, Loren Bliss wrote:

Mr. Ashe:

As I requested in my last, please return to me the text of the suppressed post.

Thank you,
Loren Bliss

On 12-Jan-17 12:34, Marc Ash wrote:

My last name is spelled “Ash.”

The post was deleted by one of our admins. So we don’t have a copy.

Marc Ash,
Founder Reader Supported News

On 12-Jan-17 13:20, Loren Bliss wrote:

My apology for the misspelling. My fault entirely, particularly since
your name is spelled correctly in my address book. Had no intention of making an Ashe of you, nor for that matter of myself.

Obviously I did not bother to note that no matter how many nationwide demonstrations Galindez might have participated in, it excused neither his identity politics nor the divisiveness so evoked. Nor did I note the obvious wealth – including the equally obvious question about its origins – that granted Galindez seemingly far greater mobility then the late, genuinely saintly Father William J. Bichsel S.J.,  a fellow alumnus of the Knox County Jail.

In this context I find it extremely interesting that Galindez seemingly shares not just Hillary's Democratic (sic) Party ideology; like Hillary, he also has Goldwater roots. Quoth RSN: “Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice...”

And then there is what the hatefully Hillaryite RSN poster screen-named Robbee said at 22:06 on 13 January 2017 in response to librarian 1984, one of the site's most knowledgeably articulate posters:

Quoth librarian:

I request that RSN put a picture of a soothing landscape or mischievous kittens at the head of a Hayden article or, better yet, don't run any more. I have a visceral urge to regurgitate on seeing this repulsive individual.

Quoth Robbee:

we'll look into it!
while you're at it? any more requests?

Apparently Robbee – continuously red-thumbed as perhaps the most obnoxiously unreadable Hillaryite troll ever to invade RSN – is now one of Ash's censors. Robbee's emergence as a site authority plus Ash's viciously McCarthyite attack  on investigative reporters Glenn Greenwald, Robert Parry and Ray McGovern, all of whom Ash attempts to smear as “Trump's enablers,” makes it obvious I'm well out of there. I'll miss the former RSN dialogue – especially with Radscal, economagic and librarian 1984 – but just as Ash said so dismissively to me, “enough is enough.”

LB/15 January 2016

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