Thoughts on Ukraine, Gentrification, White Racism

NO ORIGINAL ESSAY specifically for OAN this week because I'm working on what I hope will be next week's lead story.

Meanwhile I'm still groping toward a satisfactory format for links to material on other websites. So here are my “in-case-you-missed-it” picks from last week's work by other journalists, with my own Outside Agitation on the comment threads as indicated. 

First of course are dispatches about the ongoing USian attempts to inflame the Ukraine Crisis into World War III, again our lead story because the outcome of the crisis may determine whether we have any future at all.

“Clashes Spread Across Eastern Ukraine As Russia Begins Military Drills on Border”By William Booth and Michael Birnbaum of The Washington Post. This Ruling Class propagantorial piece provoked a discussion thread about why the USian Empire “always” supports Nazism. My contribution was a short summary of modern history:

When the U.S. One Percent welcomed all the Nazi war criminals after World War II, the Nazis made no secret of their intent – to use U.S. resources to spread Nazi ideology (hence "U.S. exceptionalism") and eventually to use U.S. wealth and military power to create a Fourth Reich.

That's what fostered Pinochet, what drove the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and what's fostering the Ukraine Crisis, where the neo-Nazi presence is NOT an accident. That's also why the Russians are so (rightfully) alarmed.

Most of all, it's why this crisis is far more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis...The One Percent clearly wants war...Furthermore, with the One Percenters believing they will be safe in their obscenely posh bunkers, they no doubt see war as the best way to suppress the rising anti-capitalist dissent and exterminate all us "takers" – We the People who are unemployed, elderly, disabled and/or members of ever-more-openly oppressed minorities.

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“Beneath the Ukraine Crisis: Shale Gas” Nat Parry of Consortium News reveals how USian aggression is (again) motivated by the quest for fossil fuel.

Though I contributed a bit of Outside Agitation to the associated discussion thread, my remarks were more relevant to the thread than to the article itself, hence my decision not to repeat them here. That said, note the unusual spelling of Parry's family name; could Nat be kin to Robert Parry, also of Consortium News? The latter Parry's reporting on the Ukraine Crisis is without peer, but this piece too is filled with vital information.

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In the fall of 1974 the jazz pianist and chanteuse Melinda Mohn told me of a dream that had deeply disturbed her. She had been hired to perform at a nightclub in Seattle, but first she had to obtain a “city pass” – an official document that instructed the armed guards to let her past the concertina wire and minefields and through the gates in the high stone medieval-fortress-like wall and finally into the city itself. Some sort of apocalypse had occurred, she said, and now in her dreamtime all cities were reserved for the Ruling Class of the neo-feudal realms that had replaced the United States. And Melinda, like any housemaid or nanny or secretary or janitor or scribe or teacher or other worker who served the aristocracy, now had to ensure her papers were in order before she was allowed into the main baronial compound of the Puget Sound region.

What made the dream a nightmare, she said, was its Catch-22 element: not only was she required to have a pass to enter the city so she could sing for the pay she needed to save herself from starvation; she also had to find some way to first enter the city without a pass in order to apply for the requisite pass, and she did not have enough money to bribe the guards...

I do not remember how the dream resolved itself; I remember only it had troubled Melinda to tears, and as I told her at the time, I strongly suspected it was prophetic. Now I know it was. “The Bleaching of San Francisco: Extreme Gentrification and Suburbanized Poverty in the Bay Area,” by Adam Hudson of Truthout, describes how the cities are becoming bastions of the One Percent and the Ruling Class in general:

“Taken together, what's going on in San Francisco is deeper than just a fight between well-to-do tech workers and longtime San Francisco residents. San Francisco is microcosm of what's going on in metropolitan areas around the world. From San Francisco to New York City to London, urban areas are being redesigned into playgrounds for the very rich. The poor, working and almost-nonexistent middle-class people who can't afford to live in these rich Elysiums are forced to live farther away, with few resources to support themselves. By pushing poor and working-class people to the suburbs, gentrification...reconfigures the geographic lines of racial and economic inequality, granting improvements to the lives of the moneyed classes, at the expense of the needs - and sometimes, even the survival - of everyone else.”

Myself a victim of gentrification – that's what forced me out of Manhattan – I too can attest to the miserable consequences of exile to wretched locales, likewise to the bumpkin viciousness one all too often encounters in such places.

One of the realms on my involuntary post-NYC itinerary was a rural area ruled by zero-tolerance Christian fanatics who believed my non-attendance at church, my organic gardening practices and my two very large black dogs identified me as a witch. These prosperity-gospel vigilantes harassed me mercilessly for nearly three years. They trampled my vegetables, flattened my tires, flung rocks onto my roof at midnight, wired newly-slain kittens to my car door and finally poisoned one of my dogs. After the dog recovered, I let it be known via the local grapevine I was not only armed, but a military veteran demonstrably skilled at marksmanship, after which the harassment stopped.

The last destination on my dismal itinerary of exile was the city of Tacoma, where it seems I will live out the remainder of my life. Like Seattle, Tacoma is a major seaport on Puget Sound, and according to the prevalent Big Lie, the regional mindset is “progressive” and “green.” But beneath that shallow facade is a bottomless miasma of reactionary hypocrisy. Though Tacoma and Seattle certainly contain pockets of genuinely enlightened voters – note the Seattle election of Kshama Sawant – the Puget Sound norm is increasingly set by suburbanites who are as maliciously xenophobic as any Ku Klux Southerner. The resultant trend toward ever-more-unabashed fascism has already paralyzed the state government, and the next election or two will no doubt put it solidly under Rightist control.

Meanwhile – the ultimate proof of the region's environmental hypocrisy – it has a 46-year record of nastily opposing mass transit, a scorecard of negativity that has no counterpart anywhere in the notoriously anti-transit United States.

Even in the region's cities, the voters cling to their automobiles with a stubborn vindictiveness that routinely spawns hate-campaigns against the growing numbers of us – all victims of capitalism – for whom mass transit is the only affordable mode of travel.

The local One Percenters want us gone. They say we lower their property values and stink up their neighborhoods. Their newest and most successful gentrification tactic is now to denounce publicly-subsidized transit as “welfare,” an angry buzzword that prompts the reliably racist, reliably Ayn-Rand-minded electorate to react accordingly: to demand the privatization of transit (thereby making it unaffordable to “undesirables”), and to vote at every opportunity to dismantle public transit systems throughout the region, exactly as occurred last week in and around Seattle.

(Despite my obviously-strong feelings on this topic, I added no Outside Agitation to the associated thread because – having been outrageously censored under Truthout's anything-to-protect-Obama election-year policy – I no longer dare post there.)

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At last the small but increasingly effective USian Real Left is beginning to recognize the harsh truth reportedly asserted in KGB analyses of the rebelliousness that characterized the U.S. in the 1960s: that while the nation's minorities possessed genuine revolutionary potential, the mostly white New Left was scarcely more than a fad.

According to Canadian media reports during the early 1990s – at least one of these appeared in MacLean's Magazine, but I can find no links to it today – KGB analysts concluded the New Left of the '60s was too anti-intellectual to accept the need for disciplined ideological study, too bourgeois comfortable and Ayn-Rand selfish to repudiate capitalism, and above all else, too racist to accept leadership from its only genuinely revolutionary sources, which were within the African-American, Hispanic, Asiatic and First Nations communities.

Moreover, the New Left's individual members were deemed too ageist to accept input from the remnants of the Traditional Left and too arrogantly self-obsessed to build any solidarity with others apart from their own socioeconomic kindred.

Thus the Soviet spooks predicted the New Left would eventually abandon or betray its minority comrades, stop its lip-service assertions of humanitarian values and become a New Right as soon as the military draft was ended – a prediction confirmed to the letter by the post-Vietnam emergence of the so-called “me generation,”  the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the outcomes of all elections thereafter.

But now the collapse of the U.S.S.R. has freed the capitalists to disclose their infinite greed and innate savagery without fear of revolutionary reprisal. They have discarded their velvet gloves and donned their original jackboots. This has fostered the evolution – actually re-evolution – of a Real Left in the USian Homeland, which in turn has prompted renewed examination of USian racism, starting with acknowledgment we Caucasians are subtly but methodically inoculated from birth with racism's toxins, the ultimate barrier against 99 Percent solidarity.

Hence “The Unbearable Whiteness of the American Left,” a Nation essay by Gary Younge that was picked up by Reader Supported News and – like a pry-bar wielded in a long-abandoned house – brought the termites out in force.  Hence too my comment-thread response:

Mr. Younge is – if I may lapse into the parlance of my radical youth – right on. The problem is that we USian whites have been conditioned from birth to think of ourselves as the personification of “American exceptionalism” – that is, of the global master race.

Not only that; we've been conditioned so thoroughly and effectively, our USian-supremacist/white-supremacist (and therefore incipiently Nazi) attitudes have been planted so deeply in our subconscious minds, they are exceedingly difficult to uproot.

Such is the psychological reality of the Fourth Reich.

But the effort to transcend that conditioning – painful as it invariably is – must nevertheless be made. Otherwise, exactly as KGB studies reportedly said of U.S. revolutionary prospects during the 1960s, racism will always nullify our efforts toward solidarity.

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It needs be said there are two pseudo-Lefts in the U.S., also a much smaller Real Left:

The fad pseudo-Left is dominantly white and idiotically useful; it helps maintain the Big Lie of USian democracy. Its chief characteristics are the rowdiness, conformity and anti-intellectuality one finds in fraternity and sorority houses. Its members are pampered college and university students enjoying the political variant of Spring Break self-indulgence. Its exemplar is Jerry Rubin, who climaxed his “radical” activism by a career as a millionaire stock broker.

The bourgeois pseudo-Left is mostly wealthy, dominantly white and also idiotically useful. Its defining traits are its indifference to 99 Percent concerns, its “progressive” anti-unionism and its opposition to socialism and Marxism. It endorses “New Capitalism” – capitalism with its evils camouflaged by human-potentialist rhetoric. Its members include New Agers, Ayn Rand feminists (consumeroid consumption as women's liberation), most USian environmentalists (“green capitalism”), etc. ad nauseam. Its exemplars include Gloria Steinem and the One Percenter Bill Gates.

The Real Left, small but growing, acknowledges the struggles for equality, economic democracy and environmental protection as part of the historical truth of class war. It recognizes the relevance of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It strives toward maximum solidarity by embracing maximum diversity. Its exemplars include Kshama Sawant and Angela Davis.

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My final recommendation for the week, “Racism and Criminalization in the Media,” is a scathing exposé of “the hiding-in-plain-sight but never-discussed racism that characterizes the United States and the ways US media subtly sustain that racism.” By Truthout's Bethania Palma Markus, it is surely the most enlightening such reportage I have yet encountered – and I with a journalism career spanning a bit more than half a century. Again I added nothing to the associated thread, but in this instance there was nothing I could say – save kudos to Maya Schenwar for having the courage to publish Markus' work.

LB/27 April 2014

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