BECAUSE
THE CONSEQUENCES of U.S. aggression in Ukraine may well determine
whether our species lives or dies, its most disturbing chapter thus far –
the USian vassal-government's back-to-the-future renewal of Adolf
Hitler's Nazi-Jihadi alliance – leads this week's OAN though the story was broken on 7 July by Robert Parry via his Consortiumnews.com.
Astute readers will also note I added its link to last week's blog, replacing the earlier Ukraine report I had initially referenced.
But I did not comment at any length on the U.S. puppet regime's
resurrection of the Nazi-Jihadi alliance until Parry's newest disclosure
was republished by Reader Supported News the next day:
Both the Wehrmacht and the SS had specifically Muslim units.
Moreover,
the Mufti of Jerusalem – the Muslim equivalent of an archbishop or
cardinal – was the prime recruiter for these units. The present-day
politics of the Middle East cannot be understood without inclusion of
this historical fact.
By
forbidding the practice of Abrahamic religion (though not paganism or
shamanism), Communist governments whether in Yugoslavia or the Soviet
Union effectively outlawed the defining hatefulness of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. Centuries of religious violence were thereby
ended.
But the U.S., a de facto Christian Crusader-state (see Sharlett, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power), has always relied on religious hatreds to advance its schemes of global conquest.
Thus,
in addition to capitalism's abject fear of economic democracy, U.S.
hatred of Communism, socialism and intellectualism has always included
primary religious motives. To be Christian, for example, is not just to
"love your (Christian) neighbors," but to murderously hate everyone
else.
Had
the Soviet and Yugoslav governments lasted longer – say for perhaps
another century – the religious warfare that now again characterizes
Eastern Europe would have no doubt ended forever.
But the U.S., like Nazi Germany before it, could never abide such peacefulness.
*** *** ***
Greece as a Proving Ground for Militarization of U.S. Local Police
WRITING ABOUT THE recent, often tragic history of Greece, RSN's Steve Weissman touched, perhaps inadvertently, on an obscure but obvious connection
between the U.S.-organized military dictatorship that ruled Greece from
1967 through 1974 and the federally militarized local police who are
killing and terrorizing U.S. residents today.
Back in the closing days of World War II, wrote Weissman,
the British government of Winston Churchill moved brutally against the
Greek Communists, who had led the resistance to German and Italian
occupation. To oppose them, the Brits created Greek special
forces...which pointedly recruited fascists who had dominated the Greek
military and police ever since the 1930s...When the US declared its
Truman Doctrine in 1947, Washington took on London’s imperial role in
Greece and gave military backing to these same fascists...
In
other words, the USian Empire – now that its capitalist overlords have
reduced the U.S. Working Class to slave wages, perpetual unemployment
and ever-worsening poverty – is now employing the same deliberately
sadistic methods of control here in the homeland as it has hitherto
employed in its overseas satrapies and vassal-states. Hence the skyrocketing incidence of killings by cops. which, already at an all-time high, is beginning to disturb even the nominally pro-cop Right. (Scroll down to “The Post report seems to suggest...”).
Nevertheless, the white-black divide on attitudes toward police brutality remain one of the best indices to the magnitude of U.S. white racism, however carefully closeted it might be.
An earlier but equally accurate index is the refusal by fully four-fifths of the white population to acknowledge the blatant racism
that characterized government policies toward the victims of Hurricane
Katrina. (Scroll down to “As to the breadth and depth of white
racism...”)
*** *** ***
Republicans Fear Trump's Outspoken Racism Is Too Revealing
WHEN RSN REPUBLISHED a Washington Post story reporting the Republican Party inner circle is worried Donald Trump's outspokenness
is tarnishing their reputation, I could not resist the opportunity to
point out that Trump was merely revealing the ideological truth the
party usually hides behind a screen of code-words:
What
is really embarrassing the Republican Party is that Trump is appealing
to the same hatefully racist element in U.S. politics as Hitler appealed
to in German politics.
This
element in today's United States is huge and bottomlessly venomous –
much larger and more malevolent than the Ruling Class dares publicly
admit.
But
if Trump wins the Republican nomination – and if the Teabagger
grassroots retains control of the party apparatus, he surely will – the
GOP will no longer be able to deny the fact it became the primary U.S.
vessel of fascism during the 1920s and has remained so ever since.
Moreover, if Sanders manages to win the Democratic nomination, there is little question he will also take the presidency.
Candidate
Trump's Teabaggers – the modern equivalent of Hitler's stormtroopers –
would then almost certainly plunge the U.S. into a second civil war.
It
is this – the (again) growing threat from the militant Right – that is
finally awakening parts of the U.S. Left to the deadly danger implicit
in forcible civilian disarmament – the same lesson that mobilized the
Deacons for Defense at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
*** *** ***
Charleston Sparks (Some) Acknowledgment of U.S. Racism
IF
THE CHARLESTON atrocity prompts even a small segment of the white
majority population in the United States to acknowledge its
often-instinctive, culturally inbred racism, the deaths of the nine Charleston victims will not be squandered, as so many other such deaths have been, by the nation's subsequent history.
Let
us then say the names of the Charleston dead – Cynthia Marie Graham
Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney,
Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra
Thompson – for it is by such roll-calls of the slain that we the living
who did not personally know them when they themselves were alive might
now sense our kinship with them, our late brotherhood and sisterhood
implicit in the fact they like each of us each had their own experience
of self and world that is now lost forever. Quoth John Donne: ...therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Meanwhile,
the reality of U.S. racism remains painfully evident not just in the
South, the region that is conveniently scapegoated for what in truth is a
national phenomenon, but throughout the imperial homeland.
To
those of us who regardless of our color know how to recognize it, it is
especially obvious in the Pacific Northwest. For example, I cannot
readily count the number of times during the past 33 years I have
written of the white racism that underlies the maliciously inflicted and
deliberately maintained wretchedness of mass transit in Pugetopolis,
the colloquial name for the 5,872 square-mile (15,209 square kilometer)
metropolitan area of nearly 4 million persons that's centered on the
seaport cities of Seattle and Tacoma.
But
I do know that – until the post-Charleston now – any such disclosure by
any writer however accomplished was either suppressed or (if it somehow
managed to get into print) was immediately and harshly denounced as
untrue, never mind the obvious racism that repeatedly surfaced
during public debates over (usually unsuccessful) efforts to improve
mass transit. (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means
Wretched Mass Transit.”)
Proportionally
speaking – that is, in comparison to comparable metropolitan areas –
Pugetopolis has the worst, most deliberately inadequate mass transit in
the United States. Because the U.S. has the worst mass transit in the
industrial world, this makes Pugetopolis mass transit the worst of the
worst. Likewise, because the U.S. is the most outspokenly
anti-mass-transit nation in the world, Pugetopolis is therefore the most
anti-mass-transit (and anti-transit-user) realm on the entire planet.
Only in Pugetopolis is mass transit openly defined as “welfare,” a code-word that in the white racist vocabulary is merely a politically correct way of saying “used by niggers.”
But on 22 June, Knute Berger, a columnist for the Seattle on-line daily Crosscut, finally began chipping away at the taboo of silence
that has prevented the region's mainstream media from acknowledging the
800-pound gorilla – or, more appropriately, the Ku Klux Klan klavern –
that's right there in the Pugetopolis living room.
On 6 July, Crosscut Guest Columnist Christopher Eide took the process of acknowledgment a lot further by asking, “What about NW's shortcomings on race.”
Then on 7 June, Politico swooped in from Washington D.C. to scoop the world on a blistering exposé of regional racism
the mainstream Pugetpolis press has deliberately suppressed for years –
“Want to Meet America's Worst Racists? Come to the Pacific Northwest.”
Now reduced to playing catch-up, the next day Crosscut published Berger's much more detailed report
on Northwest Front and its call for forcible racial cleansing of the
entire Pacific Northwest: not just Washington state and Oregon, but also
Montana (and maybe Alaska and Idaho as well).
Berger's 8 July piece was so thorough it prompted me to applaud via its comment thread:
Well done, Mr. Berger, with kudos to you, Christoper Eide (6 July) and Crosscut
in general for at long last discarding the taboo against admission of
Pacific Northwest racism. Now let's hope (1)-someone (besides me) has
the journalistic courage to expose its direct connection to the wretched
state of Pugetopolis mass transit, and (2)-that such journalistic
bravery doesn't trigger an advertising boycott to kill Crosscut just as The Seattle Sun (1974-1982) and the original Seattle Magazine (1963-1970) were slain...
Given how the (hitherto-denied) racism of Pugetopolis has produced the transit crisis
that reveals the region's signature claim of environmental
enlightenment to be nothing more than a particularly breathtaking brand
of political hypocrisy, I cannot but wonder whether and to what extent
unacknowledged racism is the hidden determinant of all U.S.
environmental policy.
Meanwhile even Hillary Clinton now admits USian racism is a helluva lot more widespread than just “kooks and Klansmen.”
*** *** ***
BRYAN STEVENSON HAS described during an interview with The Marshall Project
an historically accurate how-and-why narrative of racism's economic
origins, linking it to both religion and class-struggle while
simultaneously explaining its malevolent persistence.
Here from an on-line text of the interview are some of the highlights of Stevenson's analysis:
The
whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of
slavery. It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel
comfortable with their ownership of other human beings. And we created a
narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and
even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including
people in the North...
Lots
of countries had slaves, but they were mostly societies with slaves. We
became something different, we became a slave society. We created a
narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery...so I don’t believe
slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades
of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced...
And
so we are very confused when we start talking about race in this
country because we think that things are “of the past” because we don’t
understand what these things really are, that narrative of racial
difference that was created during slavery that resulted in terrorism
and lynching, that humiliated, belittled and burdened African Americans
throughout most of the 20th century. The same narrative of racial
difference that got Michael Brown killed, got Eric Garner killed and got
Tamir Rice killed. That got these thousands of others — of African
Americans — wrongly accused, convicted and condemned. It is the same
narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions
of people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led
to the executions in Charleston...
Stevenson has also launched an initiative to mark where lynchings took place in the U.S., which is explained by another of his statements in the Marshall interview:
“You
can’t go to Germany, to Berlin, and walk 100 meters without seeing a
marker or a stone or a monument to mark the places where Jewish families
were abducted from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,”
said Stevenson in an. “Four thousand African Americans were lynched
between 1870 and WWII and none of us know anything about it. We don’t
mark these places where these lynchings took place. Most of them took
place on courthouse lawns that are now adorned with monuments to the
Confederacy.”
Perhaps
I am being overly optimistic, but I believe Stevenson has given us the
core ingredients for a desperately needed antidote to the racist toxins
with which we whites are so relentlessly poisoned – particularly by
constant repetition of propaganda that deliberately omits from our
official national histories any discussion of racism's Machiavellian,
pre-Nazi, pre-Orwellian and most definitively capitalist origins.
*** *** ***
Surprise -- Supremes Rule against Economic Segregation
NOTING
TODAY'S U.S. is ever more segregated by income, Robert Reich says a
Supreme Court decision – its impact unfortunately obscured by the
mainstream media's focus on the marriage equality and health care
rulings – has substantially bolstered our protections against discrimination.
In a 5-4 ruling, Reich reported, the Court found
that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 requires plaintiffs to show only that
the effect of a policy is discriminatory, not that defendants intended
to discriminate....The decision is likely to affect everything from bank
lending practices whose effect is to harm low-income non-white
borrowers, to zoning laws that favor higher-income white homebuyers.
This from the court that with its Citizens United judgment knowingly destroyed the last vestiges of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is perplexing indeed.
My immediate reaction is the justices are merely throwing us a bone, perhaps modeled after the Affordable Care Act –
which cleverly – and obviously for international propaganda purposes –
creates the illusion of near-universal health insurance. But it
simultaneously imposes such exorbitant co-payments and fees, only the
rich can afford to use it, thereby fulfilling ACA's ultimate purpose –
that of perpetuating the USian policy, unique in the industrial world,
of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.
*** *** ***
Good News for LGBT Seniors in Court's Marriage Decision
THE
SUPREME COURT'S legalization of same-sex marriage means that lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transsexual couples can now access the legal benefits
of marriage no matter where in the United States they live, says the
Alliance for Retired Americans “Friday Alert” issued 10 July.
Elderly
LGBT couples living in states where marriage equality was formerly
outlawed now have the same rights granted heterosexual couples including
Social Security spousal survival payments and state and federal tax
benefits, the ARA reports.
*** *** ***
A
FORMER OFFICIAL of the Carter Administration wondered during an
interview if one or more of the federal secret police agencies will try to kill Edward Snowden, a courageous speculation that proves again the malevolent, Fourth Reich nature of the USian Empire.
*** *** ***
HIGH POETRY DISGUISED as prose – that's Ta-Nehisi Coates' “Letter to My Son,” a piece as poignantly angry as Ginsberg's “Howl” but infinitely more lyrical, as eloquently defiant as the concluding lines of Yeats' “Wanderings of Oisin” yet appropriately, even forcefully secular; as emotionally compelling as Kavi's “Black Marigolds.” Originally published by The Atlantic and republished by RSN, it is unquestionably the most powerful new writing I have seen in maybe the past 45 years. To read it is to relish it...and to want to read it again.
LB/6-13 July 2015
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