MY APOLOGY FOR Dispatches' long silence.
Convinced there is no way to defeat our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters save by doing whataver may be necessary to survive their ongoing campaigns of exterminate-the-Working-Class ecogenocide -- the murderously weaponized profiteering by which they are replacing us with slaves and robots -- I have been trying since last November to find some new pathway for this blog. At that I may have succeeded; my new approach might be termed "speculative futurism" -- that is, if by some miracle we have any future at all. But its launch -- at present a collection of handwritten notes that fill two legal pads -- has been repeatedly delayed by the need to complete several more mundane projects I trust will be infinitely more useful to those who inherit my few possessions.
And now our relentlessly Neoliberal (Neonazi) politics, in the form of six exceptionally disturbing reports in the daily horror show of local, state, federal and global news, has added its own depressing taint:
The Republican Party has Turned Fascist and is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World
So triumphs the (mostly clandestine) termination of USian democratic process our Masters began with the Wall Street Bankers' (quickly forgiven and forgotten) Plot c. 1929-1934 to turn the U.S. into an ally -- and more likely a colony -- of Nazi Germany.
Supreme Court Rules Against Union Recruiting on California Farms
This completes the methodical murder of the USian labor movement begun by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1974.
With support of Biden, federal court backs Trump’s police-state assault on peaceful protests in Lafayette Square
A horror story accurately summarized by its headline.
Time to Say "You're Fired" to Merrick Garland?
See obvious reasons above.
Military Document Puts (All) Socialists in League With Neo-Nazis
In other words, any form of socialist organizing is to be made illegal.
Appearance Versus Essence: Biden is Stabilizing, Not Ending, Neoliberalism
As predicted, the "Democratic" (sic) Party is again functioning as the Republican Fifth Column.
Indeed
the news has become so incessantly horrific, I -- a near-lifelong
journalist -- radically reduced my reading of it after by some miracle
(thank you Goddess!) we managed to get the Hitler-wannabe Trump and the WitchFinder-General-wannabe Pence at least temporarily out of the federal executive branch.
But since that deceptive "victory," it has become painfully obvious nothing of substance will change under the new regime -- that in hideous truth the only "change we can believe in" (exactly as under Barack the Betrayer) -- is that our Masters will continue to worsen our lives.
And now we know the Democrats will do as they did before 2018 -- that is, everything possible to ensure the overt Nazis take full power in 2024.
*****
BECAUSE I AM fervently committed to de-politicizing Dispatches, I am also publishing here today a commentary from earlier this month, originally intended as the beginning of a preface to an introduction of the new Dispatches, but now revised for presentation here as what I hope will by my last purely political commentary ever. For when truth is shrunken to pearls before swine, when our Masters' Moronic Majority has been permanently conditioned to such moral imbecility it reflexively applauds atrocities as victories, then journalism is reduced to utter pointlessness, to naught but (another) exercise in skull-versus-boulder futility.
Initially what I wrote was in favorable response to "A Kinder, Gentler US Empire Is Not Possible"; I sought to employ this exceptionally thought-provoking column by Caitlin Johnstone as the peg upon which to hang my withdrawal from political journalism.
While I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Johnstone’s hypothesis and salute her courage for daring express it, I soon realized I must also respectfully suggest she has not taken it to it’s ultimately unavoidable conclusion, to wit: whether our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters have revealed themselves to be the sadistic moral imbeciles they truly are or remain closeted as Democrats and other pseudo-humanitarians, the ultimate lesson of human history is that all genuinely progressive movements -- that is, any truly humanitarian movement -- will be methodically destroyed at birth or as soon as possible afterward.
Note I am 81 years old, a near-lifelong Marxian formerly self-disguised by sometimes award-winning journalistic necessity, first as a "liberal Democrat" (until arson, almost certainly by federal agents, destroyed all my life's work in 1983); next as a "democratic socialist" (until the forcible retirement imposed by the ecogenocidal profiteering of '08-'09 cost me everything save a miserly Social Security pension and damned me to ever-deadlier poverty). I am also a seasoned veteran of defeat: the (failed) post-Sputnik campaign to make USian K-12 brainwashing more like Euro/Soviet education and thus far less hostile to science, mathematics, the humanities and original thinking in general; the (failed) Civil Rights Movement; the (failed) Anti-Southeast Asian War Movement, which despite its innumerable lies to the contrary was pathetically immaterial to Vietnamese victory, won solely by the infinite courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army; the (failed) Back-to-the-Land Movement; the (failed) Alternative Press Movement; and the (repeatedly failed) Labor Movement.
Though I voted for Obama twice -- votes I considered meaningless apart from their function in preserving the franchise -- by 2011 I had dubbed him "Barack the Betrayer" and had recognized his “change we can believe in” as the greatest Big Lie of political betrayal in USian presidential history; during that same period of enlightenment I was repeatedly booted in the metaphorical gonads by the irrefutable and therefore terrifying technological truth our ever-worsening circumstances are now so universal they have become inescapable save by death -- precisely as our Masters intend.
Thus, recognizing I truly had nothing left to lose, I joined the earliest Tacoma-activist ranks of the (failed) Occupy uprising, at the same time publicly acknowledging the Communist-at-heart I had secretly been at least since the murderous aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 proved to me our species' one and only genuinely humanitarian alternative was a definitively transitional Dictatorship by the Proletariat -- a true reformation now rendered forever impossible by the defeat of the Soviet Union.
I
was also an early activist in the (failed) Tacoma $15 Now Movement,
though worsening health forced me to drop out several months before its
defeat by the already reliably subjugated voters.
Yet even then I moronically retained just a bit of hopefulness.
But now after living through the cunningly disguised but effectively genocidal Neoliberal weaponization of the first 18 or so months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I can no longer doubt all is lost, certainly for modern society. In which context the entire global space-race becomes nothing more than an all-time epic of colossal propaganda and obscenely costly psychological warfare intended to maintain the cult of compulsory optimism. How? By distracting us from the ever-more-undeniable reality of an apocalypse already well underway – and most likely fatal to our entire species.
Why – or perhaps how – have I at last achieved some semblance of intellectual realism?
More appropriately, what enabled me to escape what Chris Hedges aptly terms the "curse" of optimism?
I escaped because anyone who recognizes the terminal magnitude of patriarchal technology also understands there is no power on this planet capable of overcoming our Masters' wealth-sustained (and therefore eternally unbreakable) monopolies on the technologies of universal surveillance and thermonuclear terror.
In societal reaction to which – or so I strongly suspect – our burgeoning belief in “space aliens” is most likely nothing more than the military-technology-fostered 21st Century reinforcement of our self-destructive dependence on adult versions of the Santa-Claus myth, specifically the variously named patriarchal god of both the socioeconomically suicidal belief in the biological absurdity called “eternal life” and the maximized ecogenocidal malevolence of a misogyny that in its apocalyptic ejaculations of clitoris-envy damns all femaleness from our Mother Earth’s to that of our planet’s smallest distinctively gendered creatures.
It is a bit of an aside, but in psychological truth the Christmas Santa is our starter-god; he introduces us to the same terror that defines not only the globally dominant patriarchal god Yahweh/Jesu/Allah, but also all the planet’s governments assembled – whether knowingly or not – using the YJA biblical Erector-set: “he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good; obey or burn at the stake.” In other words, it’s the same enslave-the-Working-Class scam whether invoked as Santa or Jesus or any other allegedly “divine” (and therefore “infallible”) would-be “savior.”
If space aliens exist, our own species' history should tell us they are undoubtedly here as conquerors – which perhaps in our species’ final moments will end forever the greatest deception of all human history, the ultimate Big Lie “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” To those of us who actually know history, the truth is of course the diametrical opposite: if there is any moral arc at all, what it bends toward is ever-more-technologically enhanced – and therefore ever more inescapable – ecogenocidal tyranny.
Proof? Look how our capitalist Masters warred against the Soviet Union until it was finally destroyed by the dark undertow of the very Russian history it had sought so fervently to transform. Yet even now 64 percent of the former Soviet population tells pollsters their lives were far better when they were governed by Marxism. Ditto for the former East Germans. (Note that Foreign Policy is a Ruling Class publication, hence -- because our Masters require accurate intelligence if they are to maintain their methods of oppression at peak efficiency -- it is allowed to be a bit more truthful in its [still-obviously biased] reporting.)
In any case, what our Masters did to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Warsaw Pact allies proves that if any genuine (i.e. truly ecohumanitarian) revolution were to occur anywhere, it will be crushed. Remember not just the murdered Karen Silkwood but the murdered Kennedy brothers and the government-murdered victims at Chicago (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark); at Kent State University (Allison Beth Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, William Knox Schroeder and let us not forget Dean Kahler, whose life was destroyed by the permanent paralysis inflicted by a single round of .30-caliber M2 Ball through the spine); and at Jackson State College (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green).
But those atrocities only hint at the horrors of our now inevitable future. For had the Soviet revolutionaries been long-term disciplined enough to perpetuate their ideology not only by successfully resisting invasion, infiltration and disinformation, but by defeating co-optation and its backup SOPs (standing operating procedures) of arrest, torture, murder and political assassination of all true progressives -- our Masters’ new Final Solution was already in their arsenals. This is the Neutron Bomb, designed specifically to exterminate hostile or rebellious populations without damaging infrastructure (gold teeth included) or reducing its post-holocaust value as loot – ever the material wealth of capitalism and its euphemism-cloaked empires.
As to the too-rapidly mutating Covid-19, I must confess it increasingly seems to me its three most plausibly deniable alternatives are (1)--the Jackson Browne/Gaia Hypothesis alternative, the punitive anger of our Mother Earth, let us hope not (yet) in terminal fulfillment of JB’s ever-more-obviously prophetic vision of “the magnitude of her fury in the final hour”; (2)--the Biblical alternative, i.e., self-imposed apocalypse by deliberate or (allegedly) accidental release and/or by any and all of the (other) diabolical forms divinely imaginable; or (3)--the space-alien bio-weapon hypothesis many humans sense but too few of us dare speak aloud, certainly not as fact but just as certainly, given UFOs, as another intuitively obvious possibility we must therefore publicly consider.
Whatever obtains, it is scarcely more than a distraction now that our downward momentum has become irreversible. Whether in service to their own moral imbecility, as puppets of extraterrestrial conquerors or in some unspeakably repugnant combination of both evils, our Neoliberal Masters have already created the intentionally addictive technologies of tyranny that doom us all, exactly as prophesied by the darkest science fiction. Worse, they have weaponized their technology into the instrument of our ultimate self-betrayal, the now-inescapable shackles of limitless surveillance falsely peddled and gullibly embraced as a technology of human bonding. With the flawed but nevertheless Working-Class-exemplary Soviet Union gone forever and China permanently reduced to a slave-state capitalism indistinguishable in its ecogenocidal sadism from that of the avowed Neoliberalism that rules the rest of this planet, I cannot doubt all is truly lost.
Yet
resistance remains vital to ourselves and to our offspring and to
theirs and thus to the sustenance of human spirit, yes even and most
especially now when any hope for betterment or promise of rescue is
banished by our ever-more-obvious subjugation, and the sci-fi prophecy
of "resistance is futile” has in fearsome fact become the one pivotal
truth of all our lives -- which means survival itself may soon be our
sole remaining possibility for revolutionary defiance.
LB/14-23 June 2021
-30-
