Censorship: Lessons from Ralph Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity

(Originally published 08 September 2013; republished here 4 October 2025 after the original publisher, TypePad, destroyed its archives and went out of business.)

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RALPH NADER, FOR whom I have never voted but for whom I have the greatest respect, has written for Reader Supported News a denunciation of President Barack Obama that will undoubtedly be noted by historians as the most bravely outspoken such commentary by any public figure to date.

Hence I urge all of you not just to read it but to disseminate it as widely as possible and communicate your approval to RSN, even if only with a word or two, as in the traditional “Yes man yes!” by which we long-ago beatniks used to shout our approval of exceptional poetry or music. My own applause is already included in the associated comment thread.

That said, in the interest of full disclosure and as a long-overdue expression of gratitude, I should acknowledge I owe Nader a big debt of thanks. In 1964 he entrusted me with the revelations that, a year later, would be published in Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of capitalism in action, specifically of how the U.S. automobile manufacturers were maximizing profits by minimizing vehicular safety.

At the time I was the sports editor and one of three news-reporter/photographers for The Oak Ridger, a small but notably excellent East Tennessee daily. It was in acknowledgment of all these roles I had been assigned to interview Nader about his research. Not only had I added car stuff to our sports coverage -- I was then the proud owner of a 1958 Porsche super-coupe -- I had also demonstrated a knack for unusual news stories, and Nader's findings felt like the biggest scoop of my career to date. But this piece never saw the proverbial light of day. It was killed by Managing Editor Dick Smyser, who in one of those indicative ironies of USian history was also the chairman of the Associated Press Managing Editors' Freedom of Information Committee.

It was my second bitter schooling in the harsh realities of censorship that are cleverly hidden beneath the claim the United States has “freedom of the press,” and it was memorably painful because I had expected better -- much better -- from The Oak Ridger. Why? Because its top executives, Publisher Don McKay, Business Manager Tom Hill and Smyser himself had been courageous enough to hire me despite The Knoxville Journal's continuing effort to slander me into professional and personal oblivion.

That episode is a story unto itself. I had worked for The Journal since September 1957, first as a part-time sports stringer through the fall of 1959, when finances forced me to drop out of college and sign up for a six-year hitch in the U.S. Army. In September 1962, having served 16 months in Korea and finished my required three-year term of active duty, I returned to Knoxville and was immediately rehired by The Journal as a full-time staff sportswriter. Obviously the paper liked me and my reporting; Assistant Sports Editor Ben Byrd once told me he believed I was destined for The New York Times or some equally prestigious publication.

But on 2 June 1963, a raid by a combined force of Knoxville cops and Knox County sheriff's deputies jailed a racially mixed group of 40 men and women on charges I knew to be utterly without basis in fact. I had been there, had been arrested and on the strength of my press card subsequently released, and now -- naive idiot that I was -- I believed I could convince Journal Editor/Publisher Guy L. Smith and City Editor Dick Evans the arrests were at the very least a terrible mistake and more probably a deliberate atrocity. Soon Smith and Evans concluded I was what in the parlance of the Jim Crow South was called a “nigger-lover” -- probably a Communist as well -- and Smith had me re-arrested in his newsroom, then publicly fired me on Page One of his newspaper.

My termination notice was a maliciously slanderous story by Ron McMahan, who knowingly wrote a deliberate Big Lie that would have been equally at home in Adolf Hitler's Völkischer Beobachter: “Forty Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee, were arrested early Sunday morning during what police described as 'a drunken sex orgy' at a South Knoxville residence...Booked at county jail on a charge of disorderly conduct was Loren Bliss, 23, of 1537 Laurel Avenue, a former Journal sportswriter.”

There was of course neither orgy nor drunkenness; the gathering was nothing more than a quiet garden party, attended by nearly as many UT faculty members, civil rights activists, young local professionals and business executives as older students. It celebrated the graduation of a woman named Maline Robinson, who had just earned a master-of-fine-arts degree from UT and who would later teach art history at the University of Wisconsin. Despite The Journal's lurid prose (“partly-clad couples were lying all over the front lawn...on tables, in closets and on the floor...Lewdness charges were not placed against anyone because during the melee everyone scattered”), the sexual allegations were nothing more than typical fabrications of the forever undiminished, never-to-be-quenched hatefulness that rules the vindictively pornographic Southron mind. Such is the racist fear, blood-lust and never-to-be-acknowledged envy implicit in the old joke that asks, “what is ten inches long and white,” then answers, “nothing.”

That the police raid occurred just as the local Ku Klux Klan and its many affiliated mainstream churches were pulpit-pounding against “interracial love feasts” was hardly coincidental. Martin Southern, the ironically named American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Knoxville, said he believed the raid had been carefully planned by a cabal of high ranking officials at UT, the sheriff's office and the police department plus top executives of The Journal and The Knoxville News-Sentinel to facilitate purging not only the university but the entire Knoxville area of anyone the local Ruling Class deemed “trouble-makers” and/or “outside agitators.”

Southern warned me that because I was the one genuinely credible witness to everything that had actually occurred -- he said I was “the fly, as it were, in the segregationist ointment” -- my own life was probably in danger. Not many days later, a would-be killer tried to invade my ground-floor apartment via its kitchen window, but the attempted hit was thwarted by my vigilant German shepherd Brunhilda and my own expert-class skill with a handgun -- a story for another time. For now suffice it to say dear Brunhilda quickly got to the meat of the problem, bit the malefactor in his blue-jeaned crotch, seized him by his penis and testicles and dragged him down from the window just as I was aligning my sights on the bridge of his nose to shoot him between the eyes.

Meanwhile Marion Barry, then Tennessee field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later the mayor of Washington D.C., had arranged for me to cover the mass-arrest story for a local African-American weekly.

But that report too was extensively censored, not by Blacks but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality¹ members Steve Wagner² and Phillip Bacon, who inadvertently revealed their own white-supremacist beliefs by insisting accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would be too much truth for Black readers and would therefore discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.”

In other words -- bottom line --  Moron Nation's meticulously conditioned hatred of the First Amendment had suddenly become as evident on the USian Left as it had always been on the USian Right.

Thus to my eternal regret I surrendered to the two CORE activists, allowing them to cut several key passages from my original text. One of the most important disclosures Wagner and Bacon whited-out  -- pun intended -- was the word-for-word report on my confrontation with Smith, in which the Nazi-sympathizing publisher/editor had made it clear I would either obey his command to fabricate a dangerously provocative Big Lie describing an interracial sex orgy that never took place, or I would suffer grave but unspecified professional afflictions in retaliation for my disobedience. Wagner and Bacon also suppressed every word of my eyewitness account of the police assault on Milton Vargas, a Panamanian diplomat who was among the party's invited guests. Never mind I was less than six feet away and saw and heard everything that happened: Vargas, neatly clad in a dark suit, white shirt and dark necktie, politely held out his diplomatic credentials to one of the invading Knoxville cops, saying "excuse me, I am..." but the cop interrupted him, snarling "yew a goddamn Mexican nigger, an yew better shut yore mouth" as he slapped Vargas' identity papers to the floor and slugged him in the face -- a wanton violation of diplomatic immunity so outrageous it provoked several days of anti-U.S. riots in Panama. As to the post-party attempt on my life -- the incident that arguably confirmed attorney Southern's hypothesis of a Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid -- Wagner and Bacon were nearly hysterical in their insistence no public mention ever be made of it.  

Barry allowed these white bourgeois tyrannies only because he believed -- probably correctly -- such compromise was vital to retain the Caucasian support implicit in the slogan, "Black and White Together."  The following, under my own byline, is all that remained after Bacon and Wagner finished censoring it. It's from the 3 August 1963 edition of The Knoxville Flashlight-Herald:

Although The Knoxville Journal had opportunity to publish a staff member's eye-witness account of the now-famed graduation party held for some University of Tennessee students by Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Ottaway, it declined to utilize that source and relied instead upon police and sheriff's reports.

That those reports were something less than reliable has since been proven in Knox County Sessions Court.

This writer, at the time a sports reporter for The Journal, attended the party with friends and was subsequently arrested, then freed after deputies learned he was a Journal staff member. He was re-arrested and booked some 14 hours later after unsuccessfully attempting to interest Journal City Editor Dick Evans in a factual account of events before and during the arrests...

Included in this writer's report would have been a statement that the party was quiet and proper despite the number of persons present and information that police and deputies had acted without grounds...

Those taken to city jail, where there is a drunkometer (a Breathalyzer by which suspects can challenge a drunkenness charge), were not charged with drunkenness, but those taken to county jail, where there is no drunkometer, were charged with drunkenness in addition to disorderly conduct...

Cases against those charged by Knox County, including this writer, were dismissed July 1. City Court cases were continued by order of Journal-supported Judge Charles Kelly and will be heard in October.

Included on the city docket is Milton Vargas, the Panamanian Vice-Consul here. Mr. Vargas, who has filed a full report with the Panamanian government, has charged he was slapped by police officers...

The only uncensored coverage of the arrests was provided by TASS -- Tyelyegrafnoye agyentstvo Sovyetskogo Soyuza or Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. The story appeared on page one of Pravda, as I recall in the 5 June edition. It was also -- or so I was told by several UT students -- broadcast in English by Radio Moscow, as were reports of the subsequent Panama riots.  

Given the prurient hatefulness that so often defines southern racism, The Oak Ridger's bravery in hiring me in mid-August, even before all the court cases had been decided, was beyond exceptional. Indeed, since The Journal's vindictively aggressive slanders were blacklisting me even amongst Northern employers, until The Oak Ridger came to my rescue I had feared my journalism career was over.

Which brings us back to Ralph Nader. Maybe a year after the Knoxville incident, he was in Oak Ridge visiting his sister, a scientist with some big-league connection to what today would be called the nuclear energy cartel. My boss Dick Smyser arranged for me to interview Nader,  exactly where I no longer remember. What I do recall is that I questioned Nader for hours, that eventually we adjourned to continue the interview at his sister's apartment, and that after I photographed him with the paper's Polaroid-back Speed Graphic, we talked literally until dawn.

Nader doubted the story would run. Citing the paper's bold defiance of the region's ubiquitous racism, I assured him it would.

Then I drove from his sister's place directly to the The Oak Ridger building on Tyrone Road, put the sports page to bed as quickly as I could and hammered out the Nader story on my issue Royal Standard typewriter. My lead said something like “'Unsafe at any speed' -- that's how Ralph Nader describes many of Detroit's best-selling automobiles.” The second graf laid out Nader's credentials -- a Harvard-educated lawyer, he had been campaigning for safer cars since the late 1950s -- and the remainder detailed his complaints against Chevrolet's Corvair. The text ran to at least six takes -- six double-spaced typewritten pages of about 300 words apiece.

Despite the befogged mind that even at age 24 is the penance we pay for a sleepless all-nighter, I thought I'd done a damn fine job of reporting. But -- perhaps not the least because Smyser himself drove a sherbet-green Corvair -- the story evoked not the anticipated thank you for the warning but instead provoked him to such fury, he shouted his denunciation the length of the newsroom, visibly startling the other members of the five-person staff. It was one of  two times he actually raged at me -- the only occasions I ever heard him raise his voice at anyone.  

That other episode, again in the newsroom  -- once more startling my colleagues with its volume (and this time a personal attack shouted into my face at bad-breath range) -- was his response to my rejection of the ballistic impossibilities set fourth as gospel by the Warren Commission. It was late in 1964, a post-deadline afternoon, probably on a Friday and therefore normally a time of relaxation, but Smyser had surprised us all by interrogating each of us about our reactions to the commission's report. (Its 888 pages had been summarized by the Associated Press in a 366-page hardbound book distributed as a freebie to news staffers at AP-member dailies and peddled for $1 apiece by their circulation departments or given away as a bonus to new subscribers.) Smyser's questions, I remember, made me very uncomfortable; they were obviously phrased to compel agreement with the commission's findings. The rest of the staff dutifully submitted. I -- an expert shot with rifles and handguns since my teens and already well versed in the technical aspects of ballistics -- could not. Smyser responded by damning me at the top of his voice, his bespectacled face red with rage, denouncing me as an uppity brat so stupidly arrogant I dared question government authority.

From then on, for the few more weeks I remained at The Oak Ridger, his simmering hostility, an entirely new element in our relationship, convinced me my answer had put my continued employment  at grave risk -- one of the many reasons I fled back to my New-York-City birthplace in the first week of 1965. In those days, before the socioeconomic cleansing euphemistically disguised as gentrification, the City truly was what James Baldwin had so perceptively labeled it in his 1962 novel: Another Country. 

Twenty years later, in conversations with other New York City journalists -- all of whom had been working elsewhere as reporters in 1964 --  I would learn the same sorts of editorial-staff interrogations had taken place on most (if not all) U.S. dailies -- for me the first conclusive evidence not only of the assassination conspiracy itself but of the extent to which upper-echelon management of the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM) was actively collaborating with the government to ensure no  "accredited" journalist  dared question the Warren Commission's findings.  By then -- the 1980s -- we knew that "government" was in fact the Central Intelligence Agency, which since the early 1950s has controlled MMPM for our Masters, much as the Gestapo controlled German media for Hitler and Goebbels.

Though in 1964 I never dared say so to anyone save my lover, I had already concluded the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was  some sort of cleverly disguised coup. My suspicions were kindled by AP reports out of Dallas in the minutes and hours immediately after the killing, some of which indicated the president had been slain by multiple shooters, with at least one assassin firing from the infamous grassy knoll.  Suspicion solidified to near certainty when Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on 24 November -- a killing typical of the clean-up operations by which the world's intelligence agencies insure their crimes are kept secret -- an atrocity I watched live on NBC television in a Bristol, Va, hotel room over breakfast with my then lover, an art major at Virginia Intermont College. I will never forget how, immediately after Oswald was shot, she turned to me, horror-stricken olive-green eyes brimming with tears,  and whispered exactly what I was thinking: "my god, we live in a banana republic." 

All that said,  Smyser was nevertheless a notably skillful editor, one who taught me a great many useful lessons about reporting. Even so, my memory still flinches at how he shouted down my objection to the Warren Commission's "magic bullet" hypothesis  and how he grimaced as he dropped the Nader copy into the circular gray waist-high trash bin that stood guard beside his desk. His expression suggested he was disposing of something grossly distasteful, at least as repugnant as a cat turd.

When I phoned Nader later than day and apologetically told him there would be no story, he nevertheless thanked me for my effort. Years after that I realized I was the one who should have thanked him -- not just for all the time he spent telling me about the built-in hazards of those Detroit cars, but for the lesson in journalistic reality.

Such is the USian variant of a “free press,” its invisible restrictions so effective, no official censorship is necessary, the result uncomfortably reminiscent of the society typified by a slogan in George Orwell's breathtakingly prophetic 1984: “Ignorance Is Strength.”

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¹The Congress of Racial Equality, CORE -- the martyrdom of activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner not withstanding -- has since been credibly exposed both as a front for the global energy cartel and as a cover for domestic operations of the Central Intelligence Agency -- see examples here, here (scroll to "Just as the Phoenix program...") and here.  Hence I cannot but wonder if the CIA was the real source of the censorship by which Wagner and Bacon purged my Flashlight-Herald report of its most vital details.

²I am uncertain as to the correct spelling of Wagner -- there are at least three possibilities --  and I thus apologize if I have misspelled his familial name. But apart from the few Oak Ridger and Knoxville Journal reports that were with me in my clip book (my portfolio of best published stories), the arsonist(s) destroyed all my records of those years; in fact -- outside my two working portfolios (text and photographs) -- absolutely nothing of my 1956-1969 work, journals and personal correspondence included -- survived the 1 September 1983 fire.    

LB/8 September 2013 (Additional details added 8 June and 9 September 2020)

-30-

To Transcend Despair, We Must Acknowledge How Bottomlessly Horrible Our Circumstances Truly Are

21 June 2025

 

"Premonitions of the Twilight": I had  intended to illustrate this essay with a red-hued variant, but decided -- for reasons I can't yet verbalize except to say they  relate to both the Celtic deity   Morrigan and the Norse notion of  Götterdämmerung -- the blue variant is more appropriate. A "sandwich"-- a photo collage -- the imagery is from some of my 1967 camera work. (Loren Bliss ©1968,1974,2025)  

*****

FOR ME, THE death of the American Republic and the threatened death of our Mother Earth called into question a notion that had been the one certain conviction within my personal ethos of general agnosticism: that each and every atom in the entire cosmos contained within itself not just the known structure of nucleus, electrons and protons but an unseen, undetected yet overwhelmingly powerful inertial momentum toward consciousness. Influenced by collegiate studies in astronomy, I had concluded sentient life could not have come into existence -- could not have "evolved from the substance of the stars" (as one professor put it) -- without such a positive dynamic.

Our matriarchal ancestors recognized this force and anthropomorphized it as the Great Goddess, the Mother of All Being, which to me feels more metaphorically apt than any other hypothesis about our cosmic source and often – in my younger years whenever I was amidst wilderness or at sea or otherwise beyond urban distractions -- felt objectively real, as it ever-more-frequently does now in the meditative solitude of my final years.

But I would be dishonest were I not to confess that the outcome of 5 November spawned the most painful doubts I have ever known. For a terrible few weeks I believed the election’s ultimate message is that our undetected atomic dynamics are in fact ruled by a much stronger negative force, an antithetical inertial momentum that redefines the universe itself. It tells us what we foolishly view as the inexpressibly beautiful choreography of creation is instead a maliciously seductive dance of destruction, the final revelation of which -- our last lesson as a doomed species on a dying planet we ourselves have fatally wounded -- is naught but its unspeakable hideousness.

Such was my own woundedness, challenged at last by phenomena I could not ignore: near-nightly dreams of intellectually and emotionally supportive, physically affectionate young women, each woman a stranger, yet each eerily familiar; two wide-awake occasions when, while sitting alone amongst this apartment-building’s courtyard gardens, I was joined by a solitary raven who perched on a branch less than an arms length distant in comfortably shared contemplative solitude; and then finally a wide-awake, seemingly coincidental encounter with a young woman of skill and wisdom, whose interpretation of these events -- all the more meaningful because she did not know my cardiologist says I'll probably be dead by September -- was phrased in modern English but identical to the promise contained in an ancient lay of magick cited by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, his life-changing epic of spiritual and aesthetic revolution: “Thus shalt thou be fetch-ed hame.”

*****

DESPITE OUR SPECIES' rightfully terrified, head-in-the-sand refusal to acknowledge it, Trump's victory in the 5 November election makes permanent the U.S. government’s formerly undeclared policy -- first publicly exemplified by President Carter's endorsement of the viciously misogynistic Hyde Amendment -- of reversing all the humanitarian advancements that resulted from the U.S. Civil War and World War II. It is now as if the Confederacy won in 1865 and Hitler triumphed in 1945 -- and with every passing day, it becomes more undeniable we must soon anticipate the methodical reversal of every humanitarian gain our species ever achieved.

Meanwhile, given the new regime's brazenly public affirmation of the nation's rejection of all moral, ethical and constitutional restraint, a renewed Holocaust – the zero-tolerance, no-exception extermination of all "enemies within" – becomes ever more likely, not only in the U.S., but throughout U.S. capitalism's neoliberalism- nazified global empire.

With the Soviet Union slain, its Red Army disbanded and every nation terrified to submission by the U.S. empire's bipartisan "Better-Dead-Than-Red" intent -- its pledge to fulfill Hitler's last-minute yearning to destroy the world -- Trump and his like-minded predecessors, whether overt (Reagan et al) or clandestine (Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, Clinton ad nauseam), have already achieved der Führer's intended subjugation of the entire planet. What we are witnessing now is not the conquest but its consequence -- the triumph of Absolute Evil.

Protected by modern technology in fulfillment of the doomsday purpose that is the sole motive for its invention, it is increasingly possible the Christonazi Reich cannot be overthrown. The promised thermonuclear enforcement of “Better Dead Than Red” guarantees no nation will ever dare attempt Trump's overthrow from without, and it seems increasingly probable We the (Humanitarian) People are congenitally unable to evolve the courage, solidarity and discipline to subverted it from within. This would mean Christonazism is literally "forever" -- that is, until the end of human time itself. Or at the very least, that it will reign supreme until some apocalyptic event neutralizes the weaponry that perpetuates its terrorism. In either case, our species is not likely to survive. Neither is our Mother Earth, already threatened with reduction to a world uninhabitable by any conceivable life form and thus to permanent Precambrian lifelessness. Those are the horrors to which we unconditionally submit if we surrender. And that is precisely why we must fight on even when it seems hopeless.

Perhaps the words of Jean-Paul Sartre can help us find our own strength:

“We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, as Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept. And because of this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment... And the choice that each of us made of his life was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death... And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered "No.”

Or perhaps we will find inspiration in the wrenching example of the courageous defenders of Fortress Brest, whose valiant resistance is here accurately portrayed in a 2010 historical-reenactment film. The Brest garrison was as doomed as that of Wake Island, and like that sadly forgotten stand by U.S. Marines, the Red Army’s defense of Brest was one of our species’ greatest epics of bravery and heroism. It is entirely appropriate the Brest film has earned “best-such-work-ever” ratings from a number of European critics; and it should vex us severely the equally courageous Wake Island fight is not similarly memorialized.

Perhaps too, after the fate of the Martyred Minnesotans leaves no doubt We the (Humanitarian) People are mortally jeopardized by badge-protected gangs of run-amok thugs – no matter whether they are assassins disguised as cops sicced on us by Christonazi Obersturmbannführers or the real cops and soldiers likewise conditioned to robotic obedience and ordered by Trump and his MAGAstapo Chief Kristi Noem to “liberate” any cities allegedly compelled by “socialism” to defend its residents’ Constitutional rights -- we will at last awaken to the magnitude of the Evil that assails us.

And perhaps we will even re-awaken to the lesson taught us by the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Perhaps – realizing we are all now potential targets of roving Christonazi assassins – we will at long last unshackle ourselves from the pseudo-left’s suicidal, useful-idiot collaboration with Christonazism implicit in its fanatical, “all-gun-owners-are-fascists” insistence on forcible civilian disarmament, repeal of the Second Amendment and the vindictive, “politically correct” imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood. As my Distinguished Rifleman father often said, “It is far better to have a firearm but not need it, than to need a firearm but not have it.” To which I, a military-qualified Expert with the M1911 .45-caliber service pistol, will add only that, “it is far better we have trained and practice-sustained skill with firearms, but no immediate need for it, than to discover – often terminally – we desperately need the skill but tragically lack it.”

Additionally, given the unprecedentedly grim future that looms – an astrologer friend tells me the planetary configurations on the U.S. Sibley Chart are like the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War Two combined, and many psychics claim Trump is the actual reincarnation of Hitler – I have three categories of cautions for my fellow activists.

First is an axiomatic statement by Lev Bronstein, the “nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn” known to history as Leon Trotsky: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”


Second is the axiom that governs the craft of intelligence analysis: Once is coincidence; twice is suspicious; three times is enemy action.”

Third is a five-point body of self-protective, keep-your-head-down advice that can be as life-saving for non-violent protestors as it is for soldiers: (1)-Learn and practice the mindfulness necessary for situational awareness – that is, the art of paying attention, of knowing at all times what is going on around you – which is an acquired skill (one that, thanks to my father, I learned in childhood); (2)-Learn first aid; consult local service centers for information about free courses; once trained, never forget its three basic principles, still the same as the U.S. Army taught me 66 years ago: “keep ‘em breathing; stop the bleeding; treat for shock”; (3)-Learn to identify cover (that which will turn bullets and maybe even grenade or shell fragments) and distinguish it from concealment (that which merely hides you); note that contrary to Hollywood, motor vehicles are not effective cover; (4)-Learn to do the low crawl and other individual movement techniques, which can save your life if protests come under fire; (5)-Learn these additional self-protective techniques for surviving gunfire in urban areas.

(I offer the above with unapologetic acknowledgment the pseudo-left is sure to be antagonized by the sources of some of its content.)

*****

TWO HEADLINES WE will never see in mainstream media:

Assured of Pardons, Gleeful Christonazis Run Amok,
Slaying, Beating and Jailing Führer Trump's Opponents

and

Trumpites Weaponize Social Security, Veterans Benefits,
Medicare, Entire Safety Net to Enforce Christonazi Theocracy

As usual, the true significance of these atrocities is methodically suppressed, not only by the mainstream media, but by our alleged leaders as well.

In the first instance, it is now axiomatic the penalties for opposing der neu Führer include extrajudicial murder. (Given the 100-percent corruption of the nation’s law-enforcement agencies and military-command structure by Christonazification, were I a gambling man, which I am not, I’d have bet substantial sums the Minnesota murderer would be allowed to escape. Now that he has finally been captured, I’d bet the Trump Regime ensures he escapes punishment with an insanity plea and then later, when no one is looking, grants him a full pard.)

Meanwhile, let us not forget there is no question Vance Boelter was doing the regime’s intended work.

Apropos the second headline – and very much an extension of the first – do not for a moment doubt that Trump and his cabal of Christonazi/Neoconfederate terrorists are now able to vindictively stop federal disbursements including individual Social Security checks literally at will, thereby silencing (and no doubt murdering by the resultant starvation and homelessness) any stipend-dependent retired or disabled person who dares criticize the new Führer by whom We the (Humanitarian) People, our nation, our species and our Mother Earth are now cursed. The real story – the terrible truth too many of us are too naive, too stupid or simply too deluded by fear to acknowledge — is that there is literally no limit to the horrors that are to be inflicted on us. Hence a third headline we will never see in mainstream media:

MAGA Is Christonazism’s Renewed Holocaust: It Repeals
Many People’s Right to Live – or Even to Survive Beyond Birth

But that is the ultimate truth of it, displayed with murder-weapon potency by 18 June's sure-to-be-fatal Supreme Court ruling that transgender people have no right to be born or continue living in the United States. It was predictably announced with all the smirking, pridefully self-righteous sadism that historically defines Christianity as manifest Evil, and it just as predictably furthers the process of turning the Christian cross into a symbol as ominously threatening as the Original Nazis' swastika. It is the most genocidal triumph yet of Trump’s adaptation of Hitler’s master plan, the subjugation of a nation by capturing its judiciary, and the victors are gloating accordingly.

The most our so-called progressive leaders are doing -- in all probability the most they will ever do – is suppress or downplay the unmitigated horrors of Trumpite intent. Beyond that -- and I am speaking of the entire “Democratic” (sic) pseudo-opposition -- all they do is rationalize their submissiveness and whimper. Were they not irremediably compromised by their (morally imbecilic) terror of fomenting anti-capitalist revolution, they would recognize they owe us the service of at least acknowledging our true plight. But they have abandoned us to the conquering Christonazis as surely as they have forsaken their sworn duty to defend our (former) Constitution.

Of course the Mainstream Media Monopoly— the world’s first (and no doubt last) privately owned, for-maximum-profit variant of Goebbels’ Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda — has downplayed or suppressed these facts entirely, and most of the so-called alternative media does likewise due to amateurish incompetence, demographic isolation, masochistic faithfulness to the Fifth Column Democrats or some combination thereof.

Whether by intention or ineptitude, such censorship perpetuates the submissiveness and denial fostered by the national cults of mandatory optimism and prideful ignorance and the Trump Regime’s open encouragement of genocidal bigotry. It camouflages the regime’s murderous intent. It also hides the appropriately terrifying fact the regime’s illegal but permanent termination of public-assistance privacy renders us all vulnerable to ruinous political ambush of the sort that was inflicted on me in December 1982 by a vengeful disciple of Hitler who was protectively closeted in the Washington State Department of Employment Security. Remembering me as one of the leaders of the group of male and female GI Bill students who got her fired from Western Washington State College in 1971 for illegally attempting to expel us in retaliation for our anti-Vietnam-War activism, she deleted my entire unemployment-compensation file, leaving me without any income whatsoever, destroying a promising career-change in mid-process and forcing my return to New York City, where I found immediate re-employment in the working press.

In response to my enraged protests -- I repeatedly badgered every Washington state politico I knew -- the department (eventually) paid me the thousand-plus dollars of unemployment compensation I would otherwise have received. But by then I’d been back in the City six months, so the money hardly mattered. And cashing the check formally ended my ability to seek the revenge I was due for the Hitlerite’s ruinously felonious malfeasance, which thus went entirely unpunished.

Such is capitalism in action even during the best of times, with favoritism guaranteeing the bureaucrats are often as corrupt as the politicians themselves. What now threatens us is infinitely worse -- for many inconceivably so.

*****

LET US THEN review our situation:

Recent history proves the “Republican” (sic) Party is -- both literally and figuratively -- operating under a false flag. Its proper name is implicit in its Christonazi/Neoconfederate identity. Its true flag is therefore most assuredly not the Stars and Stripes of our slain Republic. Its true banners -- brazenly displayed during the attempted coup of 6 January 2020 and in Charlottesville, Virginia in the 11-12 August 2017 prelude to the martyrdom of Heather Heyer -- are instead the swastika of the 17-million-victim Nazi German Holocaust and the Stars and Bars of the 750,000-casualty Confederate mutiny that would have set the South apart as the slavemasters' white male supremacist Christian theocracy.

Its ideology is a nightmare symbiosis of methodically resurrected Ku-Klux-Klan bigotry intensified by Christianity's self-righteous murderousness sharpened to conquering lynch-mob fanaticism by the cunning application of strategy and tactics perfected by Adolf Hitler and refined into the Mein-Kampf equivalents of the Powell Memo and Project 2025. The result is an avowedly ecogenocidal manifestation of Absolute Evil maliciously vectored by a political party that has become a white Christian version of the Taliban. It has made itself unstoppably powerful by its conquest of the entire federal apparatus, at least 28 of the 50 state governments and every law-enforcement agency in the nation.

The same history proves the “Democratic” (sic) Party, irremediably compromised by its role in the coup of 22 November 1963, is actually the Fifth Column – that is, the clandestine subversion unit – of the Christonazi/Neoconfederate kampfbund. The resultant institutional reality is unalterable by anything short of genuine revolution because both parties, their elected officials and their supportive bureaucracies are the wholly owned properties and puppets of the capitalist ruling class. Government policies whether federal, state or local are therefore the increasingly brazen expression of ruling class will, which -- as proven by its nauseatingly repetitive Triangle-Shirtwaist, Blair Mountain and Bhopal atrocities -- is always the forcible extraction of maximum profit with minimal cost to itself and maximal victimization of its workers.

Now the ruling class is replacing us with computers, robots and artificial intelligence – exiling us to permanent unemployment, fatal poverty and boiling revolutionary anger -- and in fearful response, with chaos and political sleight-of-hand to cover its intent, it is obviously intent on eliminating those of us they deem "surplus" by renewing the Holocaust, with Trump as Führer. The capitalists clearly expect him to Christonazify as many as he can, exterminate the rest of us and march any survivors into inescapable slavery.

History also tells us this failed nation’s citizenry now has only a Potemkin Village of socioeconomic or political representation and is thus reduced, de facto, to the disempowered defenselessness that precedes enslavement. Many of our fellow citizens have been methodically battered to slavery's silent submissiveness by neoliberalism’s decades of social-Darwinism. Already they are too fretfully obsessed by the dire necessities of day-to-day survival to dare make any effort to restore the Constitution slain by the voters on 5 November 2025. Many younger silent submissives see no reason to try; their embittered complaint -- "your Constitution was never protected us even when it was supposedly still in full force" -- is increasingly the defining truth of U.S. politics.

Though the slaying of the Constitution began with 1954's addition of "under God" to the "Pledge of Allegiance" -- the capitalized "G" is de facto recognition of the sadistic deity of Christian theocracy; the "under" declares him our omnipotent master -- its slow-motion murder did not become overwhelmingly obvious until Carter the Clandestine Theocrat declared war against women with his comments about the Hyde Amendment in 1977. Here we encounter both a vivid example of the party's post-JFK Fifth-Column function and an apt prelude to its present-day Neville Chamberlain treachery. Thus was misogyny made official federal policy, not by the nazified Republican Ronald Reagan, as we often incorrectly assume, but by a Democrat's controversial legislative ambush.


Whether or not this sort of betrayal is a silent submissive's sole experience of political truth seems immaterial; the same hopeless sense of inescapable powerlessness afflicts even many citizens who are old enough to remember when the U.S. was -- at least for most whites -- a genuinely democratic republic and a notably comfortable realm in which to live. Who then are these persons? I suspect they're the dominant segment of the 36.1 percent who did not vote in November and the vast majority of the approximately 94 percent of anti-Trump voters who refuse to protest now. (See "largest protest" link, below, for an authoritative estimate of the demonstrators' numbers.) Though the submissives include many who regard Christonazism as repugnant, it appears they are too abjectly fearful to ever find the courage to openly oppose the unmitigated horror of the Christonazi onslaught. Young or old, I suspect the degree of their submissiveness is a measurement of the extent to which they've internalized the futility-of-hope factor paradoxically implicit in Ayn Rand's toxic ethos of self-obsessed moral imbecility, the neoliberal credo with which we're all perpetually dosed by mainstream media and the brain-policing that passes for education.

Undoubtedly by intent, neoliberalism is suppressing our individual and collective capability for humanitarian empathy. Robbing us of our ability to achieve solidarity, the resultant politically terminal deficiency was first exemplified by the gradual deterioration of '60s radicalism into the late-'70s Me-Generation avarice that would define the entire decade of the '80s. By 2012, this Ayn Rand poison -- its aggressive self-obsession now bolstered by open scorn for empathy -- was strong enough to kill Occupy within a few months. The movement thus collapsed into the spasms of egotistic clashes and identity-politics squabbling that enabled its defeat by government forces. In retrospect, it seems obvious Occupy was destroyed to clear the way for Hillary, which appears now to have been the plausibly deniable guarantee of Trump's ascendance.

Though Trump unquestionably spearheads capitalism’s inevitable transformation into hard-core nazism, his buffoonish or erratic behavior makes it difficult for some people to recognize him as a genuinely apocalyptic threat It's not an uncommon ploy; the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy disguised himself as a clown. Too many people thus continue to dismiss Trump's genocidal rhetoric as political hyperbole, sensational but ultimately meaningless. Nevertheless, his predatory purpose becomes more undeniable with every outrage. Obviously he intends to complete the nullification of the Constitution, thereby rewarding the vengefully white-male-supremacist Neoconfederates by forever reversing the outcome of the (first?) Civil War. He would simultaneously reward the Christonazis by enabling them to transform the nation into a theocratic American variant of Hitler's Germany. Their plan is to make the former U.S. a new Auschwitz, invisibly fenced and policed by inescapable electronic surveillance, a continent-sized death camp for exterminating everyone on their hate lists – note again not only Boelter’s intended victims but the approximately 300,000 transgender children the Supreme Court just added to their targets. Once the corpses have been ground and baked to fertilizer and the execution-complexes converted to Disneylands and shopping malls, the former Republic would become a theocratic re-education camp for cradle-to-grave zero-tolerance Christonazi mind-warping.

Given the regime's stated intent to weaponize science as a tool of theocracy, I cannot doubt its agenda includes research to determine if it is possible to genetically detect LGBTQ tendencies at birth -- with immediate extermination for any newborn in whom such tendencies are diagnosed -- and death as heretics for any parents who dare protest.

Our masters and their puppets would have us believe the horrors inflicted on us by the 5 November vote are an anomaly that will be undone by next year's congressional midterms. That is another Big Lie. Trump has repeatedly stated his election is to be the nation's last. Compelling circumstantial evidence indicates his emergence as Führer fulfills the intent of the Bankers’ Plot the retired Marine General Smedley Butler heroically interdicted in 1933. A Wall Street scheme to make the U.S. a satellite of Nazi Germany, its details still remain so classified we have to google at least half-a-dozen sources to obtain even a vague indication of its magnitude and depth. (Note especially the indications of ruling-class-mandated grants of presidential and congressional immunity that in 1934 and early 1935 seem to have given the plotters the protected status of a de facto permanent working group, a clandestine precursor to the infamous Trump/Musk Department of Government Efficiency.) Ninety years later – precisely as we witness in the transgender atrocity – its outrages are routinely approved by a Supreme Court deliberately packed with Christonazis specifically chosen to legitimize the new Führer’s will. As we of the (real) left repeatedly sought to warn the nation, this is an especially glaring example of how the Trump applies the strategies and tactics his messiah Hitler used to conquer the Weimar Republic.

Another adaptation of Hitler’s blueprint for subversion, the nazification of schoolchildren, has been accomplished by decades of psychological conditioning vectored by mandatory reading of Ayn Rand’s fictionalizations of the Mein Kampf/übermenschen ethos. The result guarantees Trump’s “Unified Reich” a new, official, easily metastasized, infinitely malignant national mindset. In its utterly merciless Trumpite/Christonazi/Neoconfederate intensity, it is a relentlessly ecogenocidal symbiosis of fanatical selfishness, prideful ignorance, sadistic bigotry and murderous anti-intellectualism that is tyranically hostile to any humanitarian instinct or desire for collective human kindness. Above all else, it is obscenely eager to manifest the public hatefulness legitimized by the Atlas-Shrugged (Elon Musk) variant of nazism. Thus it is not only absurd but clinically delusional to imagine the Trumpites have any potential for conversion to humanitarianism. The terrible magnitude of their triumph is in fact proven by the chronic absence of (effective) opposition; the silent submissives I described above are in actuality among the initial victims of the Trumpite kampfbund's weaponization of Ayn Rand's brand of moral imbecility. Though Rand proclaimed herself an atheist, the Christonazis sanctify her by filtering her venom through their prosperity gospel, using her sociopathy to reinforce their assertion that greed is good and ecogenocidal greed is truly godly.

Thus the global aristocrats and their lynch-mob puppets celebrate with infinitely sadistic glee -- the aristocrats because they now have official permission to sedate themselves with a suicidal orgy of ecogenocidal avarice as terminal climate change hooks our species from the cosmic stage and drops the final curtain on the misogynistic war against our Mother Earth. The Christonazis and Neoconfederates -- incorrigibles every one -- celebrate because they view Trump's “Unified Reich” as the obliteration of each and every humanitarian achievement, the reversal of evolution for which they and their doctrinal forebears have always so hatefully yearned. Make no mistake; this blitzkrieg of malignancy -- with unimaginably worse to come -- is what we face. Welcome to the suffocating darkness of our species' darkest most apocalyptic Dark Age -- precisely why I dearly hope my cardiologist's estimate of my longevity proves accurate.

*****

MY PESSIMISM ABOUT the U.S. potential to evolve an effective liberation movement is by no means unsupported. In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken began lamenting the growing dominance of our national cult of prideful ignorance and compulsory stupidity. In the 1950s, Vance Packard documented the extent to which we were already conditioned to reliably abject conformity and submissiveness. In 1992, a year after the defeat and destruction of the Soviet Union, Canadian media ferreted out a particularly damning Soviet estimate that characterized the U.S. as lacking adequate revolutionary potential even during the allegedly radical 1960s and early 1970s.

As best I recall – I apologetically confess I have not yet recovered the requisite source material despite how carefully I originally filed it away1 -- it was Maclean’s Magazine that so scooped the world. It reported the conclusion of the Committee for State Security (KGB) that while the U.S. minority communities of Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations peoples had indeed evolved the consciousness prerequisite to successful revolution, the revolutionary intent seemingly manifest by most of the Caucasians who supported the civil rights, anti-military-draft, anti-Vietnam War, feminist and environmentalist movements was merely a charade, a fad, a false consciousness that would vanish (or revert to existential-fascist norms) as soon as circumstances allowed. Implicit in the analysts’ view was their recognition most U.S. whites were even then too cowardly for the hazardous work of revolution and were already too aggressively self-centered to grow the requisite solidarity with other victims of capitalism.

The absolute correctness of the KGB’s dismaying hypothesis was proven beyond equivocation by the breathtaking speed with which U.S. whites abandoned all anti-war activism after abolition of the draft on 27 January 1973. Nearly all the white activists, most of them university students, instantly returned to the conventionally exploitative pursuits that define the capitalist elite, ignoring the fact the war raged on until 30 April 1975. The late Jerry Rubin, pseudo-revolutionary turned unapologetic Me-Generation millionaire, was typical.

White feminism reversed itself too, albeit less obviously. What had begun as an expansion of the anti-patriarchal mindfulness that defines Marxism was reduced to an ideologically reactionary campaign for individual achievement of implicitly white-supremacist petite bourgeois advantage and the fostering of anti-male hatred, all within the context of improving capitalism. Its hate-mongering built an impenetrable barrier to solidarity and served as the springboard for the identity politics that have since combined with neoliberalism-maximized moral imbecility to thrust revolutionary socialist solidarity seemingly forever beyond U.S. reach.

Around the same time – a trend I witnessed as an adjunct-faculty photography instructor c. 1975-1981 -- environmentalism began rejecting its initial Earth Day diversity and deteriorating into an elitist, esoterica-segregated movement that in symbiosis with what might be termed Nurdism would achieve its ultimate notoriety with its belief – audible in the increasingly white-male-supremacist groves of environmental and computer-science academia nearly three decades before Eric Pianka made it public in 2006 – that a pandemic that killed off 90 percent of the global human population was the only way to save our Mother Earth from the permanent reduction back to the Precambrian lifelessness that looms as the consequence of our masters’ thermonuclear, biochemical and industrial follies. Though Pianka never urged such a Final Solution, nor identified its targets, it was always obvious the vast majority of victims would come from the working class, the 99.9 percent of our species who are forever dependent on paychecks for survival.

As for how the ruling class would survive any pandemic it would presumably unleash, by the late 1970s, the bankers were already building bunkers.

Significantly, the sorts of ideological reversals that followed the ‘60s are a defining characteristic of U.S. political history: note the transformations of the Republicans and the Democrats, the former from Abolitionist to Conservative to Christonazi/Neoconfederate, the latter from pro-slavery stalwarts to advocacy of the New Deal and then their post-JFK retreat to functioning as the Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column. Note too the transformation of Reconstruction to Jim Crow, its relief via the (brief) Civil Rights interregnum followed by the (probably permanent) reversion to the genocidal racism of Christonazism. These transformations illustrate how the effective the slavemaster-minded capitalist ruling class is – and always has been -- at conditioning the white majority to self-destructively shackle itself with hard-right ideology whenever its grievances intensify enough to threaten humanitarian revolution or even provoke attempts at significant reform.

It is something of an aside, but in the above pattern we witness history's unequivocal refutation of our species' ultimate Big Lie: the historically false notion the "moral arc" of the universe "bends toward justice." Bend it does, though any honest reading of the data proves its curvature under patriarchy is exclusively toward ever-more-inescapably apocalyptic tyranny. We also see that as the arc of patriarchal history curves toward ever-more-advanced technology, it merges with and becomes indistinguishable from the curve of tyranny. Was pre-patriarchal history any different? The misogyny-tabooed scholarship by Marija Gimbutas, Alexander Marshack, Gerald Hawkins, Barry Fell, Gavin Menzies, Barbara Mor and Robert Graves tell us it surely was – that in societies which evolved as extensions of motherhood, the source-model and psychodynamic impetus of matriarchy, technological advancements were shared for collective benefit rather than weaponized as assets of tyranny. Cooperation -- not competition -- was the primary means of survival. Otherwise we could not have sustained ourselves through at least 300 millennia of ice ages and epic geological disasters. In profoundly alarming contrast, the imposition of patriarchy -- by talking snakes, burning wheels in the sky and self-proclaimed deities that descend to earth in thunderous clouds of smoke and fire -- has brought us to the brink of terminal apocalypse in a mere six thousand years, a terrifying nemesis that suggests patriarchy is indeed the cosmic equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets.

The resultant lynch-mob nazism of the white U.S. working class is often affirmed in blood, as in the 1921 Tulsa massacre, or when an estimated 400 white construction workers and 800 white office workers attacked, savagely beat and hospitalized hundreds of peace demonstrators in New York City on 8 May 1970. That atrocity, encouraged by openly approving cops, resoundingly applauded by leaders of both major parties and endorsed by most of the nation’s labor unions, is an obvious prelude to the present-day atrocities perpetrated – invariably with obvious police support – by the Neoconfederates, the Christonazis and the Trumpite kampfbund in general, the membership of which continues to grow. Aristocrat or lumpenproletarian, not a one of their sort would ever accept socialism; the former have mandated the relentless indoctrination of the latter by their churches to reject socialism as demonic, by their schools to fear it as enslavement and by mass media to regard it as a euphemism for race-mixing, homosexuality and emasculation.

Not only is their fanatical bigotry and methodically sustained ignorance irremediable; it has always been, as documented by Steven Hahn in Illiberal America (W.W. Norton & Company: 2004) – the definitive ethos of the nation's white majority. Now -- and probably forever -- it is the triumphantly official policy of the federal government. Eventually it will the prescribed dogma of all but a coastal dozen of the 50 states. It is irrefutable proof the U.S. is now as purposefully hateful as the Germany it inspired. Apropos which, see James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press: 2017).

To understand the true bottomlessness of our enemy’s sociopathy, read “The Last Article,” here. As I have said elsewhere, the Lyudmila Pavlichenko formulation applies to the whole blood-thirsty lot, leaders and followers alike: they are indeed “fascists not humans.”

But now there may be a tiny defiant flicker of fiery hope within the all-smothering darkness. Trump's sneeringly sadistic, Pinochet-caliber "economic shock therapy" -- runaway food-price inflation sneakily imposed by tariffs and mass deportations (lean ground beef up 68 percent in a single month) -- is growing the resistance with a speed as apparently unprecedented as the true-but-censored rate of inflation itself. Thus the 14 June anti-Trump "No Kings" campaign produced what are now said to be the largest protest demonstrations in U.S. history. And as it says in "Biko," Peter Gabriel's evocative anti-apartheid anthem,2 "Once the flames begin to catch/the wind will blow it higher."

__________________

1In 2004, as a result of family treachery – the ultimate triumph of an older, now-dead half-sibling who had long despised me – I was evicted from the rural, forest-and-garden acreage I had been assured would be my home for as long as I chose to remain there. I’m now guessing that during the resultant move – of necessity made in great haste and under constant threat of violence – I accidentally disposed of the relevant file. But I am still searching for it – I have two four-drawer filing cabinets of material to sort – and if I do find it, I will post it as bibliographical references.

2A musically superior "Biko," unfortunately marred by an intrusively discordant introduction of musicians following the performance, is here.

(For M, in recognition and gratitude.)

LB/30 January-20 June 2025

-30- 

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U.S. Votes Trump as Führer, Killing Our 248-Year-Old Republic, Imposing a 'Unified Reich' Tyrannized by Christonazi Theocracy and Neoliberal Economics

09 November 2024

(Note: given the outcome of Tuesday's election, I consider it a blessing I am terminally ill, according to my cardiologist doomed by post-Covid complications of heart and kidney failure to die before next September -- this despite the fact I was fully inoculated.  Though the I Ching, Runemal  and  the Marseille  Tarot all predicted in January 2020 the pandemic would kill me, I began to believe by 2023 I had misread these ancient  oracles,  which for me have always been uncannily accurate.  But in June and July of that year I was felled by Covid, abed 10 days with scorching fever and 12 days more for recovery, then learned it had fried my heart and irreparably damaged my kidneys. Thus I will most likely escape the horrors of Trump's promised New American Holocaust.)

*****

As I was allowed to suggest via a New York Times comment thread this morning (8 November 2024), 'I think if we want a truly accurate picture of our domestic future -- financial, political, sociological -- we need look at the Pinochet Regime in Chile. (I say this not only because Elon Musk's pledge of "economic hardship" echoes the neoliberal "shock treatment" Pinochet imposed on Chile, but because of the incoming regime's promises of ideological transformation and vengeance.)'  (Links added for DfD readers.) Needless to say, this puts a powerful imprimatur on the following analysis.  

*****

WHILE THIS REPORT'S  headline may strike some readers as a bit over the top, it will do so only because so much of the capitalists' Mainstream Media Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit re-creation of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), has already been intimidated into radically downplaying the ecogenocidal counter-revolution President-Elect Donald Trump has promised his violently hateful, lynch-mob-minded legions of supplicants  and storm-troopers.  In terrible truth, the campaign oratory of Trump, his Vice-President-Elect JD Vance and their fanatical henchmen justifies every word within this rightfully terrifying text. That's why it's so copiously footnoted by links.  Trump's republic-killing pledges, including his promise to sic the military on "enemies within" -- presumably anyone who dares even the slightest criticism of his policies and edicts -- is documented here. Other campaign promises are detailed here and here. Even without the unabashed Christonazification proposed by Project 2025,  the implications of these promises rationally evoke unprecedented anxiety.

Try as I might, I cannot banish my fear that Trump is the end, forever, not only of the American experiment in democracy, but of any realistic hope for saving our species from extinction or preserving our Mother Earth from permanent reduction to Precambrian lifelessness.

To The New York Times editors' attempt to reassure the world all is well because "the long-term fate of American democracy...remains in the hands of the American people,"¹  I can only reply  it was those very hands that have imposed the apocalyptic cancer of Trump on the nation and the world, not once but twice. These editors, normally far more usefully insightful, have somehow chosen to echo the misguided optimists who maintained the Germans had surely tasted sufficient democracy in the Weimar Republic to prompt them to eventually oust Hitler.  But the Original Nazism proved so compelling that stopping its reign of unspeakable atrocities would never have been accomplished without the indescribable heroism of the Red Army. As Ernest Hemingway is alleged to have said: "Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.”² The Soviet Union's  monumental sacrifice -- a death-toll present research is pushing toward 40 million --  is as vital a lesson in the requirements of humanitarian survival as any in our species' approximately 300-million years of experience. Yet now it is obvious the U.S. electorate has either tragically forgotten its message or -- more likely in the case of the Trumpite zealots -- rejected its validity.  The defiant re-election of Trump despite his inflammatory bigotry,  multiple felony convictions and relentlessly repeated vows of ecogenocidal tyranny prove today's Christonazism is no less seductively binding -- and blinding -- than Hitler's original. But this time there is no Red Army to rescue us from the resultant horrors.

Seemingly as much in denial as the Times honchos, Kamala Harris likewise seeks to reassure us, telling us "it's going to be ok." She tries to soothe us as if we were injured children fearfully awaiting medical intervention.  Never mind the overwhelming  evidence "ok" is the very quality Trump will steal from the collective future of the entire 99.9 Percent and violently rip from the individual futures of any of us who dare rise up to oppose him; Kamala says "it's going to be ok."    Never mind his co-conspirators' plans to outlaw unions,  rob women of their right to vote and repeal or diminish every other progressive  achievement that has defined  our 248-year history; Kamala assures us "it's going to be ok." And never mind an entire  universe of rival critics -- fiercely unapologetic Marxians and conciliatory united-front communists and democratic socialists and conventional progressives and radical pacifists -- all agree it was the Democrats' craven submission to the demands of  their capitalist puppet-masters  that passed the termination switch back to Trump and returned the doomsday keys to the Christonazi fanatics;  Kamala insists "the light of America's promise will always burn bright...it's going to be ok." Such is the Democratic (sic) Party's  post-election strategy.

Are we then so gullible  we'll continue believing  what we are repeatedly told, that Trump's terrifying triumph is merely the unfortunate result of the Democrats' mistaken judgement, that we are suffering nothing more than the temporary consequences of a series of well-intentioned strategic and tactical errors? Don't we comprehend what is being done to us? Can't  we sense the nation-wrecking malice in Biden's extended refusal to   resign his candidacy?  Why aren't we outraged by the infinite contemptuousness  so blatantly evident in the Democrats' carefully scripted effort to conceal the apparent feeble-mindedness that now --  with Josef Goebbels cunning -- does double duty to excuse the president's unprecedented malfeasance?  Why do we ignore  the overwhelming evidence the slaying of our 248-year-old republic is the  intended outcome of a predatory, multi-generation plutocratic operations plan that dates back to the 1930s and the scheme hatched by Hitler, Mussolini and our  capitalist overlords to enslave us all by nazification? Are we too numbed by trauma to recognize  the Trumpite triumph as tantamount to invasion and conquest?  Are we already too sickened  by neoliberalism's metastasizing moral imbecility to resurrect  the  empathy that fosters solidarity? Have we thus become too self-indulgent to embrace the discipline that forges solidarity into effectiveness? Are we too intimidated to organize sustained resistance? Are we indeed the permanently subjugated  rabble our predatory masters believe us to be? Have we truly surrendered to enslavement? Have we forgotten we're  the working class, the 99.9 Percent without whom human society can neither function nor survive? Will we ever  dare  rise up again to take back what is rightfully ours?

*****

(Note: the following is a substantially improved version of the comment I posted on the  World Socialist Web Site immediately after Trump's victory became overwhelmingly obvious.)

WHILE I AM not at all surprised by the Christonazi triumph, I am both surprised and terrified by the approval of a new American Holocaust implicit in the fact Trump is gaining reelection not just by Electoral College fiat but by winning the popular vote as well.

I can no longer doubt what I've hypothesized for several weeks on several comment threads, those of  NYT and the World Socialist Web Site included, that  the Biden/Harris candidacy was never more than the Democratic (sic) Party's most plausibly deniable way to throw the election to Trump, thereby fulfilling the Democrats' historically proven post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the Republican (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and simultaneously completing the bipartisan, slow-motion nazification process tacitly approved by the Congressional grant of de facto immunity to the Bankers' Plot perpe-traitors in 1934. I hardly need say both are essential aspects of the capitalists’ scheme to expand and perpetuate what today we know as neoliberal tyranny.³

My hypothesis will be confirmed if Trump rewards Biden and Harris by exempting them from the mass arrests by which he promises to punish all his opponents. (Perhaps he will also exempt Obama, whom I long ago dubbed Barack the Betrayer, and whom I have long suspected the Democrats put in the White House for the clandestine, plausibly deniable purpose of resurrecting the fanatical racism that brought us to the present denouement.)

As to the toxic magnitude of that racism, and as to how Trump is winning the popular vote even in states where substantial majorities are approving pro-abortion measures, I believe the answer is implicit in the Pew-Poll data that shows 77 percent of the white adult citizenry⁴ in denial of the genocidal racism that was so overwhelmingly  obvious in Bush II's response to Katrina. I take this data as an accurate measurement of U.S. white-supremacist sentiment.  Thus there is a theoretical 77-percent majority of white women who are both pro-choice and enough vengefully racist to vote for a convicted felon who is also an admitted disciple of Adolf Hitler. The election results indicate they are voting away their bodily autonomy to enable Trump’s promised restoration of official white supremacy and simultaneously voting to regain and perpetuate their bodily autonomy via their home states' restorations of abortion rights. Obviously they fail to understand all Trump need do to impose a national abortion ban is yield -- as is his obvious intent -- to the  Christonazi demand to reactivate the Comstock Act,  which could easily be expanded into a national ban on all forms of contraception. It's former use as a weapon against the LGBTQ community -- which Trump considers part of "the enemy within" -- could also be resurrected.  And with Christonazi control of the Senate, there is no longer any possibility Comstock can be repealed. 

Significantly, regardless of the odds against its passage, the most recent Comstock-repeal effort was quietly sandbagged by the Biden/Harris Administration -- yet another proof of the Democrats'  clandestine function as the Christonazi Fifth Column, which I cite here as a lesser example of the penchant for treachery necessary to throw an election.   

And now -- 8 November 2024 -- it appears only a miracle can stop the Trump and his Christonazis from taking the House as well. This final viuctory -- terminal in every sense -- would not only give them absolute control of the federal government; it would end forever any hope the 19 remaining so-called blue states might be allowed to maintain sanctuaries that sustain women's autonomy and preserve the lives of those of us Trump and his lynch-mob followers target for deportation or extermination. Trump has already told us  he'll impose martial law to subjugate any cities or states that dare resist. To avoid demoralizing the national military by employing it for the mass  murder of fellow Americans, Trump will almost certainly order the long-term occupations policed by one or more of his his militia organizations, much as Hitler did with his infamous Death's Head SS.  These extended intrusions will undoubtedly replicate the horrors of unrestrained genocide that characterized the German presence in Poland, the western Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Because the populations of most of the 19 blue states are to varying extents  forcibly disarmed and often denied the ability to learn and practice marksmanship, they will never be able to organize effective partisan resistance of the sort that was mounted by the Russians, Poles and Yugoslavs. Nor is civil war possible.  Federalization of blue-state national guard units to round up immigrants, arrest dissenters and suppress protest demonstrations would place them under defense department command, subjecting all officers and enlisted personnel  to the Uniform Code of Military Justice,  with death-penalty offenses including mutiny and sedition. The defection of a guard unit to defend a state against federal invasion is not only outlawed by the UCMJ but prohibited by the surveillance that  inescapably monitors us all. The blue-state secession about which so many progressives have fantasized is thus also rendered impossible.  And it seems there is no hope whatsoever for aid from outside the country. Research indicates the U.S. is so feared and despised, no nation on earth  would be willing to provide the assistance necessary to restore its peoples' freedom  -- that even the remaining communist nations would rather see the U.S. destroyed than resurrected as a Marxian ally.

We have been voted  into the abyss; the apocalypse -- whether by world war, environmental rape or both -- is upon us all.  

Confronted as we shall soon be by a violently hostile domestic regime rendered technologically omnipotent by unimaginably advanced weaponry, forever robbed of our privacy by total surveillance, threatened by the regime's promise to criminalize even the most superficial expressions of opposition and severely fragmented by identity-politics divisiveness,  the only possible way we might yet preserve our humanity -- and perhaps also eventually arise to help save our species and preserve our Mother Earth -- is by defiantly building the solidarity necessary to collectively embrace Leon Trotsky's ideologically disciplined, no-compromise brand of world-wide socialist activism.

Let us read, re-read and commit to memory the solidarity-building lesson of John Paul Sartre's "Republic of Silence" -- that he and his comrades

...were never more free than during the German occupation...The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as humans...

Let us not forget Comrade Trotsky's cautionary adage that "in every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana."

Let us nevertheless wholeheartedly organize our minds and bodies  for maximum resistance.

This time around, we have nothing to lose but our  hopelessness.

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¹America Makes a Perilous Choice," The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2024. (Linked here but not above because non-subscribers may be unable to access it without emailed invitations from subscribers .) 
²Though I cannot find an authoritative source for this quote -- hence  "alleged" -- I have heard it repeated since my teens and know enough about Hemingway (a distant maternal cousin) to find the attribution entirely credible, particularly as something he might have said as a war correspondent  covering  (and clandestinely participating in) World War II. 
³I long ago began correctly describing neoliberalism as "socioeconomic nazism" because I recognized its intent to use genocide by austerity (rather than by  death camps) to create an übermenschen of the Hitler/Ayn-Rand breed and eventually transform all humanity into a master race capable of achieving whatever it might imagine. See Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism  (George Monbiot & Peter Hutchinson, Crown: 2024), especially pgs. 16-24 and 155-158. 
⁴CORRECTION: I somehow misremembered this number as "73 percent." Shame on me; I should have checked it.

LB/6-9 November 2024

"...Far and away the road goes winding..."

-30-