Anti-Black Slander from the Democratic Party?

THE OLDEST QUARREL inside the Left is undoubtedly the fight between pacifists and those who believe humanitarian reforms can be wrest from the capitalist Ruling Class only by violence or credible threats thereof. 

Events in Ferguson  re-heated the dispute to a simmer, but Baltimore  brought it to a rolling boil, and last week it bubbled onto the pages of mainstream media. 

Yet that's only half the story. The other half is that one writer, Jonathan Chait of the aggressively upscale New York Magazine, is using the discussion to slyly blame U.S. African Americans  for the downfall of the Democratic Party.

Thus, in Chait's obliquely presented view, black rebelliousness is responsible for the party's reduction to the me-too fascism that has characterized Democratic foreign policy since the ascendance of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency, and defined its domestic policy since President Jimmy Carter's theocratic signature  enshrined the Republican war against women as federal policy. 

Meanwhile the appearance of the violence-versus-nonviolence debate in mainstream publications is, I believe, of profound political and historical significance. It is unlike anything I have seen during the nearly 60 years I have been a professional writer, editor and/or photographer. Nor have I heard of its like occurring anytime during the 75 years I've been living this lifetime. 

Moreover – and let us not forget this all-important point – Chait and the writers he cites all represent the Ruling Class regardless of the political disguises assumed by their publishers. Thus it is arguable the widespread coverage suddenly being given this issue is the most accurate yardstick yet of Ruling Class fears that Working Class anger in the U.S. is approaching the ignition-point of revolution. 

That's why Chait's opening graf, which builds a pro-violence argument he soon demolishes with volleys of academic research, is worth quoting in totality, especially for its links: 

The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon . “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox's German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson  asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.

But then three paragraphs later Chait not only refutes the writers he cited. He also reaches a conclusion I would expect to find – albeit stated in more obviously racist terms – only in an avowedly Rightist journal:

The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.

Because I (of course) do not read New York Magazine, I owe Margaret Flowers and her excellent on-line daily Popular Resistance a salute of thanks for making Chait's “Riots and Social Change” available to a proletarian such as I. PR routinely does a damn fine job of bringing to Working Class attention important stories we 99 Percenters would otherwise be denied by the nation's various mechanisms of de facto censorship, but this time Flowers outdid herself.

All of which is prefatory to what I said on the associated comment thread. But it is more than just another en passant response. It is important for two reasons: it addresses the revisionist history by which the Ruling Class increasingly beclouds what happened within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It also – or so I hope – alerts a few significantly placed people to a new Democratic Big Lie as potentially malicious as the “welfare queen” Big Lie the Democrats borrowed from the Republicans to justify enactment of genocidal “welfare reforms” in 1995.

(My apology for the fact there are a few repetitions between the explanatory grafs above and those below. The repetitions are unavoidable because I have reprinted my original comment word-for-word.)

Let us not forget that as a writer for aggressively upscale New York Magazine, Mr. Chait's perspective is necessarily that of the Ruling Class.

Hence the subtle but nevertheless implicit race-bating and victim-blaming in his statement that "The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order."

The truth, however, is quite different. The New Deal coalition was not "crack(ed) open" by the Republican Party but rather by the Democrats themselves.

President Lyndon Johnson's 180-degree turn in foreign policy immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led directly to the Southeast Asian (aka "Vietnam") War.

In turn -- and exactly as the Ruling Class intended -- the war destroyed the Working Class solidarity that had created and sustained the New Deal. The war divided the U.S. Working Class -- what today we would call the 99 Percent -- into two venomously hostile camps: the sneeringly contemptuous draft-exempt elite and the equally embittered draft-bait, cannon-fodder majority of those of us who (because we lacked the money and influence to bribe our way out of the draft), had no choice but to serve.

Contrary to the implications of Mr. Chait's remark -- a clever falsehood that seems designed to protect white Ruling Class Democrats by blaming blacks for the party's troubles -- all the significant non-racial divisions in present-day U.S. politics date from that history-changing Vietnam-era divide.

As to racist hate-mongering by the Republicans, that indeed occurred, but again contrary to Mr. Chait's disingenuous claim, the class warfare implicit in the Vietnam draft had already destroyed the New Deal.

Vietnam had also -- because of the tacitly genocidal U.S. policy of sending a preponderance of African-American combat troops to fight its colonial wars -- radically inflamed the long-simmering racial injustices that underlay the riots.

The Republican Party, which since the 1920s has been the primary vessel of U.S. fascism, predictably pounced with malicious glee on the resultant white fear. Obviously -- at least in retrospect -- this too was precisely as the Ruling Class intended.

Subsequent U.S. history makes it equally obvious what happened next. The Ruling Class deftly expanded Vietnam's divisiveness by manipulating it into a plethora of profoundly emotional clashes over firearms, jobs, unions, welfare, immigration, education, abortion, sexuality, Christian supremacy and ultimately the prevalent definitions of patriotism and what it means to be a U.S. citizen.

Again exactly as the Ruling Class intends, the resultant hostilities -- perpetuated as they are by a media machine more psychologically effective than even Josef Goebbels might have imagined -- destroy any future possibility of ever again restoring 99 Percent solidarity.

(Disclosure: I am not a Vietnam veteran but am a Vietnam-era vet: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty, overseas service in Korea 1961-1962, honorably discharged after completion of three-year reserve obligation).

LB/8-14 June 2015

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Inspection, Police Atrocities, Unhealthy Care, Iraq, Guns

THE INSPECTION THAT prompted me to pen a genuine rant last week is now behind me, and of course I passed – I always do – but the physical cost of preparing for two inspections in three weeks is such that my normal 24/7 pain has doubled.

This comes from various long-ago injuries inflamed by geriatric osteoarthritis, and its normal 2-3 range has doubled to a relentless 4-6 I can only hope will eventually abate.

The numbers refer to the medical profession's 1-to-10 discomfort scale, with my 10 – since as a male I have obviously never experienced childbirth – a wisdom tooth that simultaneously impacted and abscessed on a Friday at the beginning of a seemingly endless four-day holiday weekend, which meant no treatment was available until the following Tuesday. The pain was so intense that when I finally got to a dentist, I was lapsing in and out of unconsciousness.

Meanwhile, back in the present, the time these accursed inspections have stolen from my life – essentially 14 days counting preparation and aftermath – has effectively killed OAN for another week.

So again there will be no Cassandra column today, as I was once more too limited by opportunity and energy to do anything more than respond to other writers' work. Goddess grant by next week I'll be recovered enough to again do some original writing.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

The Associated Press reported the angry response of an oppressed urban citizenry that for the past four years has been targeted by some of the most murderously brazen police brutality in the USian imperial homeland. Reader Supported News aptly headlined the AP story “Albuquerque Protesters Put Police Chief 'On Trial'.” I used its comment thread to reveal one of my darker suspicions – that the national epidemic of atrocities being inflicted on us by our federalized, militarized, Gestapo-ized local police is a top-level, One Percent-mandated experiment in which we the people are the lab rats – its purpose to determine how much we will suffer before our obedience and submission turns to rebellion.

This entire sequence of events – the police violence, the federal response – needs to be understood in its probable context:

(1)-Some federal agency or agencies responsible for the defense of capitalism – that is, the suppression of the Working Class – wondered how far the USian public can be pushed before it will revolt.

(2)-The federally militarized police were therefore ordered to behave in Albuquerque as an army of occupation.

(3)-After years of murderous brutality, the people rose up.

 

(4)-The federal government ordered an investigation.

(5)-The killing (maybe) stopped, not because the federal government stands for justice (just ask Edward Snowden), but because the feds now have a laboratory-tested yardstick of the intensity of oppression at which rebellion becomes likely.

Such is life – and death – under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

 

Such is capitalism itself: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth.

Such is our Ayn Rand future: posh, impregnable palaces for the One Percenters and their politicians, bureaucrats, military officers and police commanders; for all of us, the slave world of the electronic concentration camp and the darkest Dark Age our species has ever known.

Wake up, people: Cassandra columnists like Chris Hedges are speaking naught but the hideous truth.

******

Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress bared some nauseating facts about the one industrialized nation on this dying planet in which health care remains a privilege of wealth, a genocidal condition intentionally perpetuated by Barack the Betrayer's so-called “Affordable Care Act,” the name of which is itself a Big Lie so outrageous it would make Josef Goebbels proud. Culp-Ressler's damning report, “The US Has the Most Expensive and Least Effective Health Care in the Developed World,” thus prompted a good deal of applause and agreement, some of which was mine:

Absolutely. The health-care difference between the civilized world and the United States is that in the civilized world, health care is intended to genuinely care for the people. But in the U.S., what is deceptively labeled “health care” actually has an antithetical purpose. It exists (A)-to make the obscenely wealthy aristocracy wealthier and (B)-to exterminate lower-income people by defining health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a basic human right.

Moreover, the Affordable Care Act – so-called “Obamacare” – does nothing to change the U.S. system's genocidal Ayn Rand dynamics. In fact it locks them in place forever.

By making health insurance mandatory, it enables USian propagandists to generate the Big Lie of near-universal insurance. But its profit-boosting co-pays and deductibles still make health care prohibitively expensive. Hence its victims – and that is precisely what we are – are now forced to pay for insurance we can never afford to use. The result is the huge windfall with which Barack the Betrayer gifted the insurance barons.

It is also a classic example of the miasma of lies, disinformation and murder by which capitalism perpetuates its bottomless evil – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever expressed.

******

Apropos health care and capitalism, a Crosscut piece entitled “Is the NW a breeding ground for a new kind of capitalism?” prompted a discussion-thread that enabled me to protest how upper management is converting my beloved Group Health Cooperative into a personal profit center for predatory business-school graduates:

(T)hough (Group Health) remains officially a cooperative, nearly all the old socialist spirit that back in the '70s prompted me to become a permanent voting member of the co-op has been extinguished.

Meanwhile the greed of its MBA-brandishing, Ayn-Rand-minded management is methodically revising Group Health's policies to make it indistinguishable from any for-profit insurance company, and it is apparently up-scaling (gentrifying) its customer base accordingly.

Given the moral imbecility at the core of the MBA ethos, such focus on managerial profiteering is now as likely to occur in allegedly “non-profit” contexts as it is in conventional capitalism.

Thus to boost revenues Group Health has done what only a few years ago would have been unthinkable. It has suppressed its members' reproductive and end-of-life rights by subcontracting with the viciously theocratic Franciscan (Roman Catholic) Health System for lowest-bid hospital care.

While the Franciscan arrangement is objectionable for many reasons, its significance here is its proof that boosting revenues, which is essential to boost managerial compensation packages, has taken precedence over patients' physical and emotional wellbeing.

Predictably, as if to declare its new pro-managerial orientation, a recent Group Health document, “Patient Financial Responsibility ('Rev. Date 2014112'),” omits the term “cooperative” entirely and describes the organization as “your insurance company.”

***

What is destroying Group Health is of course capitalism:

Even camouflaged by euphemisms and lies, the core value of capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue. Capitalism is therefore, exactly as described by its disciple Ayn Rand, the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever put forth – human history's closest approximation to absolute evil.

 

******

Anyone who seeks to understand what is happening in Iraq should read “Who Are Iraq's Sunni Arabs and What Did We Do to Them?,” a superb backgrounder by Juan Cole of Informed Comment. My contribution to the comment thread thus appropriately started with an expression of gratitude:

Thank you, RSN and Mr. Cole, for this vital background.

But then I focused on what – perhaps even more than petroleum lust – I'm sure prompted the folly of what will no doubt soon be known as the First Iraq War:

As to what truly motivated Bush and still motivates his henchmen (including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton), Mr. Cole's last paragraph says it all:

“Sunni Iraqis had been in the 20th century cosmopolitan and often modernists. Many were liberals yearning for democracy. From 1968 they turned to more of a Soviet model, a strongly secular one.”

Thus again we witness the bottomless savagery of USian imperialism – In Vietnam, “we had to destroy the village to save it” (from Communism). Now it's the destruction of a whole nation to “save” it from Communist influences. Next will be the entire planet.

Such is the absolute evil of capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the violently malicious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth.

******

Unfinished Dirty Business: Antivenin for an Anti-Gun Snakebite

Scatterbrained and hurting as I was with the preparation for the quarterly premises inspection, I failed to notice how a poster who hides behind the screen-name Billy Bob had slandered me in the comment-thread hissy provoked by a significant truth – that Civil Rights Movement non-violence was empowered by armed African-American citizens – a definitive reality the forcible-disarmament fanatics have been desperately trying to flush down the Orwell hole for six decades.

As I noted last week, Charles E. Cobb Jr.'s forthcoming book boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis” – yes, literally. Reader Supported News published Cobb's important essay about the book, but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted its title, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014).

Meanwhile, Billy Bob's antagonism toward me had shown that where firearms are concerned, the Left – at least the pseudo-Left that won't rest until the Working Class is totally disarmed – has its own equivalent of the Hard Right's corps of Big Liars and Ku Klux demagogues.

I replied appropriately:

Billy: I'm sorry I was too preoccupied with the demands of survival to note earlier the personal venomousness of your response.

If you'd bothered to learn anything about me, you'd know I'm a 74-year-old semi-retired journalist, a former Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam-War, back-to-the-land, alternative-press and Occupy activist. A declared socialist, I currently serve on a 15 Now organizing committee.

Hence for you to try – as you did above – to maliciously equate me with the Republican Sharron Angle (whose name you misspelled), merely puts you at one with those fanatically anti-gun Democrats and anti-union “progressives” who hysterically slander all supporters of the Second Amendment as “Nazis.”

I thank you for that disclosure. I will keep it in mind anytime I read anything else of yours – if indeed I bother. I will also remember the craven cowardice of hiding behind screen-name anonymity to insult a person who posts under his or her own name.

 

That said, never in my life have I advocated political violence. Nor will I. Though the death of the Soviet Union has forever doomed non-violent resistance to capitalism – that's why “hope” is idiocy rather than “audacity” – I have also glimpsed the face of war, and that alone mandates my lifelong commitment to political non-violence.

Meanwhile your nasty effort to associate me with “Second Amendment remedies” is surely reminiscent of the defining tactics of agents-provocateur.

LB/22 June 2014

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Another Inspection Again Wrenches My Life

I CAN'T OBJECT to the idea behind the federally mandated quarterly inspections of the individual dwelling units in any lower-income senior housing complex that was built with even a tiny percentage of public funds. Officially the purpose is to make certain the facilities are fully functional – that the plumbing, exhaust fans, alarm systems and electric ranges are all operational.

(I should note here we seniors are forbidden gas cooking, which means that 10 years after encountering my first electric range, I still can't successfully cook even the most simple meals. Indeed I despise electric ranges, which as far as I am concerned are worthless for anything save boiling water or heating soup. With a gas flame, you can see what you're doing; with electricity, you can only guess, which in my case means everything has to be burned on the outside to make sure it is not raw in the middle. But that is another issue for another time.)

Unofficially, the purpose of the quarterly inspections is to monitor the mental health of the occupants: detection of an unkempt or dirty apartment that might indicate the onset of Alzheimer's, hoarding that might endanger an occupant or create fire hazards for an entire complex, that sort of thing.

 

Nevertheless and in reality I resent these intrusions more than anything that fate and bureaucratic tyranny has ever dealt me. This is not just because of the violation of my privacy; the medical truth is that each inspection literally steals six or seven days from my life. Four of these days are taken by the preparatory cleanup, which for me – because of my arthritic spine, shoulders, left wrist and right knee – is an excruciatingly painful ordeal of dusting, vacuuming, mopping and, finally, on the morning of the inspection, neatening my bed into semi-military, Suzi-homemaker presentableness. This is in fact the most agonizing chore of all, which due to its hurtful extremes of bending and reaching takes me at least 30 minutes and sometimes half again that, the very reason I do it as seldom as possible. The remainder of the stolen time – the post-inspection hours of inspection day plus one or two days afterward – is required for recovery, most of it in my newly made bed.

But I have not verbalized these objections – at least not emphatically – until now, when the combination of the surprise state inspection inflicted on us at the end of last month and the upcoming regular inspection Tuesday is stealing 12 whole days from my life. (The interval between the first inspection and the second was just long enough all the cleaning had to be repeated.) The result – because the time-theft occurs at a peak of volunteer obligations (this blog; the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow tenants; work for the organizing committee of 15 Now Tacoma; public relations for a friend who is a playwrite and musician) – is I am more frantically jammed up and therefore more jaggedly stressed than I have been at any time in memory, including the many years I worked at two and sometimes three jobs.

Another very big part of the problem is the wrenching time-theft imposed by my dependence on Pierce Transit. PT's bus service was only marginally adequate in 2009, the year my car died, and now after five years of anti-transit-user downsizing, it has been shrunken by least 70 percent. The transit authority bureaucracy will no longer disclose the actual size of the cuts, but the result is unquestionably the worst bus service I have ever seen anywhere in the urban U.S. Indeed there was more frequent bus service – far more frequent – provided by Knoxville Transit Lines in Knoxville, Tennessee during the 1950s. (For example, KTL buses ran until 1 a.m.; most PT buses cease operations at 9 p.m., some as early as 5 p.m. – and Knoxville in 1954 had half the population of Tacoma in 2014.) Bottom line, because of the bus service here – or rather the abysmal lack thereof – an errand that took me maybe 45 minutes when I had an automobile can now take up to an entire day.

 

I was of course prepared for the interruption inflicted by this month's quarterly inspection, but the additional seven days stolen by the surprise state inspection was the proverbial straw that broke the metaphorical camel's back. Such are the punishments capitalism maliciously inflicts on those of us it exploited into inescapable poverty.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because so much time during these past few weeks has been stolen by inspections, OAN again gets shortchanged; again no real essay, and only five Internet posts during the past seven days:

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote about the mix of theocratic Christianity and Hard Right populism that enabled a Teabagger to beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor last week. But “David Brat: Free-Market Purist, Ayn Rand Devotee” said nothing about the campaign's historical precedent, and I responded accordingly:

What we are witnessing in David Brat – and mark my word (because you read it here first) – is the combination of strategy, tactics and rhetoric that will leverage the USian Homeland's final transition to unabashed neo-Nazism.

Doubt me? Read William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon and Schuster: 1959, 1960, 1987, 1988, 1990).

It's by studying Shirer we see what we might aptly dub the "Bratley Method" is precisely how the Nazis sold themselves and their programs to the seemingly ultra-civilized German people as Germany suffered from the devastation inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression.

***

Yes (Rise and Fall) is long, but it's vividly written, and its well worth the effort. For me it was the perfect sea-cruise book, and I had lots of time to read it – on the troopship returning from Korea, the U.S.N.S. Sultan, which in 1962 made the passage from Inchon to Oakland Army Terminal in about three weeks. For me, that was the blessed passage of return to civilian life after the three-year, Regular-Army active-duty portion of a six-year enlistment. (The remainder was in the reserves, but – luck of the draw or blessing of the Goddess – I was not recalled for Vietnam.) And of course I've reviewed Rise and Fall many times, as it's been part of my library ever since.

******

Alan Pyke exposed another atrocity of USian governance  in “Impoverished Mother Dies in Jail Cell Over Unpaid Fines for Her Kids Missing School.” I noted how it exemplifies capitalism in action:

What this Dickensian tragedy tells us is that in the merciless new world of the former United States – a realm transmogrified into the de facto Fourth Reich – any one of us who is not part of the Ruling Class could suffer the fate of Eileen DeNino

Indeed the death of Eileen DeNino – and the deaths of so many others like her, always from the denial of basic human needs that now under the savagery of Ayn Rand economics have become privileges of wealth – makes me think perhaps the Hans Christian Anderson story of the “Little Match Girl” is replacing the Horatio Alger tales as the epic that properly symbolizes our present and future. (Indeed, recast in a 21st Century setting by cinematographer Filip Matevski's 12-minute film, it becomes just that.)

Apropos which, perhaps (an anti DeNino poster) would say the Match Girl too "refused to help herself" when, as in Matevski's work, the child chose to spend the night in the freezing cold rather than submit to sexual abuse, or – as in the older versions of the story – refused to go home to be beaten by her father.

Meanwhile let us all mourn Eileen DeNino, a mother dead in debtor's prison, another victim of capitalism's New World Order.

******

Trevor Timm of Guardian UK revealed another of the dark and menacing secrets of Obamanoid tyranny in “The US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How the Cops Are Tracking You.” I pointed out an even darker truth:

It is a great irony the wanna-be Nazis of the Confederate-Flag/Swastika-Banner Hard Right – the Christians who claim the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to persecute non-believers; the white racists who believe their god gives them dominion over non-whites; the misogynists who think all women are sluts at heart – were the first to caricature Obama as another Hitler.

Perhaps it was just one of those oddball examples of accidental prophecy from a wildly incongruous source.

More likely it was a case of psychological projection, the mechanism of recognition embodied in a taunt once commonplace on Southern schoolyards: “it takes one to know one.”

However it came about, its terrifying truth becomes more evident every day. Barack Obama is worse than Bush, even worse than Nixon. He is the first genuine tyrant to hold the office of President of the United States, and by his embrace of the modalities of tyranny, he is methodically transforming this nation and its empire into the de facto Fourth Reich.

But the greatest irony of all is how it is his own race – more than any other group of us who, because we are lower-income people, are being scapegoated into equivalents of Nazi Germany's Jews – that is already bearing the brunt of this looming new holocaust in which federalized local police are trained and equipped to function as the new Gestapo.

******

Charles E. Cobb Jr. discussed his forthcoming book, which boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis.” Reader Supported News titled Cobb's important essay “Guns Made Civil Rights Possible: Breaking Down the Myth of Nonviolent Change,” but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted the actual title of the book, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). Then my comment-thread response got right to the point:

A similar volume, Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense (University of North Carolina Press: 2004), was marginalized by the same zero-tolerance codas of political correctness with which the U.S. Left fanatically suppresses all positive references to firearms.

Meanwhile, with the Working Class more in jeopardy than ever, the USian Left's signature effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – i.e., mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is surely amongst the greatest ironies of human history.

Contrary to its claims, pacifism cannot succeed without the threat of violence. The British surrendered to Gandhi's pacifism only because it was backed by the potential of armed revolution organized by the Soviet Union. The same is true of Rev. King's nonviolence.

Indeed all the humanitarian gains of the 20th Century – unions, labor rights, civil rights, safety-net programs – were wrested from the capitalists only by the Soviet threat. That's why, now the U.S.S.R. is dead, capitalism is methodically abolishing all those concessions.

But with the USian Left embracing pacifism and thus functioning as the chief spokesperson for the One Percent's effort to disarm the 99 Percent, these bitter truths are now also tabooed.

***

It was the armed Anglo-Saxon and Cymru yeomanry with their deadly longbows – the massed repetitive firepower of which was not equaled until the invention of the machine gun – that eventually brought the invading Norman kings (of England) to heel. Nevertheless it took what amounted to 300 years of intermittent civil war, some of which is immortalized in the epic of Robin Hood.

Though it is another truth suppressed by political correctness, the most important historical difference between Britain and the continental nations originated from Roman forcible disarmament of conquered peoples. Universal throughout the imperial mainland, it was for a number of reasons never successful in the province of Britannia. Hence even before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the British peasantry was always at least minimally armed, which is why the remnants of what we know today as "democracy" were never totally exterminated there, seeds that began thriving in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

******

Juan Cole wrote a piece on the criminality of the Iraq War,  but “Blair-Bush & Iraq: It’s Not Just the Quagmire But the Lawbreaking & Deception” ignored what may be the most important aspects of the story:

(1)-That it was the perfect distraction from the questions about 9/11 that were then gathering momentum;

(2)-That, apart from Turkey (which is now hopelessly lapsing back into Islamic theocracy), Iran was the only genuinely secular society Islamic culture has ever produced. Thus its destruction brought about the immediate re-imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy, whether Sunni or Shiite, with all its misogynistic savagery. This is an obvious victory for the One Percenters whose intent is to make capitalism safe by imposing Abrahamic theocracy – Jewish in Israel, Christian or Islamic everywhere else – on the entire world.

I keep hoping maybe next week won't be so grim, but then I remember we're all residents of a dying planet – a world we ourselves are killing. 

LB/15 June 2014

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