President Obama's Victory Day Rudeness: I Apologize for My Country's Scorn of Living Russians and Soviet Dead

Mothers and daughters became Soviet warriors. (Click image to view it full size.)

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I AM ASHAMED of how those who rule the Imperial United States and its European satrapies dishonored the millions of Soviet men, women and children who were slain in the epic struggle to save the world from Nazism.

I am ashamed of how we who have never yet suffered comparable invasion  have been taught to belittle the breathtaking sacrifices of those who fought and died to defeat the most obviously sadistic invader our unspeakably savage era has thus far produced. I am ashamed of the politics of xenophobia and greed that demand we disdain fellow humans we should instead hail as heroes and heroines, not just of their own Motherland but of all humanity.

Behind my shame at our overlords' unconscionable bad manners on this particular Victory Day is my far greater shame at how we in the United States have allowed our once-exemplary representative democracy to be reduced to an oligarchy of global oppression and environmental ruination.

I am especially ashamed of how its tyrannies are perpetuated by a white electorate so blinded by racial, socioeconomic and religious hatreds,  it seems idiotic to imagine it will ever stop voting against its own well-being. 

But my country has become so much a police-state, I dare not continue without affirming my shame is the shame of a patriot – that if I did not love my country, I would not so grieve its betrayal. I would not denounce the capitalist One Percent and their political vassals for looting my country into poverty. I would not damn the One Percent's ballot-box disciples for voting my country into ruin merely to inflict suffering on those whose race or ethnicity or gender or sexuality they despise. If I did not love my country, I would not be so appalled by the electronic concentration camp  to which it has been reduced by these betrayers of liberty and their wanton perversions of democratic process.

Nor dare I rationally hope for liberation in what remains of my lifetime. The U.S. Ruling Class is protected by technologies of surveillance and retaliation we can scarcely imagine. Armed with powers earlier generations attributed only to god, it is combining the doctrines of Ayn Rand economics, U.S. exceptionalism and divine-right imperialism into a new and uniquely USian form of Nazism – a Nazism in which absolute power rests not with a single despot but with an infinitely despotic cabal of corporate executives.

The pivotal question of our time, brought into sharp focus by the events in Ukraine, is therefore whether this newest, U.S.-sponsored onslaught of the human penchant for moral imbecility can be brought to bay before its proponents literally nuke the world into a radioactive cinder. 

Yet even if we somehow succeed in building a successful resistance, it may already be too late for our species and this planet as we know it. Indeed it is entirely conceivable some sure but thus far secret knowledge of ourselves as denizens of a dying world is what is fueling the unrelenting greed of the One Percent – a greed so limitless it has no known precedent in human experience.

Is this what is happening? Have the One Percenters been reliably informed their deadly contempt for Nature commanded by the Abrahamic religions has already doomed us? Is the One Percent's intent now merely to see who can collect the most wealth before the too-long-ignored-and-despised Mother Earth sounds the final buzzer? 

Only the darkest and most hopeless of times could produce such otherwise-unthinkable thoughts. And that – the darkest most hopeless time in our species' history – is the time in which we are cursed to live and challenged to do whatever we can to resist the encroaching darkness.

Another dark time, nearly as dark and hopeless as the present, were the months immediately after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on the Summer Solstice of 1941.

But the Red Army and the Soviet people fought back valiantly, eventually defeating what was then the best trained, most technologically advanced war machine on Earth. 

Let us therefore never forget their victory came at a terrible price – their combined military and civilian deaths now estimated to be as many as 43.3 million. (Yes, this is the same material linked in my second paragraph above. But the source for the 43.3 million figure is the researcher Boris Sokolov, for whom you must scroll far down the text.)

All such numbers are inconceivable unless we restate them in quantities we can envision. 

Picture a man or a woman or a child. Then picture that person dead. Picture a corpse.

If you accept Sokolov's estimate (which I do), picture that corpse multiplied 43.3 million times. Forty-three-point-three million is the present-day population of five cities the size of London. Or five the size of New York City. Or four the size of Moscow. Now try to envision these entire municipalities filled with naught but corpses – decomposing bodies that were once living men, women and children, folks with all the pleasures and pains and ambitions and desires and other emotions you or I or anyone has.

That's what it cost the Soviet Union to save us from the Nazis.

But the most important element in this recitation of grim facts is that the Soviet people prevailed – and that by prevailing they saved us all, every man woman and child now alive – from those earlier forms of fascism and Nazism personified by Mussolini and Hitler. (Yes, Fascist Italy did indeed aid Nazi Germany  in the invasion of the Soviet Union.)

The English-language service of the Russian state television network, RT, celebrates this 70th anniversary of the Soviet triumph with a Victory Day program  so thoughtfully scripted it should be preserved and issued as a DVD. It is a valuable historical document, and if it is available, I will add it to my own personal library. 

RT's coverage gives us the obligatory summaries of the fighting but also offers vital glimpses of social history – stories of the people and how they coped with the stresses of enemy invasion.

It includes a sampling of the often poignant poetry of Russian wartime popular music. It is a musical literature utterly unlike the self-consciously happy-faced, “Boogie-Woogie Bugle-Boy-of-Company-B” trivializations with which we in the wartime U.S. were sedated. But you'll have to wait a bit for all the RT material to load, and then you'll have to scroll down to its last pages.

The songs are each accompanied by translations into English, and two are especially moving. One is called “White Cranes”:  “Sometimes it seems to me each fallen soldier/ That never came back from fields of gore/ In fact did never perish as they told you/ But turned into a crane as white as snow.” The other is “Wait for Me”: “That in the midst of gunfire/ It was your waiting for me/ That saved my life.”

Also especially relevant on this occasion is the 2010 Russian film entitled Brestskaya Krepost – “Brest Fortress” in English – that tells the heartrending stories of some of the soldiers and civilians, among them three women, who fought in the battle that was the Soviet equivalent of our Pearl Harbor and Wake Island battles combined.

Available as a DVD with some versions subtitled in English, it is notably unlike most Hollywood war films in that it neither sanitizes the horrors of the battlefield nor belabors the audience with pro-war propaganda.

The ability of Russian cinematographers to depict horrendous violence without simultaneously glorifying it is a skill that has apparently been carefully denied their U.S. counterparts. But that should surprise no one who understands that in the new imperial U.S. oligarchy, government at every level and all its mainstream informational media (including film producers, textbook publishers and advertising agencies), are owned and controlled by the same self-serving inner circle of voraciously capitalist One Percenters.

Nor is there any doubting the diabolical, Josef-Goebbels-inspired efficacy of the uniquely privatized U.S. government propaganda apparatus that has been spawned by the One Percent's seizure of power. The greed and selfishness the propaganda so successfully evokes was undoubtedly a major if undocumented factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prepared in accordance with state-of-the-art psychological research, its influence is so irresistible, it has already convinced the nominally well-informed people of Western Europe to accept the Big Lie World War II was single-handedly won by the United States. 

This same process of de facto psychological warfare, the relentless dumbing-down I label “moronation,” is what sustains Moron Nation – that portion of the U.S. electorate which is ever more militantly white, theocratically Christian, aggressively reactionary and therefore ever more inclined to embrace a uniquely USian, Ayn Rand version of Nazism. Its emergent ideology is already apparent, not only in the use of “austerity” as a euphemism for calculatedly genocidal elimination of social services, but in a local war against public-transport users I wrote about extensively earlier in this decade.

Now of course the One Percent's (allegedly unofficial) propaganda machine – which in truth is as potent and functionally official as Goebbels' own Ministry of Propaganda – is turning not just its assault weapons but its heaviest Joe McCarthy siege guns on anyone of significance who dares dispute the empire's portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine.

Quoth the ever-reliable Robert Parry via a Consortium News exclusive:

U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty has a checkered history that includes hiring Nazi sympathizers as Cold War commentators. Now, one of its current writers has used the platform to bash an American scholar who won’t join Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine.

That follows Parry's earlier report detailing how the group-thinkers insist on describing the deadly ramrodding of Ayn Rand capitalist savagery down post-Soviet Russian throats as nothing more than “growing pains” intended “to help (these people) attain a better life.”

Which suggests another presumably unthinkable thought:

Given its context of economic warfare with imperialistic intent, could it be the real reason Obama snubbed the Russian people and their Victory Day celebration is that he cannot agree with what it celebrates?

Remember it was the immediate ancestry of the present-day One Percent that tried via the Bankers Plot of 1934  to join the U.S. to the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Perhaps then Obama is no different from so many other U.S. politicians in harboring a clandestine, beyond-top-secret commitment to the Nazi resurgence already evident in the Western Ukraine and unquestionably lurking in the Moron Nation shadows of the USian Homeland as well.

After all, what is Nazism – particularly with its profit-expanding policies of slave labor and the extermination of anyone no longer exploitable for profit – but the ultimate form of capitalism?

LB/3-10 May 2015

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Psycho Jail: Cruelest Twist in U.S. War on Free Speech

I HARDLY KNOW how begin this piece because it covers three subjects – each controversial – that at a glance might seem only distantly related.

First and most obvious is the rapidly intensifying political oppression within the United States. Its newest manifestation is the unprecedented arrest-without-charges and psychiatric confinement of Brandon Raub – another example of the smirking, any-cruelty-allowed tactics by which the One Percenters boast to the world they have terminated the American Dream, slain the American Experiment in constitutional democracy and are now burying the remains forever.

The second topic is the self-serving (and ultimately self-defeating) hypocrisy of our domestic Leftist media. The third is journalistic ethics in general: whether to report atrocities we know are intended mostly to intensify fear and thereby bully us into (further) relinquishment of our (former) constitutional rights.

Which – if I am to practice full disclosure – links to a fourth topic: my own growing terror at the encroaching police-state darkness that moves ever closer to becoming the defining characteristic of governance in the United States.

Dare I, for example, even write this essay? 

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Never in my journalism career – it began in 1956, now spans 56 years and includes extensive daily-newspaper coverage of The Decade of Political Murder that effectively terminated our republic – have I encountered a story as frightening as the RT exclusive I summarized, live-linked and forwarded to everyone on the Outside Agitator's Notebook mailing list earlier this week:

Federal agents employed a terrifying new tactic to silence protest when they apprehended an alleged Libertarian activist in Virginia and – instead of charging him with a crime – confined him in a psychiatric hospital.

Fearing the government's intent was to "disappear" him permanently, several friends intervened, and  a judge eventually ordered the man's release. Nevertheless the permanent, indelible  odium of "involuntary commitment" to a mental hospital – infinitely more damning than a felony rap sheet – has undoubtedly ruined his life in ways he probably has not even begun to discover.     

Here's the story as broken last night by Liz Wahl of RT: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogVdPvNoVQQ&feature=related

This is the most terrifying news report I have ever heard. What it means is that the feds can now seize and detain anyone without charges merely by jailing them in a mental institution, theoretically forever. What happens next -- what can and does happen in such places -- is rightfully the stuff of horror films: brains destroyed by electric shock, lobotomy, psychotropic drugs or all of these together, once-functional people reduced to drooling, mewling cretins urinating and defecating uncontrollably and covered in their own reeking filth. 

Unfortunately some of you who receive this mailing will note the fact the victim is a Rightist and gloat accordingly. But what the federal secret police agencies can do to a Rightist they can also do to a Leftist – or anyone else.

Make no mistake: this arrest marks a new escalation in government efforts to silence protest. Indeed this is precisely the tactic the Soviet Union used against dissidents: locking them up as psychiatric patients, then methodically destroying their minds.

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Exactly as I predicted, Leftist media ignored the illegal detention and involuntary commitment by which the federal government has forever destroyed the life-prospects of a retired Marine named Brandon Raub.
 

Ruling Class Media ignored it too.

The Left undoubtedly suppressed the story out of ideological hatefulness – the fervent belief right wingers deserve not even the few considerations (allegedly) accorded criminals.

This is precisely the principle described by Nat Hentoff in his superlative book Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee (HarperCollins: 1992). Hentoff's subtitle, How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other, tells us why the Brandon Raub atrocity never made it into Reader Supported News or Truthout or Common Dreams or – at least to my knowledge – never saw the proverbial light of day via any other such publication whether on-line or off.

When Ruling Class Media censored the story, it also most likely acted from ideological motives. Take your pick: (A)-Since the Raub atrocity occurred on President Obama's watch, Obama and the Democrats will get the blame, making the story an election-year no-no for any pro-Obama news outlet; (B)-The infinitely sinister extra-legal method employed for the permanent destruction of Raub's quality of life vividly reflects the ongoing overthrow of our constitutional democracy, which makes the story verbotten – bad propaganda – in any international-circulation U.S. media; (C)-This same revelation of hideous truth – again the bad-propaganda factor – makes the story unsuitable for mainstream/Right news outlets; (D)-All of the above.

I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if publications written primarily for capitalists – business magazines like Forbes or newspapers like The Wall Street Journal – tacitly applauded the tactic by giving it at least some coverage, however subdued.

Meanwhile I myself hesitated several hours before forwarding the story.

Part of my hesitation was concern for journalistic ethics, specifically traditional journalism's entirely proper prohibition against blatant fear-mongering. I recognized the Raub story as a 21st Century variant of a witch-burning: a public example so horrific – as involuntary confinement in an insane asylum undeniably is – it will deter the modern-day heresy of opposition to capitalism.

Heresy? Indeed: the increasingly dominant Christian fundamentalists increasingly zieg-heil the capitalist aristocrats – the new Ruling Class – as their vindictive god's chosen vessels: men whose edicts are therefore the “word of god” and who therefore tyrannize by Divine Right.

Hence to forward the story was to intensify the very climate of oppression I deplore.

But not to forward it was to leave the relatives, friends and colleagues on my mailing list possibly ignorant of a new threat: as if had I refused to shout “snake” when I knew someone was about to step on a cottonmouth.

There was also the dark side of my hesitancy: I was terrified.

What might be done to me if I forwarded the story?

Now too I wonder what might be done to me in retaliation for all my other criticism of the status quo.

Such terror cannot but dilute one's writing.

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Both as a journalist and because two of my late relatives were repeatedly locked up in mental institutions, I am fully aware of the Bedlam horrors that persist in such U.S. facilities to this day.

I also recognize these unspeakable realities for what they are: direct expressions of the hatred and contempt with which Moron Nation views mental patients. According to any number of sources, ours is by far the most sadistically backward, bigoted and brutal such stance anywhere in the industrial world. (Google: “stigma as related to mental disorders,” no quotes.) 

Here of course is why involuntary confinement in a mental institution is such an unspeakably terrifying prospect. 

One so detained becomes the powerless victim of a society in which the prevalent belief is little changed from the Middle Ages: that mental illness is demonic possession or, at the very least, punishment for sin, the viewpoints of a surprising plurality of U.S. Christian clergy as revealed by a Baylor University survey in 2008.

While the Baylor study was confined to local churches, a more broad-based Northwestern University investigation completed in 2011 reveals such attitudes are widespread and intensifying, no doubt paralleling the wildfire growth of Christian fundamentalism and its ever-more-rapacious imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy.

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Perhaps – if beyond the terminal climate change the capitalists have inflicted on all of us there is by some miracle a future for our species – historians to come will grant the decade of the 1960s its proper lamentation: not for the failure of its pseudo-revolutions, but rather because it was The Decade of Political Murder, when We the People were robbed of the last men who could have saved us from ourselves: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy.

That plague of death – and the failure of any woman or man to pick up the banners of the slain – was the death of our Republic.

Thus today we grovel in ever-more-restricted, ever-more-terrorized poverty beneath the ruthless paradigm of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Though it is still new to the USian homeland – “USian” because journalistic ethics forbid I slander the other American peoples by furthering the misappropriation of their continent's name – such governance is old news everywhere else in the empire so mislabeled.

But now, just as Malcom X predicted, the proverbial chickens – vultures actually – are coming home to roost.

LB/2 September 2012

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(©Loren Bliss 2012: permission to quote or reproduce is conditional upon attribution to the author and link to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)