USian Ukraine's Nazi-Jihadi Pact Ups World War III Risk

BECAUSE THE CONSEQUENCES of U.S. aggression in Ukraine may well determine whether our species lives or dies, its most disturbing chapter thus far – the USian vassal-government's back-to-the-future renewal of Adolf Hitler's Nazi-Jihadi alliance  – leads this week's OAN though the story was broken on 7 July by Robert Parry via his Consortiumnews.com.

Astute readers will also note I added its link to last week's blog, replacing the earlier Ukraine report I had initially referenced. But I did not comment at any length on the U.S. puppet regime's resurrection of the Nazi-Jihadi alliance until Parry's newest disclosure was republished by Reader Supported News the next day:

Both the Wehrmacht and the SS had specifically Muslim units.

Moreover, the Mufti of Jerusalem – the Muslim equivalent of an archbishop or cardinal – was the prime recruiter for these units. The present-day politics of the Middle East cannot be understood without inclusion of this historical fact.

By forbidding the practice of Abrahamic religion (though not paganism or shamanism), Communist governments whether in Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union effectively outlawed the defining hatefulness of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Centuries of religious violence were thereby ended.

But the U.S., a de facto Christian Crusader-state (see Sharlett, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power), has always relied on religious hatreds to advance its schemes of global conquest.

Thus, in addition to capitalism's abject fear of economic democracy, U.S. hatred of Communism, socialism and intellectualism has always included primary religious motives. To be Christian, for example, is not just to "love your (Christian) neighbors," but to murderously hate everyone else.

Had the Soviet and Yugoslav governments lasted longer – say for perhaps another century – the religious warfare that now again characterizes Eastern Europe would have no doubt ended forever.

But the U.S., like Nazi Germany before it, could never abide such peacefulness.

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Greece as a Proving Ground for Militarization of U.S. Local Police

WRITING ABOUT THE recent, often tragic history of Greece, RSN's Steve Weissman touched, perhaps inadvertently, on an obscure but obvious connection  between the U.S.-organized military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 through 1974 and the federally militarized local police who are killing and terrorizing U.S. residents today.

Back in the closing days of World War II, wrote Weissman, the British government of Winston Churchill moved brutally against the Greek Communists, who had led the resistance to German and Italian occupation. To oppose them, the Brits created Greek special forces...which pointedly recruited fascists who had dominated the Greek military and police ever since the 1930s...When the US declared its Truman Doctrine in 1947, Washington took on London’s imperial role in Greece and gave military backing to these same fascists...

In other words, the USian Empire – now that its capitalist overlords have reduced the U.S. Working Class to slave wages, perpetual unemployment and ever-worsening poverty – is now employing the same deliberately sadistic methods of control here in the homeland as it has hitherto employed in its overseas satrapies and vassal-states. Hence the skyrocketing incidence of killings by cops.  which, already at an all-time high, is beginning to disturb even the nominally pro-cop Right.  (Scroll down to “The Post report seems to suggest...”).

Nevertheless, the white-black divide on attitudes toward police brutality remain one of the best indices to the magnitude of U.S. white racism, however carefully closeted it might be.

An earlier but equally accurate index is the refusal by fully four-fifths of the white population to acknowledge the blatant racism  that characterized government policies toward the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (Scroll down to “As to the breadth and depth of white racism...”)

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Republicans Fear Trump's Outspoken Racism Is Too Revealing

WHEN RSN REPUBLISHED a Washington Post story reporting the Republican Party inner circle is worried Donald Trump's outspokenness is tarnishing their reputation, I could not resist the opportunity to point out that Trump was merely revealing the ideological truth the party usually hides behind a screen of code-words:

What is really embarrassing the Republican Party is that Trump is appealing to the same hatefully racist element in U.S. politics as Hitler appealed to in German politics.

This element in today's United States is huge and bottomlessly venomous – much larger and more malevolent than the Ruling Class dares publicly admit.

But if Trump wins the Republican nomination – and if the Teabagger grassroots retains control of the party apparatus, he surely will – the GOP will no longer be able to deny the fact it became the primary U.S. vessel of fascism during the 1920s and has remained so ever since.

Moreover, if Sanders manages to win the Democratic nomination, there is little question he will also take the presidency.

Candidate Trump's Teabaggers – the modern equivalent of Hitler's stormtroopers – would then almost certainly plunge the U.S. into a second civil war.

It is this – the (again) growing threat from the militant Right – that is finally awakening parts of the U.S. Left to the deadly danger implicit in forcible civilian disarmament – the same lesson that mobilized the Deacons for Defense at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

*** *** ***

Charleston Sparks (Some) Acknowledgment of U.S. Racism

IF THE CHARLESTON atrocity prompts even a small segment of the white majority population in the United States to acknowledge its often-instinctive, culturally inbred racism, the deaths of the nine Charleston victims  will not be squandered, as so many other such deaths have been, by the nation's subsequent history.

Let us then say the names of the Charleston dead – Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson – for it is by such roll-calls of the slain that we the living who did not personally know them when they themselves were alive might now sense our kinship with them, our late brotherhood and sisterhood implicit in the fact they like each of us each had their own experience of self and world that is now lost forever. Quoth John Donne: ...therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Meanwhile, the reality of U.S. racism remains painfully evident not just in the South, the region that is conveniently scapegoated for what in truth is a national phenomenon, but throughout the imperial homeland.

To those of us who regardless of our color know how to recognize it, it is especially obvious in the Pacific Northwest. For example, I cannot readily count the number of times during the past 33 years I have written of the white racism that underlies the maliciously inflicted and deliberately maintained wretchedness of mass transit in Pugetopolis, the colloquial name for the 5,872 square-mile (15,209 square kilometer) metropolitan area of nearly 4 million persons that's centered on the seaport cities of Seattle and Tacoma.

But I do know that – until the post-Charleston now – any such disclosure by any writer however accomplished was either suppressed or (if it somehow managed to get into print) was immediately and harshly denounced as untrue, never mind the obvious racism that repeatedly surfaced  during public debates over (usually unsuccessful) efforts to improve mass transit. (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)

Proportionally speaking – that is, in comparison to comparable metropolitan areas – Pugetopolis has the worst, most deliberately inadequate mass transit in the United States. Because the U.S. has the worst mass transit in the industrial world, this makes Pugetopolis mass transit the worst of the worst. Likewise, because the U.S. is the most outspokenly anti-mass-transit nation in the world, Pugetopolis is therefore the most anti-mass-transit (and anti-transit-user) realm on the entire planet. Only in Pugetopolis is mass transit openly defined as “welfare,”  a code-word that in the white racist vocabulary is merely a politically correct way of saying “used by niggers.”

But on 22 June, Knute Berger, a columnist for the Seattle on-line daily Crosscut, finally began chipping away at the taboo of silence that has prevented the region's mainstream media from acknowledging the 800-pound gorilla – or, more appropriately, the Ku Klux Klan klavern – that's right there in the Pugetopolis living room.

On 6 July, Crosscut Guest Columnist Christopher Eide took the process of acknowledgment a lot further  by asking, “What about NW's shortcomings on race.”

Then on 7 June, Politico swooped in from Washington D.C. to scoop the world on a blistering exposé of regional racism  the mainstream Pugetpolis press has deliberately suppressed for years – “Want to Meet America's Worst Racists? Come to the Pacific Northwest.”

Now reduced to playing catch-up, the next day Crosscut published Berger's much more detailed report on Northwest Front and its call for forcible racial cleansing of the entire Pacific Northwest: not just Washington state and Oregon, but also Montana (and maybe Alaska and Idaho as well).

Berger's 8 July piece was so thorough it prompted me to applaud via its comment thread:

Well done, Mr. Berger, with kudos to you, Christoper Eide (6 July) and Crosscut in general for at long last discarding the taboo against admission of Pacific Northwest racism. Now let's hope (1)-someone (besides me) has the journalistic courage to expose its direct connection to the wretched state of Pugetopolis mass transit, and (2)-that such journalistic bravery doesn't trigger an advertising boycott to kill Crosscut just as The Seattle Sun (1974-1982) and the original Seattle Magazine (1963-1970) were slain...

Given how the (hitherto-denied) racism of Pugetopolis has produced the transit crisis  that reveals the region's signature claim of environmental enlightenment to be nothing more than a particularly breathtaking brand of political hypocrisy, I cannot but wonder whether and to what extent unacknowledged racism is the hidden determinant of all U.S. environmental policy.

Meanwhile even Hillary Clinton now admits USian racism is a helluva lot more widespread than just “kooks and Klansmen.” 

*** *** ***

 

Some Long Overdue Truth about Racism's Economic Origins
 

BRYAN STEVENSON HAS described during an interview with The Marshall Project  an historically accurate how-and-why narrative of racism's economic origins, linking it to both religion and class-struggle while simultaneously explaining its malevolent persistence.

Here from an on-line text of the interview are some of the highlights of Stevenson's analysis:

The whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of slavery. It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel comfortable with their ownership of other human beings. And we created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North...

Lots of countries had slaves, but they were mostly societies with slaves. We became something different, we became a slave society. We created a narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery...so I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced...

And so we are very confused when we start talking about race in this country because we think that things are “of the past” because we don’t understand what these things really are, that narrative of racial difference that was created during slavery that resulted in terrorism and lynching, that humiliated, belittled and burdened African Americans throughout most of the 20th century. The same narrative of racial difference that got Michael Brown killed, got Eric Garner killed and got Tamir Rice killed. That got these thousands of others — of African Americans — wrongly accused, convicted and condemned. It is the same narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions of people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led to the executions in Charleston...

Stevenson has also launched an initiative to mark where lynchings took place in the U.S.,  which is explained by another of his statements in the Marshall interview:

“You can’t go to Germany, to Berlin, and walk 100 meters without seeing a marker or a stone or a monument to mark the places where Jewish families were abducted from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” said Stevenson in an. “Four thousand African Americans were lynched between 1870 and WWII and none of us know anything about it. We don’t mark these places where these lynchings took place. Most of them took place on courthouse lawns that are now adorned with monuments to the Confederacy.”

Perhaps I am being overly optimistic, but I believe Stevenson has given us the core ingredients for a desperately needed antidote to the racist toxins with which we whites are so relentlessly poisoned – particularly by constant repetition of propaganda that deliberately omits from our official national histories any discussion of racism's Machiavellian, pre-Nazi, pre-Orwellian and most definitively capitalist origins.

***   ***   ***

Surprise -- Supremes Rule against Economic Segregation

NOTING TODAY'S U.S. is ever more segregated by income, Robert Reich says a Supreme Court decision – its impact unfortunately obscured by the mainstream media's focus on the marriage equality and health care rulings – has substantially bolstered our protections against discrimination. 

In a 5-4 ruling, Reich reported, the Court found that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 requires plaintiffs to show only that the effect of a policy is discriminatory, not that defendants intended to discriminate....The decision is likely to affect everything from bank lending practices whose effect is to harm low-income non-white borrowers, to zoning laws that favor higher-income white homebuyers.

This from the court that with its Citizens United  judgment knowingly destroyed the last vestiges of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is perplexing indeed.

My immediate reaction is the justices are merely throwing us a bone, perhaps modeled after the Affordable Care Act –  which cleverly – and obviously for international propaganda purposes – creates the illusion of near-universal health insurance. But it simultaneously imposes such exorbitant co-payments and fees, only the rich can afford to use it, thereby fulfilling ACA's ultimate purpose – that of perpetuating the USian policy, unique in the industrial world, of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

*** *** ***

Good News for LGBT Seniors in Court's Marriage Decision

THE SUPREME COURT'S legalization of same-sex marriage means that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual couples can now access the legal benefits of marriage no matter where in the United States they live, says the Alliance for Retired Americans “Friday Alert”  issued 10 July.

Elderly LGBT couples living in states where marriage equality was formerly outlawed now have the same rights granted heterosexual couples including Social Security spousal survival payments and state and federal tax benefits, the ARA reports. 

*** *** ***

Have the USian Secret Police Marked Snowden for Death?

A FORMER OFFICIAL of the Carter Administration wondered during an interview if one or more of the federal secret police agencies will try to kill Edward Snowden,  a courageous speculation that proves again the malevolent, Fourth Reich nature of the USian Empire.

*** *** ***

A Link to the Best New Writing I've Read Since the 1960s


HIGH POETRY DISGUISED as prose – that's Ta-Nehisi Coates' “Letter to My Son,”  a piece as poignantly angry as Ginsberg's “Howl” but infinitely more lyrical, as eloquently defiant as the concluding lines of Yeats' “Wanderings of Oisin” yet appropriately, even forcefully secular; as emotionally compelling as Kavi's “Black Marigolds.” Originally published by The Atlantic and republished by RSN, it is unquestionably the most powerful new writing I have seen in maybe the past 45 years. To read it is to relish it...and to want to read it again.


LB/6-13 July 2015

-30-

First the Bad News, Then the Amusements

THIS WEEK'S COLUMN is mostly a collection of confessions, observations, quotes and memos originally written on scrap paper or in my wallet-sized index-card notebook, the latter a thoughtful gift from my second wife Adrienne, to whom again thanks.

But before I share these always random, occasionally lewd and sometimes humorous jottings, here as stark reminders of the time and place in which we live (and therefore in fulfillment of OAN's journalistic obligation) are links to a few stories that typify the deteriorating human condition and the sorry state of our nation and our world.

As always in these darkest of years of our species' 200,000-year history, the applicable acronym is SNAFU. A linguistic relic of World War Twice, it stands for “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”

The week's most unsurprising but nevertheless vital news was another study that has confirmed the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is dead – that we 99 Percenters are now the ever-more-enslaved subjects of an increasingly tyrannical capitalist oligarchy. Meanwhile a separate poll confirms we the people are moving ever closer to the flash-point of rising up angry. Both reports were covered by Thom Hartmann in a single story. 

I did not have time to comment on Hartmann's work because my entire week was consumed by first-of-the-month chores. With an automobile I'd have accomplished these tasks in less than a single day. But because I no longer have a car and am thereby dependent on the “welfare” provided by mass transit,  what formerly took me about five hours by automobile now takes five days by bus.

The methodical reduction of mass transit  in the Puget Sound region and elsewhere throughout the United States exemplifies the increasingly obvious refusal of the One Percent to attempt even minimal amelioration  of terminal climate change – another factor in the 99 Percent's increasing rebelliousness.

Meanwhile the climate disasters described by Amy Goodman's too-cautious academic guests give us additional glimpses of the death-dealing future  our species will probably not survive. Such is capitalism's deadly curse upon ourselves, our descendants and our planet.

How the Ruling Class will respond if we dare foment effective resistance is already well known, exemplified not just by the crushing of the Occupy Movement,  but by the extermination-and-disruption campaign with which local cops and federal secret police destroyed the Black Panthers  during the 1960s and 1970s.

Obviously the de facto Fourth Reich is nothing new.

As Bill Quigley reports for Reader Supported News, already “2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one in every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and black. Here are 40 reasons why.” 

Lastly, there's One Percent's Final Solution, “we had to destroy the village to save it.” First applied in Vietnam, the destruction-is-salvation approach now jeopardizing us globally, as events in Ukraine take another step toward World War III: “we had to destroy the planet to save it.”

(Yes, dear readers, just as you might have surmised, the doctrine of destruction as salvation is derived from the dogmas of Abrahamic religion. Note the Biblical flood, the fates of Sodom and Gomorrah, and most especially the nauseating rationale for burning heretics  at the stake.)

The only remaining question is when will SNAFU become FUBAR, the Vietnam War's acronym for “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

 *** *** ***

NOW THE PROMISED randomness:

Assuming reasonably long lives, it seems that as we age toward the grave, we become ever more brutally honest with ourselves. That's when we discover savoring our memories of love is a helluva lot more rewarding than remembering our professional triumphs. (Scribbled on the back of a grocery list while waiting in a Fred Meyer checkout line, probably in 2010.)

*

FiboNazi numbers: mathematical data the Nazis (whether followers of Hitler, Ayn Rand or both), publish to support the Big Lies that conceal the ruinous and often deadly consequences of their policies. (Sometime in 2014, with apologies to Leonardo Fibonacci.)

*

The greatest barrier to combating the U.S. plague of moral imbecility is the lack of a suitably magnetic role model. (Jotted on an index-card sometime in 2009, no doubt prompted by my dawning realization Barack Obama was the most calculatedly malicious liar ever to hold the presidency.)

*

Tacoma – a place where people pick their noses in public. (Undated, probably 2012.)

*

The lessor of two evils: a man or woman forced by poverty to lease a pair of demon-haunted rooms in a vampire-infested slum. (Undated.)

*

Social documentary photography and photojournalism in general is ultimately about expressing human emotion as visual geometry and the choreography of light and darkness. That's probably why those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families so often make the best photojournalists. Normally in patriarchal culture, only women are taught to read and heed the nuances of nonverbal language, but in the hurtful and potentially deadly miasma of familial dysfunction, that skill is vital for survival regardless of one's gender. (Undated, probably 2010.)

*

For a girl-child or a woman, any patriarchal family is definitively dysfunctional. (An epiphany while typing the above, 7 June 2015.)

*

“You're not allowed to be yourself, so you try to be someone else, even if you gotta go schizo to do it.” (Said by a bus rider as he disembarked at a Pierce County mental hospital, 30 June 2012.)

 

*

“Another goddamn public-disclosure document written in the incomprehensibly turgid language Ruling Class academics use to ensure their work remains obscure.” (Undated, probably 2011, the identity of the document in question irrelevant because the judgment is so broadly applicable.)

*

Metro Gnome – an invisible creature who lurks on Seattle buses, making its presence known by chronic disruption of schedules. (Undated.)

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We must make peace with Mother Nature lest she make war with us. (Undated).

*

Old men who become enchanted by music often do so because it is only way they will ever again hear a beautiful woman murmur in their ears. (24 August 2013.)

*

In the old days, before the media monopolies took over, daily newspaper newsrooms were refuges for bright and rebellious people from the Working Class and the declassé, and we who became journalists did so with the proud and certain knowledge our reporting could improve the human condition.

Now though the only people allowed to report the news are the pampered sons and daughters of the Ruling Class – those who feel it their duty to protect the status quo – that is, if they ever pass beyond self-obsession to consider duty at all. (Undated, probably 2011 after reading an especially biased report on the Occupy Movement.)

*

“All the adolescent boys of my generation had Circle-J races – sitting in a circle in the woods or a barn or someplace jacking off. The object was to see who could orgasm the fastest, who could shoot their load the furthest and who could produce the most come. Ever since I heard of that, I've wondered if it's why so many men have premature ejaculations.” (Anonymous female elder c. 2014.)

*

“Her boyfriend bought her a cell phone. Now he's jealous. He thinks she loves the phone more than she loves him.” (Conversation between two teenage girls on a bus, 28 July 2013.)

*

“Apropos brevity, nothing is more minimalist than a blank page.” (Note to another writer, context forgotten, 2012.)

*

Transit therapy – riding the bus all day and talking to one's self or to imaginary companions – that's our new national mental-health program. (13 September 2013)

*

If we are all how the Deity experiences herself, why are so many of us so metaphysically challenged? (During a bus ride; undated.)

*

We each combat sordidness in our own way. (April 2015.)

*

I can think of no better conclusion for this column than a heartfelt thank-you note to Thais Smedley, another of the women who so profoundly influenced my life.

In popular fiction one's initiation into manhood typically begins with the loss of one's virginity, often to an older woman. But I had lost my virginity five years earlier to a girl my own age, and the initiation you granted me that unforgettable summer afternoon in 1959 – you with your white blouse and white shorts and your wondrous mane of raven hair – was to intellectual manhood instead.

You invited me into the cool of your light and airy basement apartment there on 12th Street by the University of Tennessee, you graciously opened a can of Campbell's beef vegetable soup, heated it, poured it into a bowl and indicated I should eat it all. Obviously I was hungry. In fact I was too impoverished to afford even the 50-cent lunch in the student center, and somehow you sensed my need but were not offended by it, and we talked as I wolfed down the soup and for a few minutes afterward. Then you gave me a forbidden book, saying you thought its contents might speak to my mind and spirit, and you gently sent me on my way.

The book was Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, and – just as you suspected – it began a process that changed my life, giving me a glimpse of the true power of language and helping break my writing free of the journalistic constraints I would eventually recognize as an especially insidious form of censorship. (From notes on scrap paper, December 2011, after awakening from a dream about the real-life episode described herein.)

Now in my 75th year, I dearly hope you, Thais, will somehow see this message and know the depth of gratitude with which I have always remembered our brief encounter. Thank you, Thais; for just a moment you embodied the Muse. Thank you indeed. I wish you the very best one's advancing years can offer: sustained health and deepening contentment with the life you lived.

LB/1-7 June 2015

-30-

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.)

*

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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