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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News and Dialogues: Scary Reports, Relevant Agitation

WHAT THE SPOOKS call an “estimate” is pretty much the same thing as what we who practice the craft of print journalism call a “news analysis” – or colloquially (and with characteristic green-visored cynicism*) – a “think-piece” or a “thumb-sucker.”

In either realm – whether that of Casper's less-than-friendly twin or that of the professional descendants of Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken and Louise Bryant – such studies examine events as expressions of their historical contexts. Presumably, these broader perspectives reveal “indications,” Casperian for “probable trends and outcomes.”

Ray McGovern, the Central Intelligence Agency's former chief Soviet foreign policy analyst turned Consortium News reporter, had 27 years experience in the spook role before he took up journalism. Thus his understanding of people, places and things Russian is of sufficient depth and magnitude to warrant not just our casual notice, but our most closely focused attention.

 

“The West Snubs Russia over VE Day,” linked here,  is maybe McGovern's most usefully informative piece yet on the Ukraine crisis. Not only does he lucidly present his own expert analysis; he also provides links to relevant works by other experts on Russia – academics who are now, with already tragic and potentially extinction-level consequences – being passively ignored (if not aggressively marginalized) by the world-conquest-minded One Percent and their vassals in government and media.

“(D)o not feel you must rely on me (although I have been watching what happens in Russia and Europe for half a lifetime),” McGovern wrote. “I strongly recommend the trenchant insights of John Mearsheimer, pre-eminent political science professor at the University of Chicago, and professor Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and New York University, a distinguished Russianist who has been a Kremlin watcher even longer than I have.”

But to me the most revealing passage in “The West Snubs Russia” is a statement by former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that describes the newest origins of the USian effort at global conquest:

“It all began with the fact that the United States suddenly started talking about the creation of a ‘new empire.’ An over-empire, a super-empire. Alas, God and fate had put the task before them. Yes, they thought their moment had come.”

Knowing as I do the dreadful reality of USian Christian theocracy -- for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008) or the just-released Bloomberg poll revealing the USian Christian fanaticism  that's expressed as unequivocal support for Israel – the reference to “God” is genuinely chilling.

Thus Gorbachev – like Mencken and Sinclair Lewis nearly a century earlier – has it terribly right. If you convince Moron Nation it is acting as an instrument of “God's divine plan,” it will obey without question, whether the mandate is the extermination of First Nations peoples (as it was in the 19th Century), the re-enslavement of blacks (as it is today via for-profit prisons and federally militarized police), or (as is threatened by the Ukraine crisis), the crucifixion of the planet on a thermonuclear cross of capitalist greed and imperialist ambition.

Finally there is my own answer to the question implicit in McGovern's statement that as to “what lies behind U.S. actions in central Europe...try as I may to come up with cogent explanations that make some sense – the reasons elude me.”  

To me – as to anyone else who truly understands the bottomless evil of capitalism – the answer is as obvious as it is terrifying, even if it remains officially unthinkable and unspeakable in mainstream U.S. society.

Because the One Percent has outsourced nearly the entire U.S. economy, most of us in the 99 Percent are now surplus workers. We are therefore people whom our overlords – once they finish imposing their Ayn Rand variant of Nazism – would gleefully exterminate, just as our overlords' ancestors smirkingly exterminated their surplus slaves.

And what today are our overlords' easiest, most efficient, most euphemistically camouflaged methods of extermination?

 

One is the abandonment of unprofitable populations to natural disasters, as were the blacks of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Another is “austerity,” the euphemism for intentionally genocidal cutbacks in government social and medical services.

A third, as McGovern notes in “Snubs Russia,” is the de facto military draft driven by poverty and joblessness. Already operational, its killing machine is methodical escalation of the wars of empire, with the inconceivable casualties of thermonuclear war thus positioned to provide extermination in its most optimum and efficient form.

 

The One Percenters and their political and military vassals are of course meanwhile protected in presumably atom-proof bunkers.

 

Could this be the ultimate reason behind the intensifying U.S. provocation of Russia? Particularly given the genocidal intent evident in other U.S. policies, no other explanation seems so likely.

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ANOTHER CONSORTIUM NEWS piece on this week's list of recommended reading is Robert Parry's careful documentation of “Obama's 'Openness' and Deceit,” which summarizes in stark detail many of the more glaring elements of Obama the Orator's obviously premeditated self-transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

Here's a key paragraph:

“This failure to trust the people with accurate information has arguably done great harm to U.S. democracy by promoting false narratives on a range of foreign conflicts. With all its talk about 'public diplomacy' and 'information warfare,' the Obama administration seems intent on using half-truths and falsehoods to herd the people into a misguided consensus rather than treating them like the true sovereigns of the Republic, as the Framers of the Constitution intended with the explicit phrase 'We the People of the United States.'”

Which again makes relevant my comments last week  on Parry's “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust.” Parry wrote of the Nazi death squads now (predictably) at work in Ukraine and of equally predictable “propaganda efforts by the Obama administration and the major U.S. news media to play down western Ukraine’s legacy of Nazi collaboration.”

As I wrote in reply,  “Give Moron Nation ten more years of dumbing-down – at the current rate of moronation, maybe even less than that – and it will be official policy the United States was on the wrong side in World War II: that U.S. support would have enabled capitalism's conquest of the planet 70 years ago.”

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*Green visors, or eye-shades, described here, were frequently worn by old-time newspaper editors, including many of those for whom I worked during my younger manhood. The visors protected its wearer's eyesight from the harsh overhead glare that often characterized newsroom lighting in the days before the American Newspaper Guild and other such unions made on-the-job eyestrain a bargaining issue.

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I DEEPLY APPRECIATE websites on which the discussion encourages real thinking (and therefore writing that is sometimes lively and interesting rather than, for example, the soporific parroting of Democratic Party talking points we encounter at Daily Kos and so many other self-proclaimed “Leftist” domains.

 

One of my all-time favorites is Thom Hartmann's Blog,  which has an attached discussion thread that seems to bring out the best from its regular participants. The occasional fascists who stomp in anticipating easy prey soon discover they are hopelessly outclassed, and usually they quickly retreat. A very few stick around for a while, hopefully long enough to loosen the stranglehold Ayn Rand and all the other Hitler surrogates have on their alleged minds.

In any case, if I may paraphrase the clever late-1950s advertising campaign  that briefly tempted me to switch from Pall Malls to Viceroys, Hartmann offers “a thinking person's blog for a rebellious person's taste.”

 

I've contributed to its dialogue off-and-on for several years, probably starting in 2009 or 2010, though alas the files that would confirm my actual starting-date were destroyed in the recent computer debacle.

As I started getting back on-line, an exceptionally informative Hartmann news analysis prompted me to elaborate in writing an idea that has intrigued me for some time – that China's capitalism is a Sun-Tzu-type ruse,  perhaps the most clever such ruse in our species' history. Here is the full text of my comment:

"All warfare is based on deception" -– Sun Tzu, c. 500 BCE 

 

Knowing something of the history of our species' long and mostly unsuccessful struggle for economic democracy –- knowing also just a bit about the Chinese revolution -– I have always found the apparent Chinese embrace of capitalism perplexing. East Asian civilization, with a cultural continuity extending back at least 5,000 years, has no counterpart on this planet. Though the civilizations of Europe and the Middle East are equally old, the inherent savagery of Abrahamic religion has ensured the total suppression of all of the cultural wisdom of these region's first 3,000 years, with the result that -– never mind for example our European DNA can be traced to the paleolithic -– we "barbarians" (for that is how East Asia regards us) -– are, culturally speaking, mere children. For this reason China has always seemed to me far better prepared to resist the deadly temptations of capitalism, which in truth is not just an economic system but an entire universe of hierarchy, governance and exploitation based on a single precept: that there is no greater virtue than greed. Thus I was genuinely astounded when the People's Republic of China seemed to adopt the very ideology against which its people had fought for most of the first half of the last century.

The easy answer, of course, was that the Chinese government had been infiltrated and co-opted. But that never felt right to me – and though now I was in the realm of gut feelings and journalistic intuition rather than facts or even factually based speculation – I began to suspect the Chinese were (again) following the principles of Sun Tzu, one of which is defeating an enemy by turning his greatest strength into his greatest vulnerability.

Viewing the relationship between China and the United States from this perspective, it appears China has used the bottomless greed that is capitalism's greatest strength to seduce the U.S. with cheap labor and endless credit and so ensnare it. The U.S. no longer has an economy; it's manufacturing capabilities have all been outsourced –- mostly to China -– and it is as dependent on Chinese money as any junky is dependent on the pusher for the next fix. When the incipient U.S.-Chinese conflict ends in war, as is inevitable, the U.S. will have its master-race ideology of divinely ordained "exceptionalism" and the Fourth Reich arrogance of its military omnipotence and the zomboid submissiveness of its Moron Nation masses as cannon fodder but none of the manufacturing capabilities essential to a sustained conflict. That is why the better-dead-than-Red capitalists will most likely try to nuke China into quick surrender and by so doing will destroy the world instead. Any other sort of war -– that is, a conventional and therefore extended war -– the U.S. would lose precisely because it no longer has an economy of its own. (Ironically, the same conditions -– lack of economic depth and manufacturing capabilities -– are what defeated the Axis in World War II.)

But what if China did not really embrace capitalism? What if China's embrace of capitalism was merely an expression of Sun Tzu's principles in present-day strategy? What if China today is as Communist -– that is, as committed to real economic democracy -– as it was under Mao Ze Dong? The relentless prosecution of capitalists reported by Mr. Hartmann suggests this is may well be the case. If this is so, the global Working Class has precisely the powerful ally it hitherto seemed to lack. Remembering that it was the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union that terrified the world's capitalists into making all the humanitarian concessions of the last century, the implications for the future are profound indeed.

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A more recent Hartmann piece protesting the workplace consequences of the zero-tolerance, divine-right tyranny  being imposed on us by our Christofascist overlords prompted a website regular screen-named Aliceinwonderland to start the discussion thread with one of the most appropriately caustic comments I have read anywhere on the 'Net:

All I can say is -– WOW. Just one question though: how the hell would employers even know whether someone uses birth control? I'm not aware of any birth control methods that are visually apparent to the onlooker.

Beyond that, I keep wondering how far these pigs have to raise the bar on fascism in America before enough people wake up and we see widespread rebellion occurring. I keep waiting, wondering, hoping...

 

So hey ladies- You want your boss peeking in your underwear?! Seriously.

 

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Soon I would post my own response to the ensuing dialogue:

As I have said so many times before, the one flaw in Mr. Hartmann's otherwise excellent reporting is his failure to recognize that capitalism is in fact the societal equivalent of  cancer.

This means -– exactly as the last 70 years of history prove beyond rational argument -– capitalism is a malignancy. And like all other malignancies, it cannot be rendered benign.

 

A second, equally important lesson is that no matter how strict the regulatory restrictions by which we attempt to neutralize capitalism's deadly toxicity, it will always  revert to its original malignant form.

 

This means it will eventually kill its host.

 

Hence –- since we the people are capitalism's host –- it is literally our species' terminal illness. Either we find a cure -– which seems increasingly impossible –- or we perish.

 

But the ultimate lesson of this most dreadful epoch is that democracy – which we fervently believed was the one sure antidote for the toxins of tyranny – has turned out to be no cure at all. 

 

In fact it is the antithesis of a cure. It is via what we call "democracy" –-  verbal shorthand for presumably representative government elected by presumably universal suffrage -– that capitalism has conquered the world.

It turned the United States into its puppet realm at least 120 years ago.

Since then it has triumphed even in the two nations wherein it was thought to be permanently defeated: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Though  capitalism's co-opting of Communism in the latter may be a colossal deception facilitated by the principles of Sun Tzu,  as I said here on 18 March 2015. 

 

What then empowers capitalism's success?

What is the essence of its deadly seductiveness?

 

Capitalism's core dynamic is the transformation of the Absolute Evil of total moral imbecility –- the mindset of a serial killer –- into apparent goodness.

 

Stripped of its camouflage, capitalism is the vileness and venom of infinite greed and infinite selfishness hidden by the perfume of false abundance and cloaked in the brightly compelling fashions of ecocidal acquisitiveness.

It is, in fact, the secular proof of a core Christian dogma I as a pagan agnostic instinctively reject –- original sin, the notion we are a species accursed and damned.

But if indeed we are not accursed and damned, why is there still such a thing as capitalism, and  why is it thriving?

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Then I followed up by describing capitalism's lineage as a direct descendant of patriarchy:

Conceptually, just as capitalism is the direct descendant of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)...

Just as fascism and Nazism are the (sole and historically inevitable) descendants of capitalism...

 

So are all these malignancies the direct descendants of patriarchy, which appeared on this planet only about 5,000 years ago.

Before patriarchy's sudden and mysterious onset, we humans regarded motherhood as our species' most important individual and collective function.

Mothers were thus properly recognized as our most important individuals.

 

Indeed the original creation story went something like "In the beginning was the Mother, and She gave birth..."

Human societies were therefore matrilinear, matrifocal and (most likely) matriarchal.

Though it is a truth maliciously concealed by U.S. archaeologists and anthropologists,  their counterparts elsewhere freely acknowledge the socioeconomic systems of these early societies were definitively communistic: from each according to ability, to each according to need.

The people of these societies were also earth-respecting in a reflexive, bow-to-the-five-directions manner most of us today cannot imagine, much less to make our own.

Then cometh patriarchy. Its advocates as described in the Old Testament of the Bible were variously  a "fiery wheel" or a "burning bush" or some creature from the sky who met Moses atop Mount Ararat and handed him a set of tablets inscribed with "divine" mandates that must be obeyed lest we all be nuked like Sodom and Gomorrah.

Here in this demonstration of force is obviously is the origin of the Christian and Islamic practice of "conversion" at swordspoint and by the burning-stake or impalement.

Significantly -– apart from the fact these primitive technologies of oppression have been replaced by  total surveillance, electric-shock torture, drones,  napalm and Willie Peter -– capitalism, fascism and Nazism employ patriarchy's  traditional missionary practices even today.

Point being, what ScaryMary and stecoop01 are telling us about the "Christian agenda" is not only absolutely true but absolutely in keeping with the patriarchal legacy as manifest not just in  all  Abrahamic religion but in its capitalist, fascist and Nazi descendants.

Yet above all else, the core purpose of patriarchy was –- and remains -- upending the natural order, seen everywhere in Nature,  in which the female is the epicenter of society.

Which leads us to the core patriarchal principle: that it's virtuous to murder the macrocosm of Mother Earth and  despise her microcosmic form Woman because, as it says in a favorite Bible-thump hymn, "thar's a better land a-waitin in the sky Lord in the sky."

Patriarchy and its descendants are therefore expressions of a kill-the-planet death cult, a truth at last made undeniable by capitalism.

  

Which in turn -– though I do not believe in extraterrestrial visitations -- makes me wonder just what cockroach universe those fiery wheels came from and whether their sowing of the deadly poison seeds of patriarchy was the ultimate (original) form of the smallpox-infested blankets my European ancestors gave my First Nations ancestors.

That's right: trash the planet enough –- as we are in fact doing –- it becomes cockroach heaven, perfect even for such highly-advanced intergalactic cockroaches (we hope) don't exist.

(Yes, I reject the Marxian explanation of patriarchy as a logical consequence of socioeconomic change. Instead I accept the Marija Gimbutas/Rianne Eisler/Barbara Mor hypothesis of patriarchy as an oppressive system forced onto conquered peoples at swordpoint –- exactly as it was, for example, forced onto First Nations folk in the Americas. But what was patriarchy's origin? For that we have only the glimpses given us by folklore, as in the biblical tale of Moses or the oldest traditional poems and ballads.)

Meanwhile the astute observer will note there is a substantial difference in the way I paragraphed the Sun Tzu post as compared to the capitalism-as-cancer/intergalactic-cockroaches post. The former is paragraphed like an academic paper. The latter reverts to journalistic form.

Why?

 

I'm not sure. Stay tuned. When I figure out what's happening I'll let you know.

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ANOTHER OF MY favorite websites is Popular Resistance,  which seldom evokes the lengthy and informative discussions that characterize Hartmann's place but often provides essential reporting that is not readily available anywhere else.

Though the website does not (yet) generate the epic dialogues one often finds in Hartmann-land, it is nevertheless possessed of a subtle (and perhaps subtly female) ambiance that encourages an emotional honesty so much of the Internet lacks.

 

Hence the following, the opening post in a gentle exchange between two old men, our conversation focused on Steve Early's comprehensive account of the ongoing rebellion  provoked by (yet another) betraying Democrat, a governor who lied his way to re-election, then killed the widely heralded Vermont single-payer/public-option health-care plan.

Thanks to Mr. Early for the most informative report I've yet seen on the Democrats' calculated betrayal of the Working Class in Vermont.

Elsewhere it's the same infuriating story –- note for example Washington state Democrat Maria Cantwell's anti-worker vote for free-trade fast-track -– but at least Vermonters have their Progressive Party through which to fight back.

Nevertheless those Democrat betrayals now virtually guarantee a total Republican landslide in 2016.

This is not because of the popularity of Republican (that is, Ayn-Rand/neo-Nazi) dogma, but because the corruption of the Democratic Party has left the electorate without any viable national alternative.

Hence the vast majority of progressives will vote "none of the above" by refusing to vote at all.

Indeed -– given Obama's record of unprecedented Big Lies and betrayals -– it is as if the Democrats are actually working to engineer a Republican victory.

Which of course makes perfect sense once we recognize the two parties serve one single cabal of capitalist overlords.

And what is Nazism – whether as expressed by the German "master race" or by the "exceptionalist" United States – but capitalism's ultimate form.

Point being, as few freedoms as we dissidents have left now, after a Republican landslide in 2016 we will have none at all.

 

In fact we will probably discover our role here in the de facto Fourth Reich reduced to that of the White Rose Society in the Third Reich.

 

Were I a believer in the Abrahamic god, which I am not, I would pray we find the courage and determination we will need to sustain any meaningful resistance.

Meanwhile –- not the least because of my own fondness for Vermont -– I salute Vermonters for daring to continue the struggle.

LB/19-26 April 2015

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