The Postmortem Continues: Some Genuine Leftists Awaken; the Identity-Politics Pseudo-Left Remains as Arrogant and Vindictively Counter-Revolutionary as Ever

WE THE PEOPLE can no longer doubt Donald Trump is the new Hitler. Last week – particularly given the conciliatory tone of his victory speech,  I said we should wait and see what sort of a president Trump would be – but his appointment of the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon as his chief advisor tells us all we need to know.

Thus before the last few remnants of our Bill of Rights  are forever abolished, we who survived the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama prelude to Trump's Fourth Reich and now find ourselves among this not-so-New Order's publicly declared targets should at least try to understand the psychological cunning by which the capitalists manipulated Moron Nation into crowning their Donald as Führer of our species' deadliest and most relentlessly tyrannical empire.

For only by studying what has been done to us – and indeed what we have thus done to ourselves – might we begin to comprehend the unbearable truth that capitalism is naught but pure Evil, the most relentlessly powerful Evil in our maliciously abused Mother Earth's history, Evil so infinitely huge and overwhelming it has burst the doctrinal bounds of theological conceptualization and become instead the now-probably irreversible mechanism of ecocidal apocalypse, whether by thermonuclear war (as was intended by fascist Hillary), or by patriarchal hatred of Woman and her macrocosm Nature soon to be enshrined as federal policy by Trump and his JesuNazi Vice-President Mike Pence.

Nor should we overlook the increasing probability the election of Trump was the product of the ultimate, climactic (and almost certainly terminal) charade of USian “democracy” – the breathtakingly Evil consequence of an utterly Evil deception in which the One Percenters, the maliciously Evil capitalist overlords of both the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties, suppressed the Sanders candidacy to inflame our disgust with the Hillary candidacy, which they had already mandated to ensure the election of Trump and Pence – the shortest most direct route to the Nazi tyranny the capitalists have been seeking for the past 85 years.

Acknowledging these unbearably bitter truths and probabilities, armed with such excruciatingly painful recognitions, we might then fulfill Sun Tzu's prerequisite, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and in one hundred battles you will never be in peril.” In other words – if our species somehow survives the forthcoming debacle and we the people of the USian Homeland somehow at last banish our obstructive optimism – we might thus begin the long process of helping our species evolve a global path to humanitarian victory.

Such is the reasoning that underlies my belief in Marxism. Despite Marxism's obvious failures – the drowning of the Soviet Union in the dark undertow of Russian history  and the more notorious collapse of the People's Republic of China into zero-tolerance state capitalism – it remains the only ideology on earth with sufficient discipline to successfully resist (and perhaps even topple and permanently eliminate) the bottomless horror of Nazism – the terminal form of capitalism – that once again openly assaults us. But now, thanks to Trump's White House predecessors, it possesses incalculably more powers of subjugation than its Third Reich forefathers might ever have imagined. And there is no longer a Red Army nor anything like it to ensure our victory.

(Note: I have added a few links – indicated as “added link” – to the following reports to exemplify the points they make.)

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It Was the Rise of the Davos Class That Sealed America's Fate (Naomi Klein, Guardian UK): They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates (added link). They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry. But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate...Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present...For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

The only point on which I would quibble with Ms. Klein is her either/or assertion about the Democratic (sic) Party.

Given its long history of betraying the 99 Percent – which started the instant a Missouri political hack named Harry S. Truman became president (but which dates to the era in which it was the party of slavery and slave-owners) – it should be obvious to anyone of Ms. Klein's foresighted intelligence the only fate suitable for the Democratic (sic) Party is not just abandonment but methodical destruction.

Otherwise the Democrats' history of wanton betrayals will merely repeat itself again.

But where to start? Moron Nation, proven so by its election of Trump, most assuredly lacks the ability, the will and most importantly the courage to provide the requisite revolutionary leadership.

Asked without a scintilla of facetiousness: where is Vladimir Lenin now that we so desperately need him? Where is the old ComIntern? Where, finally, is the Soviet Union? (Never forget it was the USSR that during the 1930s provided us with a leadership built from our own people so effectively we nearly overthrew capitalism here in its global headquarters.)

Alas, there is nothing like that – no source of the requisite training and discipline -- in the world today. Which means Moron Nation is truly on its own – and when in history did a despotism of dunces ever give birth to anything save chaos, destruction and death?

Truly, only a miracle can save us now.

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My (very strong) suspicion is – apart from an even greater escalation of Democratic (sic) and Republican “austerity” – i.e., genocidal war on elderly, disabled and otherwise chronically impoverished people – there will be very little change in the status quo. (But given the 180-degree difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies, no doubt we'd have gotten that anyway, assuredly in a far more euphemistic form.) To make real change, we need a genuine revolution, and that will never happen here in Moron Nation, at least not in the lifetimes of anyone now living, because too much of the citizenry has been moronated into maliciously selfish submission.

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Never forget “the party of evil” is in fact one capitalist party of two deceptive names, Democratic (sic) and Republican.

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Trouble is, identity politics – the capitalist antidote to class consciousness – will abort (anti-capitalist) solidarity before it is even in the embryonic stage. The clitoris-envy misogyny of the anti-abortion Christian jihadist right; the forcible disarmament fanaticism of the pseudo-Left – people who truly believe every firearms owner is “a Nazi” and the mere ownership of a firearm is “an act of violence”; the Ku-Klux minded racists and Nazi-minded ableists of the Right; the tree-spiking environmentalists of the bourgeois Left, whose hatred of corporate depredations is exceed only by their demonstrably murderous hatred of Working Class people who have no other livelihood than logging – these differences and their corollaries, envenomed ad nauseam by hatreds of the same bottomless magnitude that tore apart the Weimar Republic and thus enabled Hitler, make any such (solidarity) hopeless under present circumstances.

The question then is how do we educate people on both sides of the political spectrum – people whose closed-minded zealotry proves them to be utterly ineducable.

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You (addressed to a hostile fellow RSN comment-thread poster) err grievously in equating Stalin with the Koch brothers. Read some history: Stalin was building an industrial nation from the ruins of a feudal nation. The Koch cabal is building a feudal nation from the ruins of an industrial nation.

But the implication of your “expect to learn Russian soon” – unintentionally to be sure (though maybe your subconscious is telling you something you should heed) – is that given present-day politics, Russia could well emerge from the global miasma as the savior of human liberty.

That savior most assuredly won't be Moron Nation, i.e., the United States of America.

Вы говорите по-русски?

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Before we damn Stalin as “a monster,” let us acknowledge the monstrous behavior of the United States, which for the most part went unchallenged by its citizenry until capitalism brought USian sadism home and the white population began to suffer the same depredations as indigenous populations abroad and minority or First Nations populations in the imperial homeland.

Then of course the white population, methodically moronated to self-destructive stupidity, did precisely as it was conditioned to do: note for example the required high school reading of Ayn Rand, a fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf whose work should never have been published, much less given, like gasoline thrown on a fire, to people capitalism had already raised from birth to be moral imbeciles. Thus in its ignorance-aborted quest for relief, Moron Nation voted in fascism. (Paragraph revised slightly to comply with format differences.)

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Think of the Electoral College as the national equivalent of the Democratic (sic) National Committee's “superdelegates.” Both serve the same class-war function – that is, making sure the will of the One Percent and the Ruling Class prevail over the will of the 99 Percent.

Just as the Democratic (sic) superdelegates parlayed an enormity of election fraud into ousting Sanders and nominating Hillary, so did the Electoral College parlay the candidacy of Hillary into the presidency of Donald Trump.

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Health Care in the Age of Trump (Adam Gaffney): The implications of the election  are widespread and multifaceted, ranging from the catastrophic impact a Trump presidency will have on climate change — and the attendant global health consequences — to the squeeze on reproductive health care access that will likely follow the rise of the Right. At the state level, important health care–related ballot initiatives went down in defeat, including a universal health care referendum in Colorado and an initiative in California...to mildly loosen Big Pharma’s tentacle-like grip on the state’s finances...Big Pharma and the insurance industry (spent) huge sums...Republicans now...(can) remold the nation’s health care system into something both uglier and more lucrative...Pharma stocks soared the day after the election).

Mr. Gaffney – still in denial of Tuesday's results – asks, “And how can we keep the dream for single-payer alive?”

The answer, of course, is that any hope of single-payer is dead, as dead as the so-called “American Dream,” in other words, dead forever with no hope of resurrection.

Apropos the Ayn Rand influence cited by (a fellow-comment-thread contributor), the significant fact about Rand is that she is the fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf: just as der Führer did, she demands extermination of all untermenschen, which by USian definition – now made policy by the Trumpite electorate – includes racial, ethnic and sexual minorities; those of us who are chronically impoverished, elderly and/or disabled; and most of all anyone who is chronically ill.

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Trump Voters Will Not Like What Happens Next (Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post): ...Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out,  and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president...The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up”...The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls...(but)...The uneducated white males who elected him, they will not like what happens next.

I should thank Keillor for his malevolent arrogance, firstly because it demonstrates exactly why Trump won; secondly because it proves the truth that earned me my all-time RSN down-thumb high, 62 at last count.

What I wrote is that “Prairie Home Companion...was a malicious satire...on those flyover folk...'Wobegon' was pronounced 'Woe-begone,' as in woe-begone peasants...The program was also a devastating parody...on 1950s rural-U.S. midday radio...For that reason, I never cared much for... Keillor nor for his perpetuation of USian class snobbery... I thought it wrong to make a mockery of people who could no more help being what they were than a polio victim in an iron lung could help being deathly ill.”

Obviously – note again the 62 red thumbs – revealing the now Keillor-proven truth about his vindictive elitism was the Hillaryite equivalent of owning a firearm, which the forcible disarmament cult damns as an “act of violence” that irrevocably defines one as “a Nazi.”

Indeed my only criticism of (another of Keillor's comment-thread critics) is the writerly observation that “hissy fit” is redundant. In the South, from whence the term originates, it was merely “hissy”: the ultimate hold-your-breath-until-purple, fall-to-the-floor, kick-shriek-and-shit-your-pants tantrum of a raging two-year-old boy, precisely as demonstrated above by Keillor's hateful invective.

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(To another RSN poster): I up-thumbed both your remarks, but must differ with you on one point. You wrote, “Bernie's revolution needs to find new legs – it'll be a winner in four years time.”

Sorry to disillusion you, but with Trump about to bring back the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (added link), Bernie's so-called “Revolution” and any other public expressions of Left-leaning thought, including this and any kindred websites, are living on borrowed time and will be dead in the foreseeable future.

What happened during the 1960s was our 1905; it is merely that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals took much longer to crush us than the Tsar's Okhrana, police, Cossacks and soldiers took to crush the brave revolutionaries of '05.

Our 1917 – if it ever comes – will most assuredly not be led by Bernie Sanders, who betrayed the entire USian Left by his surrender to Hillary.

Indeed, I suspect this (Fourth) Reich, which pre-dates Trump by 53 years, will prove to be the Thousand-Year Reich Hitler imagined and with dreams of which his legions of Nazi war criminals further toxified the already-fascist USian Ruling Class when they were welcomed here after Germany's defeat. There is no power on earth that can beat it – not without destroying the planet – nor will the greedy submissiveness of Moron Nation ever dwindle, not until Mother Earth herself rises in apocalyptic rebellion against capitalist depredation. And by the time that happens, all of us alive today will be well and truly dead. Only a miracle can save us. 

By the one red thumb I've already gotten for this comment, it's clear some of you – probably in fact most of you – have no idea of the terrorism inflicted on this nation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

It literally destroyed, literally forever, the lives of millions of USians – not only those it summoned to public degradation and financial lynching, but the millions more whose careers were destroyed and who were thus forever damned to inescapable poverty by the ripple effect of its indescribably vicious accusations. My father was one of this latter group; as in fact was I, my journalism career forever limited by the lynch-mob-like frenzy into which HUAC's accusations goaded the USian public. Ultimately, it is because of HUAC I will die in ever-more-wretched poverty, in all probability murdered by the poverty itself.

The primary legacy of HUAC's accusations was, firstly, the death, forever, of any ideologically disciplined (and therefore effective) opposition to capitalism, and, secondly, the fascist taint, “austerity” included, that poisons USian politics, culminating in the election of Trump and HUAC's vindictive return – its unprecedented tyranny now made truly omnipotent by all-seeing surveillance technology from which there is no possible escape.

Wake up, idiots. Unless you're my age (76) or older, you cannot begin to imagine the ruinous magnitude of the horrors soon to be unleashed on us.

Such is the ultimate malevolence (added link) of Moron Nation.

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Trans People Are Terrified of What Lies Ahead. We Must Look Out for One Another (Hannah Simpson, Guardian UK): The announcement that Donald Trump won the election was devastating for many people, but transgender people like me were especially frightened...The election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence to our nation’s highest office gives the social conservatives who championed them free reign to overturn decades of progress...A right-shifted supreme court could void all same-sex unions, and perhaps even challenge the fitness of transgender persons to be parents...any chance of the climate improving vanished this week.

I'd say Ms. Simpson is being optimistic: “could void” should be replaced with “will void” and “may well continue” be replaced with “will escalate.”

Here, of course, in the persecution of sexual nonconformists – which, mark my word – will be expanded to include heterosexual couples living together without marriage and communal households in which polyandry and/or bisexuality is common – is the ultimate and absolute proof of the infinitely murderous, infinitely sadistic viciousness of the Abrahamic god and therefore the defining core not just of Christianity, but of Judaism and Islam as well.

(With 60-something percent of the USian population believing the Bible as the literal word of god and therefore definitively fundamentalist whether they admit it or not, no wonder Trump won. And Pence is a theocratic, prosperity-gospel ogre [link added].)

The real winner, of course, is Moron Nation – a constituency now enabled to be as fanatically savage as their Jewish and Muslim counterparts in the Middle East.

Everyone in the targeted communities should waste no time in contacting Pink Pistols and learning the rudiments of effective self-defense.

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Does Trump Have a Mandate? (Marc Ash, Reader Supported News): For the second time in the fledgling 21st century, we are set upon by a right wing radical assuming the power of the US presidency without having won the popular vote.

Sorry, but (the) “50 years of progressive gains” (cited by a fellow comment-thread-contributor) is a Big Lie, an effective weapon in the One Percent's paralysis of USian political consciousness.

The era of “progressive gains” ended when President Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. The era of revenge fascism now culminating in Trump, Pence and the resurrection of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee began immediately thereafter. The maliciously anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act became law on 23 June 1947. Any hope the U.S. might achieve economic democracy thus died forever, leading to the despair that, as in Weimar Germany, prompted the hopelessly oppressed 99 Percent to embrace fascism.

President Kennedy tried to revive the New Deal but was murdered on 22 November 1963 – the day future historians (if indeed there is a future) will cite as the date USian liberty died forever.

“Peace President” Johnson's so-called Great Society was ultimately nothing more than massive bribery to suppress resistance to his murderous Vietnam War. President Nixon, a fascist felon, began his second term by dropping all pretense of support for the 99 Percent's well-being, and our standard of living has declined steadily ever since.

True, there have been a few identity-politics gains since then, but these are mere Ruling Class giveaways. They have no impact on the increasing savagery of capitalism and capitalist governance, do nothing to alleviate our ever-worsening economic suffering and are therefore not “progressive” at all.

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It's Time for Progressives to Seize Control of the Democratic Party (Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News):  Donald Trump’s victory has left the Democratic Party open to redefining itself.

As I look back, defying Mr. Galindez's repetition of the Obama-ism by which the Betrayer justified his de facto pardon of the Bush Regime war criminals, what I see bolsters the suspicion I voiced on this site several weeks ago – that the One Percenters had concluded Trump was the more direct path to the Nazi Nation they've sought since the Bankers' Plot of 1934 (link added).

Indeed the mysterious failure of the Democratic (sic) Party's election-fraud apparatus seems to eliminate any other conclusion.

Moreover, Trump's appointees, apart from obvious Teabagger consolation prizes like Sarah Palin, are ideological twins of the neo-libs and neo-cons Hillary would have appointed to ensure our neo-subjugation.

Alas, the RSN posts in which I suggested the One Percent was secretly abandoning Hillary have seemingly been disappeared, though (the contributor screen-named) Radscal cited my suspicion:

“But Loren Bliss has gotten me thinking that the One Percent...may actually hope they could install Drumpf...for a more conventional fascist regime.”

Meanwhile let us not forget the support given Hillary by Messrs. Galindez, Ashe, Reich and Krugman fails the “which-side-are-you-on”  (link added) test so vital in times of intensified class-struggle and identifies them all as willing members of the One Percent's Ruling Class vassalage – a fact we dare not forget, particularly now that with the impending resurrection of HUAC we have to be McCarthy-era careful what we say or write in public.

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I frankly don't believe the Democratic (sic) Party CAN be reformed. Not now, not ever. Like the Republican Party, the Democratic (sic) Party is in fact the party of capitalism and capitalist governance, i.e., fascism.

Nor, given the realities of late-stage capitalism, can either party EVER be anything but a betrayer of the 99 Percent. Indeed, if we have not learned that lesson from the 2016 presidential campaign, we are clearly incapable of learning anything at all.

What we need is a genuine Democratic Socialist Labor Party, sworn from the moment of its formation to fight the class war on behalf the entire 99 Percent.

Won't happen, of course – the Moron Nation pseudo-Left is too invested in its self-destructive identity politics, too moronated-stupid to ever give them up, too bourgeois-hateful of blue-collar workers and too damn cowardly to ever embrace the hard and sometimes deadly work of revolution.

But it is nice to think about...

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Think logically. What are we told by the fact the Democratic (sic) Party is submissively silent on the Republicans' genocidal plans to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security?

What we are told by their silence is that the Democrats' private position is the same as the Republicans' public position.

In other words, had Hillary been elected, the same thing would now be happening.

Which vividly illustrates why the Democratic (sic) Party is infinitely worse than the Republican Party. Both are parties of capitalist governance – i.e., fascism. The Republicans admit it – even boast about it. By contrast, the Democrats hide their fascism behind a smokescreen of Big Lies – again Hillary's “public” versus “private” positions.

Moreover, these deliberately malicious lies totally nullify the principle of free elections. How can the voters make a knowledgeable choice if one of the parties always lies about what it is?

All of which has two points: one is the overwhelming probability that with Trump we are neither worse off nor better off than with Hillary; two is that our ONLY hope is the creation of an independent, truthfully informed, ideologically disciplined Democratic Socialist Labor Party.

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Don't Call Clinton a Weak Candidate: It Took Decades of Scheming to Beat Her (Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK): Sometimes I think I have never seen anything as strong as Hillary Clinton.  That doesn’t mean that I like and admire everything about her. I’m not here to argue about who she is, just to note what she did. I watched her plow through opposition and attacks the like of which no other candidate has ever faced and still win the popular vote...Or, as my brilliant friend Aruna d’Souza put it Wednesday: “At some point soon we need to discuss whether Sanders would have been able to win, but helpful hint: today, it just sounds like you’re saying: ‘The Democrats should have cut into Trump’s lead in the misogynist vote and the whitelash vote by running a white man.’ Let’s come to terms with the racism and the misogyny first, before analyzing the what-ifs – because otherwise we’re just going to replicate it forever. And if you think that the angry anti-establishment vote won (hence Sanders would have fared better), let me remind you that patriarchy and white supremacy are the cornerstones of the Establishment.”

Rebecca Solnit, a writer for whom I had enormous respect, is correct about Hillary's strength.

Hillary's strength is so great she handed the One Percent the Nazi victory they have sought since 1934, when Russian (Soviet) intelligence operatives helped Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC ret., save President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal from the Bankers' Plot, whereby the One Percenters' great-grandfathers sought to make the United States the economically dominant partner in the Third Reich and its later Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

What Hillary has accomplished is the most powerful act of political subversion in the past several centuries – maybe in our species' entire history. Indeed, she deserves a hearty Zieg Heil for putting our neo-Führer in the White House, thereby fulfilling the Aryan promise of the imperial domicile's name. USA! USA! USA!

As to Ms. Solnit, the spiteful gender-identity invective with which she has gifted us tonight permanently reduces her from significant essayist to to maudlin propagandist. The implicit hatred of and contempt for the viciously downtrodden USian 99 Percent evidenced in Ms. Solnit's newest text also casts profound doubt on the (alleged) humanitarianism from which she wrote. It thus reduces all her previous works to “schtick” – merely another extended program of histrionics, a chic and lucrative Big Lie wrapped in pseudo-empathy, one more dismal manifestation of the ultimately deadly charade of USian “democracy.”

Considering the role of the Soviet Union aka Russia in saving us from the pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini capitalists in 1934, when these banksters plotted to make the U.S. a Nazi nation and turn the American Legion into an USian SS – I cannot but wonder if that's the real reason Goldwater Girl Hillary so despises Russia and all Russians including their unborn children.

Or maybe she just envies the Russians their oh-so-beautiful, oh-so-nuanced language, capable of so much more than the malignantly leering cackle that is Hillary at the apex of her expressiveness, as when she was celebrating the hideously agonizing death of Qaddafi by anal impalement.

How ironic too how Hillary – even as she was enthroning the real neo-Hitler (neo-Duce too) – was damning Vladimir Putin as the new Hitler. It was the most effective sleight-of-hand political action I've ever witnessed – obviously (Ms. Solnit take note), another proof of Hillary's great strength.

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Learning to Walk (Michelle Alexander, Michelle Alexander's Facebook Page):  (W)hat happened  can't be explained simply as a failure of the political establishment...Nor is it simply a problem of racism or sexism — though both are alive and well and flourishing in this moment. Nor is this election simply a matter of economics, though global capitalism and neoliberalism have created a world in which people of all colors are suffering greatly as factories close, work disappears, wages stagnate, and human beings are treated as disposable — like plastic bottles tossed in a landfill — as political and media elites (not just Trump) spew propaganda that encourages us to view “the others” as the enemy...What many of us have been attempting to do...(is) build a thriving multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, egalitarian democracy out of the rubble of slavery and genocide...

It is truly astounding – but simultaneously no surprise – to witness the lengths to which the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassalage will go to preserve Identity Politics, the inherent divisiveness our capitalist overlords chose long ago as their primary antidote to class consciousness and the Marxian epiphany it inevitably evokes.

Now of course in the USian election of a genuinely Nazi regime, we see the ultimate fruition of Identity Politics, now proven even more effective at building a malevolently militant Aryan Right than at ensuring the hopeless division of the Left.

In other words, by its vindictive embrace of Identity Politics, the USian Left first reduced itself to a pseudo-Left and now has slain itself entirely, witness the USian replay of how the Germans discarded their own Weimar-guaranteed liberty in 1933.

But – Identity-Politics propagandists like Garrison Keillor, Rebecca Solnit and the far more subtle Michelle Alexander not withstanding – from beyond the pseudo-Left's remains another Left is arising. It is potentially a Red Banner Left,  acutely aware of the capitalists' seductive cunning and the bottomless evil it maliciously fosters. Thus it freely acknowledges the need for the ideological discipline inherent in Marxism.

The question then is not whether the One Percent will respond to the failure of its Identity Politics deceptions, but rather just how violent it will be in its effort to suppress our awakening.

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No, Everything Is Not Going to Be Alright (Ted Rall):  Given that I’ve been saying The Donald had an excellent chance of winning for many months, maybe you should be scared when I tell you what I think there’s really a 15% chance of: another presidential election in four years...forget impeachment...the chances of Republicans impeaching a Republican president are pretty much zero...forget constitutional checks and balances. Weimar Germany had a lovely constitution, in many ways better than ours, but constitutions are mere paper unless they’re enforced...Guantánamo, immigration prisons, drone assassinations and secret black site CIA prisons are all brazenly unconstitutional. If Trump and his henchmen want to trash legal and political precedent, nothing institutional will stop them...Trumpism is here to stay, for at least four years.

The “right wing smear machine” of which you speak – “you” was not Mr. Rall but a comment-thread-contributor to whom I was replying – was in fact Hillary Clinton's Democratic (sic) Party, and its malevolent effectiveness is proven by the fact that while we were previously oppressed by closet fascists, we are now tyrannized by ever-more-brazenly outspoken Nazis. Thus after 82 years of clandestine efforts the great grandsons of the original 1934 Bankers' Plot conspirators have at last achieved their goal: conversion of the USian Empire into the Fourth Reich.

If I were to be in any way critical of Mr. Rall – which I most assuredly will not – it would only be to suggest he is still extricating himself from the cult of self-deluded optimism that is the opiate that anesthetizes the present-day, identity-politics USian Left to stupefied ineffectiveness.

But at least Mr. Rall – unlike the vast Moronic Majority of his peers – is beginning to awaken to the infinite horror we are facing, which includes not only another Holocaust, but a Holocaust facilitated by technologies of surveillance and genocide the original Nazis could only imagine – literally, all the murderous sadism of the Abrahamic god, the morally imbecilic deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – now fully materialized in the tools of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their ever-more-openly Nazi vassalage; total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Indeed that – total subjugation – is precisely what we are facing. But until we acknowledge how utterly alone and powerless we are – until we start reading Marx and Sun Tzu and Che Guevara rather than identity-politics invective, triumphalist jock biographies and Ayn Randish self-help manuals – the only question is not whether we are destined for concentration camps, but how soon we will end up there. In fact I think Mr. Rall's notion there is a 15 percent chance 2016 will not be the last USian election ever is dangerously optimistic.

Nor would Hillary have been any better: the the only difference between the Democratic (sic) Party and the Republican Party is the former lies about the magnitude of their Nazification while the latter boasts about it.

Moreover, now that we are being rationally pessimistic, note the choice our overlords offered us: between two Hitlers, Hillary Hitler (who wanted to be the first-ever conqueror of Russia and was willing to impose biblical Apocalypse – the extinction of our species and the death of our planet – to achieve her goal); versus Donald Hitler, neo-Führer of the neo-Holocaust, who won election by promising white USia to ensure its bigoted hegemony forever. Indeed it was the classic rat-experiment, performed in the rat lab of capitalism with us, we the rat-people of the rat-race, as subjects.

No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. There is only the Slavic myth of Saint Nicholas, a good-hearted priest – originally pagan, later Russian Orthodox – who ministered to those flung down by misfortune. It was a fine midwinter bedtime story, a parable for the instruction of children in the necessities of sharing and generosity, an excellent prelude to the most profound slogan of our age: “from us according to our ability, to us according to our need.” But it was stolen by the capitalists and twisted into an orgy of obscene profiteering and we of Moron Nation laughed and applauded and let ourselves be Trumped. Hence our Christmas stockings will now and forever contain naught but thorns and cinders.

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I have no doubt the (basic strategic and tactical doctrine that enabled Trump's triumph) was planned long ago, probably during the first meetings between the legion of high-ranking Nazi war criminals to whom the Empire gave sanctuary and their sponsors the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today's One Percent, i.e the Bankers' Plot perpetraitors (note spelling) who wanted to make the U.S. part of Hitler's Greater Reich. Interesting too the skillful sleight-of-hand by which Hillary distracted us by damning Putin as the “new Hitler” even as she was helping put the real neo-Hitler in the White House.

LB/17 November 2016

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Postmortem; DAPL Escalation; Gratitude for a Pivotal Gift

DESPITE ALL THE intensified and now obviously never-to-be-diminished nastiness spewing from the Hillaryites, the one certainty about President Elect Donald Trump is that we cannot yet be certain what sort of president he will be.

As I emailed a profoundly distraught friend early this morning, Trump's acceptance speech was a model of reconciliation – and no I am not being sarcastic. He said, in essence, that he intends be president "for all Americans," and that he wants to befriend  any nation who will befriend us.

Shortly after the president-elect had spoken, RT (which had provided what was by far the most professional election-night coverage), reported that – as Western European leaders were still dithering about in shock  and horror  – Russian Premier Vladimir Putin had sent Trump a message of congratulations,  the first national leader to do so.

Putin's reaction means I can sleep much better tonight. Take it from me – because I was part of the last Civil Rights Movement – it is a helluva lot easier to fight domestic racism than it is to stop global war-mongering: in which context note the (temporary) successes of the Civil Rights Movement versus the permanent debacles of Vietnam, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. ad nauseam.

It is something of an aside, but in defense of the individual USian soldier, Marine, sailor and air-person, – and bearing in mind I was once a U.S. Regular Army soldier myself (active duty 1959-1962; reserves 1963-1965) – it should be noted a major part of the blame for our now-obviously permanent inability at conventional warfare is the fact that under capitalism, military equipment is designed for maximum profit rather than maximum battlefield efficiency. The classic example is the current U.S. service-rifle, the M-16 and its newest variant the M-4 carbine, each so notorious for fatal malfunctions it is often “lost” on the battlefield and replaced by AK-47s taken from enemy dead. The AK-47 and its successor the AK-74 – like all Sino-Soviet equipment – is designed to kill the enemy rather than to fatten the bank accounts of obscenely wealthy military-industrial profiteers and their bureaucratic collaborators.

Thus, despite the USian Empire's permanent-war mentality and militarily aggressive war-dependent capitalism, U.S. troops have not won a conventional war since 1950, when they conquered North Korea. But they were then battled into headlong retreat when the Chinese, employing Sun Tzu's principle of “when near, make it appear you are far away,” infiltrated 300,000 combat-seasoned soldiers across the Yalu River into North Korea, launched a surprise offensive along the entire front and sent United States and United Nations troops fleeing for their lives. The result, after the Chinese took back North Korea and returned it to Kim Il Sung, was the (oft-violated) armistice of 1953, which remains in effect. Clearly as embittered by the Empire's endless failures at conventional warfare as Sen. (“Nuke Hanoi”) Barry Goldwater was, Goldwater Girl Hillary unquestionably intended to use nukes to compensate for the now-notorious U.S. inability to win at conventional warfare – never mind the result would exterminate our species and kill the planet as well. That's why so many people, I among them, were legitimately terrified by Hillary's ever-more-obvious intent to start World War III, quite possibly with an unprovoked thermonuclear attack on the Russian Motherland.

But neither could I bear the thought of a Trump presidency and its threatened Holocaust against African-American, Hispanic, First Nations, Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual-Queer, Communist, socialist, anarchist and libertarian peoples – not to mention the Christian jihad against female sexual freedom promised by its opposition to abortion and birth control. Hence I voted for Jill Stein, literally – as I said in a comment-thread post repeated below – so I could die with a clear conscience in another manifestation of Christian doctrine, Hillary's intended “better-dead-than-Red” enactment of the biblical End-Times Apocalypse.

Prior to Hillary's malicious and undoubtedly criminal theft of the Democratic (sic) Party's nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I was of course a Sanders supporter. But Sanders betrayed us, becoming in the end a dedicated Hillaryite, thereby – or so I suspect – reducing his future political significance to absolute zero. The Democratic (sic) Party has in all probability similarly doomed itself. 

As Robert Parry of Consortium News wrote earlier this morning, (i)n the end, Hillary Clinton became the face of a corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment, while Donald Trump emerged as an almost perfectly imperfect vessel for a populist fury that had bubbled beneath the surface of America...voters chose him in part because they felt they needed a blunt instrument to smash the Establishment that has ruled and mis-ruled America for at least the past several decades. It is an Establishment that not only has grabbed for itself almost all the new wealth that the country has produced but has casually sent the U.S. military into wars of choice, as if the lives of working-class soldiers are of little value.

By his use of the euphemism “Establishment,” Parry seemingly hoped to give British respectability to what in the post-Occupy USian homeland are more correctly known as the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals – the malevolently greedy politicians, bureaucrats, generals, police chiefs, academics, religious leaders and mainstream-media propagandists who, as the Oberführers of capitalist governance, oversee its efficiency in assuring maximum power and unlimited profit for our overlords, total subjugation for everyone else.

Interestingly, though Consortium News has often joined in the protests  against Barack Obama 's self-proclaimed presidential power to order the murder of anyone  – U.S. citizens included, Parry makes no mention of this policy as a possible post-election factor. Let us hope it is not; the USian reputation for banana-republic politics, which dates to 22 November 1963 but is underscored by Obama's nullification of the U.S. Constitution,  is already damning enough.

Were I Parry's editor, I would have insisted he add three additional elements to his analysis.

One is the irrefutable statistical proof that non-Ruling Class USians are in truth as politically powerless  as medieval serfs or antebellum slaves. While the Moronic Majority are far too ignorant and reflexively anti-intellectual to understand the statistical proof of their ever-worsening plight or the ever-more-obvious fact its only lasting remedy is the permanent overthrow of capitalism, they most assuredly understand – as Parry correctly reported – its day-to-day financial realities, the suffering and death of which Trump promises to ameliorate. But Parry's report was most assuredly weakened by the absence of the statistical corroboration.

On another element of the same topic of the 99 Percent's powerlessness, the report was also weakened by omission of the fact many people my own age – including most of my 90 neighbors in the low-income senior housing complex in which I dwell – are painfully aware that in the notoriously dishonest difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies (the latter including the austerity promises she secretly makes to her One Percent masters), lurks her intent to continue the slow-motion genocide of the devastating but mostly unpublicized cuts Obama and the Democratic (sic) Party in general have made in Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

Two is the equally irrefutable proof the white segment of the Moronic Majority is reflexively, even malevolently racist – albeit often unconsciously so. This evidence is in post-Hurricane-Katrina studies by the Pew Foundation, perhaps the most credible of the USian polling organizations. Quoth a 2005 Pew report:

(B)lacks and whites draw very different lessons from the tragedy. Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government’s response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm’s victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government’s response.

Given that the victims of racism should be the sole source of any definition of what racism is, given also how 77 percent of the whites arrogantly dismissed the blacks' post-Katrina grievances, it seems to me the implicit racism is undeniable.

(Disclosure: my own hostile encounters with racism include a plethora of nasty white reactions to the fact that, over the years, I had two black girlfriends, and of course the vindictive fury of Guy L. Smith, editor and publisher of The Knoxville Journal, that after my arrest in a 1963 civil-rights incident severely crippled my journalistic career-prospects; the same arrest prompted a venomous outpouring of hostility from professional colleagues, alleged friends, other fellow students, one of my four half-sisters and several maternal relatives. And let us not forget the Ku Klux Klan's subsequent efforts to murder me in retaliation for my resistance to the racist agendas of The Journal, The Knoxville News-Sentinel and most especially the University of Tennessee.)

Thus it seems to me the white USian population is no less racist than, say, the 1930s Germans were anti-Semitic. Thus too, when Trump began spouting racist invective, I concluded he was verbalizing the hitherto closeted and/or officially denied racism of Moron Nation whites, and on that basis predicted he would win the election. As a friend e-mailed me last night, “Fuck. You were right.”

The third element in Trump's victory is the methodically conditioned and thus truly limitless USian fear of material loss, a bone-deep cowardice that is easily mustered by our overlords to eternally prohibit even the mildest amelioration of capitalist depredation. As I emailed to another friend last night, “the problem – as common in the countryside as in the towns and cities – is that we are all taught from birth that our only real identity is in our material possessions. Hence we are terrified to lose them; hence too anytime that loss is threatened, we as a nation react with infinite savagery. Though I understood this dynamic from a very early age, I also scorned it, not recognizing the universality and literal bottomlessness of the associated fear until my own material possessions – i.e., the 'Dancer' manuscript and all the rest of my writing and photography – were taken from me by the 1983 fire. As a result I was utterly destroyed – destroyed forever and beyond repair – by their loss. This is, I believe, an extremely important lesson in how the psychic-vampire function of capitalism – especially aided as it is in so many USians by the sadistic opiate of Abrahamic religion – keeps us enshackled.”

Trump, therefore – in exactly the same way Hitler was unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-Versailles Germanism – is unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-New-Deal “Americanism,” whatever that may bode.

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I WROTE FOUR comments on the Reader Supported News website since my last post here on OAN, on 29 October. (Yes last week I entirely missed my self-imposed mid-week deadline; I had momentarily forgotten the horrendous amount of time consumed by running – hobbling, actually – first-of-month errands without an automobile; even with a ride to the supermarket provided by a friend, what used to take me one day by car now takes at least five days – often more – by bus.) In any case three of my RSN comments focus on pre-election issues; one is reprinted in full below; the others are merely titled, described by a few sentences and linked for the sake of the record. The fourth is a denunciation of the escalating war against the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, also reprinted. And there was one other post I'm printing in totality, a short essay that began as a comment on a Chris Hedges piece published by Popular Resistance but – as if by visitation of the Muse – unexpectedly, even involuntarily turned into an expression of gratitude for a long-long-ago, far-far-away and profoundly influential gift from a young woman named Thias Smedley, who was as lovely as her given name, which is pronounced Tie-yeese, accent on the last syllable.

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The Real Clinton Email Scandal Is That a Bullshit Story Has Dominated the Campaign: Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this...Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest. It did not. Instead, email-related talk has...influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

My response was to repeat something I have already said many times, and will say once more for those who have not voted:

“The choice our overlords offer us is very simple: either Hillary Hitler (who believes she can top Adolf Hitler, Bonaparte, Charles XII of Sweden, the Teutonic Knights, the Mongols and the Persians in being the first-ever conqueror of Russia), or Donald Hitler, who promises to persecute African American, Hispanic, First Nations, LGBTQ and Leftist peoples.”

“Put even more simply...a vote for Hillary Hitler is a vote for World War III, thermonuclear apocalypse and the extermination of our species, while a vote for Donald Hitler is a vote for a new Holocaust.

“Which is precisely why I voted for Jill Stein. That way, in that final millisecond of consciousness as I am turned into radioactive vapor, I won't be blaming myself for having voted to turn our Mother Earth into a radioactive cinder.

“Yes, it truly is that simple.”

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Obama Is Pathetic on Human Rights in North Dakota (By William Boardman) – The President gave lip service to “the traditions of the first Americans.” He didn’t mention treaties between sovereign nations, of course, because he’s not about to break with the traditions of the second Americans: that such treaties are only a means to a genocidal end and aren’t to be taken seriously by the United States of exceptional, manifestly destined Americans whenever such treaties interfere with what the US wants. That’s what “properly attentive” means historically. Freely translated, “properly attentive” means “make a show of peace talk, then roll over them with whatever force necessary after it’s too late to affect the election.” The legal mind is nothing if not properly attentive to elegant turns of phrase in its unyielding hypocrisy.

“I think Mr. Boardman should have used much stronger language. 'Pathetic' is a bird with a broken wing, a child burned by USian napalm, and most assuredly not the exemplar of lies, corruption and genocide (whether by drone or austerity) who – thanks in tiny measure to my own two unforgivably optimistic votes – now inhabits the White House. But because I myself am a professional writer and editor, I understand Mr. Boardman's problem. The only truly accurate description of Obama is 'evil,' but – due mostly to the atrocities committed by Abrahamic religion – that noun is no longer fashionable.”

“You (on RSN) are all too kind in your denunciations of this most malevolent of presidents. Here we see the true legacy of 'change we can believe in,' the most maliciously premeditated Big Lie ever told by a presidential candidate, the prelude to his years-in-the-planning shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer.

“His intent – now in North Dakota proven to be what the far Right has claimed from the beginning – is obviously the reduction of the entire USian 99 Percent to the inescapable powerlessness and degradation that is the eternal lot of the (White Exceptionalist) Empire's African-American and Hispanic subjects, and even harsher subjugation for First Nations peoples – this so he can gleefully point to the Standing Rock Sioux and say 'see how I made their lives even worse, so don't you others dare complain.'

“It is indeed 'change we can believe in': change from less brutal charade of representative democracy to the overt savagery of unabashed fascism. And because there is no force on this planet capable of stopping the USian neo-Reich, the casualties are only beginning. Mark my word, the cops and soldiers and private-security stormtroopers – every one a wanna-be serial killer (and most of them already kill-hardened in the Middle East) – will soon be firing for lethal effect, just as occurred at Kent State University and Jackson State College. The propaganda preparation is already underway. And the orders are no doubt coming from the Betrayer himself.”

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Spiritual Blackout in America: Election 2016 (By Cornel West) – (T)he neofascist catastrophe called Donald Trump and the neoliberal disaster named Hillary Clinton are predictable symbols of our spiritual blackout.

Quoth I: “While the leaders are certainly as much to blame as the masses, don't forget that (precisely as happened in Nazi Germany), it is the USian masses' obscenely capitalist, lockstep conformist selfishness – each USian's psychopathically craven terror of suddenly having even one penny less than the proverbial Joneses – that has fueled the transition from limited democracy to zero-tolerance plutocratic tyranny. And – again like the Nazi Germans – as they have sown, so shall they be reaped.

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Animosity Towards Clinton Runs Deep at the FBI (Guardian UK) – Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

“Has it occurred to anyone else we are perhaps witnessing the opening moves of a soft coup by factions of the Ruling Class who are rightfully terrified by Hillary's (Goldwater Girl/Christian fundamentalist) intent to bring about the Apocalypse?”

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American Irrationalism (By Chris Hedges) – There is no shortage of signs of impending environmental catastrophe, including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of atmospheric carbon to above 400 parts per million... We are led to succumb to the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a culture in dissolution.

“Chris Hedges' 'American Irrationalism' is a protest so powerful it is strongly reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's epic Howl, to which I was introduced by a keenly perceptive fellow University of Tennessee student named Thais Smedley whom I met, seemingly by random chance, as we were walking from opposite directions on a campus sidewalk.”

“It was 1959, when possession of the Howl text anywhere in the South was a felony.

“Thais was a senior bound for graduate school, I a 19-year-old freshman soon to run out of college money and enlist in the Regular Army to fulfill the six-year military obligation the Empire imposed on all save the most financially privileged of the draft-era's males. But on that hot May early afternoon I encountered Thais – whose raven hair fell below her shoulders in what was then a gesture of bohemian defiance, who was clad in the more subtle rebelliousness of a white linen blouse with matching white shorts and bare-legged black leather t-strap sandals and whose appearance thus drew from me the spontaneous salute of a memorably face-stretching grin – my poverty-imposed denouement was yet five months away in the unknown future. Thais grinned back, and now suddenly I was wealthy with the unanticipated gift of her presence, enchanted by her soft-voiced eloquence, smitten by the uniqueness of her beauty and flattered by the attention of a woman three years older than I.

“But I was also lost, lost in the dark miasma of contradictions between the undefined but nevertheless implicitly Marxian values with which I had been raised – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s – and the quagmire of incipient fascism in which the anti-intellectualism and lockstep conformity of the Joe McCarthy realm seemed intent on drowning me.

“Thais somehow sensed my existential quandary, invited me to her dwelling – with its painted stone walls and potted plants it was a study in green and white, the brightest, most airy, most welcoming basement apartment I have ever entered – and there we talked for perhaps two hours, during which she fed me a bowl of Campbell's beef noodle soup, gave me her copy of Howl – 'I think this will speak to you,' she said; 'and I don't need it anymore' – then oh-so-gently sent me on my way so she could continue packing for her move elsewhere to another university.

“She was right, of course; even at 19, I somehow knew better than to ignore the perceptions of a woman who, like some personification of the Muse, had momentarily appeared as if by magic in my life. Ginsberg did indeed speak to me, and Howl was for me the doorway to a new consciousness, an eventual synthesis of my father's Marxism and my own outrage at the casually brutal ignorance of the nyekulturniy state I have since come to damn as 'Moron Nation.' The key that unlocked it – the mechanism of epiphany for which I am forever grateful to Thais – is Howl's opening line: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...'

“Let us therefore hope Hedges' opening line, 'There is no shortage of signs of impending catastrophe...' awakens as many in the millennial generation as Ginsberg's words awakened in mine; let us also hope Doctor Margaret Flowers' gift of 'American Irrationalism' here via Popular Resistance is as pivotally influential on the multitudes as Thais Smedley's gift of Howl was to me 57 years ago.”

Later, in a dialogue with another reader, I added a defense of Hedges:

“(He) is one of the very few who dare tell us how dire our circumstances truly are. Yes this can cause despair, but if that's what it takes to awaken Moron Nation to what it has done to itself and is now doing not just to our entire species but to our entire planet, so be it. With its total surveillance technology, its domestic policy of slow-motion genocide (to exterminate all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit), and its doomsday foreign policy, the USian Empire is in hideous truth the most malevolently oppressive regime in our species' history. I know this sounds pessimistic, but it is in fact the opposite. As Sun Tzu so clearly understood, if we are to evolve an effective response, we must grasp the totality of our enemy's (oppressive) capabilities and (genuinely evil) intentions. And because I do believe we are capable of evolving such a response, beneath my apparent pessimism lies a profound optimism.”

LB/9 November 2016

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