Well, what is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's position on Syria? Of course China by default opposes anyone trying to overthrow their government, but will it go so far as to subsidize a Russian occupation there? Does China's twin energy romances with Russia and Iran force it to keep them in the fight?
I'm talking about the technology, not Texas. Other countries will reap the benefits. I'm in Texas and I know the culture here is insane. I wouldn't be surprised if developers are allowed to claim their development is NEVER finished so that they can block solar panels indefinitely, a sort of solar Jim Crow to go with the actual Jim Crow being restored down here.
As far as I'm concerned, America, the South, and Texas should have paid a crippling price for their anti-intellectual, anti-secular and anti-science culture years ago, but somehow, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this behemoth is too big to fail until it fails catastrophically. The international system is too rigged in favor of incumbents.
I also think that things don't change because the incumbent empires reform first, but because they are overthrown by rising empires exploiting new technologies. Kevin Phillips' book "American Theocracy" talks about how Holland's social order built on wind power got eclipsed by Britain's discovery of coal power, and Britain in turn by American oil. Each of these countries had used its wealth to create the intellectual capital to stay ahead of their rivals, but their financial & cultural elites became entrenched in their previously successful energy paradigm and led their lands to failure. But this took a long time to become apparent.
It is an irony that Texas was the Ground Zero of the oil revolution, and now it has the resources to lead the world in wind, geothermal and solar but won't do so because Big Oil enshrined an "American way of life" here that impedes development in a way that it doesn't in China, India, or Latin America.
That sentence was meant to be snark, right? Lebanon got chopped to pieces by proxy militias 40 years ago and the Lebanese still don't fully have their country back. And Syria and Lebanon are probably not "nations" by anthropological standards. The divisions in these societies may have always been too vicious to form a real nation.
We didn't prepare ahead for the power vacuum that would exist once American hegemony fell apart. Now we aren't preparing for the consequences when the rising regional powers start shooting at each other in that vacuum. Which in this case means Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel. One overt nuclear power, one nuclear power that's lying about it, and one country with enough money to buy plenty of nukes.
This is a serious matter, August 1914-level dangerous. No one is talking about our worst-case contingencies. If you think we should do nothing, then for God's sake at least start marching now to that effect, because our public needs to be informed that it can no longer start whining for Washington to "do something" when the media images get too scary, as they will.
The big question here is, what does Trump prescribe based on his statement? Is he saying:
a. no more overseas interventions
or
b. his interventions will be HUUUUUGE and be so successful that your head will spin?
That's kind of a huuuuuge difference. And it's the first time that a Republican candidate with serious numbers (meaning not surnamed Paul) has dared to question the idea of American hegemony since the Cold War began. Even an ignorant lout, it seems, can see that we don't know what we're doing overseas. But can an ignorant lout author a process for extricating ourselves from our commitments in over 130 countries and define a National Interest in non-superpower terms?
This could be the most important development of the 2016 campaign if Trump is rebuked by the GOP establishment and, as usual, keeps fighting back and provoking the rank & file into discussing what it all means.
The issue is not NATO influencing the outcome, but the anti-war culture's conspiracy theories that there was no genuine uprising at all or that it did not represent any significant number of Libyans. Bombers do not equal popular legitimacy.
These days in the Middle East a centrist is an armed salafist with a blank check from Saudi Arabia, a right-winger is ISIS until something more extreme comes along to soak up the despair, and a leftist is the entire rest of the universe. Too bad that majority rule =/= the rule of the guy with the biggest gun.
Outside of America, state churches were the historical norm, in fact to the very beginning of civilization. The Russian Orthodox Church was the state church of the Czarist regime. Stalin rehabilitated it during WW2 into a submissive puppet. The fall of the Soviet Union began a process of restoring the Orthodox Church as the favored religion of the nationalistic government, which in turn is increasingly a dictatorship.
To put this in context, when the Archbishop of Canterbury, during World War 1, called for the extermination of the Turkish people in retaliation for their genocide of Armenians, do you think the British government was free of responsibility?
What secular reason could Putin possibly have for his massive gay-bashing crusade? Sounds like he's doing a quid pro quo for the Orthodox Church on that one.
The question is, what is the Right's end game? It clearly goes beyond abortion. Now it openly attacks even access to contraception.
Of course, none of this affects the rich, meaning that poor people, mostly non-white in the future, will multiply while the nation's wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. We know that the Right already is gerrymandering and voter-IDing non-whites so that they can never win elections at the state and national level. That leaves the struggling working-class whites as the only electorate allowed in the future.
Now when all governmental health care for the lower class is exterminated, what remains? A few will still have insurance from their jobs, but Hobby Lobby proved that in certain firms right-wing bosses can dictate what their employees are allowed to have on ideological grounds.
Everything is being narrowed down to religion. Catholic dioceses are abandoning their social commitment to educating the inner-city poor to chase white flight in the suburbs. But in Protestant-world, blacks and whites don't even go to the same churches and the financial resources are all with the latter.
We are being forced back into the Middle Ages, except this time instead of a blatant monopolistic Catholic church, many denominations will compete to whore themselves to rich donors, promising to keep the poor under control the most cost-effective way possible. That includes schools and hospitals.
My conclusion is that in the planned future, the poor will be forced to crawl to the most racist, pro-greed churches to beg for health care and pass all kinds of ideological tests and indignities to qualify. They will be terrified into silence on political issues, down to their very right to vote.
Feudalism was awful, but it lasted almost 1500 years. Someone's making long-term plans to bring it back.
If you bothered to read my comment below you would see that I am not disagreeing with you. I am saying that the Supreme Court is in on the scam with the GOP.
Like many of the classic scams used by Jim Crow, this scam also hurts poor whites. Poll taxes hurt the poor of every color, while grandfather clauses entirely targeted blacks. Literacy tests were rigged by the white officials administering them, so they could pass whomever they wanted to vote.
The complexity of this network of discriminatory schemes may have let the rest of America shrug and say "it's too complicated to prove intent" and look away for 90 years. That certainly is what is happening now. We don't want to admit that yet again the "most patriotic" Americans are the most racist and anti-democracy, because what does that say about our true identity as Americans?
The horrifying thing about Jim Crow is that poor whites never took to the streets against those laws that also disenfranchised them. They ultimately valued being non-voting members of the Master Race more than having a vote that they shared with blacks. I see no signs that this attitude has changed. They will never march alongside blacks to overturn this unfair conspiracy.
To the Assad-lovers on this thread. If you want to say that we must now exterminate the Syrian opposition because it is the only practical way to stop ISIS, we can have a rational discussion about that. If you want to say that no one in Syria EVER had a right to rebel against one of your few remaining "Socialist" tyrants because all anti-American regimes are saintly and just and all who are harmed by them are an evil monsters who deserve to be genocided, you are full of crap. I don't even understand what your end game is, except for one where the whole world operates under Beijing rules: we must all peacefully submit to whatever dictatorship guarantees the most stability. Which, years ago, was exactly the argument used by Washington when most revolutions were by leftists. The right of people to revolution is universal and necessary, no matter how many people revolt for bad causes, or take foreign support to do so. What we need are legal criteria on what justifies taking up arms against a government, given that almost all governments now claim to be elected.
Because one day you might need to join, or oppose, a revolution, and the criteria you apply to defend Gadafi or Assad may not be the sort of country you want your children to spend their lives in.
Given the crimes that Assad committed, can you really say that there is a "Syrian" people? I mean, if I support mass murder against rival ethnic groups because they refuse to live under a biased regime, then how can I really be committed to sharing equal citizenship with them after they have been subdued? The same goes for my enemies' commitment to sharing power with my people. I don't think the people who initially rebelled against Assad are the monsters you want them to be. But they'll still have to be protected by any real settlement, just as the Alawites and Christians will have to.
Yeah, because the Saudis and Israelis won't try to retaliate. You better start reading "The Guns of August" and understand how incredibly dangerous this situation is.
As usual, the only good thing I can say about Trump's remarks are that they will confuse and divide Republicans. The Israel Lobby candidates like Cruz can't support Russia bailing out Assad & Hezbollah. Bush, obviously, is a toady whose family is joined to Saudi Arabia at the creepy investment fund.
At some point Trump was bound to run afoul of Israel and Saudi Arabia, so it will be interesting how they flex their muscle in our bought-out political system to attack him.
Okay, but remember your words about internal affairs when America's second civil war begins in your lifetime. We have enough weapons, mostly under the control of right-wing generals and private citizens, to dwarf all these foreign wars put together. Much worse weapons are waiting to be built by a vast sea of 3D printers and CNC machines. The rationalizations for ethnic cleansing are already coming from the lips of presidential candidates. The world will have to watch helplessly.
I wish there would be a revolution against a right-winger somewhere so we could see if "socialist" anti-imperialists would apply the same standard to those rebels. Otherwise they're just as hypocritical as Washington and Moscow.
That's the "majority" that these Republican Moslems claim to be a part of. While the base swings each week to the candidate who has most recently made the most offensive, hateful, bigoted statement.
Petit bourgeoisie immigrants might think that their worship of greed and economic inequality makes them good Americans, but it was capitalists who fabricated the very notion of a White race, a Black race, and the supremacy of the former as a means of co-opting rebellious indentured servants on the corporation-financed plantations of colonial Virginia. The logic of this mechanism still holds today. The Whites were indoctrinated to see themselves as enforcers and conquerers, loyal to their war chief/bosses and hostile to all forms of equality.
Thus racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia serve the rational goal of the rich in erecting caste walls to protect their wealth with least effort and convert it into privileges to pass on to their parasite offspring. Including command of a redneck henchman army that needs to occasionally feed on the bodies of the Other.
All forms of inequality are connected. All forms of "merit" are rigged cultural constructs. The Republican Party works to restore the runaway inequality of the past by idolizing these constructs as sacred tribal traditions. The completion of this process of neo-feudalism requires the elimination of human rights for all Moslems rich and poor.
Israel has exploited America's ignorance and narrow interest politics to get away with Great Power swagger without Great Power responsibility. Now it's gotten in the way of a serious Great Power protecting its own interests. Same for Saudi Arabia.
Remember the movie "The Long Good Friday" where Bob Hoskins, a bullheaded, small-time London gangster, finds his gang under attack by a force too powerful to be just a criminal gang, and he discovers the hard way that he's blundered into a blood feud with the Irish Republican Army? Netanyahu = Hoskins.
No one has adequately explained that, but apparently because Medicare is an insurance fund it's viewed as Not The Government. The implications are that Medicare and Social Security are not redistributive, and that redistribution is evil democracy overrun with ni**er parasites.
These are not true, but they may provide insight on the tribalist, barbarian mentality of the White Right. Social Security, Medicare, the war machine, and veterans' benefits are seen as not being part of government, but somehow older and more legitimate. I think they view themselves (but not the rest of Americans) as a pure blooded tribe that conquered this land and have no need for modern government because they're one big patriarchal family under their holy men. And benefits for elders and warriors are simply tribal or family obligations. This is also false, because real tribes are based on community property and redistribution, not private oligarchs.
Bet Netanyahu didn't see Russia coming into his Clean Break bantustan zone. 400 nukes protected by accusing anyone who point them out of being anti-Semitic aren't worth a damn now.
If Netanyahu and his US neocon agents hadn't spent a generation turning Iran into the new Nazis (hilarious considering Saudi tyranny and terrorism), Putin would never have had an opening. The US and Israel drove Iran and Russia into each other's arms in a reversal of historical norms.
The US finally achieved its insane goal of making Saudi Arabia and Israel the co-suzerains of the Middle East, only to find that they have amassed so much power along the way that they now give orders to Washington instead of vice versa.
But how long will this alliance, equal in its cynicism to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, survive? Consider that Richard Clarke accused the Saudis of attempting to build a copy of a Chinese IRBM base in 1986, presumably with nuclear missiles in transit stopped by Reagan's intervention. Consider that the Saud family's thin claim to legitimate rule is based on their ancient title as the protectors of Mecca and Medina. The King of Jordan has that role for Jerusalem, Holy City #3. Consider that while both the Sauds and Israelis have been accused of aiding ISIS, there's no sign where ISIS will stop its ambitions, and Israel has destabilized the countries that would have shielded it from ISIS' unorthodox methods.
I think one of these allies is planning to betray the other. Maybe both. The Saudis want nukes. The Israelis want to provoke whatever war will allow them to ethnically cleanse the Occupied Territories.
I fear Israel WANTS the Palestinians so desperate that they will turn to ISIS, which is hated by the entire world. That becomes the justification for wiping them out. But doing that by destroying al-Aqsa will doom the Jordanian monarchy and who is left to take over there but ISIS? The Saudis seem to be all for ISIS conquering Lebanon and Syria. Even an incompetent, suicidal ISIS can win in those countries once they're in ruins. And Israel can't deport the Palestinians anywhere else.
So either Israeli troops must occupy those ruins to make sure the deportees don't acquire the means for revenge, or something much worse: Israel is looking to engineer an ISIS caliphate full of Palestinians for the precise and sole purpose of annihilating it with nuclear weapons.
That would be a really bad time to find out that the Saudis actually have their own secret nuclear arsenal.
It's not the sole foundation of his popularity, but it's the part that vets his attacks on the Republican priesthood. All those criticisms are expressed all the time by Democrats, but this faction of Americans already accepts as gospel that all Democrats are in a war to destroy the glorious supremacy of white Christian Americans, thus if they say it, it's a lie. But if Trump says it, suddenly the listener starts to put the pieces together about why the Republicans he supported in the past never delivered the promised Reaganoid nirvana. Only Nixon could be trusted to negotiate with Commies, only Trump can be trusted to expose Wall Street. Democrats are assumed to be traitors in each case.
“As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
To all the people on this site who kept claiming there was no difference between the Republicans and Democrats:
1. I told you the GOP was much worse than what you'd seen
2. You're cowards who believed whatever would justify you washing your hands of democracy and not having to risk your lives against what the Republicans will become
3. I also said that many of you hate the USA so much that you wanted it to fall apart so rule could be re-localized, and I warned that it would be armed far-right racist extremists who would win in every corner of the land.
But that will not be the end of the war. They will be defeated after many years, but the victors will recall that you made the war possible by prioritizing peace over equality.
It's not even that they think Obama is too sympathetic to Moslems. It's that they will make themselves believe whatever they have to in order to cross the Rubicon of risk in physically destroying their enemies. So they start from the premise that their enemies are trying to destroy them and then make up whatever conspiracies they need to connect those enemies together into a threat large enough to justify violent "self-defense". Blacks and Moslems MUST be tied together into one enemy army, along with gays and Mexicans. Obama MUST be the leader of that army, because that will justify the action of taking over the government, cynically rewriting laws so that whites can never be outvoted by blacks, de facto mandating a one-party state, and terminating the citizenship of broad swathes of the population.
All of that, outlandish as it seems, is the only political alternative to sharing power with growing non-white populations. Nothing else works. So they must believe ridiculous things.
I must say, I have waited for decades for America, and its most bigoted backwaters, to pay a real economic price for its war on intellect. Yet it doesn't happen. The South benefitted from the first wave of capitalist union-busters shipping jobs to a region that ironically was finally getting modern infrastructure in part due to LBJ's bargain to get it to accept Civil Rights. Of course the jobs kept moving all the way to the Global South, but the myth that Reagan created Southern prosperity and that moving further Rightward will create more can only be disproven by catastrophe.
My solution hearkens to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, where academics prepare a redoubt to ride out the collapse of a galactic civilization, disguised as a university. Our cities must be made more self-reliant, able to withstand the worst that Republican state governments can do to them. As the Right eliminates all government in rural & suburban America, they will fall into barbarism. The cities must defend themselves while remaining connected to a technological world that is moving on without America. And they must prepare to employ an influx of refugees from Republican political oppression and economic collapse. I believe that the tools to do this exist: solar/wind energy, 3D printing/CNC technology, internet-based trade, and most importantly Self-Directed Education (see Koskata). Our children will have to carry the burden of learning how to keep a secular, technological society going while their rural counterparts are taught about demons and curses.
After years of NATO attempts to encircle Russia and US attempts to penetrate Central Asia, turnabout is fair play. Presenting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, jockeying for power in full view of white people with money.
So is the future of Western democracy a rising tide of LePens and Trumps on the Right, and an opposing tide of Sanders and Corbyns on the Left? It seems we are headed toward a class showdown.
I think they expect the military to lead them and their personal guns in a glorious crackdown on everybody they hate.
It is little known that the early Reagan administration floated a trial balloon to create a national militia, supposedly in case the National Guard had to be called away for a war (presumably the Big One against the Soviets). They even set up tables at gun shows and took names of interested citizens.
The idea went nowhere, but the tables at the gun shows kept going, morphing into the militia movement of the '90s and its descendants.
We can also recall that the Brownshirts reached a strength of 4 million Germans at the time of Hitler's victory; in effect the militia was the Nazi Party and its real grass-roots power. Maybe our gun nuts will be willing to support anything that restricts ownership of combat-useful weapons to those who look like themselves. Right-wing talk about "a militia of all the people" refers to a time when the colonies were essentially a white warrior tribe engaged in a war of aggression and enslavement against people of color.
I think for these persons, using Christian "conscience" to Jim Crow the Constitution again, or secession, or supporting the rise of a fuhrer Trump, or supporting a military coup with their own private guns are all simply paths to a monopoly on power. The question is, can their factions be set against each other to prevent them from unifying and throwing their guns behind one would-be tyrant?
I am certain that the rich do not want secession to become more than a Southern bluff to extort Jim Crow-type local exceptions to the Constitution. Secession means the end of our military empire and God knows how much of our overseas business depends on its existence. Their optimal solution is probably "one country, two systems" as we had after Reconstruction collapsed - a true return to the Gilded Age for business. Trump and a military coup probably have much the same appeal for secular greedbags, holding the country together at the seeming sacrifice of unpopular Wall Street.
It wouldn't be invisible anymore. Which means it wouldn't hold back against the people that those in the poll supporting the idea want rounded up and put in concentration camps. They want a coup for their convenience, not the military.
Find out about the Oathkeepers cult in the military. Also Mikey Weinstein's work against Christian penetration of the military's officer corps.
"It is heresy to say so in hyper-capitalist Trumpland, but everybody might have been better off if Reagan had just left the Communists in Afghanistan alone."
It takes a long time to understand the consequences of actions. I despised Ron Dellums for saying that the Soviets were justified in invading Afghanistan. Actually, I still despise that statement. But if we move away from "justified" to "punishable", I can see that for the Soviets it was a war of imperial maintenance, just like America's wars. Actually, I think the US should also have been punished by the entire world for what it did in Vietnam. But at least under the traditions of Great Power politics, an empire has a special right to interfere with its weaker neighbors, under the rubric of "buffer states". Afghanistan was definitely a buffer state for the USSR. Technically, the US only has two buffer states: Canada and Mexico.
Clearly, the US is locked into a pattern of defeating an old enemy by creating a new one. We naturally sided with Stalin against Hitler because Hitler knew no bounds and had a regime that conquered for a living, converting resources and populations into weapons for the next invasion. But abandoning our anti-Communist paranoia to do this created a cognitive dissonance about our postwar relationship with the USSR.
We repeated this whole sorry pattern with our use of Islamist militants to bankrupt the USSR. We allied with Saudis and Pakistanis whose values and vision for the world should have been repugnant to us. We assumed that in the postwar world everything would return to some mythical "normal" free of violent coercion.
However, the America of 1942 was coming off a history of having no long-term alliances, and in that emergency situation we couldn't be picky. The USSR was the only country that could wear down a Wehrmacht possessing a 15-to-1 kill ratio. What is alarming is the alacrity with which the US bypassed its longtime democratic allies in 1981 to work with two of the worst regimes on Earth, and take their word for it that the jihadis we were backing were the "good" ones. I would argue that in both eras, the US and its voters wanted the benefits of world power while making someone else do the dying - which forced us to be very lax about who that someone else was. But the conditions of 1981 did not justify any of that. Fascism appeared to be winning in 1942. The USSR was not winning in the eyes of any objective analyst in 1981. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who talked Carter into going into Afghanistan first, had already correctly predicted in his 1971 book that computer technology would favor Western economies and finish off the Soviet Bloc. So he knew this intervention was not necessary to save the Free World.
"Direct negotiations" my ass. The right to a state is not something that Israel can grant. It is a human right, despite the endless efforts of Israel to convince Americans that Palestinians are non-human. Since Palestinians are not Israeli citizens, and are not seceding from a state, they automatically have the right to form a state.
But if we had real democracy in the first place, the GOP couldn't have gerrymandered districts, brainwashed the public using Citizens United money, or built up an empire of lying "experts", all of which helped create the fantasy world where half our citizens live in which the US can solve any problem with the threat of infinite military force.
Israel and Saudi Arabia seem so creepily confident that ISIS is not a threat to them that I have to suspect one of them has some sort of control over its leadership. Saudi Arabia only bombs ISIS because we pressured it. Israel helped build up Hamas when it could no longer make the PLO out to be a supervillain, and it helped Khomeini when he seemed useful in hurting the Arab world. Are these countries creating their worst enemies, or secret puppets?
"Only the US" is a statement we're going to have to learn to stop saying. The world got by before the US, and it was just as ugly and violent as it was under the US hegemony. Russia and China will impose order on the places where it is profitable for them to pay decent wages to locals. Other Great Powers and regional powers will do the same. The unprofitable parts of the world will continue to live in anarchy and misery. Only a superpower is arrogant enough to attempt to force compliance from all the humans on Earth, even where it has no interest in their economic utility.
Not a threat to the world, but to the people who get in its way. There are many small ethnicities in the Middle East with no armed force on their side. "The same way as Nazi Germany was to the Jews and the Roma" is a reasonable statement.
That's an ironically racist statement. The first chemical weapons were merely canisters of poison vapors released on the Western Front in 1915 in the hope that the wind would blow them the right direction. Hardly beyond the capability of a non-Western person. Hardly requiring the backing of a government. Hell, in the name of economic prosperity, enterprises all over the world poison their own citizens all the time.
I think for Libyans the lowest level of hell was when Gaddafi was systematically destroying rebel cities with artillery and bombs while he pretended to be having ceasefires and negotiations. As in, he was going to kill everyone who opposed him. Note that while Assad's equally murderous regime is still stubbornly defended by ethnic groups that recognize the threat to their existence by any alternative regime, NO ONE in Libya is still fighting to restore the Gaddafi dynasty or his sold-out brand of fake Islamic socialism.
Instead of playing this fantasy where Gaddafi was challenged entirely by foreigners and not by a large rebellion among his own disgruntled citizens, why not just admit that you think that a socialist dictator has the right to stay in power by any means necessary - but you will not grant the same privilege to a right-wing dictator like Mubarak?
If it's not the rights of gay citizens, it's something else. The question we must ask is, how can we share a country with an army of white Christian capitalist fanatics who will keep making our lives miserable until we surrender all power to them? How long can we live in a state of siege never knowing when their next crusade is going to hit us?
When do we start finding ways to genuinely hurt them for all the crap they do to punish us for hurting their bloated pride as "real" Americans? Has the time come to disinvest in Red State America along with its 51st State, Israel?
It's amazing to me how much the opening paragraphs of this article remind me of news stories trying to explain where Donald Trump gets his support from. Alienation from our fellow humans seems to be the global excuse for pathological behavior. Hell is other people, heaven is bullying them into submission by whatever ideology is at hand, even if I know none of its details.
Jeez, Trump, that's not a plan, that's the history of the 1980s. It's all already been done. The plants are already in the South. The wages have already been slashed, the benefits already destroyed. GM and Chrysler went broke anyway.
What I've read is that this agreement clears the way for Iran joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In other words, the anti-NATO. Consider what that means if the US decides to doublecross the deal and invade.
I guess the important news is that Saudi Arabia is not joining Israel and the GOP in demanding regime change. That's what opposing the agreement is really about. Maybe the Saudis should explain that to the Democratic senators who claim that Iranian nukes are a threat to the region.
The US model seems to be to anoint regional hegemons to control their neighbors, but inevitably only hateful and hated regimes will take the job. Israel and Saudi Arabia have earned a lot of Arab hatred, but we see that as a good thing because them Arabs must be evil because they refuse to be good money-worshippers like us. The Sauds and the Likud look "white" to Washington and Wall Street in the same way Diem and the Shah did.
The guilt of Saudi Arabia lies at a deeper level, and it is shared with the US and Pakistan. Their covert agencies labored together to create the jihadi universe in Afghanistan, to make it too chaotic and competitive for the Soviet blunderers to keep up with. Then the US simply walked away, leaving the Pakistani Army and the network of Arab bankrollers assembled by the Saudis, including Osama bin Laden, to run wild.
So even if the Saud family itself doesn't fund ISIS, it is funded by Saudi/Gulf feudal elites enriched by the Saudi model of oil feudalism and deranged by Wahhabism, who slid from funding the Afghan mujahedeen to al Qaeda to ISIS in search of the biggest bang for their bucks.
The Sauds are to blame in the same way that Ronald Reagan created the climate for men like the Koch Brothers to turn our own country into a medieval oligarchy.
Our countries have been in a cynical relationship since 1945, with inherently contradictory agendas, and both must in a sense compensate for propping each other up, a great sin in the eyes of certain of their constituencies, by doing something hurtful (but not really damaging) to the other. Saudi must spread Islamist extremism, and the US must push the narrative that Moslems are somehow all terrorists (without explicating the Saudi role in that). I think each side understands that about the other, but they can't explain it to their publics.
But this ritual backstabbing maybe has run out of room to avoid damage in an increasingly crowded, zero-sum Middle East. People are fed up, they want real change, and the US and Saudi are all for the tyranny of a freakish and unwholesome status quo.
This could be Trump's big opening with Southerners who I expected to be resistant to him on tribal/religious grounds. No more of this cowardly trickery with grandfather clauses and poll taxes and "separate but equal". Now, a chance to rewrite the definition of citizenship to mandate white minority rule and a one-party state in the future.
"If we are to throw our doors open to any, we must then throw them open to all."
But we have thrown doors open to "any", so you're saying we have no choice between totally open and totally closed?
All Americans are raised with the myth that racism was a misunderstanding, an accident, and had nothing to do with the Founding Fathers and the founding principles of our society (limited govt, states' rights, property rights). Therefore, there's no danger that restoring those principles will be used to bring back the horrors of our past.
Yet the Right keeps trying to undermine the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. They seem to have a plan that requires this. I wonder what it is.
Let's not forget the Indonesian genocide, which the US tacitly supported. That was done with knives too, and the Army behind it is still the Army of Indonesia.
I'd say he accomplished his goal of making Trump appear to regard Latinos as subhumans and servants. Now folks like you have to dig through Trump's past actions and statements to conclusively prove otherwise. Good luck.
Now that the earthquakes are spreading through the fracking boomtowns, I expect the new energy mirage will collapse much more quickly. Yet we will still learn nothing, except that we must sacrifice each other to survive one more day.
Israeli citizenship for Palestinians guarantees nothing. Blacks were citizens under Apartheid and Jim Crow. Hell, Black citizens are gunned down with impunity in the United States today. The famous genocides of the 20th century were primarily of fellow citizens with the exception of the Third Reich.
I wondered in the past why Republicans didn't make a more sustained effort to attract Blacks who hate illegal aliens. Maybe the Evangelical obsession with converting "entrepreneurial" Latinos and overthrowing Catholicism blocked this. Not a concern for Trump.
The problem is, international law forbids colonization of inhabited lands. If Huckabee is forced to explain his position, does he say that Israel (& America) have a special, Hobby Lobby-esque license from God to conquest that no one else gets to exploit, or does he say that international law is generally null and void and any country can do whatever it can get away with?
In fact, why doesn't the media ask all Zionists to make that exact same choice?
Some useful books for understanding the macro problem of imperial incompetence and decline:
The Rise of the Trading State by Richard Rosecrance implies that when a nation empowered by trade tries to control its trading partners, it embarks on a road to an empire that betrays its original strengths, and bankrupts it with multiplying commitments.
American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips comes right out and says America is entering imperial senility, characterized by religiosity, wacky revival schemes and a hollowed-out economy of speculative bubbles. In other words, insane acts of faith.
I probably ought to read Mancur Olson's book on why war victors perpetuate their bad habits and losers enact tough reforms that allow them to leap ahead in peacetime.
The system's need to justify war and infinite spending dominates its definition of war - every war is World War 2, every enemy is Hitler, with dirty bombs and germs added to make it all personal to the taxpayers. Meanwhile, outside our bubble, people analyze our global financial rackets and rickety alliances and carry out very cheap ways to disrupt them as a way to convince other people that they are fit to rule them. Our concepts of victory are now absurd.
The problem is, someone is responsible for the accumulation of overseas commitments that thus require the military to magically learn to control every situation in every country. The military had a responsibility to say "It can't be done", or "It can't be done well." Instead, these expansions were viewed as career opportunities, because thanks to the revolving door, they are. We are a long way from Gen. Smedley "War Is A Racket" Butler.
I've been telling everyone for decades that racism is the foundation of capitalist injustice, that it must be dealt with now. This morning we see headlines that Donald Trump has begun a bidding war among GOP candidates in calling for the repeal of the 14th Amendment. The liars will say it's just against the Mexicans, but in their extremist gatherings they will start talking about a final solution to the Black problem.
The far right has had a fringe movement attacking the 13th Amendment for years. Once those two amendments are gone, there will be nothing left standing from the Civil War. MLK needed the de jure existence of those amendments to win his struggle. Now we're looking at the law of the land regressing all the way back to Dred Scott. It means every accomplishment of progressives is written on sand, that they will not fight to make anything permanent, that there is no such thing as progress.
THAT'S why Blacks must scream at Democrats. Why can't Democrats get White people to MIND such an atrocity? The political system that lets cops gun down Blacks with impunity and lets millions of Whites literally say that Blacks collectively deserve it shows that we do not have progress in America. We simply alternate periods where things get better with periods where things get worse. Once there was a Black senator in Mississippi; a few years later his voters were disenfranchised, and it was all business as usual. THAT'S HAPPENING NOW! Obama will just become another forgotten Hiram Revels and all you White leftists will never elect a president again because this police terror will keep minorities voiceless.
If you can't see that another Jim Crow is being constructed that will mandate corporate rule under the guise of White minority rule, then the victims must do what others have done from Ireland to Vietnam.
All they need to know is how far you are willing to go to create equality. If you tell them to wait another 100 years for your progressive agenda to improve their great-great-great grandchildren's lives, you're just as bad as the White racist progressives who told the Civil Rights movement to be patient - and ended up having to deal with Malcolm X and the Panthers. And yes, by our standards those 1960s progressives are racists - how do you know how future generations in a mostly-nonwhite America will judge us?
You refuted none of my examples because you can't deal with the necessary ugliness and dirtiness of wars by the weak against the strong. The destruction of the colonial empires after WW2 was all about blackmail:
1. the US using its Marshall Plan aid to force Europeans to shut down their racist empires
2. the fear that Communists would exploit the sins of these empires to create a global race war
3. and of course the threat of the indigenous themselves to commit armed revolution against war-ruined governments.
Further examples of blackmail succeeding in a good cause: the fall of apartheid, the independence of Ireland thanks to a brutal assassination campaign, the US threat of a cutoff of Marshall Plan aid to force the UK and France to abandon their alliance with Israel in 1956, Gen. Grant's forcing the Confederates to abandon their plan to execute all captured white officers who commanded black troops by threatening tit-for-tat. And finally, the reality that FDR and the New Deal were enabled by a real fear among the oligarchy of a workers' revolution in 1932.
It used to happen all the time. It's beginning to look long overdue when I see all the crimes of inequality tearing down all the good that past revolutionaries and radicals have accomplished.
Where would Dr. King have been without the threat of Malcolm X? How far did Gandhi get before the British confronted the danger that Indians would side with the Japanese invaders? Where did any nonwhite radicals anywhere get with the White capitalist powers until they could threaten to go over to the Communists? And look at how bad things have gone since that ultimate blackmail threat has ceased to exist.
Though it is certainly better to have all this happen now than next year, the views I've seen expressed by "color-blind" leftists at, say, Daily Kos has made me angry. Describing BLM protestors as "shrieking", "lazy", "dependent on others", and generally threatening. Have I missed any of the major racist memes? I even saw the divide-and-conquer trick, calling Blacks racist on the grounds that police proportionately murder even more Native Americans.
My response is, the American Revolution was triggered by a tiny fraction of the violence that our police commit against African-Americans and other minorities. The anger of those persons in being treated as enemy aliens by a police force that clearly regards Whites as the only real Americans (and the only ones who pay enough in taxes to treat as their bosses) should be enormous.
The solution for healing this breach is in looking at why American capitalism needs ni**ers. But to do that, you have to move so far to the left of where Sanders is now as to truly alienate 60% of the American population.
During eight years of watching White radicals piss on Obama, while refusing to acknowledge the people who vote for him, I have concluded:
1. said radicals have failed to convince their fellow Whites to embrace their ideals, and can't accept that this makes them failures
2. they really, really hate the idea of sharing power with poor people who still have allegiance, rightly or wrongly, to ideas like patriotism, economic growth, upward mobility, and personal consumption
3. they refuse to pass the baton to the new, mostly-nonwhite proletariat who genuinely need class struggle defined on their own terms
4. Occupy and BLM are both uprisings against the system and against the dogmatic Marxist position of how we are supposed to replace it. We are at ground zero, trying to replace Das Kapital with something based on the 21st century multicultural world.
Where would radicals have ever gotten without rude behavior, impossible demands, impudent upstagings of the last generation of progressives... or even the implicit possibility of armed revolution?
Those same low-info Americans who are sick of foreign involvement in general will be the very first ones to freak out when they're bombarded by propaganda about a specific threat from a specific foreign state that fits the right stereotypes. Which is why those pre-agreement poll numbers from Prof. Cole look very different than the ever-declining support for the agreement now that the warmongerers have a target to aim at.
The problem is that the Republicans have cleverly encouraged the conversion of bipartisan military largesse into a form of welfare for Republican constituencies based on their bullying dogma that they are better Americans than everyone else. Now that this belief is part of the Red State "culture" it will be violently defended no matter if we overthrow the elite lobbyists who helped create it. Gun ownership and militarism are so tied together that the only alternative is a gun culture so extreme it even rejects the central government in favor of a neo-Confederate militia fantasy.
Well, I think that people believe that the defeat of fascism in 1945 promoted democracy, but there were unusual circumstances and it was a side effect of many countries fighting for their survival against a particular anti-democratic ideology that failed to deliver on its promises to conquer the world.
At least Dr. Shamoo is willing to argue that ISIS is an unacceptable creature, like the Khmer Rouge (whom the world was happy to let Communist Vietnam fight). If you're serious about alternatives to that, then let's consider all the things that could happen if ISIS just keeps growing as a sort of collective insanity of the victims of the West. I mean, it's unlikely, but it's also unlikely that it's lasted this long. We don't want to imagine it happening, because we know the racists and Zionists will seize on it as proof that Moslems are animals and have no rights that White Christians are obliged to respect. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.
I mean, relative to the conditions in which they find themselves, Moslems turning to ISIS so they can die fighting instead of just starving makes more sense than White middle-class Americans turning to a bullying maniac billionaire to get revenge on everyone they absurdly blame for their not being millionaires. The world has a dangerous problem in both cases.
You talk as though the Taliban was not the creation and puppet of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. Pashtun independence via the Taliban is as much a lie as Kashmir independence via Pakistani Army front terror groups. Pakistan will attack anyone who advocates genuine independence for either region. It demands them as part of a sphere of influence at the expense of its neighbors. The Pakistani Army has always been the great devil in the region down to its atomic bomb program and Americans have been fools for helping it and refusing it to see as the force it was really fighting in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance consisted of ethnicities who refused to live under Taliban rule and unless you are advocating their right to partition the country then you're a hypocrite.
And we're just as much fools now for refusing to understand that it's really Saudi Arabia that we're fighting in Iraq and Syria. Once we pull out of both wars, other countries will rush in to replace us; Russia, much of the rest of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Iran and maybe India. Maybe that is for the best, but it could also be catastrophic.
Americans have never accepted the legitimacy of spheres of influence. They went straight from total isolationism to superpower, leaping over the messy zone in-between where they would have had to accept dividing up the globe with other Great Powers, because that would mean we were not Exceptional and that there is not an indivisible moral standard imposed by God and enforced by His favorite country. So fat chance that they will ever accept Iran's normal condition as a regional hegemon.
The Saudis have a lot more money than Iran, but it's stuck in the USA and US debt. The Israelis have the most advanced Orwell-ware and kill-ware on Earth, which is all that anyone seems to value. But Iran has a future and those other regimes do not, because Iran is sitting right where China is trying to restore the historical center of the world economy. We've lived for 500 years in an abnormal economic world where big capitalists and their expensive ships and obedient navies have overshadowed the land-based trade of the Asian interior.
The subtext is that some evil Other is responsible for all our problems, and it must be punished, but us helpless white Christians know the Other are an army of drug-crazed rapists who will damage our economy if we try to give them the punishment they deserve, so we must exercise our birthright as the Master Race to trick them into surrendering all their rights. Once you've bought into that, the implication is that the rich are the leaders of your tribe and they must be strengthened by allowing them to commit economic crimes, and the victims of the rich are the Other, and you don't want your fellow tribesmen thinking that you're soft on Otherism.
Good. Tell your neighbors and relatives. It's time for America to be stripped of its status and influence. American brand names should gather dust on your store shelves. Entire types of product and retail enslavement like Walmart should be driven out of the civilized world. Just as the 1% must not be able to brainwash Americans with infinite commercials into buying their pet politicians, but Wall Street corporations must not be able to brainwash the rest of humanity into buying American cultural imperialism. It's the only way for my fellow Americans to learn reality.
The key problem is that the public is willing to lie to itself that destroying the Iran deal will not lead to war, but to sanctions that will cause Iran to come crawling to us without any shots getting fired. If you ask often enough what we will do if that doesn't work, then maybe the hawks will screw up the script and say the fatal words, "regime change". See, the public doesn't recall all the lies from 2002, but it does recall the words "regime change". It senses that this is the point where it might get dragged into making real sacrifices.
At the very least, we need to demand Chuck Schumer's position on regime change, because Democrats definitely are afraid of those words, and he doesn't want to mention them. The more they're mentioned, the more Democrats who won't override Obama's veto.
The idea that Japan was about to surrender is what needs to be put to rest. There was no peace faction in the Army, and the Army controlled everything. Army hardliners were still trying to keep the war going after the atomic bombs. Fanatic officers even tried to seize Hirohito's surrender announcement, showing that even the surrender was a fragile thing.
But the main hypocrisy in all this is that the leftist alternative to either nukes or invasion is a blockade. This from the very leftists who now denounce the economic sanctions that the US slaps on everybody as barbaric. If our sanctions killed 400,000 Iraqis without Saddam Hussein surrendering, then how many Japanese would have died during the winter of 1945-46?
Meanwhile, North Korea stands as mute testimony as to how determined a country can be with the world against it. 62 years and counting. Mass starvation (supposedly), endless terrorism, a nuclear weapons program. No signs that they're about to surrender. No one ever brings that up in these Hiroshima arguments.
I'm getting scared. I see no evidence that the supporters of peace have any willingness to hurt the supporters of war, which is what we're down to. Instead, the supporters of peace attack other supporters of peace for not being absolute pacifists in the past, as if that was the position of the American people. The poll numbers show that the American people have learned nothing, and fear everything but their own military's violent incompetence.
The supporters of war will march, and pour money into campaign coffers, and create an illusion of consensus that will attract low-information voters, while the supporters of peace will sit at home and bemoan the way things are.
Schumer should be treated by the peace movement exactly as though he were George W. Bush himself. His office should be barricaded by human chains. He should have no peace anywhere he goes, since he wants no peace for anyone else. But you know that won't happen. He won't even admit that war will result from his actions, and no one will take him to task.
From what I've heard about the GOP debate, the candidates are still promoting the delusion that Iran will cave in and there won't be a war. They know the public can't recall all the way back to the years before 2003 when this same scam was being sold.
Even the GOP is afraid of admitting to the public that America can't win World War 3. The question is, can the Zionists, Saudis and GOP sabotage peace in such a way that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization further delays Iran's membership, which will make official that we are threatening war with all the countries in Central Asia plus Russia and China.
I would add FDR's gigantic betrayal of Upton Sinclair when he ran as a radical Democrat for the CA governorship in '34, in order to save the party.
I think the big change since FDR's time is the collapse of a Left organized outside of electoral politics. In his time, the unions were the big progressive power, which meant progressivism had to include economic equality. The fact that unions existed independently of the Democratic Party and spread across the spectrum all the way to Communism meant that FDR could play good cop and scare the capitalists into compromise with him, instead of the other way around as we see with Obama.
An example of this is that when Obama or any other Democrat finally does something that the activist left agrees with, they do nothing to reward him, so he's exposed to the full fury of a highly organized, ideological and dogmatic right-wing army. Our side only knows how to punish, not reward. Will you see anyone, I mean anyone, marching to support Obama's peace treaty with Iran? Nope, we'll wait to march until the bad guys get back in and declare war and the bombers are waiting on the runways. The unions were always marching for FDR when he was moving in their direction.
The Democratic Party stands for not being Republican. I'm not kidding. If one party moves towards a particular position, as long as it's not an oligarchy priority, the other party will move towards the opposite position because it's what happens when you have two a market duopoly. The Republican Party came to be defined by the winners of the Civil War, and those who felt victimized by those ascendant elites became Democrats, from Southern racists to Northern immigrants, proletarians, and intellectuals. It's always been a catchall, because that's how you put together big numbers against the currently-defined "Establishment". But it's impossible to discipline or direct or unify, and as we've seen it has no natural immunity to bribery by the oligarchs.
Well, it's not like they're going to admit that our ally and financier, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is actually the world's leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.
There will be no money for anything good until the military budget is cut. Which is exactly why right-wing voters ultimately all fall into line with the war machine. They want trillions to be spent on war so that not one penny will be available to redistribute to "inferior" Americans.
If Sanders is willing to talk specifics about what missions the military must jettison, then we can start talking about major cuts. This, however, is where right-wingers rally in collective outrage, while everyone else tears each other down arguing about what should be cut first.
Reconsider loyalties in terms of capitalism and not ethnic and religious loyalty, and it makes more sense. Saudi Arabia committed itself to turning its oil into US $, which trapped it in US/Wall Street investments. Israel has moved further and further to the right. Both countries have acted to crush leftism in the Middle East. The former Arab socialist states have all sold out or been overthrown, and their new leaders want Saudi and US/Israeli money.
And the people who are left in the lurch? Arabs without money. The proletariat of the Middle East. They have the misfortune that like in Orwell's 1984, their oppressors pretend to be sovereign states engaged in a permanent war with each other as an excuse for their tyranny.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved
Well, what is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's position on Syria? Of course China by default opposes anyone trying to overthrow their government, but will it go so far as to subsidize a Russian occupation there? Does China's twin energy romances with Russia and Iran force it to keep them in the fight?
I'm talking about the technology, not Texas. Other countries will reap the benefits. I'm in Texas and I know the culture here is insane. I wouldn't be surprised if developers are allowed to claim their development is NEVER finished so that they can block solar panels indefinitely, a sort of solar Jim Crow to go with the actual Jim Crow being restored down here.
As far as I'm concerned, America, the South, and Texas should have paid a crippling price for their anti-intellectual, anti-secular and anti-science culture years ago, but somehow, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this behemoth is too big to fail until it fails catastrophically. The international system is too rigged in favor of incumbents.
I also think that things don't change because the incumbent empires reform first, but because they are overthrown by rising empires exploiting new technologies. Kevin Phillips' book "American Theocracy" talks about how Holland's social order built on wind power got eclipsed by Britain's discovery of coal power, and Britain in turn by American oil. Each of these countries had used its wealth to create the intellectual capital to stay ahead of their rivals, but their financial & cultural elites became entrenched in their previously successful energy paradigm and led their lands to failure. But this took a long time to become apparent.
It is an irony that Texas was the Ground Zero of the oil revolution, and now it has the resources to lead the world in wind, geothermal and solar but won't do so because Big Oil enshrined an "American way of life" here that impedes development in a way that it doesn't in China, India, or Latin America.
The newest solar electricity delivery contracts are coming in as low as 6 cents/kwh in places like Nevada and Austin, Texas. It's a race to zero.
That sentence was meant to be snark, right? Lebanon got chopped to pieces by proxy militias 40 years ago and the Lebanese still don't fully have their country back. And Syria and Lebanon are probably not "nations" by anthropological standards. The divisions in these societies may have always been too vicious to form a real nation.
Oh no. Not again.
We didn't prepare ahead for the power vacuum that would exist once American hegemony fell apart. Now we aren't preparing for the consequences when the rising regional powers start shooting at each other in that vacuum. Which in this case means Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel. One overt nuclear power, one nuclear power that's lying about it, and one country with enough money to buy plenty of nukes.
This is a serious matter, August 1914-level dangerous. No one is talking about our worst-case contingencies. If you think we should do nothing, then for God's sake at least start marching now to that effect, because our public needs to be informed that it can no longer start whining for Washington to "do something" when the media images get too scary, as they will.
Well, a lot of Americans died from 1775 to 1781 in a dispute over taxation without representation.
The big question here is, what does Trump prescribe based on his statement? Is he saying:
a. no more overseas interventions
or
b. his interventions will be HUUUUUGE and be so successful that your head will spin?
That's kind of a huuuuuge difference. And it's the first time that a Republican candidate with serious numbers (meaning not surnamed Paul) has dared to question the idea of American hegemony since the Cold War began. Even an ignorant lout, it seems, can see that we don't know what we're doing overseas. But can an ignorant lout author a process for extricating ourselves from our commitments in over 130 countries and define a National Interest in non-superpower terms?
This could be the most important development of the 2016 campaign if Trump is rebuked by the GOP establishment and, as usual, keeps fighting back and provoking the rank & file into discussing what it all means.
The issue is not NATO influencing the outcome, but the anti-war culture's conspiracy theories that there was no genuine uprising at all or that it did not represent any significant number of Libyans. Bombers do not equal popular legitimacy.
These days in the Middle East a centrist is an armed salafist with a blank check from Saudi Arabia, a right-winger is ISIS until something more extreme comes along to soak up the despair, and a leftist is the entire rest of the universe. Too bad that majority rule =/= the rule of the guy with the biggest gun.
"Holy war" and "international law" are inherently incompatible. Consider where the supreme authority comes from for each.
Outside of America, state churches were the historical norm, in fact to the very beginning of civilization. The Russian Orthodox Church was the state church of the Czarist regime. Stalin rehabilitated it during WW2 into a submissive puppet. The fall of the Soviet Union began a process of restoring the Orthodox Church as the favored religion of the nationalistic government, which in turn is increasingly a dictatorship.
To put this in context, when the Archbishop of Canterbury, during World War 1, called for the extermination of the Turkish people in retaliation for their genocide of Armenians, do you think the British government was free of responsibility?
What secular reason could Putin possibly have for his massive gay-bashing crusade? Sounds like he's doing a quid pro quo for the Orthodox Church on that one.
The question is, what is the Right's end game? It clearly goes beyond abortion. Now it openly attacks even access to contraception.
Of course, none of this affects the rich, meaning that poor people, mostly non-white in the future, will multiply while the nation's wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. We know that the Right already is gerrymandering and voter-IDing non-whites so that they can never win elections at the state and national level. That leaves the struggling working-class whites as the only electorate allowed in the future.
Now when all governmental health care for the lower class is exterminated, what remains? A few will still have insurance from their jobs, but Hobby Lobby proved that in certain firms right-wing bosses can dictate what their employees are allowed to have on ideological grounds.
Everything is being narrowed down to religion. Catholic dioceses are abandoning their social commitment to educating the inner-city poor to chase white flight in the suburbs. But in Protestant-world, blacks and whites don't even go to the same churches and the financial resources are all with the latter.
We are being forced back into the Middle Ages, except this time instead of a blatant monopolistic Catholic church, many denominations will compete to whore themselves to rich donors, promising to keep the poor under control the most cost-effective way possible. That includes schools and hospitals.
My conclusion is that in the planned future, the poor will be forced to crawl to the most racist, pro-greed churches to beg for health care and pass all kinds of ideological tests and indignities to qualify. They will be terrified into silence on political issues, down to their very right to vote.
Feudalism was awful, but it lasted almost 1500 years. Someone's making long-term plans to bring it back.
If you bothered to read my comment below you would see that I am not disagreeing with you. I am saying that the Supreme Court is in on the scam with the GOP.
Like many of the classic scams used by Jim Crow, this scam also hurts poor whites. Poll taxes hurt the poor of every color, while grandfather clauses entirely targeted blacks. Literacy tests were rigged by the white officials administering them, so they could pass whomever they wanted to vote.
The complexity of this network of discriminatory schemes may have let the rest of America shrug and say "it's too complicated to prove intent" and look away for 90 years. That certainly is what is happening now. We don't want to admit that yet again the "most patriotic" Americans are the most racist and anti-democracy, because what does that say about our true identity as Americans?
The horrifying thing about Jim Crow is that poor whites never took to the streets against those laws that also disenfranchised them. They ultimately valued being non-voting members of the Master Race more than having a vote that they shared with blacks. I see no signs that this attitude has changed. They will never march alongside blacks to overturn this unfair conspiracy.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court agrees.
To the Assad-lovers on this thread. If you want to say that we must now exterminate the Syrian opposition because it is the only practical way to stop ISIS, we can have a rational discussion about that. If you want to say that no one in Syria EVER had a right to rebel against one of your few remaining "Socialist" tyrants because all anti-American regimes are saintly and just and all who are harmed by them are an evil monsters who deserve to be genocided, you are full of crap. I don't even understand what your end game is, except for one where the whole world operates under Beijing rules: we must all peacefully submit to whatever dictatorship guarantees the most stability. Which, years ago, was exactly the argument used by Washington when most revolutions were by leftists. The right of people to revolution is universal and necessary, no matter how many people revolt for bad causes, or take foreign support to do so. What we need are legal criteria on what justifies taking up arms against a government, given that almost all governments now claim to be elected.
Because one day you might need to join, or oppose, a revolution, and the criteria you apply to defend Gadafi or Assad may not be the sort of country you want your children to spend their lives in.
Given the crimes that Assad committed, can you really say that there is a "Syrian" people? I mean, if I support mass murder against rival ethnic groups because they refuse to live under a biased regime, then how can I really be committed to sharing equal citizenship with them after they have been subdued? The same goes for my enemies' commitment to sharing power with my people. I don't think the people who initially rebelled against Assad are the monsters you want them to be. But they'll still have to be protected by any real settlement, just as the Alawites and Christians will have to.
Yeah, because the Saudis and Israelis won't try to retaliate. You better start reading "The Guns of August" and understand how incredibly dangerous this situation is.
As usual, the only good thing I can say about Trump's remarks are that they will confuse and divide Republicans. The Israel Lobby candidates like Cruz can't support Russia bailing out Assad & Hezbollah. Bush, obviously, is a toady whose family is joined to Saudi Arabia at the creepy investment fund.
At some point Trump was bound to run afoul of Israel and Saudi Arabia, so it will be interesting how they flex their muscle in our bought-out political system to attack him.
But Americans are not safe from each other, and what we say about foreigners is a projection of what we really want to do to each other.
Okay, but remember your words about internal affairs when America's second civil war begins in your lifetime. We have enough weapons, mostly under the control of right-wing generals and private citizens, to dwarf all these foreign wars put together. Much worse weapons are waiting to be built by a vast sea of 3D printers and CNC machines. The rationalizations for ethnic cleansing are already coming from the lips of presidential candidates. The world will have to watch helplessly.
I wish there would be a revolution against a right-winger somewhere so we could see if "socialist" anti-imperialists would apply the same standard to those rebels. Otherwise they're just as hypocritical as Washington and Moscow.
What a piece of Uncle Tom propaganda.
Paul - 2%
Bush - 2%
That's the "majority" that these Republican Moslems claim to be a part of. While the base swings each week to the candidate who has most recently made the most offensive, hateful, bigoted statement.
Petit bourgeoisie immigrants might think that their worship of greed and economic inequality makes them good Americans, but it was capitalists who fabricated the very notion of a White race, a Black race, and the supremacy of the former as a means of co-opting rebellious indentured servants on the corporation-financed plantations of colonial Virginia. The logic of this mechanism still holds today. The Whites were indoctrinated to see themselves as enforcers and conquerers, loyal to their war chief/bosses and hostile to all forms of equality.
Thus racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia serve the rational goal of the rich in erecting caste walls to protect their wealth with least effort and convert it into privileges to pass on to their parasite offspring. Including command of a redneck henchman army that needs to occasionally feed on the bodies of the Other.
All forms of inequality are connected. All forms of "merit" are rigged cultural constructs. The Republican Party works to restore the runaway inequality of the past by idolizing these constructs as sacred tribal traditions. The completion of this process of neo-feudalism requires the elimination of human rights for all Moslems rich and poor.
Israel has exploited America's ignorance and narrow interest politics to get away with Great Power swagger without Great Power responsibility. Now it's gotten in the way of a serious Great Power protecting its own interests. Same for Saudi Arabia.
Remember the movie "The Long Good Friday" where Bob Hoskins, a bullheaded, small-time London gangster, finds his gang under attack by a force too powerful to be just a criminal gang, and he discovers the hard way that he's blundered into a blood feud with the Irish Republican Army? Netanyahu = Hoskins.
No one has adequately explained that, but apparently because Medicare is an insurance fund it's viewed as Not The Government. The implications are that Medicare and Social Security are not redistributive, and that redistribution is evil democracy overrun with ni**er parasites.
These are not true, but they may provide insight on the tribalist, barbarian mentality of the White Right. Social Security, Medicare, the war machine, and veterans' benefits are seen as not being part of government, but somehow older and more legitimate. I think they view themselves (but not the rest of Americans) as a pure blooded tribe that conquered this land and have no need for modern government because they're one big patriarchal family under their holy men. And benefits for elders and warriors are simply tribal or family obligations. This is also false, because real tribes are based on community property and redistribution, not private oligarchs.
Bet Netanyahu didn't see Russia coming into his Clean Break bantustan zone. 400 nukes protected by accusing anyone who point them out of being anti-Semitic aren't worth a damn now.
If Netanyahu and his US neocon agents hadn't spent a generation turning Iran into the new Nazis (hilarious considering Saudi tyranny and terrorism), Putin would never have had an opening. The US and Israel drove Iran and Russia into each other's arms in a reversal of historical norms.
This is definitely not the way things worked in the old Soviet Union.
The US finally achieved its insane goal of making Saudi Arabia and Israel the co-suzerains of the Middle East, only to find that they have amassed so much power along the way that they now give orders to Washington instead of vice versa.
But how long will this alliance, equal in its cynicism to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, survive? Consider that Richard Clarke accused the Saudis of attempting to build a copy of a Chinese IRBM base in 1986, presumably with nuclear missiles in transit stopped by Reagan's intervention. Consider that the Saud family's thin claim to legitimate rule is based on their ancient title as the protectors of Mecca and Medina. The King of Jordan has that role for Jerusalem, Holy City #3. Consider that while both the Sauds and Israelis have been accused of aiding ISIS, there's no sign where ISIS will stop its ambitions, and Israel has destabilized the countries that would have shielded it from ISIS' unorthodox methods.
I think one of these allies is planning to betray the other. Maybe both. The Saudis want nukes. The Israelis want to provoke whatever war will allow them to ethnically cleanse the Occupied Territories.
I fear Israel WANTS the Palestinians so desperate that they will turn to ISIS, which is hated by the entire world. That becomes the justification for wiping them out. But doing that by destroying al-Aqsa will doom the Jordanian monarchy and who is left to take over there but ISIS? The Saudis seem to be all for ISIS conquering Lebanon and Syria. Even an incompetent, suicidal ISIS can win in those countries once they're in ruins. And Israel can't deport the Palestinians anywhere else.
So either Israeli troops must occupy those ruins to make sure the deportees don't acquire the means for revenge, or something much worse: Israel is looking to engineer an ISIS caliphate full of Palestinians for the precise and sole purpose of annihilating it with nuclear weapons.
That would be a really bad time to find out that the Saudis actually have their own secret nuclear arsenal.
It's not the sole foundation of his popularity, but it's the part that vets his attacks on the Republican priesthood. All those criticisms are expressed all the time by Democrats, but this faction of Americans already accepts as gospel that all Democrats are in a war to destroy the glorious supremacy of white Christian Americans, thus if they say it, it's a lie. But if Trump says it, suddenly the listener starts to put the pieces together about why the Republicans he supported in the past never delivered the promised Reaganoid nirvana. Only Nixon could be trusted to negotiate with Commies, only Trump can be trusted to expose Wall Street. Democrats are assumed to be traitors in each case.
Abraham Lincoln, 1855:
“As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
To all the people on this site who kept claiming there was no difference between the Republicans and Democrats:
1. I told you the GOP was much worse than what you'd seen
2. You're cowards who believed whatever would justify you washing your hands of democracy and not having to risk your lives against what the Republicans will become
3. I also said that many of you hate the USA so much that you wanted it to fall apart so rule could be re-localized, and I warned that it would be armed far-right racist extremists who would win in every corner of the land.
But that will not be the end of the war. They will be defeated after many years, but the victors will recall that you made the war possible by prioritizing peace over equality.
First Trump came for the Mexicans.
Then he came for the Moslems.
You know the rest of the song.
It's not even that they think Obama is too sympathetic to Moslems. It's that they will make themselves believe whatever they have to in order to cross the Rubicon of risk in physically destroying their enemies. So they start from the premise that their enemies are trying to destroy them and then make up whatever conspiracies they need to connect those enemies together into a threat large enough to justify violent "self-defense". Blacks and Moslems MUST be tied together into one enemy army, along with gays and Mexicans. Obama MUST be the leader of that army, because that will justify the action of taking over the government, cynically rewriting laws so that whites can never be outvoted by blacks, de facto mandating a one-party state, and terminating the citizenship of broad swathes of the population.
All of that, outlandish as it seems, is the only political alternative to sharing power with growing non-white populations. Nothing else works. So they must believe ridiculous things.
I must say, I have waited for decades for America, and its most bigoted backwaters, to pay a real economic price for its war on intellect. Yet it doesn't happen. The South benefitted from the first wave of capitalist union-busters shipping jobs to a region that ironically was finally getting modern infrastructure in part due to LBJ's bargain to get it to accept Civil Rights. Of course the jobs kept moving all the way to the Global South, but the myth that Reagan created Southern prosperity and that moving further Rightward will create more can only be disproven by catastrophe.
My solution hearkens to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, where academics prepare a redoubt to ride out the collapse of a galactic civilization, disguised as a university. Our cities must be made more self-reliant, able to withstand the worst that Republican state governments can do to them. As the Right eliminates all government in rural & suburban America, they will fall into barbarism. The cities must defend themselves while remaining connected to a technological world that is moving on without America. And they must prepare to employ an influx of refugees from Republican political oppression and economic collapse. I believe that the tools to do this exist: solar/wind energy, 3D printing/CNC technology, internet-based trade, and most importantly Self-Directed Education (see Koskata). Our children will have to carry the burden of learning how to keep a secular, technological society going while their rural counterparts are taught about demons and curses.
Ben Franklin would say that the society that sacrifices ingenuity to security will soon have neither.
After years of NATO attempts to encircle Russia and US attempts to penetrate Central Asia, turnabout is fair play. Presenting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, jockeying for power in full view of white people with money.
So is the future of Western democracy a rising tide of LePens and Trumps on the Right, and an opposing tide of Sanders and Corbyns on the Left? It seems we are headed toward a class showdown.
Also, they know whites are losing their majority in the population. So screw democracy.
I think they expect the military to lead them and their personal guns in a glorious crackdown on everybody they hate.
It is little known that the early Reagan administration floated a trial balloon to create a national militia, supposedly in case the National Guard had to be called away for a war (presumably the Big One against the Soviets). They even set up tables at gun shows and took names of interested citizens.
The idea went nowhere, but the tables at the gun shows kept going, morphing into the militia movement of the '90s and its descendants.
We can also recall that the Brownshirts reached a strength of 4 million Germans at the time of Hitler's victory; in effect the militia was the Nazi Party and its real grass-roots power. Maybe our gun nuts will be willing to support anything that restricts ownership of combat-useful weapons to those who look like themselves. Right-wing talk about "a militia of all the people" refers to a time when the colonies were essentially a white warrior tribe engaged in a war of aggression and enslavement against people of color.
I think for these persons, using Christian "conscience" to Jim Crow the Constitution again, or secession, or supporting the rise of a fuhrer Trump, or supporting a military coup with their own private guns are all simply paths to a monopoly on power. The question is, can their factions be set against each other to prevent them from unifying and throwing their guns behind one would-be tyrant?
I am certain that the rich do not want secession to become more than a Southern bluff to extort Jim Crow-type local exceptions to the Constitution. Secession means the end of our military empire and God knows how much of our overseas business depends on its existence. Their optimal solution is probably "one country, two systems" as we had after Reconstruction collapsed - a true return to the Gilded Age for business. Trump and a military coup probably have much the same appeal for secular greedbags, holding the country together at the seeming sacrifice of unpopular Wall Street.
Let's not forget the DuPont coup plot of 1934.
It wouldn't be invisible anymore. Which means it wouldn't hold back against the people that those in the poll supporting the idea want rounded up and put in concentration camps. They want a coup for their convenience, not the military.
Find out about the Oathkeepers cult in the military. Also Mikey Weinstein's work against Christian penetration of the military's officer corps.
"It is heresy to say so in hyper-capitalist Trumpland, but everybody might have been better off if Reagan had just left the Communists in Afghanistan alone."
It takes a long time to understand the consequences of actions. I despised Ron Dellums for saying that the Soviets were justified in invading Afghanistan. Actually, I still despise that statement. But if we move away from "justified" to "punishable", I can see that for the Soviets it was a war of imperial maintenance, just like America's wars. Actually, I think the US should also have been punished by the entire world for what it did in Vietnam. But at least under the traditions of Great Power politics, an empire has a special right to interfere with its weaker neighbors, under the rubric of "buffer states". Afghanistan was definitely a buffer state for the USSR. Technically, the US only has two buffer states: Canada and Mexico.
Clearly, the US is locked into a pattern of defeating an old enemy by creating a new one. We naturally sided with Stalin against Hitler because Hitler knew no bounds and had a regime that conquered for a living, converting resources and populations into weapons for the next invasion. But abandoning our anti-Communist paranoia to do this created a cognitive dissonance about our postwar relationship with the USSR.
We repeated this whole sorry pattern with our use of Islamist militants to bankrupt the USSR. We allied with Saudis and Pakistanis whose values and vision for the world should have been repugnant to us. We assumed that in the postwar world everything would return to some mythical "normal" free of violent coercion.
However, the America of 1942 was coming off a history of having no long-term alliances, and in that emergency situation we couldn't be picky. The USSR was the only country that could wear down a Wehrmacht possessing a 15-to-1 kill ratio. What is alarming is the alacrity with which the US bypassed its longtime democratic allies in 1981 to work with two of the worst regimes on Earth, and take their word for it that the jihadis we were backing were the "good" ones. I would argue that in both eras, the US and its voters wanted the benefits of world power while making someone else do the dying - which forced us to be very lax about who that someone else was. But the conditions of 1981 did not justify any of that. Fascism appeared to be winning in 1942. The USSR was not winning in the eyes of any objective analyst in 1981. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who talked Carter into going into Afghanistan first, had already correctly predicted in his 1971 book that computer technology would favor Western economies and finish off the Soviet Bloc. So he knew this intervention was not necessary to save the Free World.
"Direct negotiations" my ass. The right to a state is not something that Israel can grant. It is a human right, despite the endless efforts of Israel to convince Americans that Palestinians are non-human. Since Palestinians are not Israeli citizens, and are not seceding from a state, they automatically have the right to form a state.
But if we had real democracy in the first place, the GOP couldn't have gerrymandered districts, brainwashed the public using Citizens United money, or built up an empire of lying "experts", all of which helped create the fantasy world where half our citizens live in which the US can solve any problem with the threat of infinite military force.
Israel and Saudi Arabia seem so creepily confident that ISIS is not a threat to them that I have to suspect one of them has some sort of control over its leadership. Saudi Arabia only bombs ISIS because we pressured it. Israel helped build up Hamas when it could no longer make the PLO out to be a supervillain, and it helped Khomeini when he seemed useful in hurting the Arab world. Are these countries creating their worst enemies, or secret puppets?
"Only the US" is a statement we're going to have to learn to stop saying. The world got by before the US, and it was just as ugly and violent as it was under the US hegemony. Russia and China will impose order on the places where it is profitable for them to pay decent wages to locals. Other Great Powers and regional powers will do the same. The unprofitable parts of the world will continue to live in anarchy and misery. Only a superpower is arrogant enough to attempt to force compliance from all the humans on Earth, even where it has no interest in their economic utility.
Not a threat to the world, but to the people who get in its way. There are many small ethnicities in the Middle East with no armed force on their side. "The same way as Nazi Germany was to the Jews and the Roma" is a reasonable statement.
That's an ironically racist statement. The first chemical weapons were merely canisters of poison vapors released on the Western Front in 1915 in the hope that the wind would blow them the right direction. Hardly beyond the capability of a non-Western person. Hardly requiring the backing of a government. Hell, in the name of economic prosperity, enterprises all over the world poison their own citizens all the time.
I think for Libyans the lowest level of hell was when Gaddafi was systematically destroying rebel cities with artillery and bombs while he pretended to be having ceasefires and negotiations. As in, he was going to kill everyone who opposed him. Note that while Assad's equally murderous regime is still stubbornly defended by ethnic groups that recognize the threat to their existence by any alternative regime, NO ONE in Libya is still fighting to restore the Gaddafi dynasty or his sold-out brand of fake Islamic socialism.
Instead of playing this fantasy where Gaddafi was challenged entirely by foreigners and not by a large rebellion among his own disgruntled citizens, why not just admit that you think that a socialist dictator has the right to stay in power by any means necessary - but you will not grant the same privilege to a right-wing dictator like Mubarak?
If it's not the rights of gay citizens, it's something else. The question we must ask is, how can we share a country with an army of white Christian capitalist fanatics who will keep making our lives miserable until we surrender all power to them? How long can we live in a state of siege never knowing when their next crusade is going to hit us?
When do we start finding ways to genuinely hurt them for all the crap they do to punish us for hurting their bloated pride as "real" Americans? Has the time come to disinvest in Red State America along with its 51st State, Israel?
The message is, only fanatical Christians have real consciences. Gays don't. Moslems don't. Atheists don't.
It's amazing to me how much the opening paragraphs of this article remind me of news stories trying to explain where Donald Trump gets his support from. Alienation from our fellow humans seems to be the global excuse for pathological behavior. Hell is other people, heaven is bullying them into submission by whatever ideology is at hand, even if I know none of its details.
Jeez, Trump, that's not a plan, that's the history of the 1980s. It's all already been done. The plants are already in the South. The wages have already been slashed, the benefits already destroyed. GM and Chrysler went broke anyway.
What I've read is that this agreement clears the way for Iran joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In other words, the anti-NATO. Consider what that means if the US decides to doublecross the deal and invade.
I guess the important news is that Saudi Arabia is not joining Israel and the GOP in demanding regime change. That's what opposing the agreement is really about. Maybe the Saudis should explain that to the Democratic senators who claim that Iranian nukes are a threat to the region.
Wait'll we get to the pop quiz on organized crime building his casinos.
That is why so many Americans find him relatable.
The US model seems to be to anoint regional hegemons to control their neighbors, but inevitably only hateful and hated regimes will take the job. Israel and Saudi Arabia have earned a lot of Arab hatred, but we see that as a good thing because them Arabs must be evil because they refuse to be good money-worshippers like us. The Sauds and the Likud look "white" to Washington and Wall Street in the same way Diem and the Shah did.
The guilt of Saudi Arabia lies at a deeper level, and it is shared with the US and Pakistan. Their covert agencies labored together to create the jihadi universe in Afghanistan, to make it too chaotic and competitive for the Soviet blunderers to keep up with. Then the US simply walked away, leaving the Pakistani Army and the network of Arab bankrollers assembled by the Saudis, including Osama bin Laden, to run wild.
So even if the Saud family itself doesn't fund ISIS, it is funded by Saudi/Gulf feudal elites enriched by the Saudi model of oil feudalism and deranged by Wahhabism, who slid from funding the Afghan mujahedeen to al Qaeda to ISIS in search of the biggest bang for their bucks.
The Sauds are to blame in the same way that Ronald Reagan created the climate for men like the Koch Brothers to turn our own country into a medieval oligarchy.
Our countries have been in a cynical relationship since 1945, with inherently contradictory agendas, and both must in a sense compensate for propping each other up, a great sin in the eyes of certain of their constituencies, by doing something hurtful (but not really damaging) to the other. Saudi must spread Islamist extremism, and the US must push the narrative that Moslems are somehow all terrorists (without explicating the Saudi role in that). I think each side understands that about the other, but they can't explain it to their publics.
But this ritual backstabbing maybe has run out of room to avoid damage in an increasingly crowded, zero-sum Middle East. People are fed up, they want real change, and the US and Saudi are all for the tyranny of a freakish and unwholesome status quo.
This could be Trump's big opening with Southerners who I expected to be resistant to him on tribal/religious grounds. No more of this cowardly trickery with grandfather clauses and poll taxes and "separate but equal". Now, a chance to rewrite the definition of citizenship to mandate white minority rule and a one-party state in the future.
"If we are to throw our doors open to any, we must then throw them open to all."
But we have thrown doors open to "any", so you're saying we have no choice between totally open and totally closed?
All Americans are raised with the myth that racism was a misunderstanding, an accident, and had nothing to do with the Founding Fathers and the founding principles of our society (limited govt, states' rights, property rights). Therefore, there's no danger that restoring those principles will be used to bring back the horrors of our past.
Yet the Right keeps trying to undermine the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. They seem to have a plan that requires this. I wonder what it is.
Let's not forget the Indonesian genocide, which the US tacitly supported. That was done with knives too, and the Army behind it is still the Army of Indonesia.
I'd say he accomplished his goal of making Trump appear to regard Latinos as subhumans and servants. Now folks like you have to dig through Trump's past actions and statements to conclusively prove otherwise. Good luck.
Now that the earthquakes are spreading through the fracking boomtowns, I expect the new energy mirage will collapse much more quickly. Yet we will still learn nothing, except that we must sacrifice each other to survive one more day.
Israeli citizenship for Palestinians guarantees nothing. Blacks were citizens under Apartheid and Jim Crow. Hell, Black citizens are gunned down with impunity in the United States today. The famous genocides of the 20th century were primarily of fellow citizens with the exception of the Third Reich.
I wondered in the past why Republicans didn't make a more sustained effort to attract Blacks who hate illegal aliens. Maybe the Evangelical obsession with converting "entrepreneurial" Latinos and overthrowing Catholicism blocked this. Not a concern for Trump.
The problem is, international law forbids colonization of inhabited lands. If Huckabee is forced to explain his position, does he say that Israel (& America) have a special, Hobby Lobby-esque license from God to conquest that no one else gets to exploit, or does he say that international law is generally null and void and any country can do whatever it can get away with?
In fact, why doesn't the media ask all Zionists to make that exact same choice?
Some useful books for understanding the macro problem of imperial incompetence and decline:
The Rise of the Trading State by Richard Rosecrance implies that when a nation empowered by trade tries to control its trading partners, it embarks on a road to an empire that betrays its original strengths, and bankrupts it with multiplying commitments.
American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips comes right out and says America is entering imperial senility, characterized by religiosity, wacky revival schemes and a hollowed-out economy of speculative bubbles. In other words, insane acts of faith.
I probably ought to read Mancur Olson's book on why war victors perpetuate their bad habits and losers enact tough reforms that allow them to leap ahead in peacetime.
The system's need to justify war and infinite spending dominates its definition of war - every war is World War 2, every enemy is Hitler, with dirty bombs and germs added to make it all personal to the taxpayers. Meanwhile, outside our bubble, people analyze our global financial rackets and rickety alliances and carry out very cheap ways to disrupt them as a way to convince other people that they are fit to rule them. Our concepts of victory are now absurd.
The problem is, someone is responsible for the accumulation of overseas commitments that thus require the military to magically learn to control every situation in every country. The military had a responsibility to say "It can't be done", or "It can't be done well." Instead, these expansions were viewed as career opportunities, because thanks to the revolving door, they are. We are a long way from Gen. Smedley "War Is A Racket" Butler.
I've been telling everyone for decades that racism is the foundation of capitalist injustice, that it must be dealt with now. This morning we see headlines that Donald Trump has begun a bidding war among GOP candidates in calling for the repeal of the 14th Amendment. The liars will say it's just against the Mexicans, but in their extremist gatherings they will start talking about a final solution to the Black problem.
The far right has had a fringe movement attacking the 13th Amendment for years. Once those two amendments are gone, there will be nothing left standing from the Civil War. MLK needed the de jure existence of those amendments to win his struggle. Now we're looking at the law of the land regressing all the way back to Dred Scott. It means every accomplishment of progressives is written on sand, that they will not fight to make anything permanent, that there is no such thing as progress.
THAT'S why Blacks must scream at Democrats. Why can't Democrats get White people to MIND such an atrocity? The political system that lets cops gun down Blacks with impunity and lets millions of Whites literally say that Blacks collectively deserve it shows that we do not have progress in America. We simply alternate periods where things get better with periods where things get worse. Once there was a Black senator in Mississippi; a few years later his voters were disenfranchised, and it was all business as usual. THAT'S HAPPENING NOW! Obama will just become another forgotten Hiram Revels and all you White leftists will never elect a president again because this police terror will keep minorities voiceless.
If you can't see that another Jim Crow is being constructed that will mandate corporate rule under the guise of White minority rule, then the victims must do what others have done from Ireland to Vietnam.
All they need to know is how far you are willing to go to create equality. If you tell them to wait another 100 years for your progressive agenda to improve their great-great-great grandchildren's lives, you're just as bad as the White racist progressives who told the Civil Rights movement to be patient - and ended up having to deal with Malcolm X and the Panthers. And yes, by our standards those 1960s progressives are racists - how do you know how future generations in a mostly-nonwhite America will judge us?
You refuted none of my examples because you can't deal with the necessary ugliness and dirtiness of wars by the weak against the strong. The destruction of the colonial empires after WW2 was all about blackmail:
1. the US using its Marshall Plan aid to force Europeans to shut down their racist empires
2. the fear that Communists would exploit the sins of these empires to create a global race war
3. and of course the threat of the indigenous themselves to commit armed revolution against war-ruined governments.
Further examples of blackmail succeeding in a good cause: the fall of apartheid, the independence of Ireland thanks to a brutal assassination campaign, the US threat of a cutoff of Marshall Plan aid to force the UK and France to abandon their alliance with Israel in 1956, Gen. Grant's forcing the Confederates to abandon their plan to execute all captured white officers who commanded black troops by threatening tit-for-tat. And finally, the reality that FDR and the New Deal were enabled by a real fear among the oligarchy of a workers' revolution in 1932.
It used to happen all the time. It's beginning to look long overdue when I see all the crimes of inequality tearing down all the good that past revolutionaries and radicals have accomplished.
Where would Dr. King have been without the threat of Malcolm X? How far did Gandhi get before the British confronted the danger that Indians would side with the Japanese invaders? Where did any nonwhite radicals anywhere get with the White capitalist powers until they could threaten to go over to the Communists? And look at how bad things have gone since that ultimate blackmail threat has ceased to exist.
Though it is certainly better to have all this happen now than next year, the views I've seen expressed by "color-blind" leftists at, say, Daily Kos has made me angry. Describing BLM protestors as "shrieking", "lazy", "dependent on others", and generally threatening. Have I missed any of the major racist memes? I even saw the divide-and-conquer trick, calling Blacks racist on the grounds that police proportionately murder even more Native Americans.
My response is, the American Revolution was triggered by a tiny fraction of the violence that our police commit against African-Americans and other minorities. The anger of those persons in being treated as enemy aliens by a police force that clearly regards Whites as the only real Americans (and the only ones who pay enough in taxes to treat as their bosses) should be enormous.
The solution for healing this breach is in looking at why American capitalism needs ni**ers. But to do that, you have to move so far to the left of where Sanders is now as to truly alienate 60% of the American population.
During eight years of watching White radicals piss on Obama, while refusing to acknowledge the people who vote for him, I have concluded:
1. said radicals have failed to convince their fellow Whites to embrace their ideals, and can't accept that this makes them failures
2. they really, really hate the idea of sharing power with poor people who still have allegiance, rightly or wrongly, to ideas like patriotism, economic growth, upward mobility, and personal consumption
3. they refuse to pass the baton to the new, mostly-nonwhite proletariat who genuinely need class struggle defined on their own terms
4. Occupy and BLM are both uprisings against the system and against the dogmatic Marxist position of how we are supposed to replace it. We are at ground zero, trying to replace Das Kapital with something based on the 21st century multicultural world.
Where would radicals have ever gotten without rude behavior, impossible demands, impudent upstagings of the last generation of progressives... or even the implicit possibility of armed revolution?
Those same low-info Americans who are sick of foreign involvement in general will be the very first ones to freak out when they're bombarded by propaganda about a specific threat from a specific foreign state that fits the right stereotypes. Which is why those pre-agreement poll numbers from Prof. Cole look very different than the ever-declining support for the agreement now that the warmongerers have a target to aim at.
The problem is that the Republicans have cleverly encouraged the conversion of bipartisan military largesse into a form of welfare for Republican constituencies based on their bullying dogma that they are better Americans than everyone else. Now that this belief is part of the Red State "culture" it will be violently defended no matter if we overthrow the elite lobbyists who helped create it. Gun ownership and militarism are so tied together that the only alternative is a gun culture so extreme it even rejects the central government in favor of a neo-Confederate militia fantasy.
Well, I think that people believe that the defeat of fascism in 1945 promoted democracy, but there were unusual circumstances and it was a side effect of many countries fighting for their survival against a particular anti-democratic ideology that failed to deliver on its promises to conquer the world.
At least Dr. Shamoo is willing to argue that ISIS is an unacceptable creature, like the Khmer Rouge (whom the world was happy to let Communist Vietnam fight). If you're serious about alternatives to that, then let's consider all the things that could happen if ISIS just keeps growing as a sort of collective insanity of the victims of the West. I mean, it's unlikely, but it's also unlikely that it's lasted this long. We don't want to imagine it happening, because we know the racists and Zionists will seize on it as proof that Moslems are animals and have no rights that White Christians are obliged to respect. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.
I mean, relative to the conditions in which they find themselves, Moslems turning to ISIS so they can die fighting instead of just starving makes more sense than White middle-class Americans turning to a bullying maniac billionaire to get revenge on everyone they absurdly blame for their not being millionaires. The world has a dangerous problem in both cases.
You talk as though the Taliban was not the creation and puppet of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. Pashtun independence via the Taliban is as much a lie as Kashmir independence via Pakistani Army front terror groups. Pakistan will attack anyone who advocates genuine independence for either region. It demands them as part of a sphere of influence at the expense of its neighbors. The Pakistani Army has always been the great devil in the region down to its atomic bomb program and Americans have been fools for helping it and refusing it to see as the force it was really fighting in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance consisted of ethnicities who refused to live under Taliban rule and unless you are advocating their right to partition the country then you're a hypocrite.
And we're just as much fools now for refusing to understand that it's really Saudi Arabia that we're fighting in Iraq and Syria. Once we pull out of both wars, other countries will rush in to replace us; Russia, much of the rest of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Iran and maybe India. Maybe that is for the best, but it could also be catastrophic.
Americans have never accepted the legitimacy of spheres of influence. They went straight from total isolationism to superpower, leaping over the messy zone in-between where they would have had to accept dividing up the globe with other Great Powers, because that would mean we were not Exceptional and that there is not an indivisible moral standard imposed by God and enforced by His favorite country. So fat chance that they will ever accept Iran's normal condition as a regional hegemon.
The Saudis have a lot more money than Iran, but it's stuck in the USA and US debt. The Israelis have the most advanced Orwell-ware and kill-ware on Earth, which is all that anyone seems to value. But Iran has a future and those other regimes do not, because Iran is sitting right where China is trying to restore the historical center of the world economy. We've lived for 500 years in an abnormal economic world where big capitalists and their expensive ships and obedient navies have overshadowed the land-based trade of the Asian interior.
The subtext is that some evil Other is responsible for all our problems, and it must be punished, but us helpless white Christians know the Other are an army of drug-crazed rapists who will damage our economy if we try to give them the punishment they deserve, so we must exercise our birthright as the Master Race to trick them into surrendering all their rights. Once you've bought into that, the implication is that the rich are the leaders of your tribe and they must be strengthened by allowing them to commit economic crimes, and the victims of the rich are the Other, and you don't want your fellow tribesmen thinking that you're soft on Otherism.
Have you ever heard about the Lavon Affair? If not, you are unqualified to comment on whether Israel is a friend of the United States or not.
Good. Tell your neighbors and relatives. It's time for America to be stripped of its status and influence. American brand names should gather dust on your store shelves. Entire types of product and retail enslavement like Walmart should be driven out of the civilized world. Just as the 1% must not be able to brainwash Americans with infinite commercials into buying their pet politicians, but Wall Street corporations must not be able to brainwash the rest of humanity into buying American cultural imperialism. It's the only way for my fellow Americans to learn reality.
The key problem is that the public is willing to lie to itself that destroying the Iran deal will not lead to war, but to sanctions that will cause Iran to come crawling to us without any shots getting fired. If you ask often enough what we will do if that doesn't work, then maybe the hawks will screw up the script and say the fatal words, "regime change". See, the public doesn't recall all the lies from 2002, but it does recall the words "regime change". It senses that this is the point where it might get dragged into making real sacrifices.
At the very least, we need to demand Chuck Schumer's position on regime change, because Democrats definitely are afraid of those words, and he doesn't want to mention them. The more they're mentioned, the more Democrats who won't override Obama's veto.
The idea that Japan was about to surrender is what needs to be put to rest. There was no peace faction in the Army, and the Army controlled everything. Army hardliners were still trying to keep the war going after the atomic bombs. Fanatic officers even tried to seize Hirohito's surrender announcement, showing that even the surrender was a fragile thing.
But the main hypocrisy in all this is that the leftist alternative to either nukes or invasion is a blockade. This from the very leftists who now denounce the economic sanctions that the US slaps on everybody as barbaric. If our sanctions killed 400,000 Iraqis without Saddam Hussein surrendering, then how many Japanese would have died during the winter of 1945-46?
Meanwhile, North Korea stands as mute testimony as to how determined a country can be with the world against it. 62 years and counting. Mass starvation (supposedly), endless terrorism, a nuclear weapons program. No signs that they're about to surrender. No one ever brings that up in these Hiroshima arguments.
I'm getting scared. I see no evidence that the supporters of peace have any willingness to hurt the supporters of war, which is what we're down to. Instead, the supporters of peace attack other supporters of peace for not being absolute pacifists in the past, as if that was the position of the American people. The poll numbers show that the American people have learned nothing, and fear everything but their own military's violent incompetence.
The supporters of war will march, and pour money into campaign coffers, and create an illusion of consensus that will attract low-information voters, while the supporters of peace will sit at home and bemoan the way things are.
Schumer should be treated by the peace movement exactly as though he were George W. Bush himself. His office should be barricaded by human chains. He should have no peace anywhere he goes, since he wants no peace for anyone else. But you know that won't happen. He won't even admit that war will result from his actions, and no one will take him to task.
From what I've heard about the GOP debate, the candidates are still promoting the delusion that Iran will cave in and there won't be a war. They know the public can't recall all the way back to the years before 2003 when this same scam was being sold.
Even the GOP is afraid of admitting to the public that America can't win World War 3. The question is, can the Zionists, Saudis and GOP sabotage peace in such a way that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization further delays Iran's membership, which will make official that we are threatening war with all the countries in Central Asia plus Russia and China.
I would add FDR's gigantic betrayal of Upton Sinclair when he ran as a radical Democrat for the CA governorship in '34, in order to save the party.
I think the big change since FDR's time is the collapse of a Left organized outside of electoral politics. In his time, the unions were the big progressive power, which meant progressivism had to include economic equality. The fact that unions existed independently of the Democratic Party and spread across the spectrum all the way to Communism meant that FDR could play good cop and scare the capitalists into compromise with him, instead of the other way around as we see with Obama.
An example of this is that when Obama or any other Democrat finally does something that the activist left agrees with, they do nothing to reward him, so he's exposed to the full fury of a highly organized, ideological and dogmatic right-wing army. Our side only knows how to punish, not reward. Will you see anyone, I mean anyone, marching to support Obama's peace treaty with Iran? Nope, we'll wait to march until the bad guys get back in and declare war and the bombers are waiting on the runways. The unions were always marching for FDR when he was moving in their direction.
The Democratic Party stands for not being Republican. I'm not kidding. If one party moves towards a particular position, as long as it's not an oligarchy priority, the other party will move towards the opposite position because it's what happens when you have two a market duopoly. The Republican Party came to be defined by the winners of the Civil War, and those who felt victimized by those ascendant elites became Democrats, from Southern racists to Northern immigrants, proletarians, and intellectuals. It's always been a catchall, because that's how you put together big numbers against the currently-defined "Establishment". But it's impossible to discipline or direct or unify, and as we've seen it has no natural immunity to bribery by the oligarchs.
Well, it's not like they're going to admit that our ally and financier, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is actually the world's leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.
There will be no money for anything good until the military budget is cut. Which is exactly why right-wing voters ultimately all fall into line with the war machine. They want trillions to be spent on war so that not one penny will be available to redistribute to "inferior" Americans.
If Sanders is willing to talk specifics about what missions the military must jettison, then we can start talking about major cuts. This, however, is where right-wingers rally in collective outrage, while everyone else tears each other down arguing about what should be cut first.
Reconsider loyalties in terms of capitalism and not ethnic and religious loyalty, and it makes more sense. Saudi Arabia committed itself to turning its oil into US $, which trapped it in US/Wall Street investments. Israel has moved further and further to the right. Both countries have acted to crush leftism in the Middle East. The former Arab socialist states have all sold out or been overthrown, and their new leaders want Saudi and US/Israeli money.
And the people who are left in the lurch? Arabs without money. The proletariat of the Middle East. They have the misfortune that like in Orwell's 1984, their oppressors pretend to be sovereign states engaged in a permanent war with each other as an excuse for their tyranny.
Well, why should the army be different than any other part of Saudi society?